Language

Bookshelf: Mini Book Reviews

Three- to five-word book reviews of Christmas-gift-worthy books.

Juan de Fuca’s Strait: Voyages in the Waterway of Forgotten Dreams, Barry Gough, 2012.
Mariners. Myths. Mystery.

The First World War: Volume I: To Arms, Hew Strachan, 2001.
Monumental. Might. Mayhem.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader, Anne Fadiman, 1998.
Personal. Pleasures. Passions.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (CBC Massey Lecture series), Margaret Atwood, 2008.
Timely. Thought-provoking. Treasure trove.

Photo by John Hannah.

An Essay on Typography, Eric Gill, 1936.
Craftsmanship. Common sense. Composition.

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, 1951.
Disturbing. Dark. Dystopian.

The Canadian Press Stylebook, 16th Edition, Patti Tasko, ed., 2010.
Policies. Procedures. Packaging. Pointers. Pitfalls.

Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, Dorothy L. Sayers, 1972.
Period piece. Peerage. Police. Pursuit. Proof.

The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt, 2011.
Bizarre. Brawls. Bloodshed.

The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2011.
Denmark. Detection. Department Q.

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel, 2012.
Reformation. Rogues. Royals. Retribution. Redux.

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Macmillan stops presses

Have you heard? Starting next year, Macmillan’s range of dictionaries will only be available online, following a digital-only trend established by the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

In “Stop the presses—the end of the printed dictionary,” editor-in-chief Michael Rundell writes: “the digital medium is the best platform for a dictionary. One of its advantages is that we can now provide all kinds of supplementary resources—like this blog. The blog covers a huge range of issues, from language change and words in the news, via innovations in language technology or unexpected shifts in grammar, to ideas for teaching English and guidance on common errors.” Rundell also counts audio pronunciations and always being up to date as benefits of going digital.

Read the complete post, or watch the video that appears at the bottom of this page, along with its associated comments (preview: some people aren’t happy).

So. Macmillan’s range of dictionaries are going exclusively digital; Encyclopædia Britannica has gone exclusively digital; the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has gone exclusively digital. Could the venerable Oxford English Dictionary—still available in print—be far behind?

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j4o9_SKOYc&w=560&h=315]

© Macmillan.

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EVENT LISTINGS: December 2012

Do you have an event planned (or know of one) that you’d like to appear in these listings? Send us the details.

November 24—December 24, 2012: Vancouver Christmas Market

Looking to experience an authentic German Christmas market while you shop for traditional German Christmas decorations, toys, pottery, food and drink, jewellery, and crafts? Fancy a stroll through “romantic rows of little wooden huts decorated in pine branches and illuminated with strings of little white lights”? This market is for you!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPjFvJnecs?rel=0&w=640&h=360]© Vancouver Christmas Market

  • Time: 11h00–21h00 (November 24–December 23); 11h00–18h00 (December 24)
  • Cost: $5 for adults (Monday–Friday: 16h00–21h00; Saturday–Sunday: 11h00–21h00); $2 for adults (Monday–Friday: 11h00–16h00); $2 for children age 7–12; no charge for children <7 years of age
  • Location: Queen Elizabeth Theatre Plaza, 650 Hamilton Street, Vancouver
  • More information

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December 5, 2012: SFU Philosophers’ Café: Is Language Changing for the Better or Worse?

The topic for this SFU Philosophers’ Café is sure to warm the hearts—and stir the blood—of all editors. It will be moderated by Dr. Lorna Fadden, the same Dr. Fadden who presented EAC-BC’s November 21, 2012, lecture on forensic linguistics.

Topics to be discussed include the following:

  • How is language changing?
  • What are some of the features that appear to be dying out?
  • What new features might be entering the language?

About the moderator: Dr. Lorna Fadden is an assistant professor of linguistics at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Over the past decade, her research has focused on discourse analysis, mostly of police interviews, and the methods and ethics of dealing with language evidence. She has consulted on numerous cases in Canada and the United States. She’s also SFU’s First Nations languages coordinator and a regular moderator for SFU’s Philosophers’ Café.

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December 8, 2012: EAC-BC Christmas party

Have you signed up for EAC-BC’s Christmas party? This year’s party will be an informal evening of board games, word games, gossip, shoptalk, and, for those who are feeling a little shy, icebreakers. (Don’t forget to bring your favourite games such as Scrabble, Snatch, and Scattergories). Guests are welcome. Dress is casual.

To avoid paying the cover charge, let the doorman know that you’re with EAC.

Have an idea for a party activity? Send your suggestion to social chair Eve Rickert.

  • Time: 18h30–closing
  • Cost: individual tabs (drinks start at <$5; nothing on menu >$12)
  • Location: The Railway Club, 579 Dunsmuir Street, Vancouver
  • RSVP

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December 8–9, 2012: Got Craft? (holiday edition)

Held only twice a year, Got Craft? is Vancouver’s largest indie craft fair. Its mission? “To bring together a community that fosters handmade and DIY culture.” This is a great chance to shop for one-of-a-kind presents while participating in a crafting DIY workshop or two.

Bonus: the first 50 people through the front doors each day will receive free swag bags.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAGd_uGjL9E?rel=0&w=480&h=360]© Shaw TV

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“The History of English” (video)

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Love history, the English language, surreal comedy, and voice-over artists with Oxford English accents? Check out “The History of English in Ten Minutes”; it’s 1,600 years of language history, crammed into ten one-minute tracks.

Track titles

  1. Anglo-Saxon (Whatever happened to the Jutes?)
  2. The Norman Conquest (Excuse my English)
  3. Shakespeare (A plaque on both his houses)
  4. The King James Bible (Let there be light reading)
  5. The English of Science (How to speak with gravity)
  6. English and Empire (The sun never sets on the English language)
  7. The Age of the Dictionary (The definition of a hopeless task)
  8. American English (Not English but somewhere in the ballpark)
  9. Internet English (Language reverts to type)
  10. Global English (Whose language is it anyway?)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3r9bOkYW9s?rel=0&w=640&h=360]© The Open University; also licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0: UK: England & Wales.

YouTube compilation: OUlearn (Learn with The Open University YouTube channel).

Voice-over: Clive Anderson.

Semicolons: aids or affectations (poll)

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Imagine. You’ve been captured by a plunder of punctuation-hating pirates and forced to walk the plank. As you teeter, The Oxford Guide to Writing and The Chicago Manual of Style clutched to your breast, the pirate king speaks. “The semicolon has no place in online writing!” he says. “Renounce your admiration for it and live!”

What do you do?

Take the West Coast Editor poll and tell us. Are semicolons essential aids to understanding—even in online writing—fulfilling a role distinct from that of the full stop? Or are they mere affectations, relics from our print-bound past?

Take me to your poll!

Buying Twitter Followers: A Penny a Person

Psst! Have you heard? Many people, including politicians, celebrities, and reality-show hopefuls (but, we hope, not editors), are buying “large blocks of Twitter followers.”

So says Austin Considine in his article “Buying their way to Twitter fame” (The New York Times, August 22, 2012). He continues:

the practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have.

Although Twitter “filed suit in federal court … against five spammers, including those who create fake Twitter followers,” we suspect that few will be dissuaded from the practice; it’s cheap (as little as a penny a person) and easy (when we searched “buy Twitter followers” on Google, we received 8,490,000 hits), and we suspect that for every Twitter-follower provider Twitter shuts down, 10 new ones will emerge.

Read the complete article.

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Troubling trendlet: grouping books by colour

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In what can only be a sign of the decline of Western Civilization, there’s “a trendlet … kicking up dust on decor sites: grouping books on the shelf according to hue.”

Yes, you read that correctly. Certain design magazines and blogs want to convince readers to group books by hue—not by author surname, not by subject matter, and certainly not by Dewey decimal number.

To make matters worse, Random House is purported to be in on the trend.

According to Sophie Kohn in her article “Dewey decimal redux: should we organize books by colour?” (Globe and Mail, September 19, 2012), Random House will be launching a “Books are Beautiful” series in October 2012:

[thirty] iconic titles each assigned a specific shade by colour specialist Pantone … so that the collection forms a rainbow on your shelf. (The edges of the pages are spray-painted to match, ensuring that the book is a physical work of art from every conceivable angle—except if you open it.)

We hold out hope that this is a hoax since we haven’t yet found confirmation on Random House’s website or Twitter account.

Feeling brave enough to read the entire article?

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“The Apostrophe Song” (video)

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In honour of National Punctuation Day, we present “The Apostrophe Song,” a song that aims to “put the apostrophe back in its place.” It’s a four-minute tuneful celebration of the greengrocer’s apostrophe—Drive-by editing set to music, if you will…

The song was created for Cool Rules, an Australian writing-skills training firm.

Words and music by Shaun McNicholas. Vocals by Gypsy Lehmann.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc2aSz9Ficw?rel=0&w=480&h=360]

TEST: Are you a hopeless bookworm?

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Editors are bookworms. Hopeless bookworms. Take this 13-question self-diagnostic test, created by hopeless—but happy—bookworm Frank Karabotsos, to determine exactly how “hopeless” your book-loving condition is.

You know how it is. You approach a bookstore and resolutely tell yourself, I’ll only go in for five minutes, buy the book I want, and make my escape. Yeah, right. When does it ever happen that way? I used to feel guilty about this, but my only worry now is, how bookish am I, really? Perhaps you’ve asked yourself the same question. Well, you’re about to find out.

If you answer Yes to more than 11 of the following statements, you’re a Bibliolater: you’d sell your house for a first edition; between 6 and 10, you’re a Bibliomaniac: you’d read a book while skydiving; between 1 and 5, you’re a Bibliophile: you probably carry reading material with you into the bath.

Only if you answer No to all of the questions are you truly safe, able to resist the temptation of books when circumstances warrant.

Take the test to find out how “hopeless” your book-loving condition is.

DOES THIS DESCRIBE YOU?
You judge a book by its spine, that is, by how well it will look sandwiched between other books on your shelves.
You change the arrangement of the books on your shelves to give them a refreshing new look, the same way others rearrange their furniture.
You wince when you hear a crack after someone bends a hardback more than 180 degrees.
You have at least three copies of War and Peace (or another famous work) in three different translations.
You know the difference between bibliophily, bibliomania, and bibliolatry.
You have an urge to remove the dust covers from your books and display them as posters in your office.
You use a steam iron to smooth out the wrinkles in the satin ribbon markers of your books.
You purchase two copies of the same book: a paperback for reading on the beach, and a hardback for reading at home.
To avoid your spouse’s cry of “Not another book!” when a parcel arrives, you have your orders sent to your work address or to a sympathetic non-bookish friend (someone who won’t be tempted to open the box).
You have multiple copies of a favourite novel, one with a cool cover, one with illustrations, and one with scholarly notes.
You buy Brodart plastic covers to protect your books, just as libraries do.
You start reading a paperback in the store, but then order the hardback since you want a copy with nicer paper and wider margins for notes.
You wish you had never heard of The Folio Society.

Now it’s your turn. What other symptoms of obsessive bookishness do you (or others you know) exhibit?

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