Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Bryan A. Garner is the award-winning author or editor of more than 20 books. Garner’s Modern American Usage has established itself as the preeminent contemporary guide to the effective use of the English language. The 3rd edition, which was just published, has been thoroughly updated with new material on nearly every page. Below we have posted one of his daily usage tips about the word “partake”. To subscribe to his daily tips click here.
Some links to get you through the day.
A tidal wave of high drug prices has recently crashed across the U.S. economy. One of the primary culprits: agreements by which brand-name drug manufacturers pay generic firms to stay off the market. This issue has been raging in the halls of Congress, the courts, and the government agencies.
Why have the Doha negotiations been so painfully slow and unsuccessful so far? A review of recent commentary and analysis seems to indicate that the difficulty has many roots, as shown by the following list of contributing factors:
The volcano that spewed ash into the Icelandic skies and disrupted world air travel has a name that’s pretty difficult to pronounce and pretty difficult to spell; it’s Eyjafjallajökull. This evidently means “island mountain glacier.” Nothing about volcanoes, fire or ash in that word.
The phrase ‘Broken Britain’ is well known to British newspaper readers; it’s a phrase commonly used across the media to describe society’s problems. Here, historian John Welshman traces this identification of a broken society back to around the time of the Second World War, and argues that the real answer is – and was then – to address society’s inequalities rather than ‘Big Society’ and a retreat from state involvement.
Wayne Sandholtz, author of Prohibiting Plunder, examines the Napoleonic practice of seizing art from conquered territories and the appointing a specialist for this very purpose.
I notice that my posts on usage, including spelling, invite livelier comments than those on word origins, and most questions I receive also concern usage. This is natural, and, as always, I am grateful for questions, suggestions, and criticism. Today I will take care of about half of my backlog but will try to get rid of the other half in May.
“In this pre-election period television plays a big role. On Sky News, at the bottom of the screen, you will see four colours: red, blue, yellow and grey. These represent Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and other. There are numbers in each colour and these represent the latest survey results of voting intention. Watch carefully and the percentages change. The numbers change because they show results according to Mori, then YouGov, then ICM, then ComRes, then Populus. The results are not “true” because they are samples – the only true result would be a full count.”
Mark Peters, a language columnist for Good and Visual Thesaurus, as well as the blogger behind The Pancake Proverbs, The Rosa Parks of Blogs, and Wordlustitude is our guest blogger this week. In this post, he looks at nonce words in the Oxford English Dictionary
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at immigration reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin looks at the international impact of Mark Twain in honor the centennial of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of his most celebrated book.
Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia, traces the enthusiasm of biological efforts to solve the mystery of melancholia and proposes that a useful, and a potentially life-saving, connection between medicine and psychiatry has been lost. Below we have excerpted the preface which explains why endocrine psychiatry deserves a second look.
Alexandra D’Arcy is a sociolinguist by training and specializes in the study of language variation and change. This is the third installation in her new monthly column so be sure to check back next month.
In honor of the History Channel’s new series, America: The Story of Us, we have pulled some American history questions from Joy Hakim’s A History of US.
Most of my knowledge on ancient Greece and Rome comes from watching the TV show ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’. Xena not only encounters Julius Caesar, Pompeius, and Octavian in her quests, but Marc Antony and Cleopatra as well. I was thus eager to learn more of the historical, ‘real-life’ Cleopatra.