“In 2014, the D.C. Public Library system hired Jean Badalamenti as assistant manager of health and human services to help the city’s 25 libraries better serve as a resource for the city’s roughly 6,500 homeless residents. Early last year, she pulled three ‘peer specialists’,” all with personal experience of homelessness, to help guide unhoused library patrons to services. – The Washington Post
Category: words
How Words Attach Themselves To Meaning
“Our language is full of interjections and verbal gestures that don’t necessarily mean anything beyond themselves. Most of our words – ‘baseball’, ‘thunder’, ‘ideology’ – seem to have a meaning outside themselves – to designate or stand for some concept. The way the word looks and sounds is only arbitrarily connected to the concept that it represents.” – Aeon
Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie Make 2019 Booker Prize Shortlist
The Testaments, Atwood’s secrecy-shrouded sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, and Quichotte, Rushdie’s recently-released riff on Don Quixote, are joined on the list of six semifinalists by Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World; Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities; Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other; and Lucy Ellmann’s 1,000-page, single-sentence Ducks, Newburyport. – Irish Times
Book Publishing Revenue Up 6.9 Percent In First Half Of 2019
The top-line message from the organization is that the combined revenue of the participating publishers for the first six months of the year was nearly US$6 billion. The previous caveat in place, that represents an increase of 6.9 percent over the same first-half period of 2018. – Publishing Perspectives
The New U.S. Poet Laureate And Native American Memory
“[Joy] Harjo interrogates both one’s responsibility toward one’s culture and the fear of being buried under its weight. … This ‘trade language,’ as she later calls English, is weak, insufficient. It’s the language of the American story, and it comes freighted with all of that story’s history, atrocity, and false hope. How, she asks, can we escape its past?” – The New Yorker
A Linguist Makes The Case For The Use(fulness) Of The Word ‘Like’
Language acquisition professor Rebecca Woods assembled what linguists call a corpus (“a representative sample of language as used by certain speakers”) from a BBC show (the makeup competition Glow Up) that’s regularly complained about for its young participants’ constant use of like. Studying this corpus, she found that the word isn’t just filler: it’s actually governed by a sort of grammar and serves a real purpose. – The Conversation
The Great Book Scare: When Readers Worried They Might Get Infected
This scare, now mostly forgotten, was a frantic panic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that contaminated books—particularly ones lent out from libraries—could spread deadly diseases. – Smithsonian
‘Just As Some Novels Supply Their Own Reviews, So Many Reviews Supply Their Own Novels’
Mary-Kay Wilmers, co-founder and longtime editor of the London Review of Books, takes apart the ways that book reviewers do their work. – Literary Hub
Big-Data Read Of 3.5 Million Books Reveals How Men And Women Are Most Described
“Not surprisingly, women in books are beautiful and men are true-hearted! Yup, when positively described, women (or other traditionally gender-specific female nouns, like stewardess or daughter) are almost always considered at the physical level, whereas men are generally described according to their inherent virtue.” – LitHub
How Barbara Kingsolver Fell In Love With Language Again
It’s fascinating work, but lately, something else is pulling me back to my computer late at night. I get carried away in such guilty pleasure that if my husband walks in unexpectedly, I’m prone to click off my screen as if hiding an online affair, or a gaming addiction. But it’s neither. I’m writing poetry. – Washington Post