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“Like all Americans, I want White House invitations and name cards to look as first-class as possible,” says Nick Gillespie at Reason. “But shelling out a quarter of a million bucks a year” on three calligraphers “undercuts the idea that President Obama thinks there’s a spending problem for sure.”
The White House reportedly spends $277,000 a year on calligraphers. But… why?
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This Sunday is the birthday of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the English mathematician and writer whose most famous works include Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and The Hunting of the Snark. Such works featured Carroll’s specialty: coining blends and nonce words. Here are some of our favorites:- Boojum
The boojum is “a particularly dangerous variety of ‘snark,’” an imaginary creature of Carroll’s invention. The word boojum has inspired the naming of everything from “a species of tree… native to Baja California, Mexico” (found in 1922 by plant explorer Godfrey Sykes, who proclaimed, “It must be a boojum!”); to a supersonic cruise missile that “was determined to be too ambitious a project… and was canceled in 1951”; to “a geometric pattern sometimes observed on the surface of superfluid helium-3,” as named by physicist David Mermin in 1976.
Example: But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day, / If your Snark be a Boojum! For then / You will softly and suddenly vanish away, / And never be met with again!” — Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
- Chortle
To chortle means “to exclaim exultingly, with a noisy chuckle.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Carroll coined the word as a blend of chuckle and snort.
Example: ”He chortled in his joy.” —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, 1871
- Frabjous
Frabjous means “great, wonderful, fabulous,” and is a blend of either fabulous and joyous, or fair and joyous. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” cries the narrator of The Jabberwocky upon learning that the Jabberwock has been slain.
Example: “‘O frabjous day!’ rejoiced Emma Dean, using her bath towel as a scarf and performing a weird dance about the room.” — Jessie Graham Flower, Grace Harlowe’s Return to Overton Campus, 1915
- Boojum
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I did some actual journalism and wrote an article about internet addiction for The Week magazine, and interviewed the head of an Internet Addiction Rehab. Here’s an excerpt.
Researchers have noted a rise in something called Digital Attention Disorder — the addiction to social networks and computers in general.
How does it work? More than 50 years ago, psychologist B.F. Skinner was experimenting on rats and pigeons, and noticed that the unpredictability of reward was a major motivator for animals. If a reward arrives either predictably or too infrequently, the animal eventually loses interest. But when there was anticipation of a reward that comes with just enoughfrequency, the animals’ brains would consistently release dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that (basically) regulates pleasure.
What does this have to do with the internet? Some researchers believe that intermittent reinforcement — in the form of texts, tweets, and various other social media — may be working on our brains the same way rewards did on Skinner’s rats.
“Internet addiction is the same as any other addiction — excessive release of dopamine,” says Hilarie Cash, executive director of the reStart program for internet addiction and recovery, a Seattle-area rehab program that helps wean people off the internet. “Addiction is addiction. Whether it’s gambling, cocaine, alcohol, or Facebook.”
And thus begins my contributions to The Week!
Welcome!
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50 collective nouns to bolster your vocabulary
You’ve heard of a “flight of stairs,” “a board of trustees,” and a “school of fish.” But a “business of ferrets” is probably a new one.
- Mustering of Storks
- Shrewdness of Apes
- Smack of jellyfish
- Kindle of kittens
- Worship of writers
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Wanna be a better writer? Try writing by hand.
Many famous authors opt for the meticulousness of writing by hand over the utility of a typewriter or computer. In a 1995 interview with the Paris Review, writer Susan Sontag said that she penned her first drafts the analog way before typing them up for editing later. “I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers,” she said. “I like the slowness of writing by hand.”
Novelist Truman Capote insisted on a similar process, although his involved lying down with a coffee and cigarette nearby. “No, I don’t use a typewriter,” he said in an interview. “Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand.” A 2009 study from the University of Washington seems to support Sontag, Capote, and many other writers’ preference for writing by hand: Elementary school students who wrote essays with a pen not only wrote more than their keyboard-tapping peers, but they also wrote faster and in more complete sentences.
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“I’d walk away from abstinence. Trot down to the liquor store and pick up a carton of Luckies (if they still make them) and a pint of Johnnie Walker and go home to relearn the finger ballet of the cigarette and wean myself back onto alcohol. Fill up the room with smoke and feel the warm, sloshy pleasures of inebriation. An eye-opener in the morning, a martini for lunch, or two — who’s counting? — and at 5 p.m. sharp, the sun is over the yardarm, the bar is open, so belly up, gentlemen, and choose your poison.
You’re the doctor, it’s every man for himself, mud in your eye, and here’s looking at you, sweetheart. I might grow back my old beard and put on a Panama hat and write heroically again.”
-Garrison Keillor, the host of A Prairie Home Companion quit smoking, and then, drinking. What he misses most are the friends who kept indulging. Read his full essay.
Photo: AP Photo/Wyatt Counts
(Source: theweek.com)
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An al Qaeda-linked website has posted a call for the killing of Matthew Bissonnette, the retired Navy SEAL Team 6 member who wrote a book about his role in the mission that killed Osama bin Laden.
Bissonnette wrote under a pseudonym, but was identified last week by Fox News. And the possibility that terrorists might come after him is just one of his worries when No Easy Day, his firsthand account of the raid on bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout, hits shelves on Sept. 11.
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Tell McCaskill your standing with Todd Akin.
—Rep. Todd Akin, struggling to revive his battered campaign, launched a page on his website asking supports to rally behind him. “I made a mistake,” he said, referring to his preposterous claim that victims of “legitimate rape” can’t get pregnant. “I used the wrong words in the wrong way.” Above the quote, the campaign asked fans to “tell McCaskill your standing with Todd Akin.” Giddy critics immediately spotted the error and tweeted their glee to the world, ribbing Akin for “using the wrong word” to “apologize for using the wrong words.” The campaign quickly corrected the error, or tried to, spelling it “your’re,” before trying a third time and getting it right.
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Recommended viewing. All the way to the end.
From This American Life’s website, Ira Glass writes: “In our recent cinema event, he talked about his illness and, for the last time in his life, danced onstage.”
David Rakoff, an essayist, actor, and regular contributor to This American Life, died yesterday at the age of 47.
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With the ubiquity of keyboards, neither children nor adults need to write much of anything by hand. That’s a shame, because study after study has suggested that handwriting is important for brain development and cognition — helping kids hone fine motor skills and learn to express and generate ideas.
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I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, ‘My God, did I write that?’
—Ray Bradbury, whom The New York Times calls ”the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream,” died Wednesday at age 91.
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Novelist and radio-show host Garrison Keillor had a writer’s studio built in River Falls, Wis. as part of an 11.5-acre retreat he created on the St. Croix River. The property includes a guesthouse, saunas, and a clay tennis court. The main residence features log-cabin style interior walls, soaring ceilings, reclaimed-wood floors, and a wood-burning stove. Photos: Inside authors’ homes
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The Exclamation Comma. “Just because you’re excited about something doesn’t mean you have to end the sentence.”
That’s true.
