Poetry & Contingency

Python

An XKCD from some time back:

07.03.2013 – 21:11 | By D-AW | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Oxford University Press has announced this coming November as the publication date for Geoffrey Hill’s collected poetical writings, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012. [Update 25.3.13: Cover Image] Who else will OUP be publishing this year? Here’s a complete list of all poetry titles: Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies Rumi, The Masnavi (bk 3) Robert Herrick, Complete Poetry […]

01.03.2013 – 16:50 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Teaching Poetry | Tagged Geoffrey Hill | Comments (2)

Oil has poise(s)

One for the science and metaphor files? From “The Thermodynamics of Glass“: A liquid has viscosity, a measure of its resistance to flow. The viscosity of water at room temperature is about 0.01 poises. A thick oil might have a viscosity of about 1.0 poise. Now, OED lets us know that “poise, n.1” is originally […]

25.02.2013 – 12:16 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology | Tagged Etymology, metaphor, OED, Oxford English Dictionary | Comments (0)

Shitepoke

From Choate’s American Bird Names: Shite poke. An attempt to render more delicate by a change in spelling a name for the bird derived from its habit of ejecting effluent when making a startled departure. In America applied indiscriminately to the Black-crowned Night Heron, the Green-backed Heron and the bittern. Poke, now E. dialect, “bag”, […]

19.02.2013 – 12:25 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Poetry | Comments (0)

Poetry and the Dictionary Conference – Oxford 2013

The CFP for this summer’s conference in Oxford has been posted. I expect to be there discussing some aspect of the OED and poetry. This symposium will be held at St Peter’s College, Oxford, on 15 June, 2013, with a view to opening up and exploring connections between poetry and the dictionary. Proposals for papers […]

13.02.2013 – 09:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Three OED Poems

Recent posts on found poetry reminded me of several OED entries I bookmarked out over the years because they gave me more than the usual pleasures of etymology, definition, and commonplace-book-like selection of previous uses. So I decided to work up a couple of these into poems. Other than acts of lineation, punctuation, elision, and […]

01.02.2013 – 09:19 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (3)

“Man” Gender

Comments on today’s LL post have centred on gender neutral “dude” in certain contexts, prompted by this cartoon: A couple commentators report completely gender neutral “dude” in all contexts. Querying my own intuitions, I find I can use it neutrally in certain contexts but not in others. For instance, in the first case below (call […]

31.01.2013 – 17:17 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Incent, Incentivize: Authority Always Wins

In the course of a recent dinner conversation I cocked my ear (and my eyebrow) at the sound of a verb I had not heard before: “to incent.” “Incentivize” I know well of course, having heard it many times in the wild and also in corporate-language peeving contexts [because, you know, verbing weirds language. See a […]

18.01.2013 – 11:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Tagged incent, incentivize, n-grams, neologism | Comments (0)

First they came for the verbs

02.01.2013 – 09:03 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Linguistics | Comments (2)

Fifty-Five English Words for Snow

Snowflake snow/single Frost snowflake/having formed flatly on surface Flurries snow/falling Precipitation snow/and+or other/falling Snowfall snow/having fallen Accumulation +quantity snow/having fallen Snow drift piled snow/by wind Snow bank piled snow/by man (with machine)

29.12.2012 – 16:52 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics | Comments (1)

Domokun and Symbolism

In my poetry classes I often find myself going on about symbolic conventions and symbolic systems, especially in the context of broader discussions of figurative language, and often to point out some distinctions between symbol and metaphor, or to show why a certain set of symbolic equivalences are irrelevant to the poem at hand (colour […]

27.12.2012 – 17:12 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Readings, Teaching Poetry, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Found Auburnun, by Geoffrey Hill

Inspired, or egged on perhaps, by my own recent discussion of found poetry in the satirical, parodic, or derivative mode, I’ve put together a new poem by Geoffrey Hill. Source below, plus the rules of composition, but let the poetry speak: Auburnun fiede at acesaga ubur in ex lecta none Plumage coloration: sexually selected […]

10.12.2012 – 11:24 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Teaching Poetry | Tagged found poem, Geoffrey Hill | Comments (2)

Poetry. Whatever.

