Category Archives: Language and Literature in Society

Little Miss Bossy Pants

In the comments to a Facebook share of my previous post on gendered language on Ratemyprofessors.com [“Vivid Unconscious Biases“], JB, a friend of a friend, writes: “bossy” is an inherently gendered term and is always used as an insult. I can’t remember ever hearing it applied to a man. Indeed, it strikes me that calling […]

11.02.2015 – 17:05 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Vivid unconscious biases

Claire Caine Miller has a post on the New York Times’s “Upshot” blog on Ben Schmidt‘s visualization tool for word frequencies in 14M ratemyprofessors.com reviews, called “Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender” [9.2.15]. While in general I find Schmidt’s stuff informative, fun, and provocative [for instance, his “Lets You” finding, which […]

08.02.2015 – 22:04 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

Now With More Nodes! Updated Prize Network Maps

In his comments to my last post on “Poetry Prize Networks in the UK“, Neil Astley said my maps ought to have included the Costa Poetry Awards. This had occurred to me when I was putting them together, but I hadn’t been able to track down a proper list of the judges for that prize. […]

23.01.2015 – 13:39 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (6)

Poetry Prize Networks in the UK

For some reason, the awarding of poetry prizes is always an occasion for controversy–accusations of logrolling, of blackballing, of various forms of individual and institutional favouritism and collusion, of low aesthetic and/or moral standards. There was more than the usual of this last week when the Poetry Book Society gave the 2014 T. S. Eliot […]

20.01.2015 – 21:09 | By D-AW | Posted in Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Plural Fixation

Or, “How not to be a pedant with the OED.” I like a good hatchet job. Done well, the literary smack-down is thrilling and educative. Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins [“Lunging, flailing, mispunching”, LRB, 19.10.06] is among my favourite examples of the dark art: characterizing Dawkins’s idea of the Christian god as “some kind of […]

30.11.2014 – 20:37 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Assessing Poetry Assessor

The web application called “Poetry Assessor” has had a second wave of attention since going back online recently. In this post I want to show why Poetry Assessor doesn’t assess poetry, and to make a broader point about the “Humanities” in “Digital Humanities”: that bad disciplinary training makes for bad interdisciplinary work. It’s a longish […]

06.11.2014 – 20:27 | By D-AW | Posted in Criticism, Digital Humanities, Language and Literature in Society, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (5)

“Pneumatic Bliss” – Eliot’s Breasty OED Entry

More from the T. S. Eliot / Oxford English Dictionary files [for background, see “Did TSE use OED, SOED, or COD?” and “Eliotic OED“]. In the latter post, I noted that 0.0135% of OED definitions contain the phrase “[with/in] allusion to” and that two of these are to poems by Eliot. Here are lines from […]

13.10.2014 – 15:24 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (2)

Eliotic OED

[UPDATE 9/15: If what follows interests you at all please see this update: “Two Notes on T. S. Eliot and the OED“] OED editor Robert Burchfield was responsible for adding Woolfian, Poundian, Joycean, Yeatsian, and Audenesque to the dictionary while preparing the Supplement of 1976-86 (later incorporated into the Second Edition, OED2). There’s no Eliotesque or […]

06.10.2014 – 18:45 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography, Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Misunderweared

A song from my early youth came back to me the other day. Here’s the first verse, with a rough translation in italics: Le bon roi Dagobert                       Good King Dagobert A mis sa culotte à l’envers ;           Put on his culotte backwards ; Le grand saint Éloi                         The great Saint Eligius Lui dit : Ô […]

29.09.2014 – 14:33 | By D-AW | Posted in Language and Literature in Society | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

Snowclone Sandwich

“Snowclone” is a word for a kind of transferable, reusable pattern of phrase, such as the original “X have Y words for Z” (on the pattern “Eskimos have fifty-five (or pick your number) words for snow“, so transferable to “The French have no word for entrepreneur“, or whatever), or “X is the new Y” (on […]

23.09.2014 – 13:47 | By D-AW | Posted in Etymology, Language and Literature in Society, Lexicography | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)