On the Mark

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous. Steven Poole, The Guardian

recensione di: On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic 

Hamartia

One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word. In Aristotle’s Poetics, that word is hamartia. It is usually rendered, in classrooms and handbooks, as “tragic flaw,” and on that translation an entire tradition of reading tragedy has been erected. Yet if we return to Aristotle’s Greek and trace the word’s history with some philological care, it becomes clear that this familiar formula rests on a slow but decisive mistranslation—less an error at a single moment than a long cultural drift in which a term meaning “mistake” gradually hardened into a doctrine of moral defect.

In classical Greek, hamartia belongs to the language of action rather than character. Its root sense is concrete and kinetic: to miss one’s mark, as an archer misses the target. By extension, it denotes an error, a misjudgment, a false step... Jonathan Bate, Jonathan Bat's Literary Remains

e, per finire febbraio e l'inverno, una bella foto della grande nevicata a Providence, in RI

 

 

Fawning

It is the afternoon of the fawn. Everywhere you turn, in workplaces and households alike, yearlings with saucer eyes, brown felt noses, and stilt-like legs are wondering if you’re mad at them. The fawn response, as it’s known in some precincts of social media, bundles various forms of ingratiating, people-pleasing behavior. It can manifest in threatening situations, where expressing authentic emotion could elicit a powerful person’s wrath or cruelty, or it might be more banal: laughing at a vindictive supervisor’s unfunny joke, saying you love a gift when you don’t, laboring over the perfect string of whimsical emojis to append to an opinion that you’ve expressed over text. Katy Waldman, The New Yorker

fawning, un termine che non conoscevo per un concetto che conosco molto bene. L'IA lo definisce in questo modo: a survival response where someone tries to stay safe by pleasing, appeasing, or agreeing with others—especially people perceived as threatening or powerful. Quale potrebbe essere la traduzione italiana? Sempre l'IA suggerisce: compiacenza, servilismo, adulazione, sottomissione accomodante, comportamento remissivo. Io aggiungerei anche leccaculaggine 

To Each His Own

 

 

adoro Roz Chast e il suo humor. La posto qui per il termine "chillax" che non conoscevo e che apprendo essere una fusione di chill e relax. Per vedere tutta la storiella, cliccate qui: New Yorker  

UNABRIDGED

Journalist Fatsis, author of the kindred book Word Freak, talked his way into the headquarters of Merriam-Webster in Springfield, Massachusetts, after learning that “the company was overhauling its foundational book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged.” The last major revision had occurred decades earlier, in 1961, totaling some 465,000 words—and, given that speakers of the English language were coining words (“Doomscrolling one year, cheugy another, rizz the next”) far faster than the dictionary could keep up with, there was plenty to do. Kirkus Review

Like

Reynolds smartly and lightheartedly shares various scenarios in which she feels using the word “like” in conversation offers an advantage. As she suggests, “like” is a great alternative to “said” when recounting to a friend how an incident made one feel. “And then I was like….” The ability to use “like” in this context “has fundamentally changed the way we tell stories.”As Reynolds explains, when feelings are the focus, “we no longer have to recite (or remember) precisely what was said.” Kirkus Reviews

il libro di Megan C. Reynolds, Like, di cui qui si parla è edito da HarperOne. Notate il sottotitolo! 

interessante anche: Keith Houston, Face with Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji (Norton)

The Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you’d probably get 100 different answers. There’s a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound mellifluous to the ear. While there’s no way to reach a universal consensus, many esteemed linguists have favorites of their own. These are a few of them.

Ailurophile

Accomplished linguist Dr. Robert Beard compiled a list of what he personally considers to be the 100 most beautiful English words. Up first — at least alphabetically — is “ailurophile,” which appropriately sounds quite alluring. The word, which essentially means “cat lover,” is derived from the Greek ailuros, meaning “cat,” and phile, meaning “lover.” Its origins date back to the 1910s, though the word continues to make the hearts of linguists purr today. Not only does it sound pleasant, but it also evokes the beautiful connection that humans have with their beloved pets.

più sorprendente, secondo me:

Cellar Door

We’d be remiss if we left off what some consider to be the most beautiful pairing of words in the English language: “cellar door.” Many have praised this combo for its euphonious sound. Journalist H. L. Mencken called it “intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm,” while Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was a noted fan of its beauty. In 1963, author C. S. Lewis admitted his astonishment when he saw the phrase written as “Selladore,” which he found an “enchanting proper name.” Bennett Kleinma, Word Smarts

 

How Indo-European languages went global

How did the language you’re reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney’s new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions. Henry Oliver, The Guardian

il libro di cui si parla è Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global di Laura Spinney pubblicato da William Collins

There’s a Word for That

Kummerspeck: a German word for weight that one puts on due to stress eating. Age-otori: a Japanese word for the particular way one sometimes looks worse after a haircut. Shemomedjamo: a Georgian word meaning “to accidentally eat the whole thing.” Tingo: a Rapa Nui word meaning “to eventually steal all of your neighbor’s possessions by borrowing and never returning them.” Aspaldiko: Basque. The joy that comes from catching up with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. Mondegreen: English, coined in the twentieth century to describe the mistaken lyrics one habitually attributes to a misheard song (and which one sometimes prefers to the real lyrics).

