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By Philip Carter

This month is the 75th anniversary of the London version of the popular board game, Monopoly. To mark the anniversary, editors at the Oxford DNB wondered what a historical version of the game might look like. The Oxford DNB includes the stories of more than 57,000 men and women from British history, of whom nearly half had ties to the capital city.

So who would you have met if you’d made your way around a Monopoly board in the 1400 years since Mellitus (d.624), our first definite capital dweller and, incidentally, the first ever bishop of London? Throw a 3 and you’re rubbing shoulders with pugilist Daniel Mendoza on the Whitechapel Road, while a 10 has you ‘just visiting’ a London jail, alongside Elizabeth Fry. (Perhaps you’re there to see Dr Crippen, who spent his last days in Pentonville prison before his execution 100 years this month.) Another 3 gets you to the more salubrious Whitehall (the ODNB has articles on over 1700 civil servants); an 11 sees you on the Strand, developed for real by the 17th-century property tycoon Nicholas Barbon after the Great Fire. Shake a 7 and it’s the Water Works (how about Hugh Myddelton?) Follow this with a 6 and you can browse in Bond Street, perhaps stopping at no. 123, where the Italian confectioner William Jarrin set up shop in 1822. Posh Park Lane (126 residents) and swanky Mayfair (232) beckon, not to mention £200 on passing ‘Go’. But, oh no! a 4 and it’s ‘Super Tax, Pay £100’: welcome to the ODNB’s 54 accountants.

If you’d like to play on, you can. Online you can search the Oxford DNB by city, town, and street, as well as profession.

Dr Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the UK the ODNB is available free via nearly all public libraries and you can log-in at home by adding your library card number here. The ODNB is also available in libraries worldwide—leaving you a little bit more for that hotel on the Old Kent Road.

Today sees the kick-off of the football (OK, soccer, but I’m British) World Cup in South Africa. Given that tomorrow sees England play the USA, this seems like the perfect time to bring you the below features from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, I’m not supporting anyone. I’m Scottish. We didn’t make it into the competition (again).

Who would Fabio Capello, England manager, have picked with the whole of British history to choose from?

Editors at the ODNB have drawn on more than 55,000 historical figures to select an alternative XI: Cole, Crouch, and Terry, but not as you know them. They appear alongside a team of true footballing greats who’d have had more of a chance.

Crouch and Crouch

On this day in history, June 11, 1920, Irving Howe was born.  To celebrate his birth I turned to the American National Biography which led me to an entry by Shirley Laird. The ANB offers portraits of more than 17,400 men and women – from all eras and walks of life – whose lives have shaped the nation. Learn about Irving Howe below.

Howe, Irving (11 June 1920-5 May 1993), literary critic and historian, was born in New York City, the son of David Howe and Nettie Goldman, grocery store operators and later garment workers. Irving Howe was married twice, first to Arien Hausknecht, with whom he had two children, and later to Ilana Wiener.

Howe became a socialist at fourteen, joining a faction led by Leon Trotsky. He graduated from City College of New York in 1940, claiming that he spent more time talking to fellow radicals than he spent in class. He completed a year and a half of graduate study at Brooklyn College before being drafted into the army in 1942; he served in Alaska for two or three years. When he returned to New York after the war, he began to publish articles in the Partisan Review, Commentary, and the Nation. In 1953 he founded Dissent, a political and literary journal that he edited for many years. In that year he became an associate professor of English at Brandeis University and also was appointed a Kenyon Review fellow. Leaving Brandeis in 1961, he spent 1961 to 1963 as a professor of English at Stanford University. From 1963 to 1970 he was professor of English at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he was named in 1970 Distinguished Professor of English.

Howe wrote or contributed to more than forty books, the most noteworthy of which are works of literary criticism. His first study, Sherwood Anderson (1952), was an analysis of Sherwood Anderson’s work and a rebuttal of Lionel Trilling’s assault on the realist movement in modern literature. Howe reveals himself a capable historian in his portrait of Anderson’s childhood in Ohio, and he is charitable in dealing with Anderson’s indistinctness and sentimentality. Howe’s next book, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (1952), provides a sensible and balanced preface to William Faulkner. Another high point of Howe’s literary career is Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study (1967), particularly his interpretation of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

Howe’s political writing includes a wide variety of subjects: Politics and the Novel (1957); The Critical Point: On Literature and Culture (1973); Trotsky (1978); and The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (1986). Based on three lectures on Ralph Waldo Emerson that Howe gave at Harvard University in 1985, The American Newness reflects his earlier optimism and pays tribute to some of his heroes such as Marx, Trotsky, and Ben-Gurion. One of Howe’s most enduring pieces is an essay published in Commentary in 1968, “The New York Inte

A few weeks ago I had the honor of attending BEA2010 (no not the BEA that happened last week) which was part of the 2010NAB conference. I was there to celebrate the launch of the BBC College of Journalism Website (COJO) a collaboration between OUP and the BBC. The site allows citizens outside of the UK access to the online learning and development materials created for BBC journalists. It is a vast resource filled to the brim with videos, audio clips, discussion pages, interactive modules and text pages covering every aspect of TV, radio, and online journalism. At the conference I had a chance to talk with Kevin Marsh, the Executive Editor of COJO, and I will be sharing clips from our conversation for the next few weeks. This week I have posted a clip in which Kevin shares why he choose journalism as a career. Read Kevin’s blog here. Watch the other videos in this series here and here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On this day in 1989, 100,000 Chinese citizens gathered in Tiananmen Square. I wanted to learn more about the event so I turned to Oxford Reference Online which led me to The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics edited by Iain McLean and Allistair McMillan. Below the entry on Tiananmen Square is excerpted.

