Ever since I heard rumors that Amazon was coming out with an eBook reader, I’ve been waiting for it. It’s here. It’s expensive, at $400. It’s wireless, which is awesome. You do your shopping and downloading right from the device, which apparently works on a cell phone (or cell phone-like) network, so you’re not limited […]
Archive | Language/Lit
Bemused Again
In my post about “bemused,” Kevin left a comment that made me wonder about the word, and how the abridged MW had a definition that the unabridged MW didn’t. I wrote to MW (of course?) and their response more or less confirms what I figured: Sense 3 of bemused in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is a […]
Bemused and Presume
Two words frequently pop up and make me wonder. Let’s start with Presume, as in “presumed innocent.” To me, strictly speaking, presume means that even though you lack all the facts, you have a high confidence that you’re right. “Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” meant that there weren’t a whole lot of white folks around, and […]
Big Book
Hurtling through physical space to my door is the latest translation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I’ve never read it before, and I don’t plan to start any time in the next month or two, but I’m glad to have it. It’s sort of famous. It’s 1296 pages of Russiany goodness. And this translation is […]
Shadow Blog!
The latest article in the Freakonomics blog is kinda funny in trying to be serious about the perils of misinformation while also quoting and laughing at the accusation of…the Shadow Blog. It’s only slightly funny when it misuses the word “whomever.” The misuse of “whom,” and my twitch about it, came up at lunch just […]
The Decameron
For no good reason, I’ve been reading some of the stories from the Decameron when I have a few minutes. Well, maybe the timing is the reason: each story is quick and easy to read. When I don’t have a lot of time or mental energy, I can open the thing at random and know […]
Bad Writing
I’m reading an autobiographical book called, “Looking for Trouble,” by journalist and producer Leslie Cockburn. She’s done a lot of really exciting stuff all over the scariest parts of the globe, and her story is fascinating. But God do I hate her writing. It’s not that it’s flat, or dull, or without style. It’s that […]
Weird Science
Anyone who’s read a couple of posts here knows that I’m hung up on the use of language. But part of my exquisite beauty is that I can also get hung up on science. Today, I present a combination of the two. A misuse of a science term. Slate, which I like (and link to […]
I hear ya
I recently posted that, due to podcasts becoming mainstream, people aren’t as snooty about audiobooks as they used to be. But, according to this article in the NYT, many people in book clubs (bastions of literary pretension) disagree. Apparently, listening to the book is cheating. I feel sorry for anyone who thinks that reading letters […]
Connected
I’m connected with Ulysses Grant because he read Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” and so have I. (He read it while traveling through the same areas that Twain had written about. I love the idea of doing that, but I’ve often found that I’ve read the appropriate book months after, or before, getting to the place […]