I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

News reporting "obscures a key driver of the climate crisis": meat production www.theguardian.com/environment/... #climate

Every time I watch ALIEN I am transfixed thinking to myself "there's no way they've left themselves enough room to get the third horizontal line in that E without it looking like a squashed-in mess!" but no, every single time there it is, and it's beautiful. Most tense part of the movie tbh.

"What memories crowd in upon you!" Walter Benjamin on book collecting: web.archive.org/web/20210414...

A debate made even stupider by the fact that the word "burger" derives from the name of a European city: Hamburg #etymology

"By removing the hashtag, tech platforms are redistributing organizational power away from the users and toward themselves. Now they have all the say in who gets to see which topic, and how topics are structured in the first place." etymology.substack.com/p/why-platfo...

It's true. The Oxford comma, often said to eliminate ambiguity, can sometimes increase it. It’s not a panacea, and writers and editors shouldn’t treat it as one stancarey.wordpress.com/2017/04/21/t...

Trying to work out the name of a film, which I’m 99% sure I didn’t make up… It ends in a darkroom with the camera lingering on a photograph in developing fluid that slowly reveals the killer/solution, but it then turns white from being overdeveloped Maybe Italian/giallo adjacent Help! #filmsky

“It actually doesn’t take much to be considered a difficult woman. That’s why there are so many of us.” Jane Goodall

RIP, Jane Goodall. She was the best of us janegoodall.global/rememberingj...

"What is interesting now is the arrival of slang that draws not on language, but on digital memes, from Tik-Tok and elsewhere. This is a whole new ball game..." @misterslang.bsky.social: jonathongreen.substack.com/p/all-togeth... #slang

Sometimes she aces it

Do you think unbending Clippy until he was a long piece of metal would be painful for him. Or do you think it would cause him to feel a great sense of relief

Three good talks on the state (pejorative) of rewilding in Ireland #spéirghorm

"Never fails to disappoint" appeared on a book cover once, leading the publisher to pulp the first print run www.theguardian.com/books/2018/n... I often edit out slips like this at work. They're remarkably common, though not as much as "cannot be understated" stancarey.wordpress.com/2018/11/19/m...

Professors who are merely silly should be fine, though #CrashBlossom

Watch and share widely on repeat 👏

A review of a book about a book about a writer www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"Sometimes it feels so revealing, sharing one’s favorite sentences with the world. There is no good and bad when a sentence moves you; there’s only what it does and how it does it." @mollytempleton.com in @reactorsff.bsky.social: reactormag.com/form-functio...

The "mom" thing in Conamara seems so obviously connected to the Irish pronunciation *but* there are a load of Americanisms here from emigration and return (not media). People regularly referred to the secondary school in An Cheathrú Rua as "the high school" 30 years ago for example.

American cultural dominance means people will always be concerned about its effects on English dialects elsewhere. I wrote about this in relation to Irish English a couple of years ago: stancarey.wordpress.com/2023/05/21/m...

FTA: Sweary maps 2: Swear harder. @stancarey.bsky.social presents @jwgrieve.bsky.social's heat maps of swearword use in the USA stronglang.wordpress.com/2016/03/22/s... #maps

I haven't seen many sound effects for nose-blowing. These are from "Blankets" by Craig Thompson I'd have liked a little variation, hungry-cat-in-Ulysses-style, but it's good enough #comics

Queen

"It's uncommodified, which is one of the reasons why it feels important – and the fact that everyone can give it a go....It’s a way of taking writing seriously." Good luck to this experiment in mass memoir

Notes (and comics) on the hyphen in Moby-Dick languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71056

A great role for Redford, and one that some people may have missed, is in J. C. Chandor's All Is Lost (2013), an exercise in pure cinema. Redford has to carry it pretty much by himself, and he's perfect

I looked into "whilst" (and "amongst") some years ago and was surprised at how strongly many Americans felt about them ("cringe-worthy"; "priggish"; "akin to people using 'thou'") stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/w...

As far as I know (and please correct me if I’m wrong!) the only pulp paperback to have been printed with fuzzy textured elements on the cover. #DailyPaperback

Decades after watching The Kingdom, I remembered its wild premise and very specific mood but little of its storylines and work politics. Enjoying a revisit and lines like these

I can't believe I need to have an AI policy! I made it pretty short though: Using AI is cheating, yourself mostly. In addition to the environmental blight created by AI, it makes no sense to use it in your intellectual and creative work. Why would you outsource your innate intelligence?

"Lynch, of course, hated endings, and it's fitting that his final project was to reopen the story he never wanted to close." Ruby Hamilton on the films of David Lynch: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"Greenlit" is now 2–3 times more frequent than "greenlighted", hyphenated or not. I have oodles of data here: stancarey.wordpress.com/2023/08/15/h...

I wrote about the decision myself and other authors took to withdraw from the longlist of the Polari Book Prizes for LGBTQ+ writers www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Classic U-shaped valley at Binn Chaonaigh in the Maamturk mountains yesterday Binn Chaonaigh is Irish for "Peak of Moss", but the mountain really abounds in heather

As you gaze into Getty Images, Getty Images gaze also into you

Every time I see it I’m like “Wake up dead, man?” “Wake up, dead man?” “Wake up dead, maaaaaaaan? (Read in hippy)” “Wakeupdeadman? (Read in cocaine)”

Watched cheesy 1980s horror film Not of This Earth (1988) on the strength of the director's Chopping Mall and Night of the Comet. The biggest jump scare was unintentional:

Read blog post recently where a Spanish phonology prof noticed this with Siri, before ChatGPT. That's why I listen to *people*. And 2020: It seems Siri, Google Home, and Alexa need butchered Spanish for their systems to work. Free link: archive.ph/2020.08.12-1... #Linguistics #LearningSpanish

This reminds me of the movie "Big Ass Spiders" which refused to use a clarifying hyphen to distinguish between big ass-spiders or big-ass spiders.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

I wrote about this once: The monstrous indecency of hybrid etymology stancarey.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/t... #etymology

TL;DR: A vocative comma in the title would be more strictly correct, if the dead man is being addressed: "Wake Up, Dead Man". "Wake Up Dead Man" makes "dead man" a direct object. It's like something you'd type in an old text-based computer game: Go north. Pick up coin. Wake up dead man.

Seen at the mall the other day - a Jessica Fletcher “action” figure… The alternate head is amazing… 😳

This is exactly why I *never* use AI! If I'm writing as myself, I want to sound like me. If I'm translating, I want to sound like the author, but in English. Why would anyone want to sound like everyone else? #xl8 #amtranslating 🌐

The latest round of cuts at ANU include an outrageous plan to close the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC). ANU has forgotten its vital function as the national university. Please sign this petition urging ANU to reconsider and protect the ANDC: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

AI's flattening of linguistic diversity undermines trust and human interaction www.theverge.com/openai/68674... #AI

This title will compel copy-editors to explain the value of the vocative comma to people who were just living their lives Like so: web.archive.org/web/20200306... [Alt text for "Wake Up Dead Man" film poster: POV from a grave, with 11 people peering in. Behind them, a church tower & moody skies.]

Nice going! And I'm in the quotations 👀

Thought of you, Stan, when I saw this “themself” in the wild, from @katie0martin.ft.com.