The wildfires have barely been extinguished here in California, but it’s already word-of-the-year season across the pond, where three prominent dictionaries chose words or phrases with a common theme: climate change, or preventing it. Cambridge Dictionary went first, with upcycling: “the activity of making new furniture, objects, etc. out of old or used things or waste material.” Collins Dictionary chose climate strike: “a protest demanding action on climate change.” And Oxford Dictionaries picked climate emergency from an all-environmental shortlist that included “climate action,” “climate denial,” “eco-anxiety,” “extinction” and “flight shame.”
Let the record show that lexicographer Jane Solomon, recently of Dictionary.com, spotted the trend back in September.
So @OxfordWords picked ‘climate emergency’ for their 2019 Word of the year. And @CollinsDict picked ‘climate strike.’
— 〰️Jane Solomon〰️ (@janesolomon) November 20, 2019
In September I suggested ‘climate crisis.’
Clearly lexicographers are all on the same page about this. https://t.co/75klqC7c6e
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“Perhaps we’ve been spoiled after eight years of Barack Obama’s uplifting discourse, his measured tones, his big words and periodic sentences, and yes, his use of spell-check,” writes linguist and English professor Dennis Baron in a blog post titled Grammar-Shaming Trump. “But we’re faced with the reality that thanks to Trump and his base—base in every sense of the word—irrationality has replaced dialectic and political rhetoric in America is racing once again toward the bottom. It’s the meaning of the words and ideas that are the danger, not how they’re spelled or punctuated.”
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There’s a prototype of a Middle English Wikipedia, and it’s splendid. (h/t @qntm by way of @ArrantPedantry)
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In 1986, Disney execs changed the title of upcoming film BASIL OF BAKER STREET to THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE. This memo, purportedly from the President of Walt Disney Feature Animation but actually written by one of the film's furious animators, soon circulated & made the news. pic.twitter.com/cPZpc2Fg3x
— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) November 17, 2019
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What’s America’s #1 boy’s name (four letters)? Test your name savvy with Namerology’s first all-name crossword.
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The Atlantic, published continuously since 1857, has a new logo and typeface. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, says the changes make the magazine “visually arresting, classically informed, and radically modern, all at the same time.” Armin Vit of the design blog Brand New is not persuaded: “Trying to own the ‘A’ as an identifier when you already comfortably own ‘The Atlantic’ seems like an unnecessary uphill battle and one that I’m not sure has a big payoff.”
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Is that person from Australia or New Zealand? A dialect coach offers tips on distinguishing similar accents.
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A marine biologist argues that scientists should stop naming species after awful people. (h/t @nancycc)
A lovely lizard named after a terrible person. (Photo via Reptiles of Arizona)
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A cannabis grower talks to branding agency A Hundred Monkeys about naming cannabis strains and his own company, Glass House Farms: “We tweaked the phrase ‘Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones’ to ‘It’s ok to get stoned in a glass house.’”
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I’ve read about a third of the books on Slate’s list of the 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years—I’ve read H Is for Hawk three times!—and I can’t wait to investigate the others.
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“An ideal name, to me, conveys as much as possible about the character, while landing on this side of formulaic or self-conscious,” writes Adam O’Fallon Price, who maintains that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth “offers a masterclass in the art of character naming.” (You can read my own tips on character naming here.)
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This is an abomination before God and man and should be condemned in the harshest terms possible. I call on all Jews, Arabs, Kurds, Persians and other peoples of the Middle East to unite and protest this assault on our shared culinary heritage https://t.co/aXCxFE79Qs
— Sam Sokol (@SamuelSokol) November 17, 2019
(h/t Ward Harkavy for the hummus tweet)
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