Happy Friday to all.  It has been a crazy week, what with our Word of the Year announcement and all.  So sit back, relax, and procrastinate your Friday away.  You can tell your boss I said it was okay.

On growing up with Joan Didion.

Some books to look for in the upcoming months.

Undercover with a Michelin inspector.

Nine foods named after people.

Business versus academia, a cartoon.

A fast food flow chart (say that five times fast!)

Out to sea.

Water on the moon!

Illuminating the Lilliputian.

Junot Diaz on writing.

What Jason Epstein ate.

Do books need trailers?

Happy Friday to everyone.  It’s been a sad week at OUP as a member of our department left for an exciting new job at Tor. While we are all excited for Cassie it is sad to lose a co-worker!  Enjoy the links below and be sure to check out all the posts we did this week on South Africa, in honor of Place of the Year!

Former OUP publicist Cassie Ammerman makes her Huff Po debut.

Cloud computing in plain English.

I’ve loved Chana Bloch’s translations for years, but here is the chance to read her original poetry.

Vaccine-Finding Map.

Paul Carr debates Jeff Jarvis about so-called citizen journalists.

On how we judge books.

It’s the heart of Fall so here is a fall poem from Mary Oliver.

A great job for a Deadhead librarian.

The 25 most-valuable blogs in America.

Should you respond to a bad review?

Rock out!

Maps without keys.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the dilemma of being old in the internet age.

Philip Greenspun, an MIT software engineer and hi-tech guru, argues in a recent blog post that “technology reduces the value of old people.” It’s not that old people don’t do technology. On the contrary, many of them are heavy users of computers and cell phones. It’s that the young won’t bother tapping the knowledge of their elders because they can get so much more, so much faster, from Wikipedia and Google.

It was adults, not the young, who invented computers, programmed them, and created the internet. OK, maybe not old adults, in some cases maybe not even old-enough-to-buy-beer adults, but adults nonetheless. Plus, the over-35 set is Facebook’s fastest growing demographic.

Even so, despite starting the computer revolution, and despite their presence on the World Wide Web today, the old are fast becoming irrelevant. According to Greenspun, “An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young person ask an elder the answer to a fact question that can be solved authoritatively in 10 seconds with a Web search?”

Why indeed? With knowledge located deep in Google’s server farms instead of in the collective memories of senior citizens, the old today are fast becoming useless. Might as well put them out on the ice floe and let them float off to whatever comes next.

According to the federal government, which is never wrong about these things, I myself became officially old, and therefore useless as a repository of wisdom and memory, last Spring. But I’m not worried about being put out to sea on an ice floe, because thanks to global warming, the ice is melting so fast that it poses no danger. There’s not even enough ice out there to sink another Titanic, though if someone built a new Titanic people wouldn’t sail on it because it probably wouldn’t have free wi-fi.

I found out all I know about global warming and the shrinking ice caps and even the Titanic not from that well-known American elder, Al Gore, but from Wikipedia. Wikipedia also told me that Al Gore, who is no spring chicken, invented the internet. I learned from Google that there was no free wi-fi before the internet, and no such thing as a free lunch.

Socrates once warned that our increased reliance on writing would weaken human memory — everything we’d need to remember would be stored in documents, not brain cells, so instead of remembering stuff, we could just look it up. Socrates knew all about brain cells, of course, because he looked that up in a Greek encyclopedia (he didn’t use the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because he couldn’t read English). And just as he predicted, Socrates, who was no spring chicken, had to look up brain cells again a week later, because he forgot what it said.

2,400 years have passed since Socrates drank hemlock — that was his fellow Athenians’ way of putting an irrelevant old man out to sea — but it looks like our current dependence on computers is rendering old people’s memories irrelevant once again. And that’s probably a good thing, because as Socrates learned the hard way, old people’s memories are notoriously unreliable, which is why Al Gore, who foresaw that this would happen, also invented sticky notes.

David’s “The Death of Socrates.” We remember the Greek philosopher’s critique of writing because his student Plato wrote it down on sticky notes.

Like old people, old elephants are also no longer necessary. Elephants became an endangered species not because hunters killed them for the ivory in their tusks but because now that we have computers, no one cared that an elephant never forgets. Technology reduced the value of elephants, and so the elephants just wandered off to the elephants’ burial ground to wait for whatever comes next. And also because the elephants’ burial ground has free wi-fi.

Unlike elephants and people, computers never forget, so we can rest assured that the value of computers will never be reduced. Unlike fallible life-form-based memory banks, computers preserve their information forever, regardless of disk crashes, magnetic fields, coffee spills on keyboards, or inept users who accidentally erase an important file.

