Michael Erard
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"Miscellany"
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 →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 [...]
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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 →Veteran US diplomat Richard Holbrooke died yesterday after being hospitalized and going into heart surgery to repair a torn aorta, and today the newspapers are full of eulogies and obituaries. But I’m interested in reports of what his last words were. According to the Washington Post:
As Mr. Holbrooke was sedated for surgery, family [...]
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Walking today along the Eastern Promenade’s lower trail, I stopped by the Yacht Services to show Iver (in my backpack) a boomtruck that was stacking floats, an autumn task. The kid loves wheels and trucks, and the older man and woman who had also been checking out the truck, loved the baby, made googly eyes, [...]
Continue Reading →Reading Richard Boyd’s 1979 essay, What is a metaphor a metaphor for?, where he says this:
Experts play a crucial role in reference for theoretical terms (and relatively esoteric terms generally) precisely because it is they who provide nonpassive epistemic access to the referents of those terms.
Which is a nonpassively esoteric way of saying [...]
Continue Reading →Also, unfortunately, the Globe & Mail designers had no way (or so they claimed) of representing the IPA symbol for “schwa,” so it ran with my note, “schwa,” in what should be a phonemic transcription of a Ket and ancestral Athabaskan word.
Embarrassing.
Continue Reading →The Globe & Mail apparently published my piece about Ed Vajda’s “discovery” of a new language family, though they not only keep most of their content behind a wall but evidently hide everything from Google crawlers. Searches on google.com and google.ca turned up no sign of the piece. Even the search function of their [...]
Continue Reading →On this blog I feel as if I’m mostly moving information around, which isn’t that satisfying to write, and it’s no fun to read, I admit. So I’m going to work harder to add some value to what I put here. But for right now, I wanted to pass on several Our Fathers written in [...]
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Continue Reading →From the NYTBR review of David Rieff’s memoir about his mother’s death:
In a car returning from receiving the terrible diagnosis, he writes, she looks out the window, and “‘Wow’ she said, ‘Wow.’” It tells us something important, surely, that one of the most articulate women of the last century should say, in the face [...]
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