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by Anatoly Liberman Modern English is swamped with words borrowed from other languages. One does not have to be a specialist to notice the presence of the Romance element in it or to guess that samovar has come from Russian and samurai, from Japanese. It is the details that, as usual, pose problems. Not only […]
Witold Rybczynski, the architecture columnist at Slate.com and Oxford author, noted in a column yesterday a disturbing trend towards “conspicuous architecture” in very exclusive zip codes. On a recent trip to Palm Beach, FL, Rybczynski was shocked to find its posh beachfront filled with “some of the least graceful buildings [he’d] seen in a long […]
by Brian Priestley It was a strange experience, watching a recent television documentary on Charlie Parker and the music I immersed myself in for nearly two years. Originally, I hoped my book would be finished in time for the 50th anniversary last year of its subject’s premature death. Instead, the U.S. release of my Chasin’ […]
In our second Serial Blogging post, part two of “Copycat” by famed mystery writer Jeffery Deaver. The story was first published in A New Omnibus of Crime. Read last week’s installment by clicking here!
John D. Barrow, a long-time Oxford author, has won the prestigious Templeton Prize, one of the world’s best known religious prizes. The prize recognizes Barrow’s distinguised career as a cosmologist at Cambridge and his prolific writings on time, space, the universe and the limits of science and human understanding. In announcing the award, the Templeton […]
by Anatoly Liberman Etymology has a place in the world because people want to know why a certain combination of sounds carries the meaning accepted by their community but, as a rule, have no clue to the answer. However, the degree of opacity differs from word to word. Compounds like newspaper and daredevil are more […]
As calls for “lobbying reform” resound through the halls of Congress this spring, we do well to remember this piece of wisdom from Ecclesiastes: there is nothing new under the sun. Influence peddling, lobbying scandals, and the reporters and newspapers that expose them, have been a part of American political life since the beginning. We […]
Mencken: The American Iconoclast by Marion Rodgers is a Finalist for The 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography! The lists of finalists was announced on Friday and the awards will be presented at a ceremony on April 28. We think there is a strong chance that Mencken will be the Crash of this […]
OUP Blog does fiction – Classic stories in serialized form In our inaugural Serial Blogging posts, we present a story by famed mystery writer, Jeffery Deaver, whose 1997 novel The Bone Collector was made into a movie starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. Our story, “Copycat,” was first published in A New Omnibus of Crime. […]
Norman Ornstein dropped in on The Colbert Report last night for a dose of Steven Colbert’s unorthodox interviewing style. Ornstein, who is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the forthcoming book on Congress, The Broken Branch, withstood Colbert’s grilling rather well, barely flinching when Colbert determined that Ornstein is actually "a […]
by Anatoly Liberman The entries in the great Oxford English Dictionary (OED) reveal, although, naturally, in broad outline, the documented history of thousands of words. Some of them surfaced in texts more than a millennium ago, others emerged in Chaucer’s works and later, and still others were added to the vocabulary of English within the […]
by Richard Striner How will historians eventually rate our incumbent president as a wartime commander? A comparison of George W. Bush and the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, is instructive. Putting aside the issue of civil liberties in wartime —— an issue that people of good will could debate almost endlessly —— Lincoln was a […]
Poet’s Work Grandfather advised me: Learn a trade I learned to sit at desk and condense No layoff from this condensery –Lorine Niedecker, 1964 From the forthcoming Oxford Book of American Poetry.
On Tuesday on his blog Whatever, John Scalzi announced the arrival of the NOAD and The American Writer’s Thesaurus in his mailbox. In addition to giving the customary compliments to Erin McKean, Editor of Oxford’s US Dictionary program, Scalzi was surprised to find both books “delightful” and “fun to read.” He then turns to the […]
There was a time when historical linguistics was one of the most prestigious disciplines in the humanities. At school, Latin and Classical Greek were shoved down young boys’ unwilling throats, and it seemed natural to look at languages with the eyes of a historian. Early in the 19th century, regular sound correspondences between languages were […]
Presidents are the curse of American history. Or to be more precise, our interpretation of American history is bedeviled by the excessive focus on the role of the president, his character and personality. Not long ago, PBS’s “American Experience” repeated its major series on Ronald Reagan, which used a biography of Reagan as a means […]