And there’s no need to throw out your 5.25″ floppies, laser disks, minidisks, Betamax, 8-track, flash drives, or DVDs just because some new digital medium becomes popular, because unlike writing on clay, stone, silk, papyrus, vellum, parchment, newsprint, or 100% rag bond paper, all computerized information is always forward-compatible with any upgrades or innovations that come along.

Plus all the information stored in computer clouds is totally reliable and always available, except of course for those pesky T-Mobile Sidekick phones whose data somehow disappeared. Assuming the cable’s not down, Google invariably shows us exactly what we’re looking for, or something that’s at least close enough to it, and Wikipedia is never wrong, ever. That’s because the information on Google and Wikipedia is put there by robots, or maybe intelligent life forms from outer space, not by people of a certain age who have to write stuff down on stickies, just as Socrates did, so they don’t forget it.

And now that I don’t have to remember all that lore that elders were once responsible for, my brain cells have been freed up to do other important stuff, like spending lots more time online looking for the meaning of life and what comes next, assuming there’s free wi-fi at the coffee shop.

This week was so busy that Friday being here already seems like a shock, not that I am complaining.  Below are some links to keep you busy until the end of the day – that is if you aren’t already busy enough!  (Though there is always time to procrastinate.)

An interview with one of our favorite blog editors, Emily Bobrow.

Google’s Eric Schmidt on what the web will look like in 5 years.

How little people eat breakfast.

Tiny Fey’s favorite 30 Rock moments.

Check out Poetry Speaks.

Happy 40th birthday Sesame Street.

Congratulations to Girls Write Now on being honored at the White House!

Watch OUP author Michael Sandel lead the most popular course in Harvard’s history.

Walt Whitman twitterized? Sacrilege!

Drawing NYC from memory.

As a New Yorker I feel it is necessary to celebrate the Yankee victory.  Go Yanks!

Hey Jude, a flowchart.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an the 40th birthday of the internet.

I began writing this online message 40 years to the minute when the internet went live.

At 7:00 pm on Oct. 29, 1969 UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, who organized the internet’s first day, had one of his programmers, Charley Kline, send a message from his computer at UCLA’s engineering school to his colleague Bill Duvall, who was sitting at a second computer at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Palo Alto. Kline typed LOG, one slow character at a time, and Duvall’s computer was to supply the IN to form the complete command, login, which would connect the machines. Duvall was also connected by telephone to Kline, and he reported each letter as it got through. First the “L,” then the “O.” But when Klein typed the “G,” the Stanford computer crashed. That makes LO the first electronic message.

A month later, the University of California at Santa Barbara joined the first computer network, called ARPANET, the Advanced Research Projects Network, and in December, the University of Utah was added. Eventually the loose configuration of computers at research facilities around the country, and then around the world, came to be called the internet, or as Dr. House would have it, the interweb.

120 years earlier, Henry David Thoreau, skeptical of the telegraph — which we sometimes refer to in retrospect as the Victorian internet — wrote in Walden, “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

The telegraph succeeded despite Thoreau’s complaint, but Samuel Morse, the telegraph’s inventor, thought Bell’s telephone was just a pretty toy. Morse was convinced that no one would want an invention that was unable to provide a permanent, written record of a conversation. These minutes from a Western Union meeting clarify concerns that no one would use the telephone to communicate anything important: “Bell’s instrument uses nothing but the voice, which cannot be captured in concrete form. . . . We leave it to you to judge whether any sensible man would transact his affairs by such a means of communications.”

And so not everyone was excited when UCLA spoke to Stanford. Kleinrock has noted the almost prophetic nature of that first message, “Lo,” as in “Lo and behold.” But except for programmers, most people in 1969 had little use for one computer, let alone two hooked together. What could these machines — electronic brains or electronic toys — possibly have to say to one another?

The internet may be 40 years old today, and no one reading this post would dream of starting their day without checking email, Facebook, and one or more online news sources, but until the 1990s few people used the Net. For all anyone knew, it was little more than a series of tubes.

In the time-honored tradition of distrusting new communications devices, in those early days computer giant IBM and telecom monopolist AT&T saw no future for networked computers and refused to bid to develop that first Interface Message Processor. In order for the internet to spread, they reasoned, managers would have to type. Even computer programmers wrote with pencil and paper, not on their mainframes, which were designed to crunch numbers, not words. Typing was for secretaries and the odd hunt-and-peck writer who didn’t have access to the typing pool.

