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El Pais is talking about a new Dictionary of Americanisms (Diccionario de americanismos) published by the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua in Madrid under the direction of Humberto Lopez Morales, secretary general of the academies. Lopez Morales, though now a resident of Madrid, was born in Cuba and lived in Puerto Rico.
Americanisms are a [...]

This may be the earliest example of written English to survive in a British church. Recently discovered on a wall in Salisbury Cathedral, Wiltshire, it probably dates from the fourteenth century. But what does it say?
Dr John Crook, who produced the digitally enhanced image of the text shown above, is asking the public for help [...]

“Hilburn . . . had the access and longevity to get to know musicians better than few in the media do today.”
– Associated Press

Is “better than few” the same as “less well than many”?

Right Reading  received the following e-mail (slightly edited) from Jag Bhalla.

A study by a research team appointed by the European Commission finds that multililngualism may benefit brains in a variety of ways:

learning in general
complex thinking and creativity
mental flexibility
interpersonal and communication skills
delay of age-related mental diminishment

“It is obvious that enhanced memory can have a profound impact on cognitive function,” says David Marsh, specialized planner at [...]

As I have mentioned, I’ve just returned from a vacation in Italy, and some posts will be a little off-topic for the next few days. Somewhere along the line I acquired Italian phrasebooks by the Rough Guide and by Langenscheidt, and we took these with us as a hedge against pointing in the supermarket and [...]

Have you ever noticed that the longer you look at any word the stranger it begins to seem? The other day a squirrel ran in front of my car, and I thought “Squirrel is an odd English word — I wonder if it comes from the French.” That guess (a guess, because I couldn’t remember [...]

What do these words have in common?
awkward birth both cake dirt gap get give ill mire muggy ransack root rotten rugged same scant scathe scowl seem skill skin skirt sky sprint steak their them they wand wrong
Answer after the jump . . .

Do they sound tasty? Google Translate thinks so (if they’re marinated). Via Google Blogoscoped:

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“Good sense is a thing all need, few have, and none think they want.” — Benjamin Franklin
“I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.” — Walter Savage Landor
Whether none should be singular or plural is the kind of question that makes the nonprescriptive linguists feel smug and superior. But people who work in [...]

Some authors rail against copy editors, and, sadly, the editors sometimes bring the enmity upon themselves. The latest author with a copy editor horror story is George Lakoff, who reports that his classic Metaphors We Live By would have been called Metaphors By Which We Live if his University of Chicago Press copy editor had [...]

I once edited some books by Guy Davenport, who said that he didnt want any of those hideous quotation mark thingees to appear anywhere in his books. As it turned out, that wasnt really a big problem for anyone.
Now some folks are proposing that we also ban apostrophes, claiming that its easy to read text [...]

Copper Canyon has been selected by the NEA be the U.S. publisher for its International Literary Exchange with China. According to Publishers Weekly, “Copper Canyon will receive $117,000 to support the translation, publication and promotion of a bilingual anthology of work by about 35 Chinese poets born after 1945.”
This is an excellent choice. Copper Canyon [...]

I’m on the road and having trouble with my internet connection. So this will be brief.
I’ve mentioned I’ve been helping to judge a translation award. Now that a set of finalists has been announced (although the Chronicle, true to form, omitted the translation category from their story; I’ll list the finalists later) I can say [...]

Via Craigslist:

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Right Reading received this e-mail from Olivia Sears, president of the Center for the Art of Translation.
I hope you are all enjoying The Best of Contemporary Mexican Fiction. I wanted to send along some of the press the book has received. Martin Riker at Dalkey Archive Press has done a tremendous job of promoting the [...]

Aoccrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny ipormoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed the txet wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn [...]

According to BusinessWriting.com, these are the 25 most  commonly misspelled words in English.
I don’t consider myself a very good speller, for an editor (I just look everything up). But this test seemed easy to me. The only question that I thought was a little tricky was the one that asked about a British spelling, since [...]

Remember the restaurant known in English as Translate Server Error? Well, be thankful the directions for finding it were not in Welsh.

I’ll be on the road for a while, and posting could continue to be light until mid January.
Meanwhile, I’ve agreed to be a reader for this translation award. Books translated in calendar 2008 by writers based anywhere  between Fresno and the Oregon border are eligible. So far these are on my reading list:

Castellanos Moya, Horacio, [...]