Tiananmen Square
Tiananmen, the Gate of Heaven’s Peace, the main square of Beijing, where in the early hours of 4 June 1989 a huge pro‐democracy demonstration was repressed by armed force.

The democracy movement began during the Cultural Revolution when many Red Guards, while accepting Mao ’s instructions to attack the Party establishment, realized that rebellion would be fruitful only if it aimed at the achievement of democracy. The first expression of this was the Li Yi Zhe Poster of 1974 which while supporting the aims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution argued for democratic institutions. The second was Chen Erjin’s book, Crossroads Socialism, written just before the death of Mao and published during the Democracy Wall demonstrations of late 1978 . This sought to extend Marxism by arguing that violent socialist revolution inevitably produces yet another exploitative social formation, the rule of the authoritarian revolutionary elite. A second revolution is always necessary to put real power in the hands of the people, through the establishment of democracy.

Mao’s successors, themselves victims of the Cultural Revolution, had an interest in strengthening the rule of law, and an interest in relaxing political control enough to prevent another outbreak. Deng Xiaoping had a personal interest in mobilizing democratic sentiment against the left. He supported the Democracy Wall protest of late 1978 until the young radical factory worker Wei Jingsheng demanded democracy ‘as a right’ and poured contempt on Deng’s half‐measures. Wei was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment, fifty other participants were arrested, and the right to use ‘big character’ posters (which Mao had approved) was abolished. Thereafter, however, Deng sought to maintain a balance between the democratic elements within the Party and the conservative veterans. At the same time he supported his protégé Hu Yaobang (Secretary‐General of the CCP from 1980 ), who had gone so far as to affirm (as Chen Erjin had done) that the forms of democracy have universal validity, whatever the content may be in terms of class.

However, when Hu refused to suppress the next great democratic demonstration in 1986 at Kei Da University where the radical democrat Fang Lizhi was Professor of Physics, Deng forced Hu’s dismissal. In early 1989 Hu died. By this time he was the hero of the democratic movement. When the leadership arranged a demeaning low‐key funeral, students marched to Tiananmen Square to protest. Thus the demonstration began.

There were at this point three groups involved in democratic dissent. The first was among intellectuals who hoped for democratization from the top. The second was led by former Red Guards who encouraged democratic revolution from below and were engaged in mobilizing workers and peasants. The third called themselves ‘Neo‐Authoritarians’; they argued that continued authoritarianism was required to carry through economic changes which would create a pluralist society capable of sustaining democracy. In spite of their views, they nevertheless supported the demonstrators.

In 2000 , tapes and transcriptions of the debates within the Secretariat of the Politburo on how to handle the demonstration, drawn from materials to which only the five members of the Secretariat normally had access, were smuggled out to the USA (translated and published in

A few weeks ago I had the honor of attending BEA2010 (no not the BEA that happened last week) which was part of the 2010NAB conference. I was there to celebrate the launch of the BBC College of Journalism Website (COJO) a collaboration between OUP and the BBC. The site allows citizens outside of the UK access to the online learning and development materials created for BBC journalists. It is a vast resource filled to the brim with videos, audio clips, discussion pages, interactive modules and text pages covering every aspect of TV, radio, and online journalism. At the conference I had a chance to talk with Kevin Marsh, the Executive Editor of COJO, and I will be sharing clips from our conversation for the next few weeks. This week I have posted a clip which emphasizes the true hard work that journalism involves. Read Kevin’s blog here.  Watch last week’s video here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Oxford Bibliographies Online is a series of intuitive and easy-to-use “ultimate reading lists” designed to help users navigate the vast seas of information that exist today. To introduce you to the doors this new online tool opens Andrew Herrmann, Associate Editor of OBO, has excerpted some suggested reading related to Greek mythology.  Use his study guide below to impress the date you bring to see the Immortals.

Andrew Herrmann, Associate Editor, Oxford Bibliographies Online

300, Troy, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, the reboot of Clash of the Titans, the forthcoming Immortals…Hollywood has been brushing up on its epic hexameter (or more likely picked up a Spark Notes guide to Homer) and has re-imagined the swords-and-sandals genre for the 21st century. While it is fun to see these classic works morph from the original Greek texts into flashy, raging battles between Brad Pitt and Eric Bana, classicists and mythology buffs alike often shudder at the blatant inaccuracies presented in these films (if Hector had killed Agamemnon in Troy, we wouldn’t have the Oresteia!). For those interested in knowing what happens in the true classic tradition, OBO recommends the following works on some of the central figures of these films.

Zeus, leader of the Olympians, has a rich mythology which extends beyond Liam Neeson’s now famous “Release the Kraken!” line in Clash of the Titans. Pura Nieto Hernandez’s Mythology entry offers a good starting point for those interested in this lightning-wielding god:

Dowden, Ken. 2006. Zeus. Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World. London and New York: Routledge.
In spite of its brevity, this introduction accomplishes a lot. Not only does Dowden concentrate on the cult of Zeus, he also provides the reader with ample mythological information about his rich subject. His careful presentation and analysis of the previous large bibliography makes this book a good introduction even to the study of ancient religion. Good illustrations add to its appeal.

