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John McIntyre, a truly old-school copy editor (the man wears a bow tie, for God's sake), has a delightful hard-boiled detective story celebrating National Grammar Day, Pulp Diction. To whet your appetite, here's a bit from Chapter 2, "The last copy editor":At the old Sun building on Calvert Street...

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More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths: colon 'part of the large intestine' goes back to Greek κόλον [kolon], but colon 'punctuation mark (:); rhythmical unit'...

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I've left the topic of my book unaddressed for too long, preoccupied as I have been with more highfalutin' topics, but thanks to the indefatigable John Emerson I hereby bring you Русский Мат.net! Don't worry, it's not just Russian, though it does have a nice Russian as they speak...

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The answer requires both an ability to read Arabic script and a knowledge of West African languages, so I'm not especially hopeful that even my Varied Readers will be able to provide it, but it's such an interesting puzzle I can't resist passing it on. Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat,...

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I just discovered that Open Library ("One web page for every book.") has a blog, and it has an entry that will upset any bibliophile, The Enemies of Books by George Oates:I learned a new word today: biblioclast, or destroyer of books. Found it on the frontispiece of The Enemies...

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Copyediting dictionaries is tedious work but I always learn things. I just discovered that the word collation, in the sense of 'light meal,' comes from the title of John Cassian's early fifth-century work Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences with the Egyptian hermits), which was read in Benedictine communities...

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Today is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Basil Bunting, one of my favorite poets; I've devoted three posts to quoting him (1, 2, 3) and several others to discussing him. He's obviously one of Mark Woods' favorites too, because wood s lot commemorates him every year, and...

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1) John Emerson sent me Interesting Schtoff from Google Books, a section of Steven K. Baum's virtual cave. It's a collection of links to old dictionaries, catalogs, and other reference books, not to mention unusual and humorous material. Baum says "Feel free to borrow any or all of...

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An AskMetaFilter question says "My grandmother's first language [Ladino] is nearly extinct. I'd like to record an interview with her for archival purposes; how should I go about it? ... I'm linguistically literate, but far from an expert, so advice from anyone with linguistics experience (particularly field lingustics) is especially...

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I had never heard of poet and translator Emery George (and there's essentially nothing about him online except that "He is Emeritus Professor of German at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor"), but he did a terrific translation (judging by the English—I don't read Hungarian) of "A la recherche," one...

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The company is Toyota, but the family name of the founder is Toyoda. Why the difference? Bill Poser discusses it at the Log; after citing an implausible theory about stroke count, he says:Another explanation is that Toyota served to dissociate the motor vehicle company from farming, which advanced...

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A couple of days ago Anatoly asked his readers for poems they loved by living poets, and as of now at that link there are almost a thousand responses. If you're a fan of Russian poetry, it's a free and nearly inexhaustible anthology of what's going on now....

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I've been on something of a spending spree at Amazon lately,* and the latest goodie to arrive is a copy of The History of the Russian Literary Language from the Seventeenth Century to the Nineteenth, Lawrence L. Thomas's abridged 1969 translation of V. V. Vinogradov's classic Очерки по истории русского...

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There is a meme running around the internet that takes the form "I'm gonna love him and pet him and squeeze him and call him George" (many variations in wording, but all ending with "...and call him George"). This is ultimately based on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, where...

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The idea of the indeterminate text is associated with postmodernism (e.g.: "the modernism of Eliot has been identified with the autonomy of the text [...] and the determinacy of its meaning, the postmodern text is 'open' and its meaning is indeterminate"), but there's nothing new about it. To quote...

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