Gleimous

You so totally need to check out Save the Words. I first noticed it several weeks ago, but then it was unavailable for awhile because of some upgrading the folks behind it were doing. Now it's back and better then ever. Thus the title of my post...

Gleimous: slimy, full of phlegm.

That's my word of the day, especially appropriate given that today I gave an exam and never in my life have I heard so much sneezing and coughing and sniffling and snorting. It was nasty. Seriously--I don't want to even touch their possibly gleimous papers.

Words as Images

Very cool stuff...

Via Andrew Sullivan.

The Photographic Dictionary...

Have fun exploring this site. Should I add a time-sucker warning? Probably... (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

By the way, this is a dead-on description of how I felt on Saturday.

Quick links...

Coming at ya from New York, where I'll be spending the holiday, some links that have stacked up in my bookmarks:

1) The cast of my favorite sitcom, "How I Met Your Mother," re-enacting some of the top moments of 2008. Oh, now I love me some NPH.

2) A cool article about slang from The Nation. I especially like the section on personal slang--the phrases you and your friends/family use that no one else would get.

3) An interesting new blog about writers' and artists' daily routines.

"The Clbuttic Mistake"

I'm doing a bit of blogging catch-up tonight, finally posting some of those links that have been piling up in my bookmark folder. Here's an instant classic, collecting some wonderful instances when obscenity filters go wrong.

Bulwer-Lytton and Lyttle Lytton Awards

These are always so much fun. Check them out here and here.

English is too hard...

...according to a presentation at the Spelling Society. (Does that sound like a fun crowd, or what?) Anyway, here's a list of 100 words identified as too hard:

"Orange, foreign, rhinoceros, properly, vomit, tambourine, tournament, tourist, heaven, engine, exquisite, opposite, advertisement, gnarled, rigid, risen, sinister, spinach, video, vinegar, tie, wheelie, quiet, science, crier, pliers, soldier, Monday, mongrel, monkey, courage, magic, manage, palace, four, journey, gnash, gnaw, gnome, ghastly, guard, miracle, miserable, pigeon, pity, prison, month, mother, nothing, once, smother, son, sponge, tongue, wonder, almost, both, comb, ghost, gross, most, only, post, programme, deny, reply, July, obey, caterpillar, chapel, damage, dragon, fabulous, family, famished, garage, glacier, habit, hazard, hexagonal, imagine, panic, radish, miaow, powder, cauliflower, plant, pyjamas, raft, rather, salami, task, vast, kiosk, kiwi, machine, encourage, somersault, swollen, souvenir"

There's no denying English is a crazy language, but forgive me for feeling the tone of this piece to be a bit panicky and over the top. This also reminds me of that wonderful alternative spelling of "fish": ghoti. Read all about it here.

53,463 nouns...

Check out this really interesting visual dictionary. I should find a way to use this in my teaching...you can see lots of connections to visual literacy, exactness, definition, etc.

"No facebooking!"

I found myself using the words from this post's title today in my English 101 class before I let my students do some work on their essays. Our classroom has computers in the back, which is great in a lot of ways, but also problematic. After all, it's hard to make sure all 25 students are using class time to actually work on their papers and not spending it on Facebook, myspace, or even checking email. Anyway, as I heard myself turn the name of that popular website into a verb, I recalled this recent article from the Kane County Chronicle, out of Kane County, Illinois. (The link came to me in a weekly email from the NCTE.)

In short, the article is about how corporate names work their way into our language, as we "Netflix" movies, "google" our old classmates, and "Mapquest" directions. The article quotes Denis Baron, a professor at the University of Illinois, who explains, “This is one of the ways that language naturally works...Common inventions, technologies and products become embedded in the language and extend their use to other areas. That’s how language changes and spreads.” For me, this is one of the aspects of language that makes it so exciting and so much fun to study. The article also quotes a Scott Osmundson (and, in a bit of poor writing, I think, it doesn't explain who he is and why we should care about his opinion), who sounds a bit afraid of such changes: “We’re starting to lose the English language,” Osmundson said. “Especially with texting and how people abbreviate words now.” I can understand some of the apprehension here, but we aren't "losing" the language--it was never this static, contained entity.

Another interesting issue to consider: what do corporations gain from such linguistic turns. As Baron suggests, it isn't always good: “It’s tricky for [corporations],” Baron said. “They want the names of their products to be on everybody’s lips, but they don’t want it to be used as a generic [word]. They don’t want all tissues to be Kleenex.”

This last line made me laugh out loud: “My friend just ‘Googled’ herself,” said Woods, 25. “That’s weird.”

