What a bizarre article in the New York Times about an alleged crisis of irony, to be blamed in large part on Obama.
As you may recall from my previous thoughts on irony, I’ve never been tempted to consider irony thriving in American life to begin with. But now to mourn its decline because of an [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘language’
November 14, 2008
Casanova, aged 11, discovers wit
I’m reading The Story of My Life by Giacomo Casanova and arrive at the following event, which took place when the boy was eleven years old.
(And yes, this is part of the bibliography for my book. If you’re trying to figure out why, I leave, for the time being, the subtlest of hints here.)
Casanova [...]
October 26, 2008
Spaces between words
The good conversations are always the impractical ones, I’ve discovered. Either I do a focussed interview of somebody and I end up with the right quotes and facts in my notebook, ready to write a story. Or I … have fun. The notebook winds up chaotic, but I end up thinking about all sorts of [...]
October 14, 2008
Word-loving as science
I still remember my high-school English teacher telling me that good writers minimize the use of the, of, a and so forth. Those are fill words–in effect, noise. Turn nouns into verbs and get rid of them, so that the signal-to-noise ratio of your writing goes up. Don’t say: “A restructuring of our financial system [...]
October 8, 2008
Amy Tan and I
And just as I am researching J.K. Rowling for my book, I am also looking into Amy Tan, and discovering interesting things other than those I am actively searching for. From Amy Tan, during this interview, the following:
I also grew up, thankfully, with a love of language. That may have happened because I was bilingual [...]
October 6, 2008
The Republicans and language
And from that same issue of The New Yorker, this piece, which might well have telepathically come out of my mind.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I feel rather strongly about words and language–in more than one language, as it happens. So when a political movement arises with the apparent mission to [...]
September 11, 2008
It’s the cliché, stupid
Here at The Economist, we correspondents have just received an order from above:
… a formal ban on “It’s the XXXX, stupid” … I think the phrase has been overdone, especially in election stories.
Can we also try, wherever possible, to avoid using “top”, as in “top officials say” or “America’s top companies”: “leading” is much better.
This [...]
August 30, 2008
George Orwell, Blogger
Perhaps it was too obvious until now. What, you mean .. publish the diaries of the great writers, thinkers and statesmen of the past? Just like that? For all to see?
And now it is obvious. They’re publishing George Orwell’s diaries, one entry at a time, as if he were a blogger today. Genius!
For a blogger, [...]
August 18, 2008
More on Shakespeare’s “Like you like it”
So you’ve heard me nag, nag, nag about the issue of like/as, first and foremost here, and then here.
Turns out that Paul Yeager and Sherry Coven have fired at the same target, in their wonderful blog for language lovers.
I see that I’m in good company….
August 17, 2008
On irony
Having a sense of irony can be an isolating and lonely experience if you find yourself living in America. I should know.
While contemplating a post on irony, I pinged a former colleague of mine, Gideon Rachman (who is now a columnist and blogger at the Financial Times).
That is because Gideon, as a Brit in the [...]
August 8, 2008
The treacherous First Person
I’ve been meaning to share a tidbit of a conversation I recently had with my colleague at The Economist, Tom Standage, while we were having lunch at Zuni in San Francisco. Both of us are writing books, both of which are not traditional “histories” but have a strong element of history, and indeed assume a [...]
August 5, 2008
China cliches: Hu knows Wen?
An amusing missive from Kaiser Kuo, at least for those of us who have lived in, or reported from, China.
It’s a sort of dirge from a weary soul who’s just seen too many bad articles/headlines/captions by foreigners about China. Just a few excerpts:
Welcome to Beijing, friends from the foreign press! I greet you on behalf [...]
August 4, 2008
Word lovers
An author named Ammon Shea has just written a book about how he read the entire Oxford English Dictionary.
That touched a nerve, because when I was sixteen I tried to read the entire American Heritage Dictionary (I still have the marked-up copy next to me now). Ammon made it through. I got side-tracked at around [...]
July 21, 2008
Shakespeare’s “Like You Like It” & my favorite grammar felony
Nothing deep today, just getting something off my chest and on the record (I heard that’s what blogs are for): It drives me nuts when people–dare I suggest that Americans are especially prone?–don’t know how (not) to use the words like and unlike.
Just to avoid the charge of snobbism, I’ll take an example from my [...]