Poseidon, father of Percy Jackson in the recent Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and soon to be played by Kellan Lutz in the upcoming film Immortals, is the stormy god of the sea. The Greek Religion entry by Angelos Chaniotis points users to a detailed study on the worship of Poseidon in ancient Greece. However, this one is not in English, so brush off your dictionary or head over to Oxford Language Dictionaries Online:

Mylonopoulos, Joannis. 2003. Pelopónnesos oiketérion Poseidonos = Heiligtümer und Kulte des Poseidon auf der Peloponnes. Liège, Belgium: Université de Liège.
Thorough discussion of the cult, sanctuaries, festivals, and political significance of Poseidon in the Peloponnese; an exemplary study in terms of method, approach, and combination of diverse source material for the interpretation of the cult and sign

A few weeks ago I had the honor of attending BEA2010 (no not the BEA happening this week) which was part of the 2010NAB conference.  I was there to celebrate the launch of the BBC College of Journalism Website (COJO) a collaboration between OUP and the BBC.  The site allows citizens outside of the UK access to the online learning and development materials created for BBC journalists.  It is a vast resource filled to the brim with videos, audio clips, discussion pages, interactive modules and text pages covering every aspect of TV, radio, and online journalism.  At the conference I had a chance to talk with Kevin Marsh, the Executive Editor of COJO, and I will be sharing clips from our conversation for the next few weeks.  To start us off I have posted a clip which emphasizes the value of truth in journalism.  Read Kevin’s blog here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

On this day in history, March 19th, the American literary icon Philip Roth was born. I wanted to learn a little more about the man whose books have filled so many of my reading hours, so I used Oxford Reference Online which led me to the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. The following excerpt, by William H. Pritchard, is just a small portion of the fascinating biography you can find in the Oxford Encylopedia of American Literature. Happy Birthday Mr. Roth!

Philip Roth’s literary career is extra-ordinary in a number of ways other than its continued production of surprising, vital, imaginative works. It began when his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and five stories, won the National Book Award for 1959; it reached a peak of notoriety ten years later when Portnoy’s Complaint became not only a best-seller but also a portent of the decay of American youth. (Students now came to college, declared Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, with pot and Portnoy secreted in their suitcases.) The career’s most recent stage, beginning in 1993, shows a writer in his seventh decade who brought out no less than six novels, all of them distinctive, three of them possible examples of masterwork. At his seventieth birthday in March 2003, he stood as a writer who has exhibited astonishing staying power, but also one who has deepened, extended, and invariably transformed himself.

It is not easy to name the qualities that most distinguish Roth’s work as a novelist. He has from first to latest shown a strong intelligence, fearsomely articulate in its ability to formulate positions, then argue with them by way of moving on to new ones just as temporary as the one abandoned. Everyone testifies to, even if they disagree about its ultimate value, his comic wit, often darkly sardonic but always incorrigibly playful. He has said that “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends,” and it may be said of him (as Robert Frost liked to say about himself) that he is never more serious than when joking. Roth’s brand of serious play has been notably engaged in exploring, often in increasingly transgressive ways, the erotic life of American men and women in heterosexual relations that are usually combative, to say the least. One must speak also of what to some readers may seem nebulous: the auditory satisfactions of Roth’s narrative voices, whose lucidity and rhythmic movement are unsurpassed. Finally, and extending this remark about movement to the career as a whole, one notes with pleasure the way in which any book of his has succeeded its predecessor in a manner always surprising, yet somehow, upon thinking about it, inevitable. To describe the dynamic of that succession over the course of forty-four years is the burden of this account.

Early Life and Education
Roth was born 19 March 1933, the second son of Herman and Bess Finkel Roth; his older brother, Alexander, would become a commercial artist. His father was assistant district manager in the Essex, New Jersey, office of Metropolitan Life Insurance; his mother, as we might assume from Roth’s characterization of her in his autobiographical

On this day in history, February 22, 1788, Arthur Schopenhauer was born.  In order to celebrate this famed philosopher I went to Oxford Reference Online which led me to The Oxford Companion to German Literature. In the excerpt below we learn about the work of Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer, Arthur (Danzig, 1788–1860, Frankfurt/Main), the radical philosopher of pessimism, who described himself as the only worthy successor to Kant, assimilated all the negative trends of a disillusioned age. Like Voltaire, he mocked at the optimism of Leibniz, writing in a highly readable style, which enabled him to draw a Dantesque vision of suffering, demonstrating ‘welcher Art dieser meilleur des mondes possibles ist’. He had other rare gifts which made him conscious, when speaking about the few men endowed with genius, that he was one of them. This explains his reference to the average product of the human species as ‘Fabrikware der Natur’. He became known as a misanthropist (Menschenverächter), and as such is second only to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer was a highly complex individualist. His personal background counted with him more than with most philosophers and encouraged a stubbornly introspective nature. He had a wealthy and cultured father, whose financial acumen led him, as bank director, to spend much time abroad, including a few months in England, which Schopenhauer used with such profit that he read The Times daily for the rest of his life. In 1805 his father committed suicide. His mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, moved to Weimar. After studying science and philosophy at Göttingen and Berlin universities, Schopenhauer graduated in 1813 at Jena with his dissertation Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. A brief experience of the Wars of Liberation (see Napoleonic Wars) left him still more disillusioned with human nature. His mother, of whose social excesses Schopenhauer already disapproved, provoked a final rift, which contributed to his lifelong dislike of women.

