By: Jessica Burkhart,
on 4/20/2009
Today is my day at Teen Fiction Cafe! Yay! I posted about going to see 17 Again with Zac Efron. I had SO much fun. Head on over and leave a comment! :)
By: Jessica Burkhart,
on 12/29/2008
I blogged about upcoming books to movies over at Teen Fiction Cafe! :) Totally check it out to see a hot pic of Brendan Fraser. :)
By: Alice Pope,
on 10/31/2008
Blog of the Week:
Teen Fiction Cafe...
"The idea for the Teen Fiction Cafe was hatched in March 2007 I was chatting online with fellow RWA member Sara Hantz and we realized our debut teen novels launched within a few months of each other," says founding member Wendy Toliver. "We thought it would be cool to gather up-and-coming as well as multi-published YA authors for a group blog, covering topics their teen readers would find interesting--as well as fellow authors, librarians, teachers, etc."
After this initial discussion, Sara and Wendy emailed a group of international YA authors they knew or wanted to know and every one said they'd love to participate. Kelly Parra volunteered to take care of the technical aspects of starting and maintaining the blog.
Here is the fabulous list of contributors to Teen Fiction Cafe:
By: Jessica Burkhart,
on 6/9/2008
For me, growing up in the 90s meant one thing...horses!
Before we moved to Tennessee, we lived in Ocala, FL. This was a horse from a horse fair my family and I attended. I made my parents sooo nervous because I was always walking up to strange horses (even the occasional stallion!) and talking to them. I was a tiny kid, but if you had a horse, I'd ask for a boost so I could ride.
By: Jessica Burkhart,
on 5/12/2008
It's my day to post over at Teen Fiction Cafe! I posted about last night's Survivor finale and other TV shows ending this month. Come check us out! :)
By: Stephanie,
on 3/5/2008
Hubba-hubba is dated slang, a word remembered even less then groovy and bobby-soxer. To my surprise, even my computer does not know it. And yet it was all over the place sixty and fifty years ago. Its origin attracted a good deal of attention soon after World War II and then again in the eighties. (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 3/4/2008
Coordinates: 59 54 N 10 43 E
Population: 808,000 (2007 est.)
I’m not sure if location, expense, or as the Onion’s Our Dumb World insinuates, a residual fear of Viking invasion is to blame, but Oslo, one of my favorite European cities, doesn’t seem to get its fair share of attention. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 2/27/2008
I keep receiving letters and comments on the spelling reform. When I broached this subject more than a month ago, I was aware of the fact that some groups on both sides of the Atlantic still believe in the possibility of the reform. Thanks to several responses, I now know more about their activities. They organize conferences and publish books on simplified spelling. I am full of sympathy for their work, even though their voices are weak and the wilderness is vast. There is no need to repeat the arguments of the opponents, for they, like the arguments of the advocates, have not changed since the middle of the 19th century. I will only dwell on two. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 2/20/2008
I have once written about ragamuffin and its kin, including Italian ragazzo “boy,” which I think is a member of that extended family. Dealing with rag-devils had inured me to the dangers of demonology. (Pay attention to the alliteration. I am so used to writing notes on literary texts that I could not pass by my own sentence without a comment.) Those who know who Puck is remember him from Shakespeare. He is a mischievous sprite in Elizabethan comedy, and the modern adjective puckish also refers to mischief. Folklorists have studied this character extensively; among others, there is a book titled The Anatomy of Puck. Now that Puck has been dismembered, a historical linguist can fearlessly approach his body and draw a few tentative conclusions. (more…)
By: Jessica Burkhart,
on 2/18/2008
I blogged at Teen Fiction Cafe about road trips with my dad, singing on a restaurant table and country music. :)
Check it out here: http://teenfictioncafe.blogspot.com
By: Stephanie,
on 2/13/2008
People constantly wonder why understand means what it does. The concept of understanding is highly abstract. It is much easier to say I see (implying that now everything is clear), and I grasp (suggesting that the object is now mine in the literal or figurative sense) than I comprehend the nature and significance of a phenomenon or message. The briefest survey of other languages shows that words for observing (seeing) and seizing (grasping) are often used to express the ideas of comprehension and acquiring knowledge. The idea of “understanding” may also come from “separation”: we sift a mass of things and by sifting discern what they are made of (discern, from Old French, ultimately from Latin dis-cernere, is “to separate”). (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 1/30/2008
First I would like to respond to the comments on my discussion of spelling reform. I was aware of the continuing efforts by some groups to simplify English spelling, but I think their chances of success are slim, because there is no public awareness of the damage done by our erratic spelling system. We need respelling bins, similar to the now ubiquitous recycling bins. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 1/23/2008
People always try to learn the origin of things, but the world and even most human institutions arose so long ago that our reconstruction can seldom be secure. Language is also old, and we know next to nothing about the circumstances in which it arose. The age of words differs greatly: some were coined millennia ago, others are recent. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 1/16/2008
Our civilization has reached a stage at which together we are extremely powerful and in our individual capacities nearly helpless. We (that is, we as a body) can solve the most complicated mathematical problems, but our children no longer know the multiplication table. Since they can use a calculator to find out how much six times seven is, why bother? Also, WE can fly from New York to Stockholm in a few hours, but, when asked where Sweden is, thousands of people answer with a sigh that they did not take geography in high school: it must be somewhere up there on the map. There is no need to know anything: given the necessary software, clever machines will do all the work and leave us playing videogames and making virtual love. The worst anti-utopias did not predict such a separation between communal omniscience and personal ignorance, such a complete rift between collective wisdom and individual stultification. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 1/9/2008
Everybody seems to resent buzzwords, and everybody uses them. It may therefore be of some interest to look at the origin of those universally reviled favorites. Language consists of ready-made blocks. When we want to express gratitude, we say thank you. The reaction is also predictable, even though the formula changes from decade to decade. At one time, people used to respond with if you please, don’t mention it, or not at all. All three yielded to you are welcome, and now I constantly hear no problem, which irritates me (of course, no problem).