This from Ernie Lapore and Matthew Stone at the NYT Opinionator blog, “Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination” [2.12.2012]: In short, a poem — and artistic language more generally — is open to whatever we find in it. Whenever we notice that an unexpected formal feature amplifies our experience of a poem in a novel way, […]

06.12.2012 – 09:56 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Teaching Poetry | Comments (0)

Hesitation, Naming, Poetry

This from one of these staged “conversations”, this time between Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Fiona Sampson, on the topic of “Language Under Stress” [audio here]. Sampson is trying to make vague point about hesitation as a “mark of authenticity” when Williams cuts in: “Hesitation” is a word that means quite a lot […]

30.11.2012 – 10:24 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged Geoffrey Hill, Hopkins | Comments (0)

Razor Tight

‘What part of “razor tight” don’t you understand?’ This was the question posed by Stephen Colbert to Nate Silver on election eve [clip 5.11.12], following a bit about some newscaster silliness leading up to the election [transcript from Daily Kos; clip here]: BILL HEMMER (11/5/2012): This race is absolutely razor tight. CHUCK TODD (11/5/2012): A […]

08.11.2012 – 20:39 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Tagged Colbert, metaphor | Comments (0)

The Reality we Face

From today’s transcript of the Rush Limbaugh show, the game-changing words of the Mayor of Realville, the Mayor of Literalville himself: That’s the reality we face. The reality we face is that what’s real isn’t, and what isn’t real is. […] I really meant to get a phone call in here. But when you make […]

07.11.2012 – 14:49 | By D-AW | Posted in Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Tagged limbaugh, literal, literally, literalville, metaphor | Comments (0)

Geoffrey Hill, Modern Thamus?

In Odi Barbare (2012), Geoffrey Hill writes: Google my old blind of Platonics with Mc- Taggart’s mystic corpulence deemed endearing. Whatever that means. Scratching his head, blogger Bebrowed did the sensible thing (i.e., did what he was told) and more: I’ve now googled every single possible permutation on Hill, his response to McTaggart et al […]

05.11.2012 – 10:10 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, General, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged Allusion, digital humanities, Geoffrey Hill | Comments (0)

Bronco Bama

This is rapidly spreading over the interwebs, with headlines such as “Colorado 4-Year-Old Is Tired Of ‘Bronco Bama’ And Mitt Romney” (HuffPo): It’s not surprising that the video is “going viral.” But I was a little surprised that I hadn’t heard “Bronco Bama” anywhere before in other contexts. It’s one of those turns of phrase […]

31.10.2012 – 14:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Society, Politics, Ethics, Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Walking Wound

On NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday, Stephen Colbert said of his television show character, also called Stephen Colbert: He wants to have a champion that he can champion and that just doesn’t exist in Mitt Romney right now. He’s just a walking wound. [link] As a figure of speech, to me this is both compelling and […]

05.10.2012 – 18:44 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Linguistics, Poetry, Society, Politics, Ethics | Comments (0)

Teaching Time

Well it’s teaching time again, which means less blogging time in the next, oh, three to six months. But I still hope to post every couple of weeks or so, and hope especially to have cause to add to the “Teaching Poetry” section of the site. On the title of this post, at least three […]

21.09.2012 – 18:41 | By D-AW | Posted in Poetry, Teaching Poetry | Comments (0)

OED Curiosity Rovers

As part of some computer housekeeping, I’ve made up a little inventory of the Python programs I’ve developed to have a peek inside the massive text file that is the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. Here’s a list: 1. Field Comparison Tool – Look for Intertextuality in poems *I discussed some this program in the […]

24.08.2012 – 14:31 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, General, Linguistics | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, Python | Comments (0)

Longest Etymologies

One of the most important improvements to the ongoing OED3 revision is occurring in the etymology sections, which are being greatly expanded. Yesterday’s Languagehat discusses two such expanded etymologies – those of ‘admiral’ and ‘to be’. The second is claimed by the current editors to be the longest etymology in OED3, coming in at 1,765 9,672* […]