Contact with Goethe, and in particular the reading of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, stimulated Schopenhauer’s treatise Über das Sehen und die Farben (1816), which he wrote in Dresden before he produced his principal work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819). Years later it was followed by Über den Willen der Natur (1836), which was extended by further variants appearing in 1841 as Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, containing two tracts, Über die Freiheit des Willens and Über das Fundament der Moral. Meanwhile he had qualified to lecture in Berlin (1820), where he hoped, by the force of his contrasting convictions, to deprive Hegel of his followers, an attempt which failed. He compensated himself by a ten-year stay in Italy before returning to Dresden and Berlin, which he left in haste for Frankfurt at the onset of the cholera epidemic which caused Hegel’s death (1831). Thus he survived a great rival, but lived unnoticed and lonely, until the mid-century brought him recognition. His Parerga und Paralipomena of 1851 proved particularly popular, and contained the well-known Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit. In the early Frankfurt period his considerable artistic and linguistic talents enabled him to translate, from the Spanish, a work of his favourite writer, Balthasar Gracian’s Hand-Orakel und Kunst der Weltklugheit. It was published posthumously.

Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung does not presen

Dennis Baron is Professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Illinois. His book, A Better Pencil: Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution, looks at the evolution of communication technology, from pencils to pixels. In this post, also posted on Baron’s personal blog The Web of Language, he looks at the dilemma of being old in the internet age.

Philip Greenspun, an MIT software engineer and hi-tech guru, argues in a recent blog post that “technology reduces the value of old people.” It’s not that old people don’t do technology. On the contrary, many of them are heavy users of computers and cell phones. It’s that the young won’t bother tapping the knowledge of their elders because they can get so much more, so much faster, from Wikipedia and Google.

It was adults, not the young, who invented computers, programmed them, and created the internet. OK, maybe not old adults, in some cases maybe not even old-enough-to-buy-beer adults, but adults nonetheless. Plus, the over-35 set is Facebook’s fastest growing demographic.

Even so, despite starting the computer revolution, and despite their presence on the World Wide Web today, the old are fast becoming irrelevant. According to Greenspun, “An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or old, know as much as Google and Wikipedia? Why would a young person ask an elder the answer to a fact question that can be solved authoritatively in 10 seconds with a Web search?”

Why indeed? With knowledge located deep in Google’s server farms instead of in the collective memories of senior citizens, the old today are fast becoming useless. Might as well put them out on the ice floe and let them float off to whatever comes next.

According to the federal government, which is never wrong about these things, I myself became officially old, and therefore useless as a repository of wisdom and memory, last Spring. But I’m not worried about being put out to sea on an ice floe, because thanks to global warming, the ice is melting so fast that it poses no danger. There’s not even enough ice out there to sink another Titanic, though if someone built a new Titanic people wouldn’t sail on it because it probably wouldn’t have free wi-fi.

I found out all I know about global warming and the shrinking ice caps and even the Titanic not from that well-known American elder, Al Gore, but from Wikipedia. Wikipedia also told me that Al Gore, who is no spring chicken, invented the internet. I learned from Google that there was no free wi-fi before the internet, and no such thing as a free lunch.

Socrates once warned that our increased reliance on writing would weaken human memory — everything we’d need to remember would be stored in documents, not brain cells, so instead of remembering stuff, we could just look it up. Socrates knew all about brain cells, of course, because he looked that up in a Greek encyclopedia (he didn’t use the Encyclopaedia Britannica, because he couldn’t read English). And just as he predicted, Socrates, who was no spring chicken, had to look up brain cells again a week later, because he forgot what it said.

2,400 years have passed since Socrates drank hemlock — that was his fellow Athenians’ way of putting an irrelevant old man out to sea — but it looks like our current dependence on computers is rendering old people’s memories irrelevant once again. And that’s probably a good thing, because as Socrates learned the hard way, old people’s memories are notoriously unreliable, which is why Al Gore, who foresaw that this would happen, also invented sticky notes.

David’s “The Death of Socrates.” We remember the Greek philosopher’s critique of writing because his student Plato wrote it down on sticky notes.

Like old people, old elephants are also no longer necessary. Elephants became an endangered species not because hunters killed them for the ivory in their tusks but because now that we have computers, no one cared that an elephant never forgets. Technology reduced the value of elephants, and so the elephants just wandered off to the elephants’ burial ground to wait for whatever comes next. And also because the elephants’ burial ground has free wi-fi.

Unlike elephants and people, computers never forget, so we can rest assured that the value of computers will never be reduced. Unlike fallible life-form-based memory banks, computers preserve their information forever, regardless of disk crashes, magnetic fields, coffee spills on keyboards, or inept users who accidentally erase an important file.

And there’s no need to throw out your 5.25″ floppies, laser disks, minidisks, Betamax, 8-track, flash drives, or DVDs just because some new digital medium becomes popular, because unlike writing on clay, stone, silk, papyrus, vellum, parchment, newsprint, or 100% rag bond paper, all computerized information is always forward-compatible with any upgrades or innovations that come along.

Plus all the information stored in computer clouds is totally reliable and always available, except of course for those pesky T-Mobile Sidekick phones whose data somehow disappeared. Assuming the cable’s not down, Google invariably shows us exactly what we’re looking for, or something that’s at least close enough to it, and Wikipedia is never wrong, ever. That’s because the information on Google and Wikipedia is put there by robots, or maybe intelligent life forms from outer space, not by people of a certain age who have to write stuff down on stickies, just as Socrates did, so they don’t forget it.

