By: Steve Novak,
on 6/14/2010
Here's a quick little video I put together of a sixth grader reviewing "Forts: Fathers and Sons."
He was more than a little nervous about the whole thing - which is obvious.
A big thanks to david for even agreeing to do it!
Steve
By: Rebecca,
on 4/26/2010
Alexandra D’Arcy is a sociolinguist by training and specializes in the study of language variation and change. She is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and the Director of the newly formed Sociolinguistics Lab at the University of Victoria. This is the third installation in her new monthly column so be sure to check back next month.
Like. Who likes it? When I ask this of my students a few bashful hands do get raised, but largely the question is met with scorn, derision, and unabashed judgment. And my students aren’t alone in these sentiments. Popular media is replete with complaints concerning this latest scourge on the English language. Newspapers, magazines, television news, talk shows, blogs and comics regularly decry its ‘weed-style’ growth and its ability to ‘drive out […] vocabulary as candy expels vegetables’ (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, January 2010). Like, however, is misunderstood.
We have very strong beliefs about why we don’t like like: it makes us seem vacuous and inarticulate. We also know who the primary offenders are: young people, and adolescent girls in particular. And we know who to blame: not just Californians but Americans. We are convinced that like is new, meaningless, and ultimately, a blight on the English language.
There are, however, a number of reasons to actually like like, or, at the very least, to respect it (or simply to hate it a little less than we currently do). I know the urge to scoff is strong, but I ask you to bear with me and suspend judgement for a moment… or at least until you follow my next blogs. You never know, you just may come to appreciate that perhaps like has a place in the language after all.
Consider, for example, that like isn’t new. ‘Ungrammatical’ uses have been a part of English for at least 200 years. In 1840 De Quincey railed against the vulgarity of like, stating that utterances such as ‘Why like, it’s gaily nigh like to four mile like’ were typical of uneducated speech. Sound familiar? More recently, like was a staple of the beat and the jazz counterculture movements of the 1950s and 60s.
Nor is like uniquely American. Today, octa- and nonagenarians in UK villages use it regularly, saying such things as ‘It was only like a step up to this wee loft’ and ‘We were like walking along that road’. We also have recordings of first generation New Zealanders saying things such as ‘Like until his death, he used to write to me frequently’ and ‘Like you’d need to see the road to believe it.’ Are these speakers emulating the Valley Girls and Surfers of California?
Lastly, teenagers aren’t the only users of like. Adolescents and early twenty-somethings do use it more than say, 40-year-olds, but the use of like crosses all age barriers. Of course, there’s nothing noteworthy about that at all. In any language change adolescents are at the forefront, and like has been developing new meanings and uses in English since at least the 1800s. The truth is that we were all adolescents at some point. So if we’re going to point our fingers at today’s teenagers, we should think about what we were saying when we were their age.
Coming next: like and its place in English grammar.
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By: Beth Gallaway,
on 2/26/2008
Matthews, Elizabeth. Different Like Coco. Candlewick Press, 2007. 32 pp. ISBN 978-0-7636-2548-1. $16.99More than anything, Coco Chanel's life story is a tale about using what you've got and and building on your strengths and resou
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By: Susan Smith,
on 6/20/2007
By: Ted Dawson,
on 4/23/2007
Harvard Law School attorney Stu Rees did his thesis on comic strip syndicate contracts. Stu represented me and several other cartoonists and helped change the way syndicate contracts were written and negotiated. Here's a link to his thesis.
The Graphic Artists Guild keeps an eye on what types of contracts illustrators are having to sign. It offers a good resource for understanding contracts as well as offering some real-life contracts as examples. GAG Contract Monitor.
The Authors' Guild has Negotiating tips for nine typical contract clauses.
Famed Illustrator C. F. Payne has some strong thoughts on Work-for-Hire agreements. While hard to avoid, WFH agreements remove an illustrator's legal authorship to his or her work. You're not just selling rights, nor simply the original art, but your very claim to authorship. Not a new article but an important one, especially since Payne's career has skyrocketing (at least compared to mine!) since he wrote this article, indicating it's not necessary to sell out in order to make a living.
Our best luck is with clients who do not have a boilerplate contract. Oftentimes clients who do have a contract have "borrowed" it from someone else, rather than having an attorney draft one for them. In any case, it is better for the Illustrator to have his or her own boilerplate, often referred to as a Letter of Agreement (see GAG Contract Monitor above). This allows the Illustrator to have more control in the negotiation process, and creates a better opportunity to explain the terms for usage of rights.
It is best to grant usage rights as specifically as possible. For example, Exclusive North American print rights for one year in March 2007 issue of Passing Classical Gas magazine. After that point, all rights revert back to you.
Limit the number of unpaid revisions to one or two. Chances are this will halve your annual workload and double your income for the year! I'm only slightly exaggerating.
How do you know if you've negotiated a good deal? If afterward you don't feel like you just screwed yourself. Never be afraid to say No and ask for what you are worth.
Ted
