To be a great writer:
know everything about adjectives and punctuation (rhythm) have moral intelligence — which creates true authority in a writer
—Susan Sontag, (2/6/74)
![“I’ve grown numb to exclamation points.”
Tom Toro at The New Yorker
[via Twisted Sifter]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4scpyNZsO1qjsf5ho1_500.jpg)
NEW WORD ORDER
Translation is an art beset with linguistic pitfalls
Each language has its own tics. The French are so fond of long, rambling sentences that when you use a French keyboard, you have to press the shift key to get a full stop – yet the semi-colon is right there. French writers also love ellipses and exclamation marks to a degree that, were you to reproduce these punctuation elements faithfully in an English translation, it would risk looking like the work of a 14-year-old. The rhythms of other languages are also obviously, fundamentally different from English.
Read full article at the Financial Times
Word for Word
Roget intended for his readers to immerse themselves in the orderly classification system of the thesaurus so that they might better understand the full possibilities for human expression. As Roget first conceived it, the book did not even have an alphabetical index—he included it later as an afterthought. His goal, then, was not to provide a simple method of replacing synonym A with synonym B but instead to encourage a fuller understanding of the world of ideas and the language representing it.
36 Adjectives Describing Light
A bright constellation of adjectives referring to various qualities of light, or other phenomena related to light, is brought to light in the list below. Quite a few of them, fromlucent to lustrous (and evenilluminating), stem from the Latin word lucere, meaning “to shine,” while many others begin with the consonant gl-, betraying their descent from a proto-Germanic word with the same meaning.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein
