Performative

We have more than enough language policing these days, even though it is now devoted more to varieties of social and political correctness than to matters of grammar, diction, or usage. The most assiduous guardians of the latter considerations—including William Safire (of the famous “On Language” column in the New York Times) and Richard Mitchell (a.k.a. “The Underground Grammarian”)—have long gone the way of all flesh. But there are times when one sees senseless violence being done to a word, and one must speak up. The inner Edwin Newman (to invoke another member of that quixotic Old Guard) can be denied for only so long.

I’ve come to that point with the word performative, which has managed to insinuate itself in record time into the discourse of academics and journalists, seemingly overnight becoming an infestation as annoying as body lice and as worthless as a pile of wooden nickels. Wilfred M. McClay, The Hedgehog Review

e sempre su The Hedgehog Review, Richard Hughes Gibson: 

The historian Joe Moran begins his 2018 style guide, First You Write a Sentence, by outlining a comic routine unfortunately familiar to many of us:

First I write a sentence. I get a tickle of an idea for how the words might come together, like an angler feeling a tug on the rod’s line. Then I sound out the sentence in my head. Then I tap it on my keyboard, trying to recall its shape. Then I look at it and say it aloud, to see if it sings. Then I tweak, rejig, shave off a syllable, swap a word for a phrase or phrase for a word. Then I sit it next to other sentences to see how it behaves in company. And then I delete it all and start again. 

Ebooks Are an Abomination

Personalmente, ho adottato senza problemi, anzi con piacere, il kindle. Di seguito un interessante articolo sul perché c'è chi lo ama e chi o odia, e come questo ha a che fare con quel che significa per noi leggere.

Whether you love or hate ebooks is probably a function of what books mean to you, and why. [...] But what it means to read, what the experience of reading requires and entails, and what makes it pleasurable or not, is not so easy to pin down. Ian Bogost, The Atlantic

Trovare le parole giuste: From adoption to sexuality, early pregnancy to death, a palliative care doctor explores the discussions we often try to avoid. Joanna Cannon, Guardian

What's Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students?

Un articolo molto interessante sul problema annunciato dal titolo. 

Teachers, as teachers, understand how to do certain things; students, as students, want to understand how to do those things. The tacit promise of the classroom is that the teacher will work to confer on the student some of his knowledge and understanding. In the best case, the teacher-student relationship arouses in the student a strong desire, a sense of thrilled if inchoate infatuation. That desire is the lifeblood of the classroom, and it is the teacher’s duty to nurture and direct it toward its proper object: learning. The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher. Amia Srinivasan, NYT

 Amia Srinivasan elabora ulteriormente questo concetto base e spiega perché ha deliberatamente usato il rapporto tra professore maschio e studentessa, da leggere!

the 50 biggest books of autumn 2021

From new novels by Sally Rooney and Colson Whitehead to Michel Barnier’s take on Brexit, Bernardine Evaristo’s manifesto and diaries from David Sedaris – all the releases to look out for. Justine Jordan and Katy Guest, The Guardian

e anche: perché sempre più autori pubblicano su Substack:

 The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie – but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee. [...] For Rushdie, the Substack deal is about finding “a slightly more complex connection” with readers, and to give him the space to talk about things that “are just too big to discuss in tweets … I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” he told the Guardian earlier this week. “I’m just diving in here and que sera sera, you know. It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.” David Barnett, The Guardian