language
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Kingsnorth
Author and poet Paul Kingsnorth talks about writing an entire novel in a “shadow-tongue” of Old English, and what that taught him about our contemporary world.
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For Everybody
…you ask them, ‘Why are you so upset?’, and they can’t answer you. For the New Yorker, Adrienne Raphael talks to linguist David Crystal about our age of abbreviation.
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In Defense of Precisely Inexact Language
Writing for Aeon, Elijah Millgram uses 1984 and George Orwell’s Newspeak/doublethink idea of language to examine why imperfect language, and expression that is sometimes inexact, contradictory, or misleading, can be better for developing the scope of human reasoning.
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2015, Year of the Badass Woman?
As it’s most commonly used, badass implies both toughness and disaffectedness. It’s rare to look at someone whose chief qualities are measured thoughtfulness and open emotionality and declare her a total badass. Ijeoma Oluo, Naomi Yang, Eudora Welty—these women are…
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Language and Exile
Over at the New Yorker, writer Jhumpa Lahiri has written a hauntingly beautiful personal essay about learning Italian, leaving English, and finding her voice in linguistic exile: How is it possible to feel exiled from a language that isn’t mine?…
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Spelling Reformed
At The Awl, Annie Abrams gives the history of a 19th-century newspaper, Di Anglo-Sacsun, and its editors’ attempts to make literacy more available to the public, by developing their own phonetic alphabet that the newspaper was written in. Abrams also dives…
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Fighting Terrorism Through Language
The terrorist organization that coordinated attacks in Paris last week has alternately been called ISIS, ISIL, and IS by government and media. However, when French President Francois Hollande addressed the world, he referred to the organization as Daesh for a…
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Does Anyone Speak English Here?
At Aeon, John McWhorter explores the twists and turns through English’s linguistic history that brought us the “deeply peculiar” language structure used today.
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The Downfall of the Pun
Punning surprises us by flouting the law of nature which pretends that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Where does the pun come from? And why does it prompt ubiquitous eye-rolls? Dive into the history…
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Away We Go
Over at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain tackles the ambiguity on the use of “farther” and “further” in contemporary writing: Farther or further? I vary them more or less thoughtlessly in my writing, sometimes to the consternation of copy editors, a number of…
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Understanding Faulkner
Richard Grant discusses how his time living in Mississippi provided him with a more full understanding of William Faulkner’s language. Despite studying Faulkner at school in England, Grant felt that it wasn’t until he moved that he was able to…
