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Not the most exciting headline for a blog post, no. But I realize it’s been a long time since I posted anything and I don’t want the blog to go too quiet. Twitter and other outlets have taken up some energy that blogging uses, true, but I value having a space in which I can… Continue reading »

The other day, meeting with a publicist from a scholarly publishing house, I asked her a question: Does the press she works for think about the gender breakdown of its authors? I asked because I often do an informal VIDA-style count of the number of male and female authors represented in book catalogs. I do… Continue reading »

…surprising things happen. For instance, lexicographers can track word lookups and peg them to news. A celebrity death or political debate now becomes a “vocabulary event.” I spent the last few weeks talking to lexicographers about how dictionary-making changes when it goes digital (“In the Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us“). For dictionary makers, going… Continue reading »

Never has a literary genre been more zombified than the short story. It’s dead! It’s alive! Dead, alive! Here are the latest conflicting diagnoses: The New York Times’s Leslie Kaufman says that short stories are alive and kicking, souped up by digital delivery (“A Good Fit for Today’s Little Screens: Short Stories,” Feb. 15, 2013):… Continue reading »

Rage, rage against the verbing of the noun (and the adjective). I’m sorry to have to tell you that at a recent publishers’ confab I heard speakers talk about “solutioning” and “obsoleting.” “Innovate” as a transitive verb is bad enough. (The dictionary says it’s okay, and I’m not going to argue with the dictionary.) But… Continue reading »