Lists like this are easy to find. The internet is full of them because—regardless of their factual accuracy—people love learning that other languages name things that they didn’t know had names, or distinguish things they had never distinguished before, or connect things they never saw as connected. The lists bear witness to the fact that there is a small but profound joy in discovering new words for our experiences. James D. Reich, Boston Review

questo articolo interessante si riferisce al libro pubblicato nel 2022: Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, di Maria Heim (Princeton University Press)

The Grammar of Angels

Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. [...] An Italian aristocrat who dabbled in magic and escaped from prison after eloping with the wife of a Medici lord, his books were burned on the orders of the pope. Edward Wilson-Lee’s new biography brings us the events of Pico’s short, blazing life, but also what is most strange and attractive about him: the wonder of a scholar who felt himself on the verge of being able to commune with angels. [...]

Once he had mastered the orthodox disciplines, Pico found himself hungry for more. He sought out Jewish scholars to teach him Hebrew and Arabic, and became convinced that there were secrets in the ancient texts of the east, accessible only only to those who knew how to interpret them. Writing excitedly to a friend, he declared that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible contained “the entire knowledge of all arts and wisdom both divine and human”. Unfortunately there was a catch: “This knowledge is hidden and concealed.” Dennis Duncan, The Guardian

recensione alla nuova biografia di Pico della Mirandola di Edward Wilson-Lee dal titolo affascinante, The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language (William Collins).

The history of the footnote

“The history of the footnote may well seem an apocalyptically trivial topic,” writes historian Anthony Grafton. “Footnotes seem to rank among the most colorless and uninteresting features of historical practice.” And yet, Grafton—who has also written The Footnote: A Curious History (1999)—argues that they’re actually pretty important.

“Once the historian writes with footnotes, historical narrative becomes a distinctly modern” practice, Grafton explains. History is no longer a matter of rumor, unsubstantiated opinion, or whim.

“The text persuades, the note proves,” he avers. Footnotes do double duty, for they also “persuade as well as prove” and open up the work to a multitude of voices. Matthew Wills, Jstor Daily

 

 

Gaslighting

These days, it seems as if everyone’s talking about gaslighting. In 2022, it was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, on the basis of a seventeen-hundred-and-forty-per-cent increase in searches for the term. In the past decade, the word and the concept have come to saturate the public sphere. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Its author, Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over and over again, then took all accusations of his falsehoods and spun them into evidence of bias.” In 2020, the album “Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, offering an indignant anthem on behalf of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you know exactly what you did on my boat.” (What happened on the boat is revealed a few songs later: “And you can tell the girl who left her tights on my boat / That she can have you now.”) The TV series “Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whistle-blower in the Watergate scandal, having previously been manipulated into thinking she had seen no wrongdoing. The Harvard Business Review has been publishing a steady stream of articles with titles like “What Should I Do if My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?” Leslie Jamison, The New Yorker

Crosswords

Word games are knotty, paradoxical devices. They offer players the illusion of control: What could be tidier than a Scrabble board, or the orderly grid of a crossword puzzle? But they are possible only because language is untamable, flush with connotations and insinuations that we cannot hope to systematize.

No one knows this better than Anna Shechtman, who confronts the waywardness of words both in her capacity as a literature professor at Cornell University and as a contributor of crosswords to the New Yorker. Shechtman was a precocious constructor, as authors of crosswords are called (at least when they are not called, somewhat grandiosely, cruciverbalists); her puzzles were first published in the New York Times when she was in college.[...] 

Crossword clues are supposed to draw on “common knowledge,” but who are the proprietors of this mystical article? Is there any such thing? And perhaps most important, can constructors neutralize the chaos of language, with its mad tumult of jostling meanings? Should they even try?

These are some of the questions Shechtman poses in “The Riddles of the Sphinx,” a book too mischievously multiform to classify. Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post

The Riddle of the Sphinx è pubblicato da HarperOne.

