Category: words

Taken en masse, the books paint a damning portrait of the 45th president of the United States. But the sheer volume of unflattering material they contain can have the paradoxical danger of blunting their collective impact. After the 10th time you read about Mr. Trump’s short attention span, your own attention is in danger of wandering. – The New York Times

In a book called Weird Wisconsin: Your Travel Guide to Wisconsin’s Local Legends, Burrows’s name was listed under a chapter called “The Worst Novel Ever Published in the English Language.” Maddeningly, the Google Books preview would not reveal the offending passage, but soon I located a Washington Post article that explained the whole entanglement. – The New Republic

“The more text to which an algorithm can be exposed, and the more complex you can make the algorithm, the better it performs. … The model that underpins [the AI software] GPT-3 boasts 175bn parameters, each of which can be individually tweaked — an order of magnitude larger than any of its predecessors. It was trained on the biggest set of text ever amassed, a mixture of books, Wikipedia and Common Crawl, a set of billions of pages of text scraped from every corner of the internet.” That means, alas, that GPT-3 has picked up some of the uglier material found in some of those corners. – The Economist

“‘Sold down the river.’ ‘Cakewalk.’ ‘Master and slave.’ American English is riddled with words and phrases with racist origins or undertones. Since the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis and the flurry of protests his and other Black Americans’ deaths have inspired, a growing number of public and private institutions are reevaluating their reliance on language with racist connotations or history.” – The Boston Globe

“[His] carefully cultivated image — a vigorous martial artist, his commitment to bushido, the code of the samurai and his fixation with masculinity, beauty and glory — has remained more notable than a lot of his writing. He even went to great pains to craft an image for an American audience with English-language interviews in the 1960s. However, the contemporary resurgence of Mishima translations is starting to get readers back to the actual work. Which, incidentally, is very good indeed.” – Metropolis (Japan)

“Radish, which has offices in Seoul and New York, says it has seen significant revenue growth since its 2016 launch, and that it has produced more than 6,500 episodes across 30 original series. Genres currently available on the app include romance and paranormal/sci-fi, but growth is planned for the LGBTQ, young adult, horror, mystery and thriller categories.” – Deadline

“The game involves some role playing. If you use only the Grammar cards, the dealer is called the Copy Chief, as in ‘The Copy Chief shuffles the fifty Grammar cards.’ If you mix in the Style cards, the dealer is the Author, the players are Copy Editors … and the deck is huge.” New Yorker Comma Queen Mary Norris writes about Stet!, a spinoff from Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer’s 2019 book Dreyer’s English. – The New Yorker

“In conjunction with an app, the C-Face Smart mask can transcribe dictation, amplify the wearer’s voice, and translate speech … between Japanese and Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, English, Spanish and French.” Naturally, it was the Japanese who dreamed up and developed it; the company that makes it is called Donut Robotics. – CNN

Shakespeare’s birthplace just reopened, and Jane Austen’s house is about to reopen – and some of the changes advantage the visitors coming now. “The cottage where Austen revised, wrote and had published all six of her novels will be offering a far more intimate experience to visitors than before: numbers will be significantly limited, with visitors given time slots.” – The Guardian (UK)