Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

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.

Peter McDonald was the first to investigate the newly opened archives of South Africa’s apartheid censorship bureaucracy in 1999. The process wasn’t easy—evidence was everywhere. Some materials had been deposited in the State Archives in Cape Town, some in Pretoria, others appeared to be missing, and the rest were still with the post-apartheid Film and Publication Board (FPB). As McDonald sorted the pieces startling discoveries were made, which he eventually recounted in his book The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and Its Cultural Consequences. In the following reflection McDonald reveals the poignant questions that drove him to discover the truth behind apartheid censorship in South Africa. You can check out more contributions to our “Place of the Year” week here.

For most of my professional life I have been thinking about the idea of culture as it has been shaped and reshaped over the past two hundred years, and about the processes and perils of literary guardianship, especially in the complex, intercultural world that emerged in the course of the long twentieth century. The last thing I ever imagined was that the archives of the apartheid censorship bureaucracy in South Africa would provide me with an astonishingly rich, if also disturbing, set of materials with which to address these sometimes abstruse questions.

After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that censors are the enemies of culture. They are the hateful guardians of the law; the nightmarish state-sanctioned adversaries who have, for one reason or another, taken it upon themselves to keep modern writers and their readers in check; and, besides, they hardly warrant close study by literary scholars, since they are censorious bureaucrats whose vocabulary is limited to a simple yes or no.

This, at least, is how I always thought about censors in general and about the apartheid censors in particular. Whenever the topic was raised when I was a child attempting to grow up in the South Africa of the 1960s and 1970s, it would not take long before someone would recount a story about the censors once banning Black Beauty, Anna Sewell’s strange late Victorian horse memoir. Like many others, I thought this said everything I needed to know about the barbarous stupidity of the system. When I looked into the newly opened archives of the censorship bureaucracy in the late 1990s, and saw some of the secret censors’ reports for the first time and discovered who wrote them, I realized that I had a major problem on my hands and a huge topic for a book.

I expected to see reports signed by ex-policemen, security agents, retired military types, and the like, but what I found was that the overwhelming majority were written by literary academics, writers and esteemed university professors. That was surprising enough. Digging a little deeper into the history of the system, I discovered that a particularly influential group of these seemingly miscast figures actually saw themselves as the guardians of literature, and, more bizarrely, as defenders of a particular idea of the ‘Republic of Letters’. What on earth were they doing there? And what sense was I to make of the fact that, as the archives revealed, repression and the arts were so deeply entangled in apartheid South Africa?

The labyrinthine archival trail, which extended from South Africa to the UK, the US, Norway, Holland, East Germany and elsewhere, soon led me to a host of other, more specific but not less improbable questions. Why were works by a number of leading black writers, including Mafika Gwala, Njabulo Ndebele, Es’kia Mphahlele, and Mongane Serote, passed by the censors? Why were the eminent Afrikaans writers Andre Brink, Breyten Breytenbach and Etienne Leroux let through in the 1960s and then banned a decade later? Why were no literary works in South Africa’s nine African languages ever suppressed? Why were the supposedly most obscene bits from Wilbur Smith’s debut When the Lion Feeds published in South Africa’s largest circulation Sunday newspaper soon after the novel was banned in 1965? Why were the censors so enthusiastic about Indaba My Children, Credo Mutwa’s ethnographic collection of tribal lore? Why did the South African branch of PEN have such a troubled history? Why did J. M. Coetzee apply to be a censor? And why was Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses hastily banned in 1988 and why is it still illegal for South African booksellers to display it today?

Again, somewhat to my surprise, pursuing the answers to these questions led me to reflect not just on a future in which apartheid, and apartheid thinking (which was not limited to South Africa), has no place, but on the power of words in the world and on the demands of our intercultural present.

(By the way, I found no evidence to support the Black Beauty anecdote, though I did establish that South African customs officials once found a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book hidden in an edition of Anna Sewell’s equine autobiography, which they promptly impounded.)

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.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s first job was as an assistant on the staff of the OED, and he later said that he had ‘learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of [his] life.’ In The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, three senior OED editors – Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner – explore more than 100 words found in Tolkien’s fiction, such as ‘hobbit’, ‘attercop’, and ‘precious’. Edmund Weiner has written this original post for OUPblog on Winterfilth (October) and Blotmath (November).

As I write this blog Winterfilth is coming to an end and Blotmath is about to begin. What on earth am I talking about? Well, as the Tolkien enthusiasts out there will know, these are the names that the hobbits used for October and November.

As it happens, although the action of The Lord of the Rings spans October and November (avid readers will remember that a lot of action happens in the one and the other is spent by the hobbits resting in Rivendell), these month names are not used in the story. They are given in an appendix in which Tolkien explains the calendar of the Shire (the land of the hobbits) and the hobbits’ names for the days of the week and the months.

Did Tolkien make these names up? No. Some people will be surprised to learn that he made up none of his ‘English’ words, as opposed to the words of the elvish, dwarvish, and orkish languages. (The one exception, funnily enough, may be the word ‘hobbit’—but the jury on that is still out.) The other strange and archaic-looking words, such as mathom, Arkenstone, eleventy, flet, and barrow-wight, are all based on earlier usage and generally go back either to Anglo-Saxon (Old English, English before the Norman Conquest) or to Old Norse (the language of the Vikings and Sagas).

So what about the months? Tolkien borrowed them for the hobbits from Anglo-Saxon texts that give both the Latin names of the months (the names we use now) and their Old English equivalents. None of the latter seem to have survived the Conquest except (in a different meaning) Yule, and Lide, a now obsolete dialect word for March, which may have meant ‘loud’ (referring to its windiness). Blotmath, or rather Blotmonath or Blodmonath, was the time when in pagan times cattle were sacrificed (blotan ‘sacrifice’ or blod ‘blood’).

And Winterfilth? In Old English this was Winterfylleth, in which fylleth means ‘fulness’, or perhaps ‘full moon’. The word for ‘filth’ was spelt and pronounced differently, but in modern English they would have come to sound the same, and this gave Tolkien an opportunity for one of the scholarly etymological puns to which he was very partial.

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.