My local classical station played a piece featuring the once famous harpsichordist Igor Kipnis; my first thought, on hearing the ID, was He died quite a while back I wonder if anybody much below my age knows his name any more? Then came the second thought: Where s the name Kipnis from, anyhow? A Ukrainian [ ]
I m reading Kate Kelley’s Proto-Elamite: Writing and Society in Early Iran (see this post), and I thought this passage (pp. 15ff.) was of enough general interest to post: Throughout the twentieth century, the archaeology of early Iran has often been analysed through a filter of its western neighbour Mesopotamia (Petrie 2013; Alizadeh 2021). The invention [ ]
As regular readers will know, I am a sucker for old-fashioned printing one of the best parts of my job as a proofreader in a printing and design department in the 1980s (do such entities still exist?) was hanging out with printers and listening to them talk about the old days. PrintingFilms.com is a [ ]
Mark Liberman s Log post inspired me to discuss the very interesting word solidus slash (mark). It developed from the name of a gold coin of the Roman Empire, which gave rise to the Latin name for a variety of medieval coins, mostly made of silver: Byzantine, Carolingian, Italian, and the one which concerns us [ ]
RNZ reports on yet another distressing development due to the AI craze: When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner Anne-Marie Thorby smelt a rat. A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects. “It started [ ]
My wife and I are watching the tenth season of Shetland (and looking forward to the eleventh, while mourning the recently announced departure of lead actress Alison O Donnell), and I was delighted to see that one of the characters, a craggy and mysterious poet named Ed Tulloch, runs a pub called The Watergaw. After the [ ]
I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas s LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh, but I have to give him a whack on the knuckles for the absurd statement at the end of this passage about Frederick Rolfe: [ ]
Terry Eagleton is usually a good read, and his LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Frank Callanan s James Joyce: A Political Life has some interesting thoughts on Joyce s relations with politics and modernism; he starts by explaining that Joyce, far from being indifferent to politics, was a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell, and [ ]
Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posted a quote from Patrick Kurp to highlight the erroneous Aristotle reference ( Perhaps he meant Poetics instead of Politics”), but I was struck by the word rhupunts. I m pretty sure I ve never run into it before; Britannica says: rhupunt, one of the 24 metres of the Welsh bardic tradition. [ ]
Ben Yagoda has a post about the recent rise in frequency of the word alongside: The American-born University of Sussex linguist Lynne Murphy recently remarked on her blog (Separated by A Common Language): “A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: ‘Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?’” That [ ]
Joel of Far Outliers has another goodie from Culture.pl, European Nationalist Revolts in 1905, quoting an article by Zachary Mazur; this is the bit I thought belonged here: For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. [ ] In October, the tsar issued [ ]
It popped into my head to wonder about the origin of the titular phrase: did it ascend to antiquity? Was its origin in the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, ancient Sumer? Imagine my surprise when I turned to the OED (s.v. ox, entry revised 2005) and found: 1.c. Chiefly U.S. [Apparently in allusion to a response [ ]
I have been made aware that the small South Pacific country formerly known as Nauru has officially changed its name to Naoero (NY Times story). That is, of course, its right, but my immediate question is: how do you say the new name? The Times has this infuriating paragraph: How the new name is pronounced [ ]
I don t normally make separate posts for different reviews of the same book, but Colin Burrow s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of Arnoud Visser s On Pedantry has so little in common with Clare Bucknell s for the NYRB (LH), and it s so frabjously expressive in and of itself, that I can t resist presenting it on [ ]
I hope at least some of y all are familiar with the W.C. Handy song Yellow Dog Blues ; if not, there are links to a couple of performances at the Mississippi Blues Travellers page Where The Southern Cross The Dog – Moorhead, Mississippi, one of those maniacally detailed investigations of historical/cultural backwaters that so appeal to [ ]
Joel of Far Outliers has posted some excerpts of Mikołaj Gliński s contribution to a newsletter from Culture.pl, How much Polish is there in Esperanto?; it begins: The Slavic Esperanto lexicon is generally considered to derive from two Slavic languages, both of which Zamenhof knew very well – Russian and Polish. While Russian, as he later [ ]
Adrian Tahourdin s TLS review of Rebecca Lee s Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and misadventures in the world of books just keeps getting better: The title Rogues, Widows and Orphans is slightly misleading. Although rogues abound here, a book that was largely about typographical misfortunes would test the patience of most readers. The Oxford English Dictionary [ ]
From Raymond N. MacKenzie s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of David Coward and William Butcher s new translation of Jules Verne, Journey to the Moon, some passages about how his publisher and his translators treated him: By the last decades of the 19th century, Jules Verne was less a writer than a brand – one [ ]
From the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project comes Gen Z constructions: an overview: The goal of this page is to provide a brief, preliminary description of some Gen Z constructions that YGDP researchers are currently investigating. The judgments on this page are mostly from the respective researchers own intuition; little to no data has been formally [ ]
The papyrus was published in 1940, but I hadn t seen it until now, and perhaps it will be new to you as well: A 3rd century papyrus conjugating γράφω in the indicative, posted the other day by Roger Pearse on his blog: Here is a truly fascinating item. It’s a leaf of papyrus from Oxyrhynchus. [ ]