Posts tagged literature

The Life and Death of Words

Words, like plants and animals, fight for survival and an international group of scientists studying English, Spanish and Hebrew believe that many — in general — are dying off.

Their killer? Editors.

Via Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death (PDF):

The modern era of publishing, which is characterized by more strict editing procedures at publishing houses, computerized word editing and automatic spell-checking technology, shows a drastic increase in the death rate of words. Using visual inspection we verify most changes to the vocabulary in the last 10–20 years are due to the extinction of misspelled words and nonsensical print errors, and to the decreased birth rate of new misspelled variations and genuinely new words.

The Guardian clarifies this a bit by killing off some difficult words of their own and getting straight to the point about how words live and how words die:

But it is not only “defective” words that die: sometimes words are driven to extinction by aggressive competitors. The word “Roentgenogram”, for example, deriving from the discoverer of the x-ray, William Röntgen, was widely used for several decades in the 20th century, but, challenged by “x-ray” and “radiogram”, has now fallen out of use entirely. X-ray had beaten off its synonyms by 1980, speculate the academics, owing to its “efficient short word length” and since the English language is generally used for scientific publication. “Each of the words is competing to be a monopoly on who gets to be the name,” [Joel] Tenenbaum told the American Physical Society.

The phrase “the great war”, meanwhile, used for a period to describe the first world war, fell out of use around 1939 when another war of equal proportions hit the world.

Takeaway: Language is a giant Darwinian battle for linguistic supremacy. Choose yours selectively. 

Video: MIT’s Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel illustrate what we can learn from analyzing 500 billion words via Google Books and its related Ngram Viewer which gives us the ability to enter words and phrases into a search engine in order to view their frequency over time.

Good Books Metamorphasis

An incredible animation channeling Hunter S. Thompson to promote Good Books, an online bookseller that donates its profits to Oxfam.

Created by String Theory.

Happy 50th, Phantom Tollbooth

A Kickstarter campaign to create a documentary with the book’s author, Norton Juster, and illustrator, Jules Feiffer, is here.

Via Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker:

Milo is also one of the few protagonists in children’s literature—Dorothy is another—who have a wiser best friend throughout their journey, in this case Tock, the watchdog. Just as Dorothy learns from the smart Scarecrow, Milo learns from Tock’s timekeeper’s knowledge. Milo doesn’t educate himself; he gets educated. His epiphany is that math and reading and even spelling are themselves subjects of adventure, if seen from the right angle. The point of “The Phantom Tollbooth” is not that there’s more to life than school; it’s that normal school subjects can be wonderful if you don’t have to experience them as normal schooling…

…For “The Phantom Tollbooth” is not just a manifesto for learning; it is a manifesto for the liberal arts, for a liberal education, and even for the liberal-arts college. (Juster, who, knowing that he had started out with a classic, went on to publish sparingly, if beautifully—his visual romance “The Dot and the Line” is his best-known later work—spent most of his career as an architect and as a teacher at Hampshire College.) What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason. Learning isn’t a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.

Spike Jonze’s Stop Motion Short for Book Lovers

Via Open Culture:

It all started when filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are) met handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan and asked her to create a Catcher in the Rye embroidery for his wall. She asked him to collaborate on a film in return. And so Jonze and Le-Tan, together with French director Simon Cahn, spent six months writing a script, then animating 3,000 pieces of felt cut by Le-Tan herself. The result is Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and it features a skeleton, his lover, and some famous book covers that spring to life.

A Q&A with Jonze about the film can be found on Nowness. A video of the making is available on Vimeo.

MetaMaus

Twenty-five years ago Art Spiegelman brought the graphic novel to the general public and radicalized the type of stories the medium could tell.

In his Pulitzer Prize winning Maus, he tells the story of both Holocaust survivors and second generation survivors that then survived them, all in a world where Jews were mice, Germans were cats and Poles were pigs.

For the 25th anniversary, Spiegelman is releasing MetaMaus, a collection of interviews, scrapbooks and even a DVD about the original work’s creation.

Via the New York Times:

…The success of “Maus” — the first of its two volumes appeared in 1986 — was far from preordained. The book was turned down by many publishers, and Mr. Spiegelman prints his rejection letters here, from nearly all of America’s major publishing houses, including Alfred A. Knopf and Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The idea of a comic book about the Holocaust was inconceivable to most. The idea made people snort. One editor wrote: “You can imagine the response I’ve gotten from the sales department.” “Maus” was finally published by Pantheon Books, which gave its author only a small advance.

And if you haven’t read Maus, we recommend stopping just about everything you might be doing and go and give it a read.