Reviews and News:
Revisiting François-René de Chateaubriand’s memoirs: “Chateaubriand, who had been working on his memoirs intermittently since around 1803, had quite a life story to tell, which is apparently why his publisher was willing to fund the writer’s retirement to get the manuscript. Soldier, witness to the French Revolution, diplomat, North American explorer, novelist, Christian apologist, and poet, Chateaubriand was the Zelig of his day, appearing to be everywhere at once. ‘Thus did Chateaubriand straddle not only two centuries but also two worlds, that of the ancien régime and that of the modern era,’ writes scholar Anka Muhlstein.”
Rediscovering the forgotten dean of the Harlem Renaissance: “While Locke played a key role in African-American life for five decades, that role was usually behind the scenes, as editor, curator, teacher, and impresario. His essays and lectures helped shape cultural debates, but he never produced a major book of his own. After his death in 1954, his reputation inevitably began to fade. Fortunately, Locke’s achievement—and what is still more fascinating, his complex and contradictory personality—can now be appreciated in full, thanks to a monumental new biography. The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.”
A new ACLU report shows how easy it is to be jailed for owing money even though debtors’ prisons have been illegal in the United States since 1833. David Dayen reports.
Raghuveer Parthasarathy, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon, has an intriguing idea on teaching evaluations. Rather than distributing evaluations at the end of course, they should be sent a year later: “I’ve long thought that evaluations shouldn’t come at the end of the term, but rather much later — the following year, perhaps, when one can actually reflect on whether the class prepared one for whatever came later, or on whether the things one learned changed one’s views of the world.”
In addition to scouring the Internet for the best writing on the most interesting topics (not always successfully, alas), I am also a regular reader of a handful of email newsletters. One of my favorites is Thomas Kidd’s occasional musings on teaching and writing. Kidd is a professor of history at Baylor and the author, most recently, of Benjamin Franklin: The Religious Life of a Founding Father. In his latest email, he describes what it’s been like to leave social media for Lent. Subscribe here if you’re interested.
Essay of the Day:
The next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is scheduled to be completed in 2037. Will it? In The Guardian, Andrew Dickson asks if the Internet might make dictionaries like the OED obsolete:
“It was one of the largest books ever made, in any language: had you laid the metal type used end to end, it would have stretched from London to Manchester. Sixty years late it may have been, but the publisher made the most of the achievement, trumpeting that ‘the Oxford Dictionary is the supreme authority, and without a rival’.
“Yet if you knew where to look, its flaws were only too obvious. By the time it was published in 1928, this Victorian leviathan was already hopelessly out of date. The A-C entries were compiled nearly 50 years earlier; others relied on scholarship that had long been surpassed, especially in technology and science. In-house, it was admitted that the second half of the alphabet (M-Z) was stronger than the first (A-L); the letter E was regarded as especially weak. Among other eccentricities, Murray had taken against ‘marzipan’, preferring to spell it ‘marchpane’, and decreed that the adjective ‘African’ should not be included, on the basis that it was not really a word. ‘American’, however, was, for reasons that reveal much about the dictionary’s lofty Anglocentric worldview.
“The only solution was to patch it up. The first Supplement to the OED came out in 1933, compiling new words that editors had noted in the interim, as well as original omissions. Supplements to that Supplement were begun in 1957, eventually appearing in four instalments between 1972 and 1986 – some 69,300 extra items in all. Yet it was a losing battle, or a specialised form of Zeno’s paradox: the closer that OED lexicographers got to the finish line, the more distant that finish line seemed to be.
“At the same time, the ground beneath their feet was beginning to give way. By the late 1960s, a computer-led approach known as ‘corpus linguistics’ was forcing lexicographers to re-examine their deepest assumptions about the way language operates. Instead of making dictionaries the old-fashioned way – working from pre-existing lists of words/definitions, and searching for evidence that a word means what you think it does – corpus linguistics turns the process on its head: you use digital technology to hoover up language as real people write and speak it, and make dictionaries from that. The first modern corpus, the Brown Corpus of Standard American English, was compiled in 1964 and included 1m words, sampled from 500 texts including romance novels, religious tracts and books of ‘popular lore’ – contemporary, everyday sources that dictionary-makers had barely consulted, and which it had never been possible to examine en masse. The general-language corpora that provide raw material for today’s dictionaries contain tens of billions of words, a database beyond the wildest imaginings of lexicographers even a generation ago….But while other dictionary publishers leapt on corpus linguistics, OED editors stuck to what they knew, resisting computerisation and relying on quotation slips and researchers in university libraries.”
Images: Dust jackets
Poem: Aaron Belz, “Ambition”
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