language
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You Don’t Mess with Shakespeare
Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language… It’s like the beer I drink. I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way, it’s basically shifting to Bud Light. Bud Light’s acceptable, but…
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A Language By Any Other Name
“Conlang” is short for “constructed language,” which is just what it sounds like: a language that has been constructed… conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for…
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Stephen Pinker, Deplorer of the Dangling Modifier
After having written 800 pages on torture, rape, world war, and genocide, it was time to take on some really controversial topics like fused participles, dangling modifiers, and the serial comma. Over at the Guardian, Steven Pinker defends his choice to…
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On Crossword Puzzles and Writing
Over at The Millions, author Christopher J. Yates discusses his affinity for crossword puzzles and how it affects his use of language in his writing: It feels to me that staring at the blank page is a lot like staring…
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On The Beauty of Words
At Book Riot, Aram Mrjoian explores the question of what makes a sentence beautiful. He conjectures that our brain becomes overwhelmed when it sees words organized and used in a way that is beyond its imagination: Maybe, when words are amalgamated…
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Language as Passive-Aggression
At the Atlantic, Megan Garber proposes a new word to describe words and phrases that have come to mean their opposite, like “honestly,” “no offense,” and “literally”: So here’s one proposal: Let’s call these words “smarmonyms.” Because they’re the words that exist because…
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Nerozumieš: You Don’t Understand
The best thing about living in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language is the ability to slide into solitude wherever I am.
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
Susan Barker discusses her third novel, The Incarnations, writing dialogue in a second language, the Opium Wars and Chinese history, and the years of research that went into her book.
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Books That Create Original Dialects
Many of the best books in classic literature innovated some aspect of storytelling, but few can claim to have ventured into tinkering deeply with language itself. Over at Lit Hub, Stephen Sparks writes on some of the best books that have…
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The (Im)Purity of Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu makes a case for emphasizing grammar rules that follow popular usage, rather than the pedantic standards set by centuries-dead classicists. Here are the plain facts: many of these pop grammar rules… were magically pulled…
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The Last of Their Words
Chi Luu writes for JSTOR Daily on the rapid extinction of the world’s languages and linguists’ efforts to preserve these dying languages for future generations. On the surface, there isn’t anything wrong with people wanting to communicate with each other…
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Why We Write with Words
For wherever writing seems to achieve preeminence as a tool of the powerful, we find at that moment that it becomes possible to take it apart and turn it upon itself, a line of that same material quickened once more…