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A Parish for Slang Bedouins, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
November 4, 2014
On the Shelf
John Frederick Lewis,
A Bedouin
, ca. 1841.
Edgar Allan Poe filed for bankruptcy in 1842. Here’s
a long list of his debts
, with creditors listed in Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York, and orderly columns of numbers that grow large enough to give you a sympathetic panic attack.
“If ambitious writers work at the boundaries of the written language (as they should), then they ought do it from a path of mastery, not ignorance; broken rules carry no power if writers and readers don’t notice the transgressions.
Proper usage shows us where the earth is
, so that, when the time comes, we know what it means to fly.”
Not unrelatedly: “
Dickens published an essay on slang
, probably by George Augustus Sala. The 1853 article expressed the view that either slang should be ‘banished, prohibited’ or that there should be a New Dictionary that would ‘give a local habitation and a name to all the little by-blows of language skulking and rambling about our speech, like the ragged little Bedouins about our shameless streets, and give them a settlement and a parish.’ ”
In which Ann Patchett reminds readers of the
New York Times
that
she’s not married to her dog
.
“I found it odd that there had never been a scientist as a Man Booker judge. There have been many non-literary types amongst the judges: a former spy, a former dancer, a Downton Abbey actor—but science, apparently, was a step too far.
Until this year, when I joined the judging panel
.”
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