If you’re the type that digs dictionary talk, then listen up. Ammon Shea reports in Humanities that researchers are currently at work on a comprehensive collection of Anglo-Saxon text, the Dictionary of Old English (DOE). Shea is a dictionary expert of sorts, having read the Oxford English Dictionary in its entirety (in only one year), and he dissects the evolution of the project with all the unabashed awe you might expect.

Although, as Shea explains, “a typical user of the DOE is usually a scholar of Middle or Old English, someone who is terribly interested in whether there have been any new nuances found in the subcategories of beon (to be) in the last eighty years, or if there is an additional text in which a form of this word has been found,” it is still important to the rest of us. After all, it is the precursor to our present day English. He adds:

We are all expert speakers of our own language, and whether we recognize it or not, the words and meanings laid out so carefully in the Dictionary of Old English are far more innately familiar to us than are the fossilized tibia or femur of some long extinct life-form. These words are the bone structure of the language that we speak and breathe today.  

Source: Humanities

For Prospect’s William Davies, receipts are a sign of the growing depersonalization of our social interactions.  The purchase of a cup of coffee to start off the day is no longer simply a pleasant trade of cash for caffeine, but an Official Transaction, accompanied by an official document—the receipt.  “The receipt seems to cleanse transactions, to seal them off from the social ambiguity that accompanies two strangers interacting in public,” he writes.  “Whereas its cousin, the bill, can be issued in a range of moods—from mint-laden and charming, to red and angry—the receipt only ever arrives with the blank gaze of the auditor.”

Source: Prospect

Image by ArnoldReinhold, licensed under Creative Commons. 

The Google Voice service does more than route calls, voicemails, and provide transcriptions of voicemail messages. It also creates poetry. When reading over the typos and imperfections in his voicemails from Google Voice, Richard Eskow writes for 3 Quarks Daily, “I see an authorial sensibility taking form, like a face emerging from a cloud bank. These transcriptions can be read as poetry.”

Eskow provides a few examples, including this one:

Love Begins a Picture

Hi Cat, I could possibly do in the morning actually in the morning
on the way
so I could meet me in the morning

Anyway, just check back with me man and I will go from there.
Love begins a picture and I'll talk to you real soon.

Source:  3 Quarks Daily  

Here in the dreary depths of midwinter, a mood of melancholic gloom often prevails—and so, James Kidd chirpily announces in The Independent, “there has never been a more appropriate moment to explore the darkest corners of your bookshelves and wallow in some truly miserable literature to enhance those winter blues.”

Kidd pronounces Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a titan of doom lit, “a bona fide contender for the title of Saddest Novel Ever Written. … In a shade over 300 pages, he conjures environmental desolation and physical deprivation and human degradation, not to mention the most poignant father-son relationship committed to paper.”

Other notable titles on Kidd’s list:

Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx: A yearning tale of cowboy meets cowboy, cowboy loses cowboy, that ends with Ennis Del Mar’s tight-lipped expression of stoic nihilism: “There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.”

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene: Perhaps the most piercing of all anthems to doomed love … which begins on a dreary January day: “It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.”

Animal Farm by George Orwell … for the pathos of Boxer’s “disappearance” and blunt prose such as: “Muriel was dead; Bluebell, Jessie and Pincher were dead. Jones too was dead—he had died in an inebriates’ home in another part of the country.”

Speaking of dying in an inebriates’ home, I’ve also got some favorite poems for relentlessly bleak winter days. Macabre poet/illustrator Edward Gorey’s tale The Iron Tonic opens with the stupendously grim rhyme:

The people at the grey hotel

Are either aged or unwell.

The guests who chose to stay aloof

Lie wrapped in rugs upon the roof.

Then it goes on to conjure some truly chilling horrors of winter:

It’s known the skating pond conceals

A family of enormous eels.

and

The infant dead beside the path

Escaped the orphanage’s wrath.

Finally, when the sky turns to slate for days on end and people with seasonal affective disorder starting fidgeting with the gun cabinet key, I can’t shake the memorable opening stanza of “Snow-Bound” by John Greenleaf Whittier:

The sun that brief December day

Rose cheerless over hills of gray,

And, darkly circled, gave at noon

A sadder light than waning moon.

Happy reading.

 (Thanks, Arts & Letters Daily.)

Source: The Independent

Image by karpov the wrecked train, licensed under Creative Commons.

Now that corporations are more like people—as many argue the Supreme Court decided in the recent Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case—corporations may soon want the right to vote. Corporations may also want to marry, run for office, and be counted in the census. Writing for McSweeney’s, Steven Seidenberg writes imagines a dystopian world where corporations are treated like people, and this happens in 2028:

Winning 72.1% of the popular vote, California Governor Mickey Mouse is elected President of the United States. He runs weakest among men (garnering just 39% of the vote) and women (45%). However, he is carried to victory by his strength in other key demographic groups: corporations (67%), cartoons (68%), lobbying groups (73%), copyrighted film scores (78%) and online avatars (81%).