Modern American Usage

laughingsquid:

What Is This Unknown Pleasure, A Joy Division Album T-Shirt For the Tumblr Generation

Or a CP 1919 t-shirt for those of us who don’t dig New Wave.

(via runjuliet)

oupacademic:

Where does the word “aloof” come from? There’s a clue in the picture. (via Panning for etymological gold: “aloof” | OUPblog)

theparisreview:

“I had never been a particularly good liar, having been blessed with a round moon of a face that registered every thought. But as I assimilated among the English, a people with whom I assumed I’d get along very well, being of clearly similar native-of-Boston stock and having a love of nineties Britpop, it was becoming clear to me that I had a more pressing social problem: I did not know how to tell a white lie.”

Elisabeth Donnelly on her semester abroad.

polyglotted:

In case any of you are interested in the history of Persian.

Gilbert Lazard is one of my idols… like… seriously… along with John R Perry and Bruce Ingham.

lulz-time:

This post has been featured on a 1000notes.com blog.

Harvard gave me a full ride. Simmons charged me full price.

(via bakerandsladen)

(Source: misskayvee, via lubetzky)

(Source: myimaginarybrooklyn)

ex-tabulis:

jasonwdean:

The convenience of the public is always to be set before the ease of the cataloger. - Charles Amni Cutter

Cutter, Charles A., W. P. Cutter, Worthington Chauncey Ford, Philip Lee Phillips, and Oscar George Theodore Sonneck. Rules for a Dictionary Catalog. Washington [D.C.]: G.P.O., 1904, p. 6.

Ed. Note: This is my cataloger’s mantra, my first law of cataloging.

Ditto for lots of other stuff like library websites! Remember, “we are not our patrons.” - Krista Godfrey

No! I say. Whether from Cutter or Ranganathan (or from some IFLA-sponsored damnation of the two) we should advance as we must and educate the user along. Simplification is condescension.

That said, I adore this image.

(via thehannahmachine)

(Source: tay-tay-on-tumblr, via bookporn)

I am troubled when we discuss female writers by the paucity of our examples. Some deserving names, Barnes and Didion for example, are always trotted out. If the speaker is pretentious (woot woot for my fellows) we might hear about Cixous or Mary Oliver—over whom, thank god, Anne Carson is lately ascending. Can we do no better? Here are my proposed additions for (Anglo-American) prose: Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Iris Murdoch, and (forever) Flannery. Maybe add Munro for the New Yorker crowd. Braddon for the graduate students. Rowling for … whomever.

I won’t go on about female poets, especially now that I notice how … umm … uninteresting is my list of prose writers. Let me instead predict that the 21st century belongs to female poets. Keep an eye out for Elisa Gabbert and Mary Walker Graham.