And now that I don’t have to remember all that lore that elders were once responsible for, my brain cells have been freed up to do other important stuff, like spending lots more time online looking for the meaning of life and what comes next, assuming there’s free wi-fi at the coffee shop.

The AMA Manual of Style is the ultimate go to resource for writing articles as well as understanding ethical standards in medical and scientific publishing, and it is now available online.  In the article below, Phil Sefton, ELS is Senior Manuscript Editor at JAMA and a contributor to www.amamanualofstyle.com weighs in on “nauseating” vs. “nauseous”. This article first appeared on the AMA Manuel of Style site.

Writers and editors rushing to meet deadlines know the feeling. The effects of stress, a few too many cups of coffee, and perhaps a candy bar or bag of chips in place of a meal can conspire to make the most steely-nerved wordsmith feel a tad nauseated. Or is it nauseous? And what of that stress, that coffee, that ill-chosen meal replacement—are its effects nauseating or nauseous?

Grammarians with more prescriptive leanings (ie, those concerned with language as it “should” be used, which presumably would include most writers and editors) would say that a person feels nauseated and that which has made him or her feel that way is nauseous. Those with more descriptive leanings (those concerned with language as it is actually used, which includes professional linguists as well as armchair observers of language) are eager to point out that while nauseated is still more often used to mean feeling the effects of nausea, the use of nauseous in that subjective sense is rapidly gaining acceptance. Similarly, while nauseous is still more often used to mean causing nausea, the use of nauseating in that causative sense will soon be more prevalent, if it is not already. Debates on the merits of prescriptive vs descriptive use of these terms can be quite heated, and current dictionaries and usage guides often attempt to walk a line between the two camps—which, considering the potential for rancor, is probably not a bad idea, particularly taking into account the ever-evolving nature of language as well as the history of these terms.

So first, a little history. Despite the pronouncements of some prescriptive grammarians promoting the idea that nauseous, when used to mean “feeling the effects of nausea,” is yet another example of a weed newly sprung up in the garden of educated usage, it appears that the term was used in that sense as early as 1604. What is more, it was likely not used to mean “causing nausea” until 1612 or later. At some point, the rule was set forth dictating that nauseous should be used to indicate causing nausea and nauseated to indicate the subjective feeling of nausea—a rule that for the most part held sway until the mid-20th century, when nauseous once again began to be used by persons describing how they feel.

Nauseous, then, when used to describe the feeling of nausea, is something of a grammatical atavism, a throwback to an earlier usage that seems to have fallen into disfavor in the intervening centuries. The term has regained its original meaning in a few generations, a resurrection only accelerated by today’s fast-paced media mix. For example, when comedian Mike Myers’ Saturday Night Live character, Linda Richman, claimed that something “makes me nauseous” (always pronounced as two syllables, with the slightest of pauses when pronouncing the first: “naaw′ shus”), the use of the term in that sense gathered steam in short order, gaining an ever-widening circulation as viewers of the program used it in conversation and e-mails; it likely now lives a healthy and happy life in the various social networking media. Other related terms from the 17th century—nauseation, nauseative, nauseity, nausity—are now obsolete or used very rarely, but for now nauseous as used to describe the subjective state of nausea seems here to stay.

So how does all of this pan out for the person seeking guidance on the use of nauseous, nauseated, and nauseating? As is often the case, an answer—very seldom is there such a thing as the answer—lies in the ever-shifting borders between the spoken and the written word. Whereas the use of nauseous in the subjective sense when speaking now seems a given, nauseated is still holding its own in text. Conversely, the use of nauseous to indicate the cause of nausea is rapidly falling into disuse in spoken conversation (and when it is used, it is sometimes confused with noxious), whereas it maintains only a rapidly diminishing tenuous lead over nauseating in text.

Accordingly, JAMA and the Archives Journals very seldom use nauseous in the causative sense and not at all in the subjective sense (unless part of quoted material); nauseating is used for the former and nauseated for the latter, at least until the dust has settled on another generation or two of language evolution. In the meantime, writers and editors rushing to meet deadlines are encouraged to take steps to eliminate or reduce stress, consume coffee in moderation, and make prudent dietary choices if skipping meals.

On this day in history, August 19, 1959, Blind Willie McTell passed away.  To honor this great musician we have excerpted his biography from Oxford Music Online’s Encyclopedia of Popular Music.  When you are done reading the post check out some of his music here.

McTell, Blind Willie

b. 5 May 1901, McDuffie County, Georgia, USA, d. 19 August 1959, Almon, Georgia, USA.

Blind from birth, McTell began to learn guitar in his early years, under the influence of relatives and neighbours in Statesboro, Georgia, where he grew up. In his late teens, he attended a school for the blind. By 1927, when he made his first records, he was already a very accomplished guitarist, with a warm and beautiful vocal style, and his early sessions produced classics such as ‘Statesboro Blues’, ‘Mama Tain’t Long Fo Day’ and ‘Georgia Rag’. During the 20s and 30s, he travelled extensively from a base in Atlanta, making his living from music and recording, on a regular basis, for three different record companies, sometimes using pseudonyms which included Blind Sammie and Georgia Bill. Most of his records feature a 12-string guitar, popular among Atlanta musicians, but particularly useful to McTell for the extra volume it provided for singing on the streets. Few, if any, blues guitarists could equal his mastery of the 12-string. He exploited its resonance and percussive qualities on his dance tunes, yet managed a remarkable delicacy of touch on his slow blues. In 1934, he married, and the following year recorded some duets with his wife, Kate, covering sacred as well as secular material.

