Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

June 2006

Our Distant Civil War

By Glenn W. LaFantasie

We too often forget that the generation that fought the Civil War lived in a world very different from our own. In our attempt to personalize the past, which all too often leads us into a romanticization of that past, we see the elements of human experience that unite us with the Civil War generation—how they, as individuals, loved and lost, laughed and cried, lived and died—but we tend, in the process, to overlook how these same people spent their lifetimes in a world that, upon closer inspection, seems like an alien planet.

From War to Peace,
Or, Harrying without Harrassment

By Anatoly Liberman The Old Germanic word for “army” sounded approximately like harjaz. Its Modern German continuation is Heer, and nearly the same word is used in Icelandic, Norwegian, and Danish (army is a borrowing from French; the idea of this word is “armed force”). English has lost harjaz, but it is astounding how many […]

Kabylia

Coordinates: 36° 40′ N | 4° 55′ E Number of provinces included: 8 As a descriptive category, world music succeeds in being a particularly vague label for such a wide range of sound. The musical styles and traditions rooted in specific places usually have more meaningful names. Kabylia for example, a small region along Algeria’s […]

Lawyers’ Poker at the Legal Ethics Forum

David McGowan, blogging at Legal Ethics Forum yesterday, posted a very thorough review of Steven Lubet’s latest book, Lawyers’ Poker: 52 Lessons That Lawyers Can Learn from Cardplayers. Of course, we should expect thoroughness from any writer who declares his intent “to integrate legal ethics, rational choice theory, and cognitive decision theory.” Like most people […]

Between beriberi and very, very:
In Praise of Useful Waste,
Or, Tautological Compounds

By Anatoly Liberman Language is unbelievably redundant. For example, vowels are called vowels because voice (Latin vox; compare Engl. voc-al) is an inalienable part of their production. Yet a word said in a whisper, that is, without the participation of voice, will not be lost. In a language in which the gender, number, and case of […]

Krubera Cave, Georgia

Coordinates: 43° 12′ N | 41° 5′ E Deepest point reached: 6,824 feet (2,080 m) With the onset of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and average temperatures worldwide on the rise, the question on the minds of many is: how to beat the heat? For cavers willing to travel to Abkhazia on the eastern coast […]

Eviatar Zerubavel on The Diane Rehm Show

Eviatar Zerubavel, author of The Elephant in the Room, will be on The Diane Rehm Show this morning. He goes on live at 11AM ET. You can listen online by clicking HERE

David Lehman on Donald Hall

Donald Hall is a wonderful choice for US Poet Laureate. I’ve worked closely with him on such projects as “The Best American Poetry 1989,” and in 1994 he asked me to succeed him as general editor of the University of Michigan Press’s “Poets on Poetry” series. So I feel a special kinship with him. But […]

Hearing History’s Requiem

By Glenn W. LaFantasie Near the High Water Mark on Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg, a massive white building shaped like a drum sits flat on the eastern slope of the ridge, obscured partially by a grove of fruit trees. Almost exactly in the center of the lines that Major General George Gordon Meade’s Army of […]

Donald Hall, poet laureate

Donald Hall (b. 1928) was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Exeter, Harvard, and Oxford. A friend of George Plimpton, founding editor of the Paris Review, he was the magazine’s first poetry editor (1953–1962), choosing the poems appearing in its pages and conducting interviews with such eminences as Ezra Pound and T. S. […]

Blessed Are the Learned,
Or, The Erratic Behavior of -ED

By Anatoly Liberman It does not surprise us that naked and wretched do not rhyme with raked and etched. But the difference between learned in I have learned a lot in this course and I have seldom met such a learned man is disturbing. In native words and in many borrowings, English has lost most […]

Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Bluff

By Steven Lubet As reported by Adam Liptak in the New York Times (June 9, 2006), a federal judge in Florida has ordered two lawyers to “convene at a neutral site” and “engage in one (1) game of rock, paper, scissors” to settle a trivial dispute about the site for taking a deposition. Calling it […]

Questions and Answers About the Marriage Protection Amendment

By William N. Eskridge, Jr. and Darren R. Spedale Last week, the Senate debated the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA), which failed to achieve the two-thirds vote needed to amend the U.S. Constitution. If ratified, the MPA would have added language to the Constitution defining marriage as “the union of a man and a woman” and […]

Johnson & Boswell in Scotland, Part 6

Continued from last week’s post: Boswell: Thursday, 2 September Johnson: Edinburgh We now returned to Edinburgh, where I passed some days with men of learning, whose names want no advancement from my commemoration, or with women of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant’s praise. The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to […]

The Oddest English Spellings (Part 3)

by Anatoly Liberman If we disregard the use of runes, we may say that literacy came to Europe with Christianity. Two exceptions are Greece and Italy. England, like its neighbors, adopted the Roman script, but the sounds of the Germanic languages (and English belongs to the Germanic group of the Indo-European family) were in many […]

The GMA

Darren Spedale and William Eskridge have been all over the media this week responding to the renewed push by President Bush and Senate Republicans for a Gay Marriage Amendment. Time.com blogger, Andrew Sullivan, made this quote from their new book (via an excerpt at the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy website) his ‘quote of […]