Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Alan Whiteside
In Russia, Ukraine and some of the other former Soviet countries HIV transmission through injecting drug users is affecting significant proportions of young men and is spreading quickly. They in turn pass the disease on to their partners, who may then transmit it to their children. While the absolute numbers are not high, the proportionate impact will be significant. In Africa AIDS is again different. There are some…
By Anatoly Liberman
Borrowed words usually come to us with borrowed things, whether it is melon, pear, pumpkin, potato or church, piano, and sputnik. Yet this is more or less true of the names of things. Outside the world of nouns, people often borrow words they either do not need or may have dispensed with. For example, bold is native, but its numerous synonyms (brave, courageous, intrepid, and quite a few others) are of Romance origin. Subtleties multiply until the embarrassment of riches chokes the speakers who no longer know which near synonym to choose. The infamous F-word was taken over from Low (= northern) German and superseded its English rivals, though nothing changed in the islanders’ habits and the old verbs were equally expressive and equally frequent. It is anybody’s guess why such a strange substitution happened.
In the premiere episode of The Oxford Comment, Lauren and Michelle talk to Benjamin Carp about the drinking habits of the Founding Fathers and visit brewmaster Garrett Oliver at the Brooklyn Brewery.
By Elvin Lim
President Barack Obama’s second Oval Office address to the nation wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the game-changer to his declining approval ratings which despondent Democrats were hoping for. The speech was a valiant attempt to connect Iraq with unemployment (guns with butter), but it came off to many as meandering and confused.
By Edward Zelinsky
President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform is reportedly forging an internal consensus concerning the federal Social Security system. The President’s bi-partisan deficit reduction commission is purportedly developing a package of reforms including higher retirement ages for Social Security eligibility, reduced cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security payments, and higher taxes.
By Christopher Wills
As my blood thins with age, I tend to SCUBA dive in the tropics. But in July of 2010, loaded with twenty-four pounds of lead weights to overcome the buoyancy of my thick wet suit and the dense salty water of the frigid Japanese Current, I found myself plunging into cold water to investigate an ecological success story off California’s Channel Islands. I wanted to see what happens when a damaged ecosystem recovers. Can it ever return to its former self?
Why would adults want to play with water pistols?
By Gordon Thompson
When George Martin first entered the recording industry in the early 1950s, assisting Oscar Preuss at EMI’s Parlophone, he encountered the end of the mechanical era. The company’s facilities on Abbey Road in genteel St. John’s Wood still used lathes to record sound by cutting grooves in warm wax with energy provided by weights and pulleys, like a child of Big Ben. The sheer mechanics of this kind of professional recording demanded large…
By Roderick D. Buchanan
The corporate corruption of science is a familiar theme to anyone whose reading stretches beyond celebrity tattle-tale. The well-documented venality of Big Tobacco and Big Pharma have become cautionary fairy tales for modern times.
By Anatoly Liberman
When did people begin to say: “I will, like, come tomorrow” and why do they say so? It may seem that the filler “like”, along with its twin “you know”, are of recent date, but this impression is wrong. It is, however, true that both became the plague in recent memory. Occasionally an etymologist discovers a word that was current in Middle or early Modern English, disappeared from view, and then seemingly resurfaced in the modern language. One wonders whether this is the same word…
By Dennis Baron
Facebook wants to trademark the word “face.” The social networker which connects more than 500 million users has already shown how we can all live together as one big happy set of FBF’s by forcing other sites to drop “book” from their names, and now, in application no. 78980756 to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Facebook is asserting its ownership of the word “face” as well.
By Elvin Lim
Nolstalgia is the selective invocation of the past. It is probably the worst kind of historical reasoning used by romantics who glorify what we remember to be good (Mom and pie) and conveniently forget all that was bad (Jim and Crow). Because nostalgia is history without the guilt, it is the most comforting kind of political appeal. And since there is no guilt without details, Beck’s bumper-sticker speech communicated offensive content without offending.
A new school year is about to start, and we all know how sleep-deprived students can be. Parents and teachers may sound like broken records, but Dr. Rosalind Cartwright can tell you that good sleeping habits are nothing to roll your eyes at.
It might just be me (and it often times is), but I could hardly blink this weekend without seeing yet another article announcing, discussing, or otherwise pointing to a big development in the world of technology/social media. So – since I find it difficult to keep anything to myself anyway – I decided to share them with you. Below, I’ve highlighted several stories of note, and I hope that if there are others that even I missed, you will comment and us know.
They call it the Snazzy Napper, but it’s more like the Snazzy You’re-about-to-have-your-purse-stolen-while-looking-ridiculous-er.
Every once in a while someone decides to do something about the fact that English has no gender-neutral pronoun. They either call for such a pronoun to be invented, or they invent one and champion its adoption. Wordsmiths have been coining gender-neutral pronouns for over a century and a half.