Monthly Archives: September 2013

New words for new words

What do you call a newly invented word if you don’t already have a word for newly invented words? Here is OED’s record of the earliest evidence for various words for new words, the making of new words, and the using of new words. Not all of these authors would be pleased to find that […]

23.09.2013 – 19:03 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology | Tagged , , | Comments (3)

Boehner’s Eking Along

Did John Boehner have John Clare’s 1829 ode on “Autumn” on the mind this afternoon when he said: At a time when the economy is barely eking along, wages aren’t increasing, new jobs aren’t available, and what are we doing? [source] The normal idiom in English is eking out, usually with “… a living” or […]

20.09.2013 – 17:35 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Linguistics | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

You must be devastated today

From Paul Muldoon’s eulogy for Seamus Heaney, spoken at his funeral, yesterday:   I flew into Belfast International Airport yesterday morning…. The border security officer was interested in what I was doing in the US. I told him I was a teacher, and he asked me what I taught. I said, “poetry.” And he looked […]

04.09.2013 – 18:09 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Teaching Poetry | Tagged , | Comments (0)

“Create”, “Creative”, “Creativity”

What have you created recently? Or, what have your various possessions let you create? In the comments to my post on the rise of “lets you”, it emerged that the third most common thing you can be let to do is “create.” And in fact, since “lets you know” is operating differently from the others, […]

04.09.2013 – 10:17 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, General, Linguistics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

At the MSA – Levinas, Poetry, and Criticism

This past weekend I was in Brighton, UK, attending the Modernist Studies Association annual conference. I was there mainly to participate in a round-table discussion on “Modernist Poetry Criticism and the New Ethics”. The abstract said, in part: …in the wake of the interdisciplinary debate between literature and/as moral philosophy, and the critical reception of […]

03.09.2013 – 20:02 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Inter (and Intra-) necine?

You probably have used, or heard used, the word internecine. But what could the word intranecine mean? Either you have an intuition regarding this or you don’t (even if you’ve never encountered the word). If you do have an intuition about intranecine, take a minute to examine it–what basis can you come up with for […]

03.09.2013 – 10:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Linguistics, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)