Thank fuck for Lydia Davis

If I went to an academic conference on literary theory, I would have been bored out of my mind! But a town meeting about potholes, that interests me.

- Lydia Davis, in conversation with Ane Farsethas

(Can't say I agree with her about the dictionaries, though. I like me a good dictionary.)

On the uses and abuses of vernacular

It took Dante, in the late Middle Ages, to take the revolutionary step of writing in his own Tuscan dialect. It would be a mistake, though, to see him with modern eyes as some kind of champion of inclusiveness. He did, after all, use Latin to make his case in On Eloquence in the Vernacular.

- Ana Menéndez, 'Are We Different People in Different Languages?'