Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
One of the greatest public health challenges of our century lies in the growth of neurodegenerative disorders. Conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and frontotemporal dementia stand as major contributors to disability and mortality in affluent and under-resourced nations alike.
It appears that the etymology of curfew has been solved. In any case, all modern dictionaries say the same. The English word surfaced in texts in the early fourteenth century, but a signal to people to extinguish their fires is much older.
The quality improvement in healthcare movement has been around for the past 25 years with variable degrees of success.
Having just arrived via ferry to the Dutch town of Sluis in mid-May 1611, William Cecil, Lord Roos (1591-1618), promptly exposed his “privy member” (penis) to what one assumes were rather surprised townsfolk.
You may be unaware of the celestial wonder known as OJ 287 but, as you will see, it is one of the most outlandish objects in the cosmos.
In the current critical/political atmosphere, the “aesthetic” has come to be regarded as the province of dandies and their descendants, not to do with the enormous difficulties of the here and now.
The Internet is full of information about the origin of the phrase Indian summer. Everything said there about this idiom, its use, the puzzling reference to Indian, as well as about a desired replacement of Indian by a word devoid of ethnic connotations and about the synonyms for the phrase in the languages of the world, is correct.
The Aleph is a blazing space of about an inch diameter containing the cosmos, tells us Jorge Luis Borges in 1945, after being invited to see it in the basement of a house. The Aleph deeply disrupted him, revealing millions of delightful and awful scenes, simultaneously.
In my correspondence with the journalist who was curious about the origin of caucus, I wrote that we might never discover where that word came from.
As Valentine’s Day approaches, we’ve curated a special reading list that considers the complexities of love, society, and human interaction. These recent history titles promise to captivate heart and mind and offer a journey through time that goes beyond roses and chocolates.
‘Ah mon Dieu, tu n’es plus ici. Voila les pleurs qui reccomensent.’ These melancholic words open the first of 173 newly digitalized letters from the ninth volume of Françoise de Graffigny’s complete correspondence.
England’s pre-Reform elections are memorably satirized in the historical sitcom, Blackadder the Third. Also glancing at late 1980s politics, the series begins with the rigged by-election for a fictional rotten borough—Dunny-on-the-Wold—taking centre stage.
If you look up the synonym of big, you are likely to find words like large, huge, immense, colossal, enormous, and ginormous, among others. Some of these will cause you to raise an eyebrow because they are bigger than big: something can be big, but not huge or enormous.
Scientific papers are often hard to read, even for specialists that work in the area. This matters because potential readers will often give up and do something else instead. And that means the paper will have less impact.
Last week, I mentioned three etymologies of caucus: from caucus, Latin for “cup”; from an Algonquin phrase, and from calker’s or caulkers’.
The Tower of Babel story (Genesis 11:1–9) is among the most famous in the Bible. It might even be considered an iconic text—famous beyond its actual content; since the story was originally written it has come to mean much more than its actual words.