Language Arts
Common solecisms from The Style Guide of The Economist.-
Raw Shark Texts. Typographic gimmickry. Unchapters.
The Genius of George Orwell (Times). If you want to learn how to write non-fiction, Orwell is your man. He may be known worldwide for his last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. But, for me, his best work is his essays. Who would have imagined that sixteen hundred words in praise of the Common Toad, knocked out to fill a newspaper column in April 1946, would be worth reprinting sixty years later? But here it is, with many of the characteristic Orwell delights, the unglamorous subject matter, the unnoticed detail (”a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living creature”) the baleful glare, the profound belief in humanity. Because what the piece is really about, of course, is not the toad itself, but the thrill of that most promising time of year, the spring, even as seen from Orwell’s dingy Islington flat.
Competition: Tom Swifties (NYT)
The Women of McSweeney’s (Rumpus).
Hunting the elusive first “Ms.” (VisualThesaurus). Some have theorized that Ms. has roots long before the 20th century. One piece of evidence that has been put forth is the tombstone of Sarah Spooner, who died in 1767 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As you can see from this image, what appears on the headstone is Mwith a superscript s. As Dennis Baron writes in his excellent book Grammar and Gender (1987), “it is certainly an abbreviation of Miss or Mistress, and not an example of colonial language reform or a slip of the chisel, as some have suggested.”
There things stood until 2004, when I happened upon this tantalizing little notice in the Humeston (Iowa) New Era of Dec. 4, 1901 (thanks to the Newspaperarchive database):
The writer seems confused about the Springfield Republican proposal since he (or she, but probably he) guesses that Ms. is an abbreviation of some longer word. That’s a confusion that persists among those who assume Ms. is an abbreviated form of Miss or Missus, but the Republican article puts forth Ms. without any particular expansion.
Wordnik is in beta
How Storytelling and Cooking Helped Humans Evolve (Boston). Natural selection is increasingly being invoked to explain practices whose origins once seemed forever inaccessible, enshrouded in the mists of prehistory. Three fascinating new books offer bold hypotheses about the origins and evolutionary significance of storytelling, language, and cooking:
Brian Boyd, an English professor, asks: How did fiction, and art in general, help humans survive and so become part of our behavioral repertoire? Art, he replies, grew out of play.
Dean Falk, a primate anthropologist and observant grandmother, has pondered long and deeply the fact that human infants cry. From that clue, she has constructed a theory about the origins of language called PTBD, for “Putting the Baby Down.”
Richard Wrangham, a Harvard anthropologist, begins his 5-million-year epic of human development from a different point: The difference between raw and cooked food.
30 ROCK is a rip-off of THE MUPPET SHOW! How are your minds today? Are they good? Not blown, you say? Do you like them that way? Then my sincerest apologies for THIS…
Into The Fray (NYT). “Are you coming to bed?”
“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”
“What?”
“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”
What kind of bookstore customer are you? Snark comment demands a reply. (Rethinking The Box started it off)
Dangerous Games (Guardian). For Graham Greene he was “unquestionably our best thriller writer”. John le Carré once called him “the source on which we all draw”. With the six novels he wrote in the years leading up to the second world war - five of which have just been reissued by Penguin Modern Classics - Eric Ambler revitalised the British thriller, rescuing the genre from the jingoistic clutches of third-rate imitators of John Buchan, and recasting it in a more realist, nuanced and leftishly intelligent - not to mention exciting - mould.
Lit Juicing (NewYorker).
Read the first 27 pages of The Woman Chaser
The Ledge is an independent platform for international literature. (Flash version).
50 Scientifically Proven Ways To Be Persuasive. Here’s one that made me think: Incentive programs need a good start. A car-wash place gave one group of customers a free car wash after 8 washes, and everybody got their first stamp after their visit. Group B got a free car wash after 10 car washes, with 3 stamps on the card. Both groups needed to make 7 more trips to get a free wash. 19% of the Group A returned, while 34% of the Group B did.