Several things helped the internet take off when it finally did, not in 1969 but in the 1990s. Affordable, user-friendly personal computers, like the 1984 Apple Macintosh; easy-to-use email programs like Eudora (1988) that worked like word processors; and browsers like Mosaic, launched in 1993, which enabled ordinary people to search the web without a computer science degree. Without those developments, the Net would have remained the province of researchers and nerds instead of a welcoming home for almost 1.7 billion people around the world, everyone from honest citizens like you and me, to stalkers and spies, dollar-hungry marketers, hate-mongers, pornographers, and Nigerian scammers.

Talking about the internet’s birthday, Kleinrock told CNN, “We didn’t anticipate the level of the dark side we see today. The culture of the early Internet was one of trust. . . . I knew every user on the Internet in those early days.” Back in 1969 no one suspected that the internet would even have a dark side. But no one knew, either, that along with “What hath God wrought,” and “Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you,” and “Fiat lux,” “LO” would go down in history as the start of a great communications revolution whose dark side is but a minor annoyance compared to the enlightenment and the fun-filled hours it brings to us, and allows us to bring to others.

And no one suspected, back in 1969, that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of computers would produce, not “Hamlet,” but HamBASIC.

Jennifer Weber, author of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, and Professor in the Department of History, University of Kansas, sent us this picture. This kitten has brightened my week and I hope he brightens your Friday!

Kit’s Lit

Lots of people enjoy Oxford’s books, but OUP’s fans aren’t limited to humans. Ike here has a deep interest in the Civil War, and OUP’s list slakes his thirst for knowledge.

By the time that you read this, fair readers, I will be on my way home to Glasgow for the weekend to see my mum. I’m very excited. However, for those of you stuck at your desks, allow me to entertain you with some of my favourite recent blog posts and articles.

Sad news for the BBC Radio 4 listeners amongst us: Norman Painter, who has been the voice of Phil Archer since The Archers began in 1950, has died at the age of 85.

How important is similar taste in books in a relationship?

According to recent research, literacy  changes the structure of the brain.

Maurice Sendak tells parents worried by Where the Wild Things Are to ‘go to hell’.

A dog from Shropshire has been named the world’s oldest. Atta boy Otto!

The battle for Jack Kerouac’s estate.

Philip Stone of The Bookseller on books by celebrities.

Queen Victoria’s celebrity hippo.

A vexed owl. The second-last photo is my favourite.

An article celebrating 50 years of Asterix.

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 variations and usage of the f-word. Obviously, this post contains rather strong language.

Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-word is many things: a super-mega-normous look at all things fuck; a huge, steaming pile of filth; and a huge, erudite pile of scholarship. It’s a myth-dispelling history lesson in taboo language, literary culture, and pop culture, with appearances by The Sex Pistols, Pulp Fiction, Dick Cheney, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, James Joyce, and Kurt Vonnegut. It may be the greatest bathroom book of all time.

This citation-packed historical dictionary also raises questions about the moral fiber—not to mention the moral cocoa puffs—of society. There was a time when fuck didn’t even get included in dictionaries, and now there’s a dictionary with only fuck, in its third edition no less? How can the tender hearts and minds of our time cope with a book so explicitly illustrating the history of fuck-a-doodle-doo and its barnyard brother, the fucked duck? What will they say at (as Jerry Seinfeld put it) “the finest finishing schools on the eastern seaboard” when confronted with almost two pages on doublefuck and six on ratfuck? Will schoolchildren of the future soon be texting and tweeting DILLIGAF and FYBIS? (”Do I look like I give a fuck?” and “Fuck you, buddy, I’m shipping out,” for the acronymically innocent).

Yes, this is a ticking bomb clock of a book, and the average language-user can’t be expected to know where the red, blue, green, and mauve wires are leading. That’s where I come in (cue “The Final Countdown”).

In addition to being the leading prophet of a new religion based on pancakes, I am also an authority on etiquette. In fact, I am a licensed etiquitte-ologist, and the fact that I made the license myself with crayons is something etiquette forbids you to notice. Instead, you should latch your eyes onto the following usage guide like a hobo seizing a discarded KFC bucket. My advice on these sensitive terms, selected from Sheidlower’s towering temple of titillation, is guaranteed to save—or cause—an embarrassing faux pas, or your money back.

(In the interests of full disclosure and maximum courtesy, I must confess to being one of several word-herders thanked in The F-word, though my contributions were small, and I remain chagrinned that my finding of neurodoublefucked didn’t warrant inclusion. Har-smurfing-umph).

pigfuck
Though not as well known in the highest echelons of society as violin concertos or speed metal, pigfuck is the name of a music genre, specifically one “associated with the late 1980s and typically regarded as an outgrowth of punk and a precursor to grunge, characterized by a gritty, noisy sound.” Thus, pigfuck is entirely appropriate to use when discussing that genre, and that genre alone. However, discretion must be exercised when proximity to a barnyard might cause ambiguity. Similarly, it is always OK to call the windfucker bird (or kestrel) by name, just as long as you don’t say it was my idea.