By: Stephanie,
on 12/19/2007
By Anatoly Liberman
Etymologist, working sub specie aeternitatis, that is, routing among withered but durable leaves and dead (immortal?) roots, has seasonal stirrings. Of course, every month there are gleanings, but how much can a tiller, an inhabitant of a northern state, glean from barren furrows in December? Yet one more post and the year will be over—something to celebrate. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 12/12/2007
By Anatoly Liberman
Strange things have been observed in the history of the verb shine, or rather in the history of its preterit (past). To begin with, a reminder. Verbs that change their vowels in the formation of the preterit and past participle are called strong (for instance, sing—sang—sung, shake—shook—shaken, smite—smote—smitten), in contradistinction to verbs that achieve the same results with the help of -t or -d (for instance, shock—shocked—shocked, cry—cried—cried). For practical purposes this division is almost useless, for weak verbs can also change their vowels, as in sleep—slept, and mixed types exist (the past of strew is strewed, but the past participle is usually strewn). (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 12/5/2007
Countless unnatural things happen in the history of language. Coincidences, as bizarre as in Dickens’s novels, encounter us at every step. For example, it turns out that Modern Engl. un- is a symbiosis of two prefixes. One has broad Indo-European connections and is the same in English and Latin. It occurs in adjectives, adverbs, and participles, such as unkind, unkindly, undaunted, and can be appended with equal frequency to Germanic words (unwise, unfair, unfit, unheard-of) and to words of Romance origin (unable, unpromising, undaunted, unimaginable). (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 11/28/2007
By Anatoly Liberman
A correspondent found the sentence (I am quoting only part of it) …stole a march on the old folks and made a flying trip to the home of… in a newspaper published in north Texas in 1913 and wonders what the phrase given above in boldface means. She notes that it occurs with some regularity in the clippings at her disposal. This idiom is well-known, and I have more than once seen it in older British and American books, so I was not surprised to find it in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). To steal (gain, get) a march on means “get ahead of to the extent of a march; gain a march by stealth,” hence figuratively “outsmart, outwit, bypass; avoid.” The earliest citation in the OED is dated to 1707. As far as I can judge, only the variant with steal has continued into the present, mainly or even only in its figurative meaning. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 11/21/2007
By Anatoly Liberman
The etymology of the adjective pretty has been investigated reasonably well. Many questions still remain unanswered, but it is the development of the word’s senses rather than its origin that amazes students of language. The root of pretty, which must have sounded approximately like prat, meant “trick.” Judging by the cognates of pretty in Dutch, Low (Northern) German and Old Icelandic, the adjectives derived from this root first meant “sly, crafty, roguish, sportive.” Before us is evidently a slang word that has been current in Northwestern Europe since long ago, a circumstance that can perhaps account for some of the vagaries of its history. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 11/7/2007
By Anatoly Liberman
Confusing as English spelling may be, it has one well-publicized, even if questionable, merit: it tells us something about the history of the language. For example, sea and see were indeed pronounced differently in the past. This fact is of no importance to a modern speaker of English but can be put to use in a course “Spelling as Archeology.” In other cases, modern spelling only puzzles and irritates. For example, most of my undergraduate students believe that the preterit of lead is lead (like read ~ read), though they never misspell bled and fled. We are heirs not only to the pronunciations of long ago but also to the absurdities of what may be called learned tradition. (more…)
By: Stephanie,
on 10/31/2007
By Anatoly Liberman
Looking Back
As always, I am grateful for comments. So far, I have received the most responses to my post on the death of the adverb. One of our correspondents notes that students in creative writing tend to put adverbs at the beginning of the sentence, as in “Happily, she met her boyfriend at the mall.” Sorrowfully, I have also noticed this mannerism, and not only in students’ stories. The adverb, nearly wiped out by morphology in American English, is doing “just fine” in syntax. For instance, the authors of scholarly publications love the word undoubtedly; they use it when arguments are weak and doubt exists. Obviously, certainly, and definitely serve the same purpose. Actually has become the bane of our life. (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 10/24/2007
One of the best things about working at Oxford is all the brilliant coworkers I have. A while ago I found out that our copywriter, John Brehm is also a wonderful poet. Naturally, I harassed him until he agreed to share a poem with you! Today we are honored to publish “Prophecies: Right Here, Right Now.” John Brehm is also the author of Sea of Faith, which won the 2004 Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. John is a freelance copywriter who works part-time for OUP. (more…)
By: Kirsty,
on 6/21/2007
By Kirsty OUP-UK
Saturday 16 June 2007 saw the Oxford offices of OUP transformed for one night only: the Oxford University Press Ball. These momentous nights only take place every few years, so it really is a special occasion. Below, for your viewing pleasure, are some photographs from the night in question. (more…)
By: Rebecca,
on 6/8/2007
Evan Schnittman (an OUPblogger) gets interviewed at BEA on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Have an itch for prank calls? Have Nancy Drew call your friends. (Yes, someone did have Nancy Drew call me. Was it you?) (more…)
I loved that movie...Call me fangirly, but I LOVE Zac Efron! <3