Category: words

“Paraguayan Guaraní – a language descended from several indigenous tongues – remains one of the main languages of 70% of the country’s population. And unlike other widely spoken native tongues – such as Quechua, Aymara or the Mayan languages – it is overwhelmingly spoken by non-indigenous people.” – The Guardian

Enter the international Apostrophe Protection Society, with its attempts to call out misuse and spread good practice. But November 2019 saw the announcement of the society’s demise, and owing not only to the highly respectable age of its founder John Richards (96): it would close, the society said, because of the ‘ignorance and laziness present in modern times’. – Aeon

Some critics argue that a novel has to also be one narrative through and through, one long story about one person. A lot of ancient fiction, arguably, is too distractible and prone to side stories to count. Even so, there are works that follow one character all the way through that are old—very old. – BookRiot

The world’s most-used online dictionary has, among other changes, capitalized Black throughout; changed homosexuality to gay sexual orientation; revised language around ethnicity, suicide, and addiction; and added such terms as DGAF and Afro-Latino, Afro-Latina, and Afro-Latinx. – The Guardian

Most nonfiction books are not fact checked; if they are, it is at the author’s expense. Publishers have said for years that it would be cost-prohibitive for them to provide fact checking for every nonfiction book; they tend to speak publicly about a book’s facts only if a book includes errors that lead to a public scandal and threaten their bottom line. Recent controversies over books containing factual errors by Jill Abramson, Naomi Wolf, and, further back, James Frey, come to mind. – Esquire

“John Cheever [once] told [an] audience he was ‘one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov’. The description isn’t unhelpful because it’s used carelessly, but because Chekhov’s influence is so widespread: most short story writers are Chekhovians, whether they realise it or not.” Chris Power looks at the nearly ubiquitous features of modern short fiction in English which Chekhov more or less invented. – New Statesman

Alongside Gaelic, Scots is one of the indigenous languages of Scotland. The thousands of Wikipedia entries written in it make up one of the largest collections of the Scots language you can access online for free. The problem is an American teenager from North Carolina — who can’t speak the language — wrote 49 percent of all the entries.  – Engadget

If your children are in secondary school and are not writing essays, they are being swindled of their chance to do well in college. If you are a college student who is rarely required to submit a paper, you are being cheated of your chance to do well in life. – Intellectual Takeout