Cartoon by Farley Katz. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/13YMpOh

Cartoon by Paul Karasik. For more: http://nyr.kr/W5IG8R

(Source: newyorker.com)

   This week, in the World Changers issue, Joshua Foer talks to John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old amateur linguist who spent three decades preparing his invented language, Ithkuil, before releasing it online in 2004. But Quijada realized he may have lost control of Ithkuil after a group of psychonetics practitioners in Russia began studying his language… http://nyr.kr/SWVG0t

Photograph by Dan Winters.

James Guida on coming out of the aphorism closet: “Yes, I wrote a book of aphorisms… Looking back, this fact seems newly bizarre— aphorisms!” http://nyr.kr/TFABpT

An article… in the Guardian—excerpted on Gawker and many other places, and widely retweeted—highlighted the claim that Robert Burchfield, the editor of the four-volume “Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” published from 1972 to 1986, “covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins.”

This claim is completely bogus…

Jesse Sheidlower editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains what really happened in the case of the missing words: http://nyr.kr/Tr9crS

Hannah Goldfield explains the appeal of Emoji: http://nyr.kr/S1Xshc

Reflections on the Winning Board of the 2012 Scrabble Nationals: A Poem by Judith Thurman http://nyr.kr/OHq8ae

What does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to call a person like James Holmes “evil”? In centuries past, “evil” was used to describe all manner of ills, from natural disasters to the impulse to do wrong. Today it’s used mostly to emphasize the gravity of a crime, trading on the term’s aura of religious finality. The meaning of “evil” has become increasingly unsettled even as it has narrowed, yet the word has proven to be an unshakable unit in our moral lexicon. Why does “evil” persist?

What Do We Mean By “Evil”?: http://nyr.kr/QjHNeK

The first time Bryan A. Garner, a lawyer and writer, met Antonin Scalia—over breakfast at the Washington, D.C., Four Seasons, in 2006—the Justice spent the early part of their conversation praising a magazine essay he had recently read on English grammar and usage. Garner, who has now written two books with Scalia, felt that it would be bad form to interrupt, but when the Justice had trouble remembering the essay’s author, he suggested a name. Scalia assented. “Sir,” Garner replied, politely, “that essay is a review of my book.”

Writing with Antonin Scalia, Grammar Nerd: http://nyr.kr/M3P7Fb