Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Alice Northover
With our announcement of Place of the Year 2012 and NASA’s announcement at the American Geophysical Union on December 3rd, and a week full of posts about Mars, what better way to wrap things up than by pulling together information from across Oxford’s resources to provide some background on the Red planet.
November is National Pomegranate Month and we thought it’d be interesting to highlight the fascinating history of this fruit. Here are some fun facts from The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Second Edition, edited by Andrew F. Smith. Plus, the “Pomegranates” entry in the Encyclopedia by David Karp.
With Thanksgiving quickly approaching in the United States, we thought that it would be interesting to highlight 10 fun facts on the holiday from the newly released The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Second Edition. Additionally, you will find an interview with Editor in Chief Andrew Smith dispelling common myths associated with the origin of Thanksgiving.
By Daniel ‘Pussy Galore’ Parker and Gabby ‘Odd Job’ Fletcher
‘Ah’, he says stroking a white fluffy cat, ‘we’ve been expecting you’. Leave Ms Moneypenny with a peck on the cheek, stash your Walther PPK in your back pocket and jump into our Aston Martin so you can join us as we speed through an A to Z of Bond fun, fact, and fiction. We have stories about Roger Moore’s penchant for love-making, tales of fictional islands, and even anecdotes about crocodile jumping. We’ve devoured OUP’s online reference works to bring you a delicious helping of double 0 heaven. Welcome to the world of Bond, James Bond
By Robert Faber
In the world of digital scholarship, discovery really matters. There are many new ways of reading content on the web or mobile devices, but making our publications easy to find in the vast ocean of digital information is a growing challenge. When we decided to take this on and set up a “discoverability” program across all OUP’s global academic publishing, it sounded simple enough: we just have to improve the ways people find and use our content, right?
By Cornelia Haase
Premiering today, 23 October 2012, Skyfall is the 23rd film in the highly successful James Bond film series. It has been 50 years since the release of the first Bond film, Dr. No, in 1962. Over the decades, there have been many Bond adventures and we have seen six different actors portraying the MI6 agent, as well as many Bond villains, and the famous Bond girls who don’t seem to be able to resist Bond’s charms.
If a theater noob polled a group of theater fans on what classic musicals she must see to jumpstart her theater education, you would be hard pressed to find a fan without The Phantom of the Opera on their list. The show, which opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on 9 October 1986, has left an undeniable impact on London’s West End, Broadway, and theater in general.
Looking at the growing use of our online products, we know that many still choose to reach beyond first impressions on the web to delve further in a reference work from Oxford. Why is it still so important to do so?
One hundred and fifty years ago today, one of the titans of the musical world was born. Claude Debussy’s innovative compositions influenced generations of composers and helped defined 19th century music. We’re celebrating his birth with an extract from the Claude Debussy entry by Robert Orledge (2002) in The Oxford Companion to Music, edited by Alison Latham.
Many questioned how the London 2012 Summer Olympic Games Opening Ceremony was going to make a mark after the spectacular Beijing Olympics only four years earlier. While Beijing presented the Chinese people moving as one body — dancing, marching, and presenting a united front to the world — the British answer was a chaotic and spirited ceremony, shifting from cricket matches to coordinated dance routines, Mr Bean’s comedic dream to a 100-foot Lord Voldemort.
Happy Birthday Enid Blyton! This giant of children’s literature was born on 11 August 1897. To celebrate, here is an edited extract from the Enid Blyton entry by David Rudd in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature edited by Jack Zipes (© Oxford University Press 2006).
Never mind if you’ve got the heebee-jeebies, how did we get that word? Winner of the Dartmouth Medal for RUSA/ALA Outstanding Reference Source and 2011 Booklist Editors’ Choice, Green’s Dictionary of Slang is a remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language. From the past five centuries right up to the present day, and from all the different English-speaking countries and regions, it demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. We dug through a few of the 10.3 million words and over 53,000 entries — definitions of 100,000 words with over 413,000 citations — to come up with a little quiz to celebrate.
By Storm Dunlop
World Meteorology Day marks a highly successful collaboration under the World Meteorological Organization, involving every country, large or small, rich or poor. Weather affects every single person (every living being) on the planet, but why do people feel meteorology is not for them? Why do they even find it so difficult to identify different types of cloud? Or at least they claim that it is difficult. The average person, it would seem, looks at the sky and simply thinks ‘clouds’. (Just as they look at the night sky and think nothing more than ‘stars’).
In the UK and some other parts of the English-speaking world December 26th is known as Boxing Day, while in other places it is also called St. Stephen’s Day. But what’s the history behind it? I turned to the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore to find out.
According to some, today is ‘Lucky Penny Day’. The OED describes a ‘lucky penny’ as usually one that is bent or perforated, or sometimes an old or foreign coin. In the early nineteenth century, a ‘luck-penny’ was defined as ‘the cash which the seller gives back to the buyer after the latter has paid him; it is given back with the hope that it may prove a lucky’. It’s also recorded that the participants would usually also spit on their palms to seal the deal.
My favorite poetry form is the sestina. I like them, I think, because they are incredibly difficult to compose and require a fair bit of calculation. This being National Poetry Month, I thought I’d challenge you all to write one.
Not sure what a sestina is?