Wonders of the human brain

A little boy in Britain has life-saving brain surgery. Then his accent changes completely. Bizarre.

Do you have a "signature" word?

"Everyone should have a signature word." That's what Ben Macintyre argues in this article. In it he also discusses Christopher Foyle's Foyle’s Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words, a book that I am going to have to put on my ever-growing Amazon.com wish list.* As someone who loves language, unusual words, and playing with language, I really enjoyed this piece--I only wish it were longer. Just yesterday I think I made up a word, although I bet lots of folks have used it before. A friend called me and asked what I was up to, and I said, "Syllabizing," as in, the act of working on my syllabi.

And now I am thinking about what my signature word is. I know I use "indeed" way more than I should in my academic writing. I also use "ought" way more than any normal 29 year-old American should. But those are not exactly the kinds of signature words Macintyre is talking about in this article. Well, I suppose I ought to give it some thought and maybe post an update if I think of one. Indeed.

Can any of you, my loyal if small group of readers, think of your signature word?

*For some reason, I can only find this book on amazon.com's UK site. Perhaps because it is so new (only published in the UK on July 27).

Gilead

Since I finally got around to returning it to the public library today, I thought I'd post about Gilead, a novel I "read" earlier this summer and enjoyed immensely--possibly more than anything else I've encountered in some time. (I am using quotation marks around "read" because, in fact, I listened to the book on CD, a habit I picked up about eight months ago to get me through several long and solitary car trips.)

Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, is a beautiful book, told from the perspective of Reverend John Ames, who is writing a long letter to his young son. Ames, who became a father very late in life, has learned his heart will soon fail him, and so feels compelled to leave whatever advice and guidance he can for his son. Sounds corny, but it really isn't. It is a book about vocation, religion, life, family--all the important things. It's a book about a man of simple means with a relatively simple life looking back over it and realizing the beauty in it. Of course, I am simplifying it a bit, but I did find myself quite moved by it again and again.

I've copied down some of my favorite passages into my journal and I'll share some of them here, without any specific commentary. I'll let them speak for themselves.*

“I’m thinking about the word ‘just.’ I almost wish that I could have written ‘The sun just shone and the tree just glistened and the water just poured out of it and the girl just laughed.’ When it’s used that way, it does indicate a stress on the word that follows it and also a particular pitch of the voice. People talk that way when they want to call attention to a thing existing in excess of itself, so to speak, a sort of purity or lavishness. At any rate, something ordinary in kind but exceptional in degree, so it seems to me at the moment. There is something real signified in that word, ‘just,’ that proper language won’t acknowledge.”

“Existence seems to me now the most remarkable thing that could ever be imagined. I am about to put on imperishability. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye. The twinkling of an eye—that is the most wonderful expression. I’ve thought from time to time it was the best thing in life—that little incandescence you see in people when the charm of a thing strikes them or the humor of it. The light of the eyes rejoices the heart. That’s a fact.”

“…There is nothing more astonishing than a human face…it has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.”

“When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with any one at all, it is as if a question is being put to you, so you must think, ‘What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?’…If you think, as it were, ‘This is an emissary sent from the Lord and some benefit is intended for me, first of all, the occasion is to demonstrate my faithfulness, the chance to show that I do, in some small way, participate in the grace that saved me’…you are free to act by your own lights. You are freed, at the same time, from the impulse to hate or resent that person. He would probably laugh at the thought that the Lord sent him to you for your benefit and his, but that is the perfection of the disguise—his own ignorance of it.”

“[John] Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me because it makes us artists of our own behavior and the reaction of God to us might be thought of as aesthetic, rather than morally judgmental in the ordinary sense. How well do we understand our role? With how much assurance do we perform it?...I do like Calvin’s image, though, because it suggests how God might enjoy us. I believe we think about that far too little. It would be a way into understanding essential things, since presumably the world exists for God’s enjoyment, not in any simple sense, of course, but as you enjoy the being of a child, even when he is in every way a thorn in your heart.”

“Grace has a grand laughter in it.”

“Love is holy because it is like grace; the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.”

“There is no justice in love—no proportion in it, and there need not be because in any specific instance, it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal, so how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?”

[Okay--I guess I lied about not commenting. These last quotations are even cooler because Ames wants us to see these observations about love in a good way--as a positive thing. I just love that idea.]

Robinson is probably best-known for Housekeeping, a novel I read several years ago but don't remember all the well. After reading Gilead, I might want to give Housekeeping another read-through.

*I should also note that my quotations might not match the published text exactly. I was copying them down based on the CDs, so I am sure there are differences in punctuation, etc.