HMFIC (head motherfucker in charge), MFWIC (motherfucker what’s in charge)
The supreme leaders, supreme commanders, dear leaders, grand poohbahs, rear admirals, and assistant deans of the world all feel, at times, that their present titles may not sufficiently connote the grandeur they wish to inspire in the help and the masses. However, if you refer to yourself as, for example, “Dr. Vargas, HMFIC” I am almost certain those children will stop laughing at you.

IHTFP (I hate this fucking place)
As a former resident of Buffalo, NY, where the snow sometimes falls in six-feet-per-week increments, and the football team loses games that range from heart-attack-spawning to mass-suicide-provoking, I can heartily recommend the use of this expression there. It is also handy and apropos in Phoenix or hell during the summer. Speaking of those sweltering mid-year months, I think we can all agree alternatives are needed to the overused, worn out clichés “Hot enough for ya?” and “It’s hotter’n Satan’s thong!” I suggest using hotter than a fresh fucked fox in a forest fire, an expression dating from 1950, for future steamy summers and eternal flame-y torments. Sometimes, freshness of phrase trumps ickiness of idiom.

goat-fucking contest
The question of when it is “okey-dokey” or “swell” to refer to a goat-fucking contest has puzzled correctness czars and English professors since Christ was a corporal. We can learn something from a Sheidlower-collected 1998 citation: “Colonel, you and me been to three county fairs and a goat-fuckin’ contest and I ain’t seen you hit by nothin’ heavier than shrapnel.” First, it seems this expression is super-apropos in the military, an entity that cultivates profanity by the bucketload. Secondly—and I presume this has something to do with the metric system—this and other examples include three country fairs along with the goat-humping, so precedent dictates that these words should stay wedded idiomatically. We can also extrapolate that a goat-flipping contest is not to be mentioned or invoked lightly. No matter how good that coffee is, it’s probably not three-county-fairs-and-a-goat-fucking-contest good. Finally, since the expression often includes merely a goat-fuckin’ (or goat-ropin’) with no mention of a contest, I am almost certain this expression is not fit for ESPN.

CFM, fuck-me
CFM is an acronym for “come fuck me” that, in the older and commoner form “fuck-me” usually applies to skirts, shoes, boots, heels, pumps and other traditionally conjugalicious women’s wear. Sheidlower defines fuck-me as “(especially of an article of clothing, typically footwear) intended to invite sexual advances; seductive, vampish, sexy.” I just wonder if the haberdashers and seamstresses and J. Petermans of the world have sufficiently plumbed the depths of CFM-ness. Perhaps some enterprising clothes-ologist could design the fuck-me fez, the fuck-me Mr. Rogers sweater, and—for the cautious-minded—the fuck-me tin-foil hat. We all need love, you know.

Finally, etiquette mavens and manners enthusiasts—not to mention politeness pundits—may be baffled when considering the bulging bucket of insults for which fuck is a prefix. Thankfully, Sheidlower’s definitions lend a helping hand. Consider this handy chart of fifteen easily confused terms:

fuckass: “a despicable or contemptible person”
fuckbag: “a disgusting person, ‘asshole’, etc.”
fuckface: “an ugly or contemptible person.—usually used abusively in direct address”
fuckhead: “a stupid or contemptible person”
fuckhole: “a despicable person; an asshole”
fuck-knuckle: “a stupid or offensive person”
fucknob: “a stupid or contemptible person”
fucknut: “a stupid or contemptible person”
fuck-pig: “a contemptible person”
fuckrag: “a worthless, contemptible, or despicable person”
fuckshit: “a despicable person”
fuckstick: “a worthless, contemptible, or despicable person”
fucktard: “a despicably stupid person”
fuckwad: “a stupid or contemptible person; an asshole”
fuckwit: “a stupid person”

If only I had this list during grad school, I could have been so much more accurate and beaten up!

Thanks to these distinctions, I’ll be able to send Festivus cards with confidence this year. My colleague Bucky is quite dumb, yet possesses no despicable or contemptible qualities, so I shall address him as “little fuckwit.” My nemesis Dr. Vargas is cunning as a sewer rat and quite despicable; therefore, he is a fuckass (as well as a fuckshit and fuck-pig). My cousin Jeffrey is neither despicable nor contemptible, but he is worthless, so I guess he’s a fuckrag, like Grandma always said.

You see, even in this warp-speed world of Twitter and moon-smashing, there’s always time for the right word in the right place for the right worthless, contemptible, or despicable person. It may be impolite to call a doofus a fucknut, but it’s impolite and inaccurate to call a fuckbag a fuckrag. There’s no excuse for it–even if you’ve been to four county fairs and a goat-you-know-what-ing.

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at an article from Seed magazine claiming that soon we’ll all be authors.

Researchers are predicting that Twitter is going global: in just four years, everyone on the planet–some 10 billion people–will be tweeting.

Writing in Seed magazine, neuroscientist Denis G. Pelli and graphic designer Charles Bigelow (he co-designed the Lucida font) find that the internet has brought us to the brink of universal literacy, and we’re also fast approaching universal authorship: “Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish.”

To illustrate this writing revolution, Pelli and Bigelow have assembled what can only be called an “authorgraph,” a chart plotting the number of book authors from the middle ages to the present, and the far greater number of authors using new media–blogs, Facebook, and Twitter–since the year 2000.

The researchers find that only 50 authors published a book in 1400 (a serious undercount). Then, thanks to the printing press, which came on line in the 1440s, book publication grew steadily over the centuries and peaked at just over a million book authors per year around 2000.

In contrast, the new genres enabled by the internet have shown massive growth in authorship over a far shorter time span. Pelli and Bigelow observe that before the printing press it took a scribe a year to produce a bible, while today you can tweet or update your Facebook status in seconds. They conclude, “The new media are growing 100 times faster than books.”

But comparing books to tweets leads to skewed figures. Plenty of writers in the age of print wrote not books but songs, poems, news articles, chronicles, laws, essays, and plays; they too must be considered authors (and of course scribes copied bibles, they didn’t write them, so they don’t count as authors). And, since books are still a presence in the internet age, we should remember that even in the age of Google and Wikipedia it still takes an author a year or more to write a book (yes, there’s Sarah Palin’s four-month wonder Going Rogue–but I’m only counting books with actual content).

That’s not to deny the impressive impact of the internet on authorship. Pelli and Bigelow’s figures show that blogging takes only five years to go from 60 bloggers to a million. Then social media sites take off, and Facebookers jump from an initial 50,000 to 75 million in just four years. Twitter authorship grows even faster, exploding from10,000 tweeters to a million in only three years and no end in sight–and here’s where Pelli and Bigelow go off the rails: “Extrapolation of the Twitter-author curve (the dashed line) predicts that every person will publish in 2013.”

Even hard-core fans of the internet must realize that’s just not going to happen.

I too have made the claim that because of the internet, everyone’s an author. Computers and the internet mean that more and more people are creating text and publishing it, and the internet has shown a robust ability to connect writers with readers in ways we never before imagined.

I’ve said more than once, as well, that thanks to the digital revolution, all you need to be an author is a laptop, a wi-fi card, and a place to sit at Starbucks. But my claims are hyperbolic.

Assuming that by “everyone” we mean people all over the globe, then we’re far from “nearly everyone” reading, and farther still from “nearly everyone” publishing. Pelli and Bigelow concede that authors today constitute 0.1 percent of the world’s population (according to their standards, an author is someone whose text reaches at least 100 readers, a number which excludes many bloggers and tweeters), but they’re optimistic that “Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.”

That’s going to take a lot longer than four more years. True, the internet opens the possibility of authorship to the other 99.9% of the world’s 10 billion people, but first many of them will have to survive infancy, find a source of clean drinking water, learn to read and write, acquire a computer, find a reliable source of electricity, and, oh yes, locate an internet service provider. That’s assuming they’re motivated to become authors in the first place. And they live in a country where the government doesn’t block Twitter.

And even if all that happens, we’ve still got to increase the capacity of Twitter to handle all that traffic without triggering the fail whale, and we’re still a long, long way from the day when there are enough Starbucks so that everyone will have a place to sit and tweet–plus somebody’s gotta make the latte.

What a beautiful week.  The mellow weather made my days seems to fly by!  Of course, it isn’t 5 o’clock yet.  So  here are some quality procrastination links to get you through the day.  Enjoy!

Matt Welch, of Reason and Alex S. Jones, author of  “Losing the News,” debate the value of online journalism.

Sometimes, being wrong helps you learn.

America’s most expensive Universities.

Three-cheers for Sam Sifton.

Thirty-two new planets! Maybe we aren’t alone…

John Oakes at the Huffington Post, just scary enough for Halloween.

The DOJ to lay off stoners.

Watch this toad.

Three tweets for the web.

On live-blogging.

Great travel tips.