Language Arts
Just added to Language Arts Guide: Thsrs - The shorter Thesaurus: enter a long word and receive shorter synonyms.
Hebrew For Christians - The first letter of the alphabet is Aleph.
Thomas Jefferson - The books of Thomas Jefferson at the Library of Congress.
HumanisticTexts - Read of humanistic ideas as they break through into history for the first time.
WriteRhymes - As you type, hold the alt key and click on a word to find a rhyme for it.
Magazines.com is for sharing magazines online.
YouSwear - how to swear in any language.
Review: The Kit-Cat Club (Guardian). Whatever the health police think of them, pies are a great leveller. In the late 1690s, a pastry cook called Christopher (Kit) Cat hung up his sign, a cat playing a small fiddle (or ‘kit’), in Gray’s Inn Lane. His signature dish was a mutton pie, dubbed a kit-cat in his honour, though he also sold cheesecakes, rosewater codling tarts (made with a kind of cooking apple, not fish) and many another inexpensive treat. It was a place where hungry authors could afford to chitchat while eating Kit Cat’s kit-cats at the Cat and Kit. The coterie who met there became an institution, under the inevitable name of the Kit-Cat Club, and were a formidable force for social change, not least because theirs was a meritocratic club within a rigidly stratified society: ‘A Kit-Cat,’ observed poor playwright William Burnaby, ‘is a supper for a Lord.’
Can you guess where my accent is from?
Read Giles Coren’s (restaurant critic of the London Times) email rant to his editors. Here’s another one about a restaurant review. And here’s another one about more editing woes.
Stet (Heffernan at NYT is stumped by how to exerpt the language on message boards and blogs.)
The Kindergarchy (Weekly Standard). In America we are currently living in a Kindergarchy, under rule by children. People who are raising, or have recently raised, or have even been around children a fair amount in recent years will, I think, immediately sense what I have in mind. Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own. This is what I call Kindergarchy: dreary, boring, sadly misguided Kindergarchy.
In Parenthese - Collection of ancient, medieval and classic texts from all over the world; translations from Greek, Old Norse, Medieval Irish, Japanese, Incan, Old French, Medieval Latin; site also includes a linguistics section.
Revolutions Per Minute. (Orion) Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different. I was reading something about food politics recently and thinking it was boring. Then I realized that these were incredibly exciting ideas—about understanding where your food comes from and who grows it and what its impact on the planet and your body are. Fifteen or twenty years ago, hardly anyone thought about where coffee came from, or milk, or imagined fair-trade coffee. New terms like food miles, fairly new words like organic, sustainable, non-GMO, and reborn phenomena like farmers’ markets are all the result of what it’s fair to call the food revolution, and it has been so successful that ideas that were once startling and subversive have become familiar en route to becoming status quo. So my boredom was one register of victory.
How To Write With Style (Kurt Vonnegut)
Kick Over The Scenery (LRB) When an art form or genre once dismissed as kids’ stuff starts to get taken seriously by gatekeepers – by journals, for example, such as the one you are reading now – respect doesn’t come smoothly, or all at once. Often one artist gets lifted above the rest, his principal works exalted for qualities that other works of the same kind seem not to possess. Later on, the quondam genius looks, if no less talented, less solitary: first among equals, or maybe just first past the post. That is what happened to rock music in the late 1960s, when sophisticated critics decided, as Richard Poirier put it, to start ‘learning from the Beatles’. It is what happened to comics, too, in the early 1990s, when the Pulitzer Prize committee invented an award for Art Spiegelman’s Maus. And it has happened to science fiction, where the anointed author is Philip K. Dick. When he died in 1982, Dick was a cult figure, admired unreservedly in the science fiction subculture, and in the American counterculture as a chronicler of psychedelia and fringe religion. By then he had published more than thirty novels, most of them as fleeting mass-market paperbacks, and well over a hundred short stories, most of them in SF magazines. By dying in March, Dick missed the May premiere of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the first movie made from his work.
What do you call those non-letter combination of symbols in cartoons (%@#!) that denotes swearing? Grawlix?
The Lion And The Mouse (New Yorker) …The end of Moore’s influence came when, years later, she tried to block the publication of a book by E. B. White. Watching Moore stand in the way of “Stuart Little,” White’s editor, Ursula Nordstrom, remembered, was like watching a horse fall down, its spindly legs crumpling beneath its great weight.
What are the inroads that Hebrew/Yiddish have made into language in the US? Take a survey?
Infinite Jest (Smithsonian). “Guy goes to a psychiatrist,” said a friend at dinner, interrupting an earnest discussion of HMOs. “Psychiatrist says, ‘You’re crazy.’ Guy says, ‘I want a second opinion.’ Psychiatrist says, ‘You’re ugly, too.’” We chuckled politely. “The oldest joke in the world, and it still kills,” the wag pronounced with authority. Wrong on both counts, I thought. No threat of fatal hilarity here; and the oldest joke in the world? Hardly. Henny Youngman, the gag’s putative progenitor, roamed the savanna only recently—between 1906 and 1998, the Late Hellaceous period. I began to wonder whether any single joke could be definitively declared as old as the hills and demonstrably twice as dusty—and resolved to find out.
50 Best Ever Summer Reads (Telegraph)