Before Northanger Abbey: Jane Austen and “Susan”
With hindsight, it’s hard to imagine a more spectacular publishing flub than the rejection of Pride and Prejudice in its first version (working title “First Impressions”) in 1797.
Not everything is hunky-dory, and why should it be?
First of all, let me apologize for the egregious typo I made in the previous post in Ernest Weekley’s name. This is what comes of being too devoted to every line of Oscar Wilde and his comedy The Importance of Being Earnest.
7 books to understand the US election [reading list]
As the US Election approaches, explore a few Very Short Introductions to help answer your questions. Get informed before the debates begin, with concise guides on a wide range of topics from American political parties to democracy.
Honoring Ernest Weekley
This is the second and last post on Ernest Weekley, an excellent scholar and engaging writer. The “installment” a week ago dealt with the history of Standard English through the eyes of the inimitable Mrs. Gamp.
Ernest Weekley and standard English
Many people who are interested in word origins know Ernest Weekley’s English etymological dictionary. I am sorry that we cannot post his photo: for some mysterious reason, all his portraits on the Internet are copyrighted. He wrote many excellent books on English words.
How interdisciplinarity enhances our understanding of social media’s societal impact
Addressing today’s most pressing challenges requires a new approach to thinking. An interdisciplinary transformative approach can advance knowledge by exploiting and harmonizing the strengths of various disciplines within a unified framework.
A fabulous story, or spilling etymological beans
An instructive essay on etymology need not always be devoted to a word going back to the hoariest antiquity. It can also deal with an “exotic” borrowing like coffee, for example.
Some very unique redundancies
One of the quirkier features of the English syntax has to do with the simple word all. All is a quantity word, or quantifier in the terminology of grammarians and logicians. It indicates an entirety of something.
Coffee all over the world
An instructive essay on etymology need not always be devoted to a word going back to the hoariest antiquity. It can also deal with an “exotic” borrowing like coffee, for example.
On querns and millstones
Have you ever seen a quern? If you have not, Wikipedia has an informative page about this apparatus. Yet there is a hitch about the definition of quern. For instance, Wikipedia discusses various quern-stones, and indeed, pictures of all kinds of stones appear in the article. But stones don’t do anything without being set in motion.
Effective ways to communicate research in a journal article
In this blog post, editors of OUP journals delve into the vital aspect of clear communication in a journal article. Anne Foster (Editor of Diplomatic History), Eduardo Franco (Editor-in-Chief of JNCI: Journal of the National Cancer institute and JNCI Monographs), Howard Broman (Editor-in-Chief of ICES Journal of Marine Science), and Michael Schnoor (Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Leukocyte Biology) provide editorial recommendations on achieving clarity, avoiding common mistakes, and creating an effective structure
How to edit your writing: tips to perfect your journal article
Editing plays a significant role in improving the quality of your journal article and builds the bridge between the first draft and a submission-ready manuscript. You might picture grammatical corrections when you think of editing, but this process also improves the clarity, coherence, and accuracy of your writing.
Why are lips called lips?
A reader asked me to explain how I choose words for my essays. It is a long story, but I will try to make it short. When more than thirty years ago I began working on a new etymological dictionary of English, I compiled a list of words about which dictionaries say “origin unknown” and came up with about a thousand items. My other list contains “words of uncertain origin.”
The real existential threat of AI
How does Artificial Intelligence (AI) affect climate change? This is one of the unprecedented questions AI raises for societies, challenging traditional perspectives of fairness, trust, safety, and environmental protection.
Two nonidentical twins: rump and runt?
Rump and runt are not twins, but they sound somewhat alike, and they may be “distantly related,” to use a phrase sometimes occurring in dictionaries, though this phrase is too vague to be useful. Rump surfaced in texts only in the fifteenth century, and but for the Rump Parliament (1648-1653), famous in British History, the word would probably have been relegated mainly to talks about animals and bird.
A whale of a blog
The title of this post embodies everything I despise about cheap journalism, but the temptation was too strong, because today’s topic is indeed the origin of the word whale. I was planning the story for quite some time, and then suddenly the media informed the world that a spade-toothed whale had been washed up on South Island beach (Australia).