March 2012
7 tags
5 tags
8 tags
9 tags
“[W]hen a man is my date to a gay rights event there is an uncomfortable and...”
– Emily Dievendorf: Bisexual Invisibility Has Dangerous Consequences (via sexisnottheenemy)
5 tags
9 tags
10 tags
8 tags
6 tags
11 tags
“Just as we would be inestimably poorer to be denied the opportunity to see...”
– John McWhorter, The Power of Babel. (via booksnippets)
BAM. This, right here. (Is it bad form to reblog my own book-quotes blog so frequently? I say no.)
7 tags
7 tags
7 tags
7 tags
“Books can be possessive, can’t they? You’re walking around in a bookstore and a...”
– Sarah Addison Allen, “The Sugar Queen,” p. 180 (via melancholytimelord)
7 tags
failure33object asked: Re: Illustrated covers... Have you seen the series they have going at Barnes and Noble? They are so pretty...
5 tags
8 tags
“When a language is dying, then, its last speakers typically render it in the...”
– John McWhorter, The Power of Babel. (via booksnippets) — Excellent, sad metaphor.
7 tags
6 tags
8 tags
8 tags
9 tags
8 tags
6 tags
7 tags
8 tags
booksnippets:
“The die is cast—I grew up seeing almost only single negatives on the page and thus internalizing a sense that ‘English English’ was strictly the written form. Only intellectually can I claim to have escaped this; as a human being, my spiritual relationship to double negatives will remain forever tainted by the vagaries of sociological evaluation. My point is simply that this...
6 tags
6 tags
10 tags
“A true understanding of how our tens of thousands of dialects of six thousand...”
– John McWhorter, The Power of Babel. (via booksnippets)
9 tags
7 tags
“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass...”
– Don DeLillo, White Noise (via constraints-of-color)
8 tags
8 tags
5 tags
9 tags
8 tags
booksnippets:
“[In the Fula language of West Africa], there is a separate gender conveying not just ‘little’ but what translates perfectly as nothing other than ‘shitty little’: shitty little monkey: baa-ngum.”
—John McWhorter, The Power of Babel.
I’d love to speak a language with a “shitty little” gender.
5 tags
7 tags
7 tags
8 tags
7 tags
7 tags
8 tags
6 tags
booksnippets:
“Gender markers in languages such as French, Spanish, German, and Russian stand out in that they generally do not express any real-world concept. Pure ornament, they just sit there. Of course, these markers at times distinguish a biologically male entity from a female one: French chat versus chatte ‘female cat.’ But when we come to the usual cases, like the Spanish un ojo ‘an eye’...
6 tags
7 tags
6 tags
7 tags
6 tags
