Michael Erard
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I want to put together a multilingual video for Babel No More, and I need your help. I’m envisioning a video where people from all over the world each contribute a line from a story in a different language, and that these are edited together.
Below is a set of instructions, and the script.
1. [...]
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Out of the blue today dropped this awesome review of Babel No More from Kirkus Reviews:
BABEL NO MORE
The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners
Author: Erard, Michael
Erard (Um…: Slips, Stumbles and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean, 2007) reports the results of his attempts to locate people who are [...]
Continue Reading →Before too long, this blog and the whole website are going to have a different look, and I’m going to ramp up my posting frequency in a bid to gain eyeballs and attention before Babel No More comes out.
I’d really love to be asked someday what threads run through Um… and Babel, because part [...]
Continue Reading →This blog gets spam comments from time to time, congratulating me on thoroughness of my observations and the relevance of my blog. But today brought a new approach: critical spam.
The next time I read a blog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this one. I imply, I know it [...]
Continue Reading →Going through old boxes the other night, came across this from Roland Barthes that I copied a decade ago:
I am increasingly convinced, both in writing and in teaching, that the fundamental operation of this loosening method is, if one writes, fragmentation, and, if one teaches, digression, or, to put it in a preciously ambiguous [...]
Continue Reading →Like any writer who wonders how his work is doing in the commercial world, I keep my eye on Um’s Amazon rankings, where I see that the hardcover is outselling the paperback. I know why that’s attractive: it’s a bit cheaper, plus it’s a hardcover, which projects the bookish essence of the book. You get [...]
Continue Reading →The other day, I got an email out of the blue from the managing editor at a Big Magazine that’s often associated with literature and the South. Do you have anything we can publish? she asked. I love it when that happens.
Continue Reading →My essay in the New York Times today is the product of a month’s worth of naptimes. The baby’s, that is, not my own. I have to say, though, that my dreams over the first year of his life have been so vivid and intense, every night packed with dreamtime craziness, probably because the [...]
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Please help me check this, and send me email with corrections/suggestions. For my hyperpolyglot book, I’m trying to give people a sense of the location of Broca’s, Wernicke’s, and associated language networks by mapping them onto the globe. The brain isn’t a sphere; it’s more ovoid. This means the placements are approximate, but they’re meant [...]
Continue Reading →1. I looked at my Nielsen Bookscan numbers for Um... in all of its formats, and realized that
2. in Denver, five paperbacks were sold at the same week before Thanksgiving, so
3. I took a chance and called Tattered Cover on the off-chance the sales happened there, and on the phone discovered
4. [...]
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