language
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What’s in a Name?
The power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our identities. At The Establishment, Jené Gutierrez recounts an argument with her editors over using the correct rendering of bell hooks’s name, and how language has historically functioned as…
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mandarin Imperial
Growing up, I understood my father through observation, and I suspect that he understood me much the same way. I liked to think our love was purer that way. Like two stray dogs who found each other and are blessed…
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Tech, Humanity, Language, and Romance
For JSTOR Daily, Matt Langione reviews the current state of artificial intelligence, and the strides AI technology must make to fully complement human thought and experience. The latest step, Langione notes, is the news that Google began improving its “natural…
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Learning and Loving in French
Supposedly, the best way to master a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker. Language, in delineating a boundary that can be transgressed, is full of romantic potential. … If first languages are reservoirs of emotion,…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
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The Newest Euphemisms
John McWhorter writes for Aeon about the evolution of euphemisms, one of the functions in a language that evolves quicker than any other.
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Opening up via Translation
At Lit Hub, Christina Farella examines the exchange of cultural ideas that comes with translation, using Helen DeWitt’s novel The Last Samurai as an example of books enriched by engaging with other languages in the English text itself.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Self-Portrait with Parts Missing and/or Smeared
A first day means there was a never-day.
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This Week in Short Fiction
The summer issue of Asymptote was published this week with a gorgeous spread of short fiction in translation from Spanish, Croatian, Persian, and more. If you’re not already familiar the journal, it publishes English translations of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and…
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Searching for Your Next Band Name
For JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at the “my next band name” meme to identify not just trends in pairing interesting words, but also the social phenomenon of how we understand what words mean.
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The Name Before My Name
There are times when I must uncork the period, for Isabel only chases my given name.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Cristina García and Truong Tran
How do you work with a material that you don’t have trust in? I had to step away from it and find another way of articulating and I had to do it without words.