language
Impediment
First Prize winner of the 15th Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest. Read more
Iberian Duet
The assumption of mutual comprehensibility between speakers of Spanish and Portuguese creates a culture of mutual ignorance. Read more
Fighting Words
A look back at World War I as the first great twentieth-century pollution of language. Read more
Language and Nation Now
Do shared languages form the natural boundaries of any nation in the world? Read more
Paul Joseph
A Brief History of Tags
A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations. Read more
Yehuda Elberg: In Memoriam
A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all. Read more
Zero Drag and Genius
Mandelbrot reviews The Wage Slave's Glossary written by Joshua Glenn and Mark Kingwell and illustrated by Seth. Read more
Life in Language
For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here. Read more
Angsty Tear-Assed Man-Dresses
A list of words gleaned from Sarah Boxer’s favourite blogs, listed in “Blogs,” an essay by Sarah Boxer published in the New York Review of Books on February 14, 2008. Read more
O Rose
What happens when you take a famous poem and run it through a series of European language translations and back to English? Read more
The Authoritative Field Guide to: Language Vermin
Want to know what a misplaced modifier looks like? How about a dangling participle? Look no further. Read more
Savage Chickens: Badass Names for Common Household Items
Doug Savage turns his daydreams into doodles. Read more
The Art of Renaming
Why does one culture give a flower a pretty, poetic name, while another culture names it in a seemingly derogatory way? Read more
Latinocanadá
Military coups, civil wars, and NAFTA are the cause of trilingual labels in Canadian big box stores. Read more
Karl Kraus, Everybody's Neighbour
He is one of the strangest creatures of that strangest of literary bestiaries. Read more
Eros the Bittersweet
Ann Carson has written a sensual and thought-provoking book about desire and called it Eros the Bittersweet (Dalkey Archive Press). My friends tell me you can't theorize about desire, and my lovers tell me (when I begin to theorize about desire) that Read more
wlappe on flickr.com
Becoming French
For an English-speaking Canadian who has been exposed to French from an early age, Paris is the most disorienting city in Europe. It is grandiose, but it is mundane. Read more
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