![“Get the hell out of Dodge” is a reference to Dodge City, Kansas, which was a favorite location for westerns in the early to mid 20th century. Most memorably, the phrase was made famous by the TV show “Gunsmoke,” in which villians were often commanded to “get the hell out of Dodge.” The phrase took on its current meaning in the 1960s and 70s when teenagers began to use it in its current form.
[via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcv96on39W1qjsf5ho1_400.jpg)
“Get the hell out of Dodge” is a reference to Dodge City, Kansas, which was a favorite location for westerns in the early to mid 20th century. Most memorably, the phrase was made famous by the TV show “Gunsmoke,” in which villians were often commanded to “get the hell out of Dodge.” The phrase took on its current meaning in the 1960s and 70s when teenagers began to use it in its current form.
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The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present of absent) communicate without words.
” Italo Calvino / Six Memos For the Next Millennium / 1988
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
Here are four books by four writers featured in the latest issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. This is a companion post to my review of “Means of Communication” (Spring 2012)
House of Holes by Nicholson Baker
Shandee finds a friendly arm at a granite quarry. Ned drops down a hole in a golf course. So begins Nicholson Baker’s fuse-blowing sexual escapade—a modern-day Hieronymus Boschian bacchanal set in a pleasure resort where normal rules don’t apply. House of Holes, one of the most talked-about books in recent memory, is a gleefully provocative novel sure to surprise, amuse, and arouse.
You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
A programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology, Jaron Lanier was a pioneer in digital media, and among the first to predict the revolutionary changes it would bring to our commerce and culture. Now, with the Web influencing virtually every aspect of our lives, he offers this provocative critique of how digital design is shaping society, for better and for worse.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin’s writings represent a long career of literary, scientific, and political efforts over a lifetime which extended nearly the entire eighteenth century. Franklin’s achievements range from inventing the lightning rod to publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack to signing the Declaration of Independence. In his own lifetime he knew prominence not only in America but in Britain and France as well. This volume includes Franklin’s reflections on such diverse questions as philosophy and religion, social status, electricity, American national characteristics, war, and the status of women. Nearly sixty years separate the earliest writings from the latest, an interval during which Franklin was continually balancing between the puritan values of his upbringing and the modern American world to which his career served as prologue.
The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary — and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.
![History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946 [via Lapham’s Quarterly]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3m900HNkc1qjsf5ho1_500.jpg)
History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
—Theodor Adorno, c. 1946 [via Lapham’s Quarterly]
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.
Cultural Connectives: Understanding Arab Culture
What typography has to do with cross-cultural understanding and linguistic minimalism.
More at brain pickings
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
