#LanguageHat

Anatoly Vorobey posted at FB (in Russian) about a novel I’d never heard of; I’ll translate what he wrote:

Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this LH post) features the 21st-century sense of “smart”:

Ben Yagoda discusses a niche usage that produces hilarity among a restricted group of English-speakers:

Andrew Keh reports in the NY Times (archived) about a divergence in pronunciation that astounds me as much as if you told me a lot of people pronounced New York “NYE-rock”:

A NY Times interactive story about “the world’s rarest pasta,” by Matt Goulding, is interesting on a number of counts. Of course if one likes pasta it’s great to see it being made in such an elaborate way (“Stretched by hand, a single ball of dough is…

Two unrelated things I’ve enjoyed recently that can be shoehorned in here via their relation to language and/or communication:

Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward:

I was reading about a recent documentary called Nuestra Tierra (apparently translated as both Our Land and Landmarks), which “examines issues of land ownership in Argentina and interrogates the role of this history in the murder of Javier Chocobar, a…

This is the kind of thing that enrages me; Natricia Duncan and Anthony Lugg report in the Guardian:

I’m finally getting around to Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers: Methods and Problems in Latin Textual Criticism, which bulbul gave me back in 2018, and I thought I’d quote this passage from the introduction (p. 11; I added a few links):

Yesterday it was Basques in Idaho, today it’s Hmong in Minnesota — Phineas Pope of MPR News says “Tuj lub players want more Minnesotans to give the Hmong sport a whirl“:

I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section on a topic dear to my heart, the importance of a clear personal voice in any literary…

One of those silly but enjoyable online quizzes, from Isabella Kwai at the NY Times: “Hey, Bampot! Can You Tell Real British Insults From Fakes in This Quiz?” (archived). The intro: