Ari asks: who’s the most important historical figure about whom most people know nothing? (Hat-tip: popping up all over the place, but as teofilo notes below, there’s a good discussion going on at Unfogged. Unless they’ve moved onto the cock jokes by now.)
The emphasis in blogs I’ve seen so far tends to be American and modern – what do the medievalists and early modernists think?
I think I’m going to be bloody-minded and nominate Edward Bushel.
The Times they are a-changing!
At what used to be The Times Higher Education Supplement, anyway. Now it’s Times Higher Education, it’s no longer owned by Murdoch, and it’s got a shiny new website full of FREE content – past and present. Woo hoo!!
(The print version has also become much shinier, although apparently the ink still rubs off on your fingers.)
Thanks to Alun for the hat-tip.
I have occasionally been worrying about my tendency to grumpiness in my blogging. But my New Year’s Resolution is this: I have realised that I am officially a Grumpy Old Bag now that I’m 40, so this is gonna be a Grumpy Old Blog whenever I feel like it.
Anyways… we have the latest Linguistic Luddites List* (H-T), or the ‘List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’ from some university you’ve never heard of (publicity stunt much?).
Now there are always many, many new coinages out there that I detest (usually the latest ugly offerings from bureaucrats and middle management), but you know, the thing about a language is that it continually evolves and grows in unpredictable and not necessarily pretty ways or it dies, and if you’re going to object to neologisms you’ve got to have a better reason than ‘Ugh! Don’t like!’ or ‘The kids/damned Yanks/common people use it!’ or ‘We’ve got a word for that already!’.
I am particularly taken by this one, for idiocy:
AUTHORED — “In one of former TV commentator Edwin Newman’s books, he wonders if it would be correct to say that someone ‘paintered’ a picture?”
Firstly, ‘author’ as a verb is hardly new. The OED has examples of author as a verb going back to the 16th century, which makes it a couple of centuries younger than the noun.
And then the logic that the nouns ‘author’ and ‘painter’ must follow exactly the same grammatical rules? Why? Just because words sound in part similar doesn’t mean they were originally formed in exactly the same way or that they have to develop in lockstep thereafter. We don’t spell it ‘auther’, do we?
(Updated to note: Among verbs formed from nouns, I have my own little pet hates, so I’m as guilty as anyone. But I’m not sure why back-formation of this kind tends to generate so much opprobrium.)
***
* I know, this is unfair on Luddites, but we all love a little alliteration, don’t we?
Thanks to Tony, I now know that 2008 is the International Year of the Potato.
How splendid.
(PS: Happy New Year, everyone!)