Queens English
From my February 7, 2021 newsletter. Reprinted in full with a few grammatical corrections. “You don’t sound Cuban.” “Where’s your ...
Category: language
latines
Latines is a gender neutral term that is pronounced as it’s written, in both English and Spanish. The “e” can also be used to make other nouns gender neut...
Monolingualism is an aberration
Julie Tetel Andresen in The Allusionist: Monolingualism is an aberration – most people have been multilingual… The human body and brain is quite well adap...
Spanishes
Free advice, actually worth a lot. I’ve been married to a Mexican for almost 20 years and I’ve slowly learned that Mexicans communicate in a way tha...
language, screenwriting
We are advised to not include Spanish language dialogue in an English language script. Rather, every character should, at first, speak English and then their wo...
“In translation it doubled in size”
Bruce Webber on the late Rosario Ferré Ms. Ferré began writing in English in the 1990s in the hope of reaching a wider audience. Interviewed by The New York Tim...
Chance truth in mistranslation
“Wash your hands before abandoning this place”
metaphors we use that belie any mind/body split
when you want to say something, but can’t, you “bite your tongue.” the sharp, quick pain of anxiety – a desire that can’t be sated. the ...
art/business/design/ideas/journalism/language/latin america/mental illness/movies & television/music/nature/people/play/power/technology/work
About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure...
We have little idea how people talked a hundred years ago.
Graham Robb: The problem is, do we know how “a human being” spoke a hundred years ago? Even a perfect recording could not restore the familiar backdrop of the t...
“Languages differ in what they must convey and not what they may convey.” – Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
Nothing is solid; gorgeous prose from The Ecomomist
Gorgeous writing from The Economist: The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly...
art: automatic summaries of books.
AutoSummarize by Jason Huff: “The top 100 most downloaded copyright free books summarized using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function a...