Lucky Caedmon

Caedmon, the first poet in English whose name we know, learned the art of song in a dream. According to Bede's Historia, Caedmon was an illiterate cowherd who couldn't sing. When, during this or that merry feast, it was decided that everyone in turn would contribute a song, Caedmon would withdraw in embarrassment, maybe claiming he had to go look after the animals. One night, somebody tries to pass Caedmon the harp after dinner, and he flees to the stables. There among the ungulates he drifts off and is visited by a mysterious figure, probably God. "You must sing to me," says God. "I can't," Caedmon says, if not in these words. "That's why I'm sleeping in the stable instead of drinking mead with my friends around the fire. But God (or an angel or demon - the text is vague) keeps demanding a song. "But what should I sing?" asks Caedmon, who I imagine is desperate, cold-sweating through a nightmare. "Sing the beginning of created things," instructs the visitor. Caedmon opens his mouth and, to his amazement, gorgeous verses praising God pour forth.

Caedmon awakes as a poet...

- Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

Coldplay lyrics...

can make me wish I didn't understand English.

- Jon Pareles, in The New York Times

(cf. almost every opera libretto ever.)

South African English

You say that the title pages of French translations of your books read, Traduit de l'americain. Mine say Traduit de l'anglais (Sud-Africaine).

- JM Coetzee, Here and Now: letters 2008-2011

Overheard at the Southbank

This is not the American Transatlantic, it's the English one.

- John Lucas, poet

Favourite footnotes: 8

(A good dictionary and usage dictionary are strongly recommended. You're insane if you don't own these already.)

- David Foster Wallace, teaching materials (English 183D, Pomona College, 2008), in The David Foster Wallace Reader

I am indebted to Google Translate

for the information - happened upon mid-translation of a 'German' poem - that the adjective 'englisch' means, among other things, 'angelic' (obv.) and 'medium-rare' (less obv.), and the proper noun 'die Engländer' can be 'monkey wrench'.

Only in English (literally) - GUEST ENTRY

"You know what happened last month, without anybody noticing? Webster's Dictionary expanded the definition of the word 'literally' to include the way it's commonly misused. So the thing is, we now no longer have a word in the English language that means 'literally'. 'Literally' doesn't have a synonym. So we're going to have the find a Latin word for it, and use it. But see, I don't know any Latin. So when I say that I am 'literally going to set fire to this building with you in it, before I hand over the keys to it', you don't know if I'm speaking figuratively or literally."

- The Newsroom

Also

'An Ode to Photocopies', by Nick Ripatrazone.

No.2 is a poem unto itself.

And also (again):

The role of the high school English teacher is also not to create a legion of English majors — God help us — but rather to pause a student’s hectic and harried day and get them thinking about words.

Or, on a lighter note...

(Un)Intentional symbolism

Answers to some light anecdotal research, undertaken by 16-year-old Bruce McAllister.*

Featuring - surprise, surprise - some pretty good examples of bad writing along with the sort of I'm-much-too-busy-for-this dickishness you get more often than you ought from big literary figures.

There are, of course,** one or two good remarks about symbolism.

__
* Fuller answers (along with interesting typed originals) available from the Paris Review Daily blog section.
** ...

Facebooks - III

Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D.H. Lawrence / Anglo-English      Attitudes - Geoff Dyer [I don't remember which came first. Most              probably read concurrently]
God Is Not Great: the case against religion - Christopher Hitchens
Flashman - George MacDonald Fraser
Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka [in      manuscript]
Apocalypse Now (Redux) script - John Milius
Histories - Herodotus [partial]
John Clare: A Biography - Jonathan Bate [unfinished]
In Ethiopia with a Mule - Dervla Murphy
Collected Poems - Zbigniew Herbert
Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie

"A passion for writing"

French man jailed for phoning and texting his ex 21,807 times

In which I particularly enjoyed the elucidatory photo of a man texting - rather politely, one might add - in English.

[with thanks to Frank MacMillan]

Books I've actually finished lately: 41

Longlisted - without the ugly sticker - for the Man Booker Prize 2014.

Also wins the ASH Smyth Prize for most uses of 'fuccan cunt' in an historical novel. (Probably.)

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 11

fnaerettan - (Old English) snoring

[at least according to Paul Kingsnorth, and the 'shadow' glossary of The Wake]

'Familiarizing English with kids'

Seriously.

lingua Dilliwalaha*

In a place - and a world - where a person's intellectual power is judged so much on the basis of their facility with the English language, I have chosen to make all characters in this book speak the same, standard, English so that their widely differing relationships to this language do not themselves become the issue.

- Rana Dasgupta, Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-first Century Delhi (forthcoming)
--
* full adjectival credit to Rob Stroud

Brilliant!

Bryan Appleyard was educated at Bolton School and King’s College, Cambridge and after graduating with a degree in English. He was Financial News Editor and Deputy Arts Editor at The Times from 1976 to 1984.

- from BryanAppleyard.com

'Americanisation' [sp?]

Can there, by the very definition of the word, be an English English spelling of 'Americanisation' [e.g.]?*

On the other hand, by the word's very origin - English, presumably - should there ever be an American?

[*Blogger says no. But I ain't throwing in the towel for that!]

InDefinition - 50

malappropriate, v. to abuse the English language

chagrin (e.g.)

If a word has long-since been adopted into English - to the point that it is not even written in italics any more - (why) must we still conform to the original pronunciation?