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How Birds and Babies Learn to Talk
Gary Marcus on what a discovery in birdsong reveals about human language development: http://nyr.kr/133tDBJ
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Cartoon by Farley Katz. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/13YMpOh
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Cartoon by Paul Karasik. For more: http://nyr.kr/W5IG8R
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"One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable…"
— Dan Chiasson on poet David Ferry’s beautiful thefts: http://nyr.kr/WtVe8C(Source: newyorker.com)
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Utopian For Beginners
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.
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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
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The Case of the Missing O.E.D. Words
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
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I <3 Emoji
Hannah Goldfield explains the appeal of Emoji: http://nyr.kr/S1Xshc
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Reflections on the Winning Board of the 2012 Scrabble Nationals: A Poem by Judith Thurman http://nyr.kr/OHq8ae
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What Do We Mean By "Evil"?→
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
