Where Good Books Come From, by Linda Leith. Part I: The Writer-Publisher Relationship
It might be that this relationship between writer and publisher is what is most in danger in the digital revolution.
The Oxford Dictionaries have issued a post on the most looked-up words of 2011, and the results are intriguing.
Some of the words that dictionary users are most interested in are recent additions, such as LOL, OMG, nom nom, and sexting, not to mention Woot! And naturally there are people wanting to know how to spell certain words, which was what frustrated the British comedian Tony Hancock, who complained that you needed to know how to spell it in order to find it in the first place.
What intrigues me, though, is that everyday words like take, look, come, go, turn, and put all rank in the top 20, with get coming very close to taking the top spot.
These are among the easiest words in the English language to spell; the people looking them up are searching not for help with spelling, but for an understanding of the meaning, or rather meanings, of such words.
I wonder if the dictionary database can provide information on who these people are. My guess is that many or most of them are native speakers of another language grappling with the complexities of English. Those of us who grew up speaking English might well wonder about “nom nom” or about “Woot”; we are less likely to puzzle over how to use “go” or “get.”
A new word to me is floccinaucinihilipilification, which ranks highly in the Oxford dictionary search monitors more because of its length than because it is often used, though it might have a future in extreme literary criticism, since it means “the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.” The longest words listed in the dictionary are antidisestablishmentarianism and pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which has staked its numerically superior but specialized claim.
The most
looked-up word in 2011 turns out to be kawaii, which was only added to the dictionary in
August 2010. A loanword from Japanese, “kawaii” means “cute,” and is popular with
fans of anime and manga. Which suggests that users of the dictionary
include not only significant numbers of students of the English language, but
an awful lot of people who are young.
© Linda Leith 2012
It might be that this relationship between writer and publisher is what is most in danger in the digital revolution.
My father died twenty years ago and I cannot listen to Leonard Cohen without mourning him. As I write, I’m listening to his copy of Cohen’s album Songs from a Room. “What is a saint?” Cohen asks in Beautiful Losers, and he answers himself, “I think it has something to do with the energy of love.”
Step Five: Ideology
You have to stop making comparisons between this political system and the one you left behind. The one back home may have been funnier to watch, but don’t forget how ineffective it was. So ineffective, in fact, that you decided to leave the country despite the good laugh you had over the political debates. Politics will be less funny in Canada.
Photo: Martine Doyon
Literary non-fiction from Yoko Morgenstern.
Photo: Danny Stoeker