21.08.2012 – 09:52 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, General, Linguistics | Tagged Etymology, OED | Comments (2)

The most and least poetic alphabetical ranges in the OED

In my presentation at DH2012 I made a couple of comments on Giles Goodland’s paper ‘OED Online’s Single-Quotations Entries: an Analysis‘, mostly about the sampling method that Goodland employs, and which everyone else has employed so far when trying to say something about the OED that isn’t facilitated by whatever the current online functionality happens […]

26.07.2012 – 12:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged n-grams, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Discovery: the most poetic word in the English language

Now that I’ve tagged more than half of the evidence quotations in OED2 for genre [see here and here for a discussion of this process], it’s time to start having a poke around in the data. A question that occurred to me last night was: ‘is there anything interesting about the relative density of poetic vs. […]

25.07.2012 – 15:01 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

Electronic OED, Poetry and Intertextuality :: DH2012 Presentation Slides

Here are the slides for my presentation today at Digital Humanities 2012 in Hamburg: PDF: Electronic OED, Poetry and Intertextuality [de-linked*] At the moment this is for reference or information only, and is presented here without the necessary context and discussion in my conference paper (to be posted at a later date). An abstract with […]

19.07.2012 – 06:00 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Digital Humanities, Etymology, Poetry | Tagged Allusion, digital humanities, Etymology, Intertextuality, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, poetry | Comments (0)

‘Occupy’ Drift: Belfast

Seen on the corner of North St and Royal Ave in Belfast this week: The slogan takes on somewhat complex shades of association in the present context.

12.07.2012 – 07:26 | By D-AW | Posted in Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged occupy belfast | Comments (0)

More Common: ‘Foot’ or ‘Etymologically’?

The OED’s etymology sections are jammed full of technical terms like ‘aphetic’, ‘stem’, and ‘neut.’; commonish words that are overrepresented here because of context, like ‘whence’, ‘obscure’, ‘adoption’, and ‘origin’; and generally very common words like ‘the’, ‘of’, and ‘is’. So what is the most common root sense in OED2 (1989)? It may be ‘stone’, […]

28.06.2012 – 17:40 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Etymology, Linguistics | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary | Comments (0)

‘What, Literally or Really’?

Overheard last night at the Cross Keys, in central Leeds, from a woman in her early twenties responding to an entertaining story told by a man about the same age, which contained a figurative (I guess) mention of having ‘lost my balls’: What, literally or really?

28.06.2012 – 05:05 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged literal, literally, literalville | Comments (0)

Oxford English Dinner

Some OED entries badly need revising. A friend who teaches in Oxford just posted this to her Facebook status (I’ve noticed younger British academics in the midst of that end-of-year slow torture called ‘marking’ like to post little gems like this on social media for relief, or therapy): Most telling student error of the year: […]

07.06.2012 – 15:51 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics, Society, Politics, Ethics | Tagged OED, Oxford English Dictionary | Comments (2)

Geoffrey Hill Cant Count

Here are two excerpts from a work on Hill I’m finishing up, both of them basically usage counts. I’m hoping readers who have spent time with Hill’s work can point out any gap in these two lists. Actually I’m hoping they can’t, but still I would be grateful if they did. First, ‘cant’: Hill uses […]

30.05.2012 – 17:34 | By D-AW | Posted in General, Poetry | Tagged Geoffrey Hill | Comments (2)

Noah Webster was a terrible phonologist

I’ve been in the NYPL last week looking at Noah Webster’s papers. One of his handwritten lectures reminded me of what a bad phonologist he was. Objecting to John Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), Webster singled out the grouping of p, l, t, s, k, and th (as in ‘think’) together under the epithet ‘sharp’, […]

07.05.2012 – 21:30 | By D-AW | Posted in Dictionaries and Lexicography, Linguistics, Poetry | Tagged Emily Dickinson, Noah Webster, phonology, Shakespeare | Comments (0)