In 1940, John Lomax recorded McTell for the Folk Song Archive of the Library of Congress, and the sessions, which have since been issued in full, feature him discussing his life and his music, as well as playing a variety of material. These offer an invaluable insight into the art of one of the true blues greats. In the 40s, he moved more in the direction of religious music, and when he recorded again in 1949 and 1950, a significant proportion of his songs were spiritual. Only a few tracks from these sessions were issued at the time, but most have appeared in later years. They reveal McTell to be as commanding as ever, and indeed, some of the recordings rank among his best work. In 1956, he recorded for the last time at a session arranged by a record shop manager, unissued until the 60s. Soon after this, he turned away from the blues to perform exclusively religious material. His importance was eloquently summed up by Bob Dylan in his strikingly moving elegy, ‘Blind Willie McTell’.

Brenda Gregoline, ELS, manages the copyediting team for 5 of the Archives Journals, and is a member of the committee that writes and updates the AMA Manual of Style. She is a member of the Council of Science Editors and has worked in scientific publishing for nearly 15 years. In this 3-part series, she reports on the most frequent mistakes authors make when submitting manuscripts to JAMA and the Archives Journals, and lets us in on what drives copy editors crazy. Read part one here and part two here.

It’s impossible to expect authors to absorb all the information in the thousand-page AMA Manual of Style–they’re just trying to get published, and it’s our job to help them. Here, in classic top-10-list reverse order, are the top 10 editorial problems we see in our submitted and accepted manuscripts, compiled by committee and editorialized upon by me. In Part I we discussed filling out author forms, omitting “behind the scenes” stuff, and generally making life difficult for the copy editor. In Part II we discussed common punctuation and style mistakes, errors of grandiosity, and wacky references. Today we discuss the final 4 in our top-10 list of most frequent mistakes.

4. Duplicate submission. In scientific publication, it is not acceptable to submit a report of original research to multiple journals at the same time. Journal editors are likely to be more disturbed by this if it looks deliberate rather than like a simple mistake (not realizing that a foreign-language journal “counts,” for example) or if the case is debatable (a small section of results was published in another paper, but the new paper adds tons of new material). Remember those forms from the 10th most common mistake? One of them asks about previous submission or publication. We need authors to be up-front about any other articles in the pipeline, even if (especially if) they’re not sure if they might constitute duplicate publication.

3. Failing to protect patient identity. Yup, there’s a form for this too! Any time a patient is identifiable, in a photograph or even in text (as in a case report), authors must have the patient’s consent. (Contrary to popular belief, the gossip-mag-style “black bars” over the eyes are not sufficient to conceal identity.) Usually we hear complaints about this, because studies are written long after patients are treated and it can be hard to track people down, but them’s the breaks. If it’s really impossible to obtain after-the-fact patient consent, editors will work with authors to crop photos, take out case-report details, or whatever it takes to “de-identify” patients.

2. Not matching up all the data “bits.” In the abstract, 76 patients were randomized to receive the intervention, but it’s 77 in Table 1. There was a 44.5% reduction in symptoms in the medicated group in the text, but later it’s 44.7%. Sometimes this is because the abstract is written first from the overall results, while the data in a table are more precisely calculated by a statistician; or maybe the number of patients changed along the way and no one went back to revise the earlier data. Either way, it drives copy editors crazy.

1. Not reading a journal’s Instructions for Authors. These days almost all scientific journals have online submission, and almost always there is a link to something called “Information for Authors,” “Guidelines for Manuscript Submission,” or something similar. Judging by the kinds of questions editorial offices receive almost daily, authors rarely read these—but the publication process would often go so much more smoothly if they would.

We are proud of our style manual here at JAMA/Archives, although we realize it isn’t the last word in scientific style and format. There can never really be a “last word” because some editor will always want to have it! Anyway, without authors there wouldn’t be anything to edit, so we would never hold any “mistakes” against them. No matter how grievous a manuscript’s misstep, an editor will be there to correct it, because it’s our job. (But mostly because we can’t stop ourselves.)

Brenda Gregoline, ELS, manages the copyediting team for 5 of the Archives Journals, and is a member of the committee that writes and updates the AMA Manual of Style. She is a member of the Council of Science Editors and has worked in scientific publishing for nearly 15 years. In this 3-part series, she reports on the most frequent mistakes authors make when submitting manuscripts to JAMA and the Archives Journals, and lets us in on what drives copy editors crazy.

It’s impossible to expect authors to absorb all the information in the thousand-page AMA Manual of Style–they’re just trying to get published, and it’s our job to help them. Here, in classic top-10-list reverse order, are the top 10 editorial problems we see in our submitted and accepted manuscripts, compiled by committee and editorialized upon by me. In Part I we discussed filling out author forms, omitting “behind the scenes” stuff, and generally making life difficult for the copy editor. Today we discuss the next 3 in our top-10 list of most frequent mistakes.

