Are E-Books Truly Different?

29 May 2012

Mignon Fogarty (a. k. a. The Grammar Girl) makes an excellent point about being surprised by an e-book’s ending. But I wonder if the question is not “is it harder to write an e-book?” but rather “how does the format of the e-book alter the stylistic requirements?”

Storytelling techniques do depend on the medium. Storytelling in television or the movies is very different from that of the stage or the physical novel. It should be no surprise that e-books, the good ones at least, would be written differently than physical books. Of course, e-books and novels are a lot more similar than novels and television are, so the differences are likely to be more subtle, but they should still be there.

I have no profound insights here on the future direction of literature; I’m just musing on the idea that the new form will impose new storytelling techniques and structures. Also, it’s probably too early to tell what those changes would be anyway. E-books are too new, and there are likely to be radical changes in the way they are formatted as we discover how people best consume e-text.

A Letter to a Prospective Lexicographer

18 May 2012

This blog post is a week old, but it’s not time sensitive.

While the particulars may be a bit different, this sounds like every single place I have ever worked. As to the degree requirement, with most jobs I’ve discovered that what a person majored in is completely irrelevant. If your studies prepped you with particular knowledge, that will be obsolete or forgotten in a few years anyway. What’s more important is the ability to think critically, to write well, and the ability to learn quickly as you do the job.

Tip o’ the hat to Erin McKean.

E-Books and the Future of Publishing

1 May 2012

I missed this a few days ago, but Timothy Egan has a thought-provoking piece in the New York Times on e-books and the future of publishing.

E-books, and the way they are currently produced and distributed, are not an unalloyed good. They have their drawbacks, but Egan’s main thrust is quite correct. The doomsayers who evoke the specter of a coming cultural wastelands are flat out wrong. There is this:

In their annual report last August, the Association of American Publishers reported that overall revenues, and number of books sold in all formats, were up sizably in three years since 2008. Without e-books, the numbers would have been flat, or declined.

One-fifth of all American adults reported reading an e-book in the past year, according to an optimistic report from the Pew Center. And those digital consumers read far more books on average—about 24 a year—than the dead-tree consumers.

Another surprise: e-book readers also buy lots of paper books. The buyers of digital tomes “read more books in all formats,” Pew reported.

And Egan also notes the resurgence of independent bookstores.

The lesson here is not to confuse the business model with the thing itself. The traditional business model used by publishers is doomed, not publishing itself.

[Tip ‘o the Hat: Andrew Sullivan]

Hen: Swedish Gender Neutral Pronoun

12 April 2012

Slate has an article on Sweden’s “new” gender neutral pronoun. Hen can be used when one wishes to avoid han (he) and hon (she).

First a couple of comments about the journalistic style. For one thing, the headline gets it wrong. There is nothing “new” about the pronoun. Right there in the article it says that the word has been floating around the edges of Swedish for half a century. Second, the lede is buried. If the article is about the pronoun, as the headline suggests, why is it not mentioned until paragraph five, after discussing how the Swedish Bowling Association promotes gender equality? It turns out the article really isn’t about the pronoun; it’s about the politics of gender equality in Sweden, which is a perfectly fine topic, but in that case have the headline emphasize that and not the linguistic angle.

It is good to see, however, that idiotic language commentary is not confined to Anglophones. Whatever your opinion of the advisability of hen might be, the addition of the pronoun won’t destroy the Swedish language or confuse children about sexuality, as some quoted in the article suggest. Both language and kid’s brains are resilient and highly adaptable. They both will weather this tempest just fine.

Will the pronoun succeed? It’s unlikely. Structural words, like pronouns, articles, and conjunctions, are the most resistant to change. The last time English added a pronoun was she in twelfth century, and even that was just a shift in pronunciation of the Old English sio, not the wholesale adoption of a new word, and as the article notes, hen has been around since the 1960s and really been nothing more than a curiosity. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs invade and rampage through the language like marauding Huns, but pronouns, conjunctions, articles, and prepositions are bulwarks against the raging hordes of lexical fashion. A major push to get Swedes to start using hen might have an impact, but probably not. It’ll be easier to revolutionize bowling.

Do We Need Stories?

1 April 2012

Tim Parks has a nice reflection on the importance, or perhaps lack thereof, of the novel and stories in our lives over at the New York Review of Books Blog.

You may wonder what this has to do with word origins. To answer that, here is an extract from Parks’s piece:

But there are also words that come complete with entire narratives, or rather that can’t come without them. The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost, is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me. Here not only is the word invented—all words are—but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.

It’s an engaging piece, and I largely agree with Parks’s conclusions, but I’m not sure I would frame the essay in the same way. It’s not that stories are important or necessary, it’s that they are inescapable. Humans are storytelling organisms. It’s what we do.

[Hat tip to Chris Pugh]