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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
by Anatoly Liberman The entries in the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveal, although, naturally, in broad outline, the documented history of thousands of words. Some of them surfaced in texts more than a millennium ago, others emerged in Chaucer’s works and later, and still others were added to the vocabulary of English within the […]
by Richard Striner How will historians eventually rate our incumbent president as a wartime commander? A comparison of George W. Bush and the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is instructive. Putting aside the issue of civil liberties in wartime —— an issue that people of good will could debate almost endlessly —— Lincoln was a […]
Poet’s Work Grandfather advised me: Learn a trade I learned to sit at desk and condense No layoff from this condensery –Lorine Niedecker, 1964 From the forthcoming Oxford Book of American Poetry.
On Tuesday on his blog Whatever, John Scalzi announced the arrival of the NOAD and The American Writer’s Thesaurus in his mailbox. In addition to giving the customary compliments to Erin McKean, Editor of Oxford’s US Dictionary program, Scalzi was surprised to find both books “delightful” and “fun to read.” He then turns to the […]
There was a time when historical linguistics was one of the most prestigious disciplines in the humanities. At school, Latin and Classical Greek were shoved down young boys’ unwilling throats, and it seemed natural to look at languages with the eyes of a historian. Early in the 19th century, regular sound correspondences between languages were […]