At Lit Hub, Jesse Sheidlower considers the world “Fuck.” “In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one […]
In normal times, I’d be writing about ten comics I read that I liked this year and haven’t written about yet. But it is, as is so often said, not normal times and I am not entirely sure what the new normal will be both here at the […]
The Future Fire shares and annotates the 55 greetings on the Voyager Golden Record. “This is my best attempt at listing all the greetings and languages on the Voyager Golden Record. I’ve annotated the bits I’m not sure about or that seem incomplete. This is what we, in […]
William J. Rapaport shares and documents the history behind a sentence: “Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.” (via @booksadventures)
“[T]he Reflectance Transformation Imaging System, which uses a combination of 76 separate photographic lights and computer processing to capture every groove and notch on the surface of the clay tablets.” Dr. Jacob Dahl, director of the Ancient World Research Cluster, and a team of researchers capture images of […]
Andrew O’Hehir reads a book about artificial language and decides: “Tolkien’s languages, one might say, form the missing link between Esperanto and Klingon.”