Background here. As Victor Hugo said to Charles Baudelaire, when the censor banned Flowers of Evil, “You have just received the sole decoration the present regime has the power to confer.”

I used to find writing a chore. It was hard work; I was assailed by doubts about what I was trying to say; none of the sentences ever quite fit together as I had hoped; the work always took too long. Now all these things are still true, but I find not writing worse than writing. What happened in the meantime? It's probably a matter of habituation. The more time you spend on an activity, the more reflexes and tricks of the hand you develop tha...

N’est-ce pas parce que nous cultivons la brume? — Rimbaud It’s tempting to try to sort out the good Derrida from the bad but the longer I try the more it all seems bad. Of course, it’s easy to separate the early, middle and late in the hopes of quarantining his earlier and seemingly more lucid works from the deluge which followed, but once the lines have been drawn it is clear that most of his annoying tics were present from the very ...

Yes, I did. You probably did too. But what is frittering? It is scandalous to do something and not know what it is. A fritter-- everybody knows that. Something fried in oil. I may have to call a mereologist to find out what defines the boundary between one fritter and another, and whether there are part-fritters or fritter-complexes with independent existence, or just one damn fritter after another. So did I fry the summer away in oil? What i...

A contest, of sorts: 1. What did the grass say to the cow? 2. What did the beef say to the chef? 3. What did the 2008 Olympics say to the air quality of the city of Beijing? 4. What did Elian Gonzalez say to his putative adoptive father? 5. What did Lazarus say to Jesus?

Imagine, for the moment, a utopian scenario. In languages A and B, for every word in A there can be found a corresponding term in B. Translation goes forward smoothly and everyone is happy. Indeed, philosophers such as Donald Davidson assure us that ultimately this is the way languages work: translation is always possible, though it may not be word-for-word or easy. The key word is “ultimately”: we don’t always have time to wait for “ultimatel...

Coincidence: just as over here, people of almost all political stripes are jumping all over Obama's pastor for having pronounced the words “God damn America” (that unthinkable, illegitimate, heretical, damnable formula), so on the other side of the globe zillions of people are taking up verbal arms in the name of the theory that “Tibet is and always will be an integral part of China.” A reasonable person, if we may conj...

On my way home from a conference in New Orleans last weekend, I noticed the following sign posted near the security checkpoint conveyor belt: Security is no laughing matter. All comments will be taken seriously.

You couldn't have said that a project, a war plan, a business or a child was “viable” before 1537, and even at that, only in French. People would have looked at you askance and corrected you: surely you meant some other word: vif, vivace, vivable (vivid, vivacious, livable), etc. And the first person to use the word probably did so by mistake, or gropingly, feeling that the French word “vivace” didn't quite render the m...

I recently discovered a website called Kids in Mind, which rates movies for parents so they can determine whether they are appropriate for their children to watch. Their rating system is much more complicated than G-PG-R. Each movie gets three numbers, one for Sex & Nudity, one for Violence & Gore and one for Profanity. Fifteen movies scored a perfect ten in the first category.

Virginia Woolf begins her essay “On Not Knowing Greek” in the middle of a sentence, as if the reader were already saying “What?” to her title: For it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, or how the actors acted, and between this foreign people and ourselves there is not only di...

Ever since S Shirazi and H Saussy wrote about their experiences learning languages I have been thinking I should write something about studying Chinese, but I felt a certain reluctance to talk about it. There's the jinx factor, of course. But more than that, I think, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants I felt guilty and false for not already being able to speak the language. Part of me is still angry — at my parents and myself — ...

Not a lot of time this week for Deep Thoughts, so just a few quick notes on a linguistic phenomenon: the productivity of the suffix -y. Our English -y/-ey goes back to Sanskrit -ika, by way of Greek -ikos, Latin -icus, and Old English -ig, so it isn't exactly new, but it is currently undergoing a kind of renaissance.