7. Common punctuation and style mistakes (not an exhaustive list). Most frequently we see authors fail to expand abbreviations; use different abbreviations for the same term throughout a manuscript; use commas like seasoning instead of like punctuation marks with actual rules of deployment; and overuse the em dash. However, I’d like to tell any authors reading this not to fret, because that’s the kind of stuff we’re paid to fix. Plus I can’t really throw stones—being a fan of the em dash myself.

6. Errors of grandiosity. Sometimes a perfectly nice and valid study will go hog-wild in the conclusion, claiming to be changing the future of scientific inquiry or heralding a sea-change in the treatment of patients everywhere. Or authors will selectively interpret results, focusing on the positive and ignoring the negative or neutral. It’s natural to want to write an elegant conclusion—it’s one of the few places in a scientific manuscript where one can really let loose with the prose—but it’s always better to err on the side of caution.

5. Wacky references. All journals have a reference citation policy, and across scientific journals it is fairly standard to give reference numbers at the point of citation, cite references in numerical order in the text (as opposed to only in tables or figures), and retain a unique number for each reference no matter how many times it’s cited. However, we still get papers with references handled in all kinds of odd ways (alphabetical, chronological, or seemingly inspired by the full moon). References that include URLs can mean big problems. Often the URL doesn’t work or the site is password-protected, subscription-only, or otherwise useless to the reader. Also aggravating: references that are just the result of the search string for the article and not the URL for the article itself.

Authors and aspiring authors: stay tuned for the final 4!

Brenda Gregoline, ELS, manages the copyediting team for 5 of the Archives Journals, and is a member of the committee that writes and updates the AMA Manual of Style. She is a member of the Council of Science Editors and has worked in scientific publishing for nearly 15 years. The AMA Manual of Style is the ultimate go to resource for writing corrections and clarifications as well as ethical standards in medical and scientific publishing, and it is now available online. In this 3-part series, Gregoline reports on the most frequent mistakes authors make when submitting manuscripts to JAMA and the Archives Journals, and lets us in on what drives copyeditors crazy.  Be sure to check back on Monday for the next two weeks for part two and three of this post.

Publishing a new edition of a style manual, particularly a lengthy, detailed manual that covers a ridiculous amount of technical material (Hello, AMA Manual of Style!), is a grueling process. In our case, it involved 10 people meeting for at least an hour every week for more than a year, where we tried not to get into arguments about grammar, usage, and the presentation of scientific data. After the meetings there would usually be flurries of e-mails about grammar, usage, and the presentation of scientific data. Then we’d all go home and dream about grammar, usage, and the presentation of scientific data. You get the picture.

My point is that the writers of style manuals are often a little, shall we say, too close to the material. In the case of the AMA Manual of Style, we are all editors as well—and it can be hard for us not to roll our eyes when we run into the same problems on manuscript after manuscript. Come on, authors: there’s a whole book on this stuff!

Which, of course, is precisely the problem. There is a whole THOUSAND-PAGE book that tries to encompass all aspects of medical editing. It’s impossible to expect authors to absorb all the information–they’re just trying to get published, and it’s our job to help them. Here, in classic top-10-list reverse order, are the top 10 editorial problems we see in our submitted and accepted manuscripts, compiled by committee and editorialized upon by me. If any authors happen to read this, maybe it will help them avoid the most common errors; if any journal Web site–design people read it, maybe they can grab some ideas for more explicit user interface; and if any copy editors read it, maybe they can enjoy shaking their heads in wry commiseration.

10. Missing or incomplete author forms. Most journals require authors to fill out some forms, usually involving things like copyright transfer, an assertion of responsibility for authorship, and so on. These forms are often filled out incorrectly or incompletely. Following a form’s instructions as to signatures and boxes to check can save significant amounts of time in the publication process.

9. Not explaining “behind the scenes” stuff. Values in a table don’t add up—oh, it’s because of rounding. The curve in this figure doesn’t connect the values listed in the “Results” section—oh, we used data smoothing. This kind of thing can be easily explained in a footnote, but many authors forget to do so because it seems so obvious to them.

8. Making life difficult for the copy editor. Authors and editors have the same goal: a polished, published, accurate manuscript. Sure-fire ways authors can ruin what should be a pleasant working relationship are to suggest that the copy editor is making changes in the manuscript for no reason; calling the copy editor to discuss changes without having read the edited manuscript first (this wastes OODLES of time); and not reading the cover letter that comes with the edited manuscript. This last is particularly charming when the author then calls the copy editor to ask all the questions that are very nicely answered in said cover letter.

Authors and aspiring authors: stay tuned for 7 more!

OUP USA President Tim Barton has published a detailed overview and position statement regarding the AAP/Authors Guild Settlement with Google which can be found here (warning, subscription site).  Below is a brief excerpt from the piece.

“…What once seemed at least debatable has now become irrefutable: If it’s not online, it’s invisible. While increasing numbers of long-out-of-date, public-domain books are now fully and freely available to anyone with a browser, the vast majority of the scholarship published in book form over the last 80 years is today largely overlooked by students, who limit their research to what can be discovered on the Internet.

For most books published in the last 10 years or so, the picture is more heartening: University libraries provide students and scholars with access to a fair number of those works via services purchased directly from publishers and aggregators. Excerpts can often be viewed online free (but only as much as is allowed by publishers, with an eye toward generating sales). And many titles are available as e-books. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the scholarship published since 1923 (the date before which titles are in the public domain in the United States) is now effectively out of reach to the modern student.

