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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Mark Peters, a language columnist for Good and Visual Thesaurus, as well as the blogger behind The Pancake Proverbs, The Rosa Parks of Blogs, and Wordlustitude is our guest blogger this week. In this post, he looks at nonce words in the Oxford English Dictionary
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at immigration reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin looks at the international impact of Mark Twain in honor the centennial of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of his most celebrated book.
Endocrine Psychiatry: Solving the Riddle of Melancholia, traces the enthusiasm of biological efforts to solve the mystery of melancholia and proposes that a useful, and a potentially life-saving, connection between medicine and psychiatry has been lost. Below we have excerpted the preface which explains why endocrine psychiatry deserves a second look.
Alexandra D’Arcy is a sociolinguist by training and specializes in the study of language variation and change. This is the third installation in her new monthly column so be sure to check back next month.
In honor of the History Channel’s new series, America: The Story of Us, we have pulled some American history questions from Joy Hakim’s A History of US.
Most of my knowledge on ancient Greece and Rome comes from watching the TV show ‘Xena: Warrior Princess’. Xena not only encounters Julius Caesar, Pompeius, and Octavian in her quests, but Marc Antony and Cleopatra as well. I was thus eager to learn more of the historical, ‘real-life’ Cleopatra.
This has been such a fun week with the launch of our new blog design that it is hard to believe Friday is already here. Below are some links to get you just a little bit closer to the weekend. Enjoy!
Tariq Ramadan is a very public figure, named one of Time magazine’s most important innovators of the twenty-first century, he is among the leading Islamic thinkers in the West. But he has also been a lightening rod for controversy. In his new book, What I Believe, he attempts to set the record straight, laying out the basic ideas he stands for in clear and accessible prose.
Five days a week Charles Hodgson produces Podictionary – the podcast for word lovers, Thursday episodes here at OUPblog.
Anthony Trollope’s Palliser novels offer many fascinating parallels with today’s political scene, none more so than the fifth novel in the sequence, The Prime Minister. Nicholas Shrimpton, of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, will be editing the new edition of the novel for Oxford World’s Classics (out next year). His profile of Trollope’s fictional hero, Plantagenet Palliser, finds some uncanny resemblances between fiction and reality.
The number of people in the English speaking world who distinguish in pronunciation between witch and which, wine and whine, wen and when is relatively small, and those who make this distinction do not say w-hitch, w-hine, and w-hen, but rather hwitch, hwine, and hwen. What follows is a breathtaking story of the hw-sound and the wh-spelling.
We are so excited to welcome you to the 2010 redesign of the OUPblog. A lot of thought and love has gone into creating a fresh home for our friends and authors who contribute to the site. We hope you will appreciate the ability to see more content on the homepage as well as the easy access to our video and twitter offerings.
Dr Jon Lawrence, author of Electing Our Masters, on the spirit of the hustings in this year’s general election campaign.
Edward Zigler is a developmental scientist and a pioneer and leader in the field of applied developmental psychology. He served on the committee that planned Head Start and was the federal official responsible for the program during the Nixon administration. Sally J. Styfco is a writer and social policy analyst specializing in issues pertaining to children and families. Together they wrote, The Hidden History Of Head Start, which looks at this remarkable social program that has served 25 million children and their families since it was established 44 years ago. We get an insider’s view of the program’s decades of services and an idea of what the future may hold.
Elvin Lim looks at the implications of the charges against Goldman Sachs.