The best place to watch language evolve: Urban Dictionary might seem a frivolous place for a poet to go a-browsing. But it’s a brilliant window on English in transition. In just over an hour online I have learned 20 new words (or more properly neologisms). I have learned that to remove a friend on Facebook, is to “deface”, that “thumb me” is to ask someone to send you a text message, and that “veepstakes” are “the process a candidate for president goes through to choose a running mate … a portmanteau word combining the colloquial pronunciation of VP as “veep” and sweepstakes”. [Guardian]
Book Of A Lifetime: Kennedy’s Latin Primer, by Benjamin Hall Kennedy: It has lived in my desk, thumbed, defaced, treasured and from time to time mistreated, for more than 40 years, since I was 12. Benjamin Hall Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer is the Rolls-Royce of text-books and surely the longest lived: 120 years after its publication it is still the best-selling book in the Classics section of my local university bookshop. [Independent]
Words can never hurt us: Twenty years after The Satanic Verses, Muslims are beginning to appreciate the right of others to offend them. [Guardian]
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