On This Day In History: In Memory of Blind Willie McTell
A post in honor of this great musician.
August 2009
Why Skate but Scathe?
Or, The Oddest English Spellings. Part 14
Anatoly looks at spelling reform, specifically at “sk” and “sc”.
Here comes the rain again…
Damp Squid author Jeremy Butterfield talks to OUP UK Publicity Manager Juliet Evans about different ways to talk about rain.
How Barack Obama can Pacify the Ghosts of Anti-Federalism to Advance the Health-care Debate
Elvin looks at the health-care debate through a historical lens.
Musing the News
An excerpt from Losing The News.
Why Should We Care About Disappearing Frogs?
An excerpt from Extinction In Our Times, explain why we should care about amphibians disappearing.
Meaning and Health
An excerpt from Hope in the Age of Anxiety, looking at the relationship between meaning and health.
Rail Travel in The Andes: An Excerpt
An excerpt about rail travel through the Andes from Jason Wilson’s The Andes: A Cultural History.
Friday procrastination: link love – festivals, fiction, and Stephen Fry
What Kirsty has been reading in Oxford this week.
Send in the Hench-poodles! An Underrated Prefix for Underlings
Mark Peters looks at the various uses of “hench” as a prefix.
Chardonnay – Podictionary Word of the Day
[display_podcast] iTunes users can subscribe to this podcast The heavyweights of the English dictionary world (The Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster for instance) can trace the use of the word Chardonnay back only to 1911 in English when it appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica. These English dictionaries haven’t made too much progress for this […]
The demise of the humble bumblebee
Professor Dave Goulson writes about declining bumblebee numbers, and why we should care.
Haydn: An Acrostic
An acrostic using terms from Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn.
The Deceptive Transparency of Compounds
Anatoly Liberman explains the etymology of compound words, notably, blackguard.
Will the Internet Create a Universal Writing System?
Andrew Robinson, author of Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction on the internet and language.
The Power of Reconciliation in the Health-Care Reform Debate
Elvin Lim looks at reconciliation.