As one of the world’s most prolific scholarly publishers, Oxford views as a core expression of its mission — and the responsibility of all scholarly publishers — the reactivation of publications long sidelined by the restrictions of a print-only existence….”

Purdy, Director of Publicity

A recent study out of Harvard confirms Twitter is all vanity. This is not a big surprise to the dictionary team at Oxford University Press. OUP lexicographers have been monitoring more than 1.5 million random tweets Since January 2009 and have noticed any number of interesting facts about the impact of Twitter on language usage. For example the 500 words most frequently used words on Twitter are significantly different from the top 500 words in general English text. At the very top, there are many of the usual suspects: “the”, “to”, “as”, “and”, “in”… though “I” is right up at number 2, whereas for general text it is only at number 10. No doubt this reflects on the intrinsically solipsistic nature of Twitter. The most common word is “the”, which is the same in general English.

Since January OUP’s dictionary team has sorted through many random tweets.  Here are the basic numbers:
Total tweets = 1,496,981
Total sentences = 2,098,630
Total words = 22,431,033
Average words per tweet = 14.98
Average sentences per tweet = 1.40
Average words per sentence in Twitter= 10.69
Average words per sentence in general usage = 22.09

Other interesting tidbits include:

Verbs are much more common in their gerund form in Twitter than in general text. “Going”, “getting” and “watching” all appear in the top 100 words or so.

“Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating” are all in the top 100 first words, revealing just how often people use Twitter to report on whatever they are experiencing (or consuming) at the time.

Evidence of greater informality than general English: “ok” is much more common, and so is “f***”.

And that is how we roll here at OUP, monitoring new social media and the changes in the English language up to the minute.  Tweet on.

Ammon Shea recently spent a year of his life reading the OED from start to finish. Over the next few months he will be posting weekly blogs about the insights, gems, and thoughts on language that came from this experience. His book, Reading the OED, has been published by Perigee, so go check it out in your local bookstore. In the post below Ammon looks at the future of the book.

There is a good deal of discussion and arguing going on regarding the apparently perilous state of the physical object known as the book. Some factions view Google’s attempt to scan the world’s libraries as a boon, and others see it as a rather naked power grab that will have dire consequences for authors and their audiences. Some individuals have embraced the Kindle, some have sworn to never sully their eyes on such a thing, and still others have never heard of it. Some are of the opinion that all print that has ever been committed to paper deserves to be preserved, and others point out that we publish more books now than ever before, and surely some of it is not worth saving. I am of varied opinion on all these things.

However, amidst all this rancor and debate, I feel that there is one type of book that is all too often not taken into account, and that is the book about which very few people care. It may seem counter-intuitive, but I believe that it is precisely because so few people care about these books that they should be kept around.

One of my favorite browsing books of late is a volume titled (with an utter lack of irony) Toys That Don’t Care, by Edward M. Swartz, published in 1971. It is an expose of the children’s toy industry, which, by the way, did indeed produce some horrific things for infants to play with back in the 1960’s. Unintentionally hilarious, it details a range of games and toys that clearly exhibit both changing social mores and standards of safety (such as the toy hypodermic needle with the slogan “Hippy-Sippy says I’ll try anything”, and a board game titled “Pieces of Body”).

The book itself is fairly strident, not terribly well written, out of print and extremely out of date. And I’ve noticed that most of the libraries near me that still have a copy have relegated it to the offsite storage facility. It gave me a good deal of enjoyment when I found it on a library shelf, and I hate to think of books such as this falling through the cracks. They are not bad enough to be produced in enormous quantities, and so survive through sheer force of numbers. And they are not good enough to have a team of supporters crying out for their preservation. But this particular absurd book, and many others just as mid-level, and going to be enjoyed by someone, provided that they can be found on a shelf.

And so, undaunted by any actual knowledge of how the library sciences work, and what influences the decision of whether to send a book offsite of not, I have resolved to spend more time searching through the basement shelves of libraries, seeking out those perhaps unworthy and certainly unloved books that are waiting to be found by someone, and to borrow these books, in the vain hope that by keeping them in the system as ‘books that are borrowed’ I can in some way forestall their inevitable relegation to the dustbin of storage.

Justyna Zajac, Publicity

In honor of National Library Week 2009, OUP will be posting everyday to demonstrate our immense love of libraries. Libraries don’t just house thousands of fascinating books, they are also stunning works of architecture, havens of creativity for communities and venues for free and engaging programs. So please, make sure to check back all this week and spread the library love.

As promised, here are the answers to our Library Love 2009: Scavenger Hunt so you can see how your library trivia stacks up, no pun intended.

1. Who was the founder of the Junto Club, predecessor to the Library Company of Philadelphia, created in 1731 and considered to be America’s first public library? (Benjamin Franklin)

2. What 18th century English poet said, “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book?” (Samuel Johnson)

3. The library of the Supreme Court of the United States was created by a congressional act in what year? (1832)

4. Who was named the first librarian of Congress in 1802? (John Beckley)

5. In what city is the Newberry Library located? (Chicago)

6. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America began at what academic institution? (Radcliffe College)

7. Under which pope was the Vatican Library established in 1450? (Nicholas V)

8. The largest research library in Ireland is located at what university? (University of Dublin, Trinity College)

9. The manuscript division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C houses White House papers and documents of all Presidents from George Washington through which president? (Warren Harding)

10. Name two of the three individuals whose private collections formed the basis for the British Museum and Library, founded in 1753. (Cotton, Harley, Sloane)