Walking around at the front of the room, waving my hands and trying to say persuasive and accurate things about subjects that I got to choose, I watch my students like a cat. I have recently been thinking about a verbal behavior that I instinctually, you know, avoid, but that might, ah, confer advantages on other speakers. I’m talking about the Hesitators. Not a reticent rhythm-and-blues band, but a linguistic category: the little noises peop...

The video of Hilary Clinton “tearing up” as she talked with a group of New Hampshire voters the day before the primary last week, already the obsessive subject of the media's short-term attention a week ago, may well thanks to Clinton's surprise victory have established itself as “historical.” The move from flavor-of-the-day coverage to event-creating object came as the wave of women voters supporting Clinton were widel...

I remember the moment I decided to learn Chinese. I was three thousand feet above the surface of the earth, flying back from a visit to my in-laws. I felt rested after a week away from the office and relieved to be heading back home. In Greek myth Atlas drew strength from having his feet on the ground but I seemed to be gaining power the higher we flew. I felt as if I were standing high above the slipstream of time, looking down upon all t...

Language extinction is probably not news to a lot of Printculture readers, but the fact that it made mainstream news cycles --including even the mighty front page of Google news-- is. The fuller versions of the story can be found here and here (National Geographic sites). The lead is that a language dies roughly every two weeks. Almost as sad is this bizarre effort, from the Los Angeles Times, to convey some sense of why language loss matters:...

We’re deep into the process of buying our first home, an endeavor complicated by the fact that we’re doing the transactions from out of state. We had given ourselves five days to look at properties and make a decision—foolhardy, perhaps, but we reasoned that we’d have to find a place to live anyway, so why not get a pre-approval and go take a look at what’s available. But this post isn’t about the incredibly stressful process of buying the mo...

After recently hearing the German word “das Baby” I began thinking about a cultural studies book I don’t want to write and probably wouldn’t even want to read (sounds like a printuculture post): The History of “Baby” or, to give it a more contemporary ring: Baby: A Natural History. How Baby Got Brought Up? The story would begin with Baby’s slow, near-fatal suffocation of its older and larger sibling Babe. The OED’s oldest examples of “baby” go...

I could never be a linguist. I loved the one true linguistics course I took and did very well in it, but it also quelled any doubts I might have had that I wanted a full plate of that every semester for five or six years, to be followed by a dissertation and, if I became one of the lucky few, a lifetime of teaching it. I love hearing the results of other people’s research, but I don’t love it enough to want to do the legwork myself. Hence I to...

Recently in the American Scholar, Thomas Mallon challenged readers with 10 questions about American intellectual life today. As our regular readers know, the gang at Printculture thought we should rally the troops and try to actually answer them. The one that interested me in particular was #7.

Static, for some. For others, the main deal. I sometimes wish I could get into the habit of speed-reading past the sounds, letters, and associations of words and just get the point, rather than sensing abysses of implication and cross-reference between any two syllables. Have you ever taken a walk with a two-year-old? The very young are not terribly goal-directed. A pebble, a snail, a gum wrapper have to be taken into consideration. The expedi...

Somewhere, sometime, fifty or sixty years from now, someone could do worse than write an academic paper or even a dissertation on race and comedy in George W. Bush's America. Such a paper would bring together the following people and events: Sarah Silverman, Sasha Baron Cohen, and Dave Chapelle on the one hand, and Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic rant and Michael Richards' racist one on the other.

The thing about Paris is, you're always running into the ghost of someone famous. I'm sure Paul Valéry stayed in lots of houses in his time, but come around a street corner, look up, see this sign and it's like Paris is actually someplace like, well, Paris, where simply everyone you've heard of — and some folks you haven't — did the things that are the reasons you've heard of them. On Wednesday of last week I walked by a group of s...

This post tracks a common phrase or saying in its various permutations by plugging it into Google, inaugurating what I hope will become a regular printculture feature that we can call “viral language” or phraseculture (other suggestions welcome). None of the online dictionaries I consulted indicate when the phrase “no-brainer” was first coined or put into wider circulation, but hearing the phrase used in a few different contexts on TV and in ...