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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By George Garnett
The Norman Conquest of England, recently examined in Rob Bartlett’s television series, offers some striking parallels. The term is jargon, of a type beloved by politicians, because it attempts to foreclose on reflection and debate. The manner of the ‘change’ – by armed force – is veiled, and the agent unspecified, even though both are always obvious.
Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counterterrorism analyst until 2004. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism. His latest book is the biography Osama bin Laden, a much-needed corrective, hard-headed, closely reasoned portrait that tracks the man’s evolution from peaceful Saudi dissident to America’s Most Wanted.
Among the extensive media attention both the book and Scheuer have received so far, he was interviewed on The Colbert Report just this week.
By Anatoly Liberman
The surprising thing about the runic alu (on which see the last January post), the probable etymon of ale, is its shortness. The protoform was a bit longer and had t after u, but the missing part contributed nothing to the word’s meaning. To show how unpredictable the name of a drink may be (before we get back to ale), I’ll quote a passage from Ralph Thomas’s letter to Notes and Queries for 1897 (Series 8, volume XII, p. 506). It is about the word fives, as in a pint of fives, which means “…‘four ale’ and ‘six ale’ mixed, that is, ale at fourpence a quart and sixpence a quart.
Over the first two weeks of February 2008 in the United Kingdom, a sizable controversy was stirred up by a lecture given to the Royal Courts of Justice by the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Rev Rowan Williams, entitled ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: A Religious Perspective’, and a prior interview which he gave to the BBC Radio 4 news programme, ‘The World at One’. In the course of both the talk and the interview, the Archbishop suggested that certain extensions of Shari’a law in Britain were both ‘unavoidable’ and also desirable from the double point of view of civil cohesion and the defence of the ‘group rights’ of religious bodies.
By Elvin Lim
American foreign policy elites are now facing the difficult choice of deciding if our short-term goals are in fostering democracy in the Middle East, or in quietly propping up authoritarian allies in the region. Even if policy-makers have a choice, it not an easy one to make. Certainly, in the long run, democracy in the Middle East would likely remove the breeding conditions for terrorism and resentment towards the West, but in the short run, transitioning toward democracy is a highly volatile project and in the meantime our strategic interests in the region could be compromised.
The winners of the prestigious First Annual Oxford Oscar Pool were announced this morning: 1st Place: Julia Pentz, Marketing Coordinator, Distribution 2nd Place: Jeff Shoup, Institutional Sales Representative 3rd Place: Debbie Farinella, Network/Consortia Sales Manager According to Jessica Chesnutt, Online Product Specialist and pool organizer, everyone’s picks were quite varied with the exception of the […]
By Geneive Abdo
Over the past several weeks, leaders of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood have placed on public display the lessons they have learned as Egypt’s officially banned but most influential social and political movement by trying to pre-empt alarmist declarations that the country is now headed for an Iran-style theocracy.
Members of the venerable Brotherhood, founded in 1928 by an Egyptian school teacher to revitalize Islam and oppose British colonial rule, have so far stated no plans to run a candidate in the next presidential election, and they surprised many by their halting participation in the transitional government, after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.
Last week we prepared for the Academy Awards by discussing words and phrases coined from film (twitterpated, bogart, party on) as well as linguistic choices in film this year (Winkelvii, ballerina lingo, The Kids are All Right, not Alright) . While watching the awards last night it occurred to me that we failed to address one of the most important cinematic words of all time: dude. Or in the parlance of our time: The Dude.
By Dennis Baron
There’s a federal law that defines writing. Because the meaning of the words in our laws isn’t always clear, the very first of our federal laws, the Dictionary Act–the name for Title 1, Chapter 1, Section 1, of the U.S. Code–defines what some of the words in the rest of the Code mean, both to guide legal interpretation and to eliminate the need to explain those words each time they appear. Writing is one of the words it defines, but the definition needs an upgrade.
The Dictionary Act consists of a single sentence, an introduction and ten short clauses defining a minute subset of our legal vocabulary, words like person, officer, signature, oath, and last but not least, writing.
Today we’d like to introduce our latest regular OUPblog column: SciWhys. Every month OUP editor and author Jonathan Crowe will be answering your science questions. Got a burning question about science that you’d like answered? Just email it to us, and Jonathan will answer what he can. Kicking us off: What is DNA and what does it do?
By Grace Labatt
The 2011 Academy Awards® take place this Sunday, February 27, the culmination of months of speculation about who will wear what, who will have the hardest time with the TelePrompTer, and, of course, who will win. But regardless of who goes home with an Oscar—whether it’s Natalie Portman for playing a tormented ballerina or Annette Bening for playing a tormented wife—language lovers already have plenty to celebrate with this year’s honorees. Films in 2010 had an array of unusual linguistic choices that highlighted their screenwriters’ unique skills.
By Kathryn Kalinak
This year’s Oscar Best Original Score nominations are as notable for who didn’t get nominated as for who did: no Carter Burwell for True Grit, no Clint Mansell for Black Swan, no Danny Elfman (and what a return to form) for Alice in Wonderland. There’s not much of a horse race this year.
When my friend sent me a link with the subject line: Carmel in WSJ! I clicked with trepidation. The last time my hometown made national news it involved a sodomy hazing incident and the high school basketball team. Phew. It was only a minor dispute over an expensive new piece of suburban architecture:
By Elizabeth Knowles
‘Is it in the dictionary?’ is a formulation suggesting that there is a single lexical authority: ‘The Dictionary’. As the British academic Rosamund Moon has commented, ‘The dictionary most cited in such cases is the UAD: the Unidentified Authorizing Dictionary, usually referred to as “the dictionary”, but very occasionally as “my dictionary”.’ The American scholar John Algeo has coined the term lexicographicolatry for a reverence for dictionary authority amounting to idolatry. As he explained:
By Jill Liddington
Elizabeth Crawford and I, suffrage historians both, watched with keen interest in early 2009 as the 1911 census began to go online. On Tuesday 13 January selected English counties became fully searchable by the public. Excitement was palpable. By midnight, there had been 3.4m searches and 17.4m pages viewed, particularly by family historians. But it was suffragettes who grabbed attention – with headlines like ‘1911 Census: the secret suffragettes who refused to be counted’.
By Elvin Lim
Something is afoot in American politics. There was a time when the rights of workers, even government workers, to collectively bargain, was taken for granted. There was a time when federal budget deficits were accepted as a necessarily evil but it was only a problem talked about and no one addressed. There was a time when it was political suicide to talk about extending the retirement age or reducing Social Security benefits. Whatever that is left of the political consensus of the last half-century is unraveling today into a cantankerous politics in which settled issues are now up for political re-litigation.