“In hindsight, we can see how rarely one technology supersedes another: the rise of the podcast makes clear that video didn’t doom audio any more than radio ended reading. Yet in 1913, a journalist interviewing Thomas Edison on the future of motion pictures recounted the inventor declaring confidently that “books … will soon be obsolete in the public schools.” – The Paris Review
Category: words
The Simple Structure That All Human Languages Share
Sentences and phrases of human languages, all human languages, have an inaudible and invisible hierarchical structure. When we are children, we impose this structure on the sequences of sounds that we hear. Our minds can’t understand continuous streams of sound directly as meaningful language. Instead, we subconsciously chop them up into discrete bits—sounds and words—and organize these into larger units. This means that sentences have a hierarchical structure. – Nautilus
How Walt Whitman Hid A Dozen Same-Sex Love Poems In Plain Sight, And How A Researcher Found Them
Whitman wrote a sequence of poems title “Live Oak, With Moss” — inspired, scholars believe, by his romance with one Fred Vaughan — but scattered them throughout his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass so that they wouldn’t be conspicuous. (Two of them were removed from subsequent editions for the next century.) Here’s how a scholar, back in 1959, discovered the series and reassembled it in sequence. – Virginia Magazine (UVA)
Russia’s Culture Minister Called Comic Books Stupid. Sales Soared
Dmitry Yakovlev, head of one of Russia’s leading indie comic producers, the St Petersburg-based Bumkniga, was unfazed by the minister’s dig. “Medinsky’s comment was pure stupidity, therefore supporting the comic industry,” he told the Guardian. “Sales increased.” – The Guardian
Translations Say Something About Their Time. And Of Ours?
Are we reducing everything we translate to standard English, whatever that might be? Or are we struggling to get close to the otherness of foreign texts? – New York Review of Books
The Shambolic Ways In Which We Learn To Write
John Warner defines “the writer’s practice” as a set of “attitudes, skills, habits of mind, and knowledge” that writers embody, carry with them, or engage in. He describes the most important writerly attitude this way: “Writers continually build expertise without ever becoming expert. It is like being inside an endlessly right-scrolling game of Super Mario World – except you never get to defeat the big boss.” – Plough
Court Rules In Battle Over John Steinbeck Estate And Tells Heirs To Stop Fighting Already
“A federal appeals court attempted to close the book on endless litigation between the relatives of author John Steinbeck in a ruling that upheld a $5 million verdict against his daughter-in-law, but threw out $8 million she faced in punitive damages.” – Yahoo! (AP)
Merriam-Webster Dictionary Admits ‘They’ As Nonbinary Singular Pronoun
“We will note that ‘they’ has been in consistent use as a singular pronoun since the late 1300s; that the development of singular ‘they’ mirrors the development of the singular ‘you’ from the plural ‘you'” noted M-W on its blog, “yet we don’t complain that singular ‘you’ is ungrammatical.” – The Guardian
Is Gary Larson About To Revive ‘The Far Side’?
“Fans of the surreal, the bizarre and sardonic anthropomorphic cows are in a fervour after The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson’s website was updated this weekend with promises of ‘a new online era’, 24 years after the reclusive creator retired at the age of 44.” – The Guardian
The Internet Is Changing How We Write (For Bad And Good)
The Internet is speeding up the evolution of English by increasing our ability to stay loosely in touch with, and mutually influence, one another. – Washington Post