language
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Janice N. Harrington
Janice N. Harrington on her new collection Primitive and critiquing the use of “primitive” to describe African American folk art.
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Translating the War in Syria
At Lit Hub, Lina Mounzer discusses the Syrian women bearing witness to the war through writing, her own complicated relationship with the English language, and translation as a symbolic act: [War] reshapes your vocabulary. It becomes part of your language.…
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A Study of Homeland in Displacement
To think of Brazil as a different place than I remember it is to think of my unbelonging, as someone out of place in my memory.
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Weekly Geekery
Love = addiction. And both hijack the brain’s learning circuit. Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, resurrected on YouTube. The top traits of bestselling books. (Hint: Not sex.) The language you speak affects your morality. Sand avalanche! In your brain!
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Creating the Defamiliar Experience
But I think of greater importance than a sense of commonality is one of understood difference. Fiction that respects us says, “I know you because I have not had your life.” For Lit Hub, Michael Helm writes on translation, examining…
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Defining Writing
For JSTOR Daily, Chi Luu examines the long-conflicting ideas of whether writing is a form of technology or a separate dialect of its spoken form. Luu references the upcoming film Arrival and the sci-fi novella it’s based on, Ted Chiang’s…
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The Gender of Mothering
At Aeon, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore writes on the language of “mothering” and the trans parents and activists seeking to define the work of mothering for themselves.
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A Living, Tweeting Dictionary
Following a viral Twitter interaction about whether the dictionary is adapting too much to new trends in language, Merriam-Webster reassures everyone that language changes over time, and that’s okay.
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Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think
For the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes…
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The Endangered List
The Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, has launched a campaign to save fifty words and phrases it deems are dying from lack of use, reports Alison Flood for the Guardian: Although language change is inevitable, it’s too bad to…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pain Scale Treaties
Perched on the shoulders of generational trauma sit these two theses: suffering begets cruelty begets suffering begets cruelty, and pain is empathy’s catalyst.
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Disliked Words around the World
Sworn haters of the word ‘moist,’ now is your chance to be heard. Oxford Dictionaries has launched a worldwide vote to find English language speakers’ least favorite word, the Guardian’s Alison Flood reported. Other top contenders include “no,” “like,” and…