Category: Uncategorized
Joan Didion: “The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic”
“I have been asked if I do not find it strange that Vanessa Redgrave is playing me. I explain: Vanessa Redgrave is not playing me, Vanessa Redgrave is playing a character who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion.…It would be logical to assume that I adopted this distance to protect myself. It…
Amid this vague uncertainty, who walks safe?
“Let me decline to enlist on either side of this concocted war of the -ists, and speak instead on behalf of a third group: the Rational People. We believe in making value judgements about language use: some writers are better than others, and even good writers sometimes make poor choices and outright mistakes. But we…
“Abuse is like beauty”
“To be brutally frank with you, abuse is like beauty. It’s in the eyes of the beholder.…A loud voice, anything, can be called abuse.”—”For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews” by Ian Urbina.
Consolidating feeds [UPDATED]
I am consolidating all of the feeds for this site into one. That’s why you might be seeing more material than before. Because the citations feed was added to the site well after the entries-only feed, thousands of subscribers were not aware that the citations exist. They’re often as interesting and as valuable as the…
Updates
So this is late, but here’s our Christmas tree: Very small, but it fit nicely in our living room. Thanks to everyone who helped put presents under it. We had a nice Christmas by ourselves: opened presents, made a nice dinner, took a walk in the park. A couple of weeks ago we went to…
California, Christmas, and Radio
Just a quick note to say that Sarah and I are now back from a week in California, where we attended a linguistics conference and I recorded a little radio. We also had a nice little Christmas. Pictures and more details to come about everything. By the way, the radio show I’m cohosting begins airing…
New Season of KPBS Radio’s “A Way With Words” Starts January 20th
I’m happy to announce that a lot of hard work goes out for public consumption starting this Saturday, January 20th, when the first shows of the new season of the radio show A Way With Words begin broadcasting. My lovely cohost Martha Barnette and I have been recording since October, trying a bunch of new…
“Plutoed” Voted 2006 Word of the Year
In its 17th annual words of the year vote–the longest-running vote of its kind in the English-speaking world–the American Dialect Society voted “plutoed” as the word of the year, in a run-off against “climate canary.” To “pluto” is to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General…
Do you want to be on the radio?
We’re looking for contestants for our new language quiz on A Way With Words, broadcast from KPBS in San Diego to California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and around the world via streaming and podcast. The quiz is a short, playful game about words and their meanings. Plus, there may be a little prize in it for you.…
New York Times “Words of the Year”
My glossary of some of the words of the year was published in the New York Times today.