The Half of It
One of my favorite—and now badly dated—childhood books was Edward Eager’s Half Magic, a fantasy about an enchanted token that granted exactly one half of what you wished for. So wishing that your pet...
View ArticleOf All Time! Honest!
It might have begun with that favorite question: “Who was the worst person of all time?” Many a late-night debate has raged over whether Mao or Stalin or Hitler wins that prize. (I recall Innocent III...
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Eastwood Ho!
And now the chair. It has become the defining image of the Republican nominating convention. Barring even more bizarre antics, it’s likely to be the most memorable of the entire presidential campaign:...
View ArticleEmpire of Signs
Travel is a chance to read. I don’ t have in mind the novel you’ve been saving, much less the stack of papers you foolishly thought you’d get to on that family vacation. I’m thinking of something much...
View ArticleThe B Word
A blog is a sort of diary written in the ether. The word blog, which derives from Weblog (we drop the “We”), is one of the shortened forms of speech that retains the end rather than the beginning of a...
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Albert in a Can, Women in Binders
The joke is an old one. Boy on telephone: “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” Tobacconist: “Yes, we do.” Boy: “Well, you’d better let him out before he suffocates!” Readers of Lingua Franca will...
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Love! Valour! Punctuation!
My morning’s first e-mail. Your Amazon order has shipped! It hadn’t just shipped. It had “shipped!” Which brings me to Broadway. In 1994, Terence McNally’s play Love! Valour! Compassion!— a...
View ArticleAll Passion Spent
Have a passion for learning? Well, maybe. But it’s possible you have some other more nuanced responses, too. Remember the scene in Some Like It Hot where Marilyn Monroe sings that she’s through with...
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What’s the Story?
Read any good stories lately? Maybe not, but Facebook thinks you read a lot of them—thousands, in fact—though “reading” may not be the term to describe what you’re doing. I check Facebook with an...
View Article#infallible
With the arrival of @Pontifex, Pope Benedict XVI has joined the ranks of the Twitterati. Benedict’s predecessor on the papal throne, John Paul II, introduced e-mail to the Vatican’s communications...
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A Little Frau With Your Bonus?
O politics, you are the gift that keeps on giving, and maybe especially to those who keep an eye out for language. Last month the German race for Chancellor took an unexpected linguistic turn. The...
View ArticleJack Lew’s Signature
When President Obama put forward the name of Jack Lew to be the next secretary of the Treasury, there were two immediate reactions. First was puzzlement and the homophonic query “Lew who?” Then came...
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Catfish Row
Screenshot from the film “Catfish.” Catfish: An online impostor posing as a romantic object. To deceive by posing in such a manner. See also the 2010 film of that name. The continuing drama of the...
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Publishers in Transition (and the Readers Who Love Them)
This morning my Twitter feed led off with this message from RandomDigital, the electronic arm of the august publishing firm Random House: @RandomDigital: Please support media companies in transition by...
View ArticleAn Appeal for Inclemency
It is a rainy, blustery day sometime in the 1950s, and at our little school desks we are preparing for lunchtime recess. Mr McHugh, my grammar school’s principal and a man of priestly aspect, announces...
View ArticleOf Ngrammatology
I’ve recently discovered Google’s Ngram Viewer. If you haven’t found and played with it yet, you will. The Ngram Viewer takes a corpus of just over five million library books digitized by Google and,...
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Getting Soft
“But soft, what light from yonder window breaks?” croons young Romeo. Generations of high-school students have puzzled over what he meant, perhaps most of all over that “but soft.” Shakespeare’s...
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Most Sincerely Yours (Really)
“She’s not only merely dead,” proclaims the Coroner in The Wizard of Oz, “she’s really most sincerely dead.” I’ve heard that line hundreds of times, and seen the film dozens, but only recently have I...
View ArticleFirst Word Problems
My last post was on correspondence closers—those expressions of fidelity and endearment on which the seamless fabric of academia depends. In that post I paused to admire the French use of elaborated...
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The Auction-House of Language
Four decades ago, Fredric Jameson analyzed structuralism and formalism in an important book he called The Prison-House of Language. The title alluded to an aphorism in which Nietzsche cautioned that...
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