“As a speaker of a small language, it can be alarming to hear the rapidly increasing influx of new words from a dominant force. Back in 2000, linguistics researcher Sylfest Lomheim caused upheaval by claiming the Norwegian language wouldn’t survive the next century. Is this the beginning of the end?” On the Anglicization of Norwegian.
Beginning of the End
Keanu Reeves, Poet
for actors who’ve considered suicide/when the matrix isn’t enuf: Keanu Reeves, who some years ago raised hackles when he played Shakespeare’s melancholy Dane, has now written a book-length poem called Ode to Happiness that pokes fun at excessive melancholy. “I draw a hot sorrow bath/In my despair room,” it begins.
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Vote for The Millions!
A number of the best essays from the last year on The Millions have been nominated for the 3 Quarks Daily 2010 Arts & Literature Prize. We need your votes to get these Millions essays through to the next round! Please take a few seconds and vote for your favorite. Then tell your friends and family to vote too!
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A Boor
Recommended Reading: This primer on how to explain without mansplaining.
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Valleyspeak
Curious to know what the new Most Irritating Word is? Not many people agree on the number one offender, but for a while a top choice was “literally,” which evolved so much over the past few decades that the Oxford English Dictionary revised its official definition. At Slate, Katy Waldman proposed that we give the title to “amazeballs.” Now, in The New Republic, Judith Shulevitz makes the case for “disruptive,” the scourge of the tech world.
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Gothic Roots
“If Gothic literature had a family tree, its twisted gnarled branches chock-full of imperiled, swooning heroines and mysterious monks, with ghosts who sit light on the branches, and Frankenstein’s monster who sits heavy, with troops of dwarves, and winking nuns, and stunted, mostly nonflammable babies, at its base would sit Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.” Carrie Frye writes for Longreads about the history and personality behind the first Gothic novel, which turns 250 this year.
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Patron-Driven Acquisition
Librarians might frown on P.D.A. in the library, that is, Public Displays of Affection by canoodling college couples. But another kind of P.D.A. might bring a different, more welcome sort of disruption to the library: Patron-Driven Acquisition, a model of e-book licensing that aims to relieve library purchasing agents from spending thousands on books nobody will end up reading.
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Tuesday New Releases
David Remnick’s biography of President Obama, The Bridge is out. (The Times explained how Remnick finds time to run the New Yorker and write a 700-page biography of a sitting president.) Also new: Another chronicle of the collapse, The End of Wall Street by talented financial journalist Roger Lowenstein; Nobel laureate Jose Saramago’s “blog book” The Notebook; another in the posthumously published oeuvre of Irène Némirovsky, Dimanche and Other Stories; the latest from A.L. Kennedy, What Becomes; and Tom Rachman’s touted debut The Imperfectionists.
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Old English isn’t recognizable to most modern speakers. Heck, I once saw a girl post in Yahoo! Answers asking where she could find a video copy of a Charles Dickens novel because she couldn’t understand such “old” English. And that’s only a little over a century of linguistic evolution! Yet ,despite people like her, a lot of English speakers can still enjoy Robert Burns (even if they’re not a teensey bit Scottish) and William Shakespeare (who is a good deal older than Charles Dickens).
Point being: maybe day-to-day Norwegian will sound more Anglican. helpful in a “global village.” keep a good literary tradition and “classic” Norwegian will still be there.
Oh, and if it helps, the native Menominee language nearly went extinct in the mid-20th Century, with only two native speakers left. It’s now rebounded and probably has a few thousand speakers. How many Norwegian speakers are there?