Michael Erard
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"Published Work"
The archive of almost everything I’ve written for the Texas Observer is here.
As you might be able to tell from today’s slew of nostalgic posts, I’m waiting on some answers, directions, and permissions, and there’s nothing more pathetically sentimental than a writer stewed in his own juice.
Continue Reading →My review essay honing in on William Safire’s Political Dictionary also showed up on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
It begins like this:
Words are the most familiar part of language, because it’s words we’re most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your [...]
Continue Reading →Why the Times spells “creole language” as “Creole language” is beyond me, using a proper noun to refer to the generic. Will it confuse people? It’s not a common spelling. Derek Bickerton (whose memoir I reviewed for the Times) spells it “Creole.” Anyway, I pointed it out to the editor. Don’t blame me.
I [...]
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Four years ago, I published a story in Technology Review about the National Virtual Translation Center, an FBI project to use technology to link contract linguists and give them tools to do translation and analysis jobs for the 16 intelligence agencies. I recently discovered that this piece (which to date is the only piece of [...]
Continue Reading →A short piece I did for the Texas Observer is here.
If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now [...]
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