The Delicate Art of Making Fictional Languages

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks [in Dune, n.d.r] represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than “Star Trek” or “The Lord of the Rings” that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.s of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you’ll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples (“Alpha”), spell-casting witches (“Penny Dreadful”), post-apocalyptic survivors (“Into the Badlands”), Superman’s home planet of Krypton (“Man of Steel”), a cross-species alien alliance (“Halo”), time-travelling preteens (“Paper Girls”), the Munja’kin tribe of Oz (“Emerald City”), and Santa Claus and his elves (“The Christmas Chronicles” and its sequel). Manvir Singh, The New Yorker

A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects

The United States may lack an official language, but a road trip across the country reveals dozens of different accents and dialects of English that serve as living links to Americans’ ancestors.

What’s the difference between these two linguistic terms? Accents center on the pronunciation of words, while dialects encompass pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. They both often vary by region. Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton, Smithsonian

(Nella foto: New Orleans)

Exclamation Point!

If you’re a woman who works in a traditionally male-dominated industry, chances are high that you’ve heard some version of this advice: when you finish writing your email, go through and replace all the exclamation points with periods.

This well-intentioned advice is based on three regressive ideas [...] Anne Helen Petersen, Culture Study

The Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World et al

Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage. April White, Atlas Obscura

altro articolo interessante questa settimana:

In the first decade of the 20th century, it was both virtually impossible and virtually unheard of for a Jewish person, irrespective of their individual talents, to be hired for any job at a major American publishing company—even if they were Ivy League graduates, heirs to family fortunes, and had brilliant literary minds. They couldn’t get hired on the editorial staff of a widely circulated American magazine, or be granted a professorship in an English department at a prestigious university, either. But all that started to change in the decades after the 1910s, when Jews entered the industry en masse. In addition to founding many of the today’s largest publishing companies, Jews became so influential throughout the industry that by the 1960s American writers as different as Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, Katherine Anne Porter, and Mario Puzo began to complain about a “Jewish literary mafia.” In short, a minority group went from almost complete exclusion to full literary enfranchisement in a matter of decades. Josh Lambert, Public Books

English has always evolved by mistake

Perhaps the world’s most famous lexicographer, Susie Dent is certainly one of the most positive people on British TV. For 31 years the queen of dictionary corner on Channel 4’s Countdown, she puts just as much energy into her books: from her first, the 2003 Language Report for Oxford University Press, to Weird Words (2013), an unapologetic compendium of farting and squelching. She even finds the fun in current events, through her regular “word of the day” posts on Twitter. Recent examples include “‘boodlery’ (19th century): unprincipled behaviour in public office”, and, on the day Donald Trump was arrested, “‘mugshot’: the use of ‘mug’ for a face looks back to 18th-century drinking mugs that often represented a grotesque human face … ”

We meet in a cafe on a rainy July day, where she is sitting – as is her habit – in a corner, enthusiastically digging into a second breakfast. She often sits quietly on her own in a coffee shop, she says. “It’s probably against the law to eavesdrop as much as I do. It really is for linguistic purposes, not for gossip. But you can pick up some gems.” Katy Guest, The Guardian

sull'interessante lavoro del/la lessicografo/a. E anche il profilo dei finalisti al Booker Prize (nella foto): Esi Edugyan, The Guardian 

The Making of the OED

Henry Spencer Ashbee owned the largest collection of pornography and erotica in the world. Born in 1834, he began collecting clandestine material as a teenager and eventually amassed so much that he had to store it in a dedicated bachelor pad at Gray’s Inn, where he would invite fellow pornophiles to peruse the collection every Saturday. Ashbee’s unorthodox hobby went further: he sent in words related to genitals, pornography and bondage to the fledgling Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be included in its pages.

Ashbee was one of thousands in the late 1800s who answered the OED’s global call to send in terms – along with examples of how the words were used in books and newspapers – for inclusion in the dictionary. The ambitious crowdsourcing project was “the Wikipedia of the 19th century”, says Sarah Ogilvie, whose book, The Dictionary People, profiles a selection of those who contributed terms. Ella Creamer, The Guardian

recensione di: The Dictionary People, di Sarah Ogilvie (Chatto & Windus).

Dictionary of Gestures

We might believe that the seat of speech (without considering ventriloquists and flatulists) has no need for the assistance of hand gestures when it comes to expressing emotions and sensations. Numerous adjectives confirm this to be true: foul, open, loud, smart, foaming, pouty, watering — the mouth can be all of these things and many more still.

Whereas in English, to have your heart in your mouth means to be very nervous, in French, it is inverted and has a different meaning. As Raymond Queneau puts it in “Loin de Rueil”: “He coldly left like in a transitional scene, just like that, in the night, mouth in heart, without a word.” Typically, in French, this means to put on airs or to simper. The MIT Press Reader

Questo è un estratto dal Dictionary of Gestures, di François Caradec, scrittore e fumettista francese, nato nel 1924 e morto nel 2008. Viene ora tradotto in inglese da Chris Clarke, MIT Press. Non mi risulta che sia stato tradotto in italiano.