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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Fresh off the heels of an exciting “Word of the Year” week, OUP geographers are still debating what should be recognized as the Place of the Year 2012. This slideshow highlights the POTY shortlist, full of contenders that may have to duel this out. Unless….if you make your vote below, we’ll be able to select the place that has inspired the majority of readers this year, sparing the planet World War POTY.
By Benjamin Wardhaugh
As well as Halloween, Guy Fawkes, and All Saints’s day, this time of the year used to see another day of fun and frenzy. ‘Almanack Day’, towards the end of November, saw the next year’s almanacs go on sale. It generally came round on or about 22 November: St Cecilia’s Day. In London, Stationers’ Hall would be crammed to the rafters…
By Alice Northover
When people think of GIFs, they often imagine a silly animation for a quick joke. But like any medium, it has potential beyond our cat-centric imagination. “The GIF has evolved from a medium for pop-cultural memes into a tool with serious applications including research and journalism, and its lexical identity is transforming to keep pace,” Head of US Dictionaries, Katherine Martin, recently commented. So it’s only appropriate to highlight a few GIFers who take the file format beyond a basic form.
It’s the close of WOTY week everyone and I’m GIFed out. Welcome new followers! And goodbye to those who quickly OD’ed on Oxford content. You will be missed. First off, it’s Movember, when men around the world sprout moustaches to raise awareness of men’s health issues. Our own Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is presenting a moustachioed man (no women) every day this month on Twitter.
A month ago, the Oral History Association (OHA) hosted their 2012 annual conference, “Sing It Out, Shout It Out, Say It Out Loud: Giving Voice through Oral History” in Cleveland, Ohio. Unsurprisingly, one topic that came up in both formal presentations and casual conversation was the field’s use of the latest tech.
One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina sets the impossible and destructive triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky against the marriage of Levin and Kitty, thus illuminating the most important questions that face humanity. A new film adaptation of the novel, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, opens today in the United States. We’ve paired a scene from the film with an excerpt of the novel below.
By Les Iversen
When Drugs: A Very Short Introduction was published in 2001, drugs were relatively hard to obtain. Recreational users could buy illegal drugs from back-street dealers, while prescription medicines required a trip to the doctor to obtain a script. The Internet has changed all that. Nowadays in Western Europe and in North America there are dozens of website dealers offering novel psychoactive drugs (“legal highs”) and prescription medicines at modest prices. The market for designer drugs has grown hugely.
November is International Drum Month, so declared by the Percussion Marketing Council. Percussionists are often the most underrated performers in the world of music, perhaps because specialized instruments aren’t strictly necessary: anyone with an upturned bucket or even just two hands to clap can engage in percussion pretty much anywhere. But drumming is harder than it looks.
Jason Haslam
October 2012 marked the 100th anniversary of the first publication, in the pulp-fiction magazine All-Story, of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ best known novel, Tarzan of the Apes. The complete novel published in the October 1912 issue, was given the cover image (where it was described as “A Romance of the Jungle”), and became an immediate hit among the All-Story’s readers. In the months following Tarzan’s appearance, dozens of readers’ letters were published, many of which asked for (or even demanded) a sequel, a request Burroughs would fulfill, eventually writing over two-dozen Tarzan novels.
By Alice Northover
Reaction has been mixed from people around the United States and the world to the USA Word of the Year, so I thought I’d bring together a few highlights. Don’t forget the GIF WOTY confusables!
There has also been some widespread confusion on a few things relating to GIF’s selection as Word of the Year [USA], so we thought it would be helpful to give a little roundup for clarification.
(1) Oxford Dictionaries USA and The New Oxford American Dictionary (and Oxford Dictionaries UK and Oxford Dictionary of English) are not the Oxford English Dictionary. OUP publishes many dictionaries and the OED is only one of them.
By Anatoly Liberman
Bullying is a hot topic. Strict laws have been passed with the view of intimidating the intimidators or at least keeping them at bay. Regardless of the consequences such measures may have, linguists cannot ignore the problem and keep out of the public eye. So to arms, comrades! That a word like bully should vex etymologists needn’t surprise anybody.
By Robert Deacon
Marine fisheries around the world are in a state of decline. Each decade the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that a larger fraction of the world’s fisheries are overexploited or depleted. Historical trends in individual fisheries have led some scientists to predict all major fisheries will be collapsed by mid-century. The economic status of these resources is even more dismal.
To gif, or not to gif–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of crude animation
Or to take arms against a sea of static
And by opposing end them.
By Elvin Lim
It is tempting now that the election returns are in for us to want to plow forward and forget the spectacular silliness we just traversed. But before we move on, it is critical that we call out those who had predicted a huge Romney victory, among them Dick Morris, Michael Barone, and Karl Rove. Ours is the era of partisan polling, and it is intellectually dishonest and bad for democracy.
By Andrew J. Polsky
When Barack Obama won reelection last week, he became the third consecutive president to win a second term. The last time that happened was at the beginning of the 19th century, when Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe benefited from Democratic-Republican dominance at the presidential level. Indeed, by the time Monroe ran for reelection in 1820, the opposition Federalist Party had collapsed.