Wednesday, August 02, 2017

Arts Journal - Words

American English Is Swallowing Up Britain, As The British Shrug And Say ‘Whatever’

“As we approach 2020, the American words the British invited into their homes are in danger of taking over. It has become possible to imagine a time – 2120 would seem a plausible and arithmetically neat guesstimate – when American English absorbs the British version completely. The child will have eaten its mother, but only because the mother insisted.” Peter Preston blames the telly TV and Netflix.

It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged, That Jane Austen’s Most Famous Sentence Is Perfect For Riffing On

Geoff Nunberg: “If you’re looking to add a literary touch to your article on pension schemes or emergency contraceptives, you’re not going to get very far with ‘Call me Ishmael.’ But ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ is always available as an elegant replacement for ‘As everybody knows’ when you want to introduce some banal truism.”

68-Year-Old Writer Files Age Discrimination Complaint Against Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Workshop officials deny that age is used as a factor in the consideration of any application, according to the university’s emailed responses to Thomson. All applicants, instead, are evaluated based on their writing samples. Dan Thomson, however, maintains that application statistics collected by the university show that, over the past five years, none of the 105 applicants age 51 or older were accepted into the workshop’s fiction program. Nearly half of the 135 fiction students accepted from 2013 to 2017 were between the ages of 18 and 25.

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