Category Archives: In the news …

Glosso fodder that’s making headlines

The Pope is allergic to adjectives (sic)

“I am allergic to those words. We have fallen into the culture of adjectives and adverbs, and we have forgotten the strength of nouns.” So proclaimed Pope Francis in a rant against descriptive words during a speech on Monday. (Sic)

 

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Trump’s use of the word “invasion” has eerie precedent

    

As The Week reported last week: “Since January, President Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 Facebook ads focusing on immigration that use the word “invasion,” the New York Times reported. He also used the word “invasion” in several tweets regarding immigrants at the border. Trump’s word choice is in the spotlight following Saturday’s massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which left at least 22 people dead. The suspect is believed to have written an online screed ahead of the attack, declaring it “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Data from Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic communications firm tracking 2020 presidential candidates’ digital advertising, shows that since late March, Trump has spent an estimated $1.25 million on Facebook ads about immigration.”

Donald Trump isn’t the only world leader who has used the words “invasion” and “invaders” with political (and malevolent) intent. As Lynne Tyrrell explained yesterday in The Guardian: A 1992 speech by Rwandan political leader Leon Mugesera is widely considered to have launched genocidal mobilization in Rwanda. Mugesera repeatedly called Rwanda’s Tutsis “invaders”. Like Trump, who recently said that four Democratic congresswomen should go back to “the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Mugesera said that the Tutsi “invaders” should be sent back to where they came from: “I am telling you that your home is in Ethiopia, that we will send you by the Nyabarongo so you can get there quickly.” The Nyabaraongo river runs to the Nile. After steady repetition of this rhetoric, the river grew clogged with Tutsi bodies during the genocide. Sending them back to Ethiopia, literally. Words became horrific action.”

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A literary “fav” – and a couple of gems – from Meghan Markle

An installment of The Duchess of Sussex’s now defunct lifestyle blog, “The Tig”, has been doing the rounds, thanks to People magazine. Describing in hungry detail what Meghan Markle wrote about five years ago on the subject of “the sweetest tradition [she] can think of,” People quotes liberally from the former actress’s July 2014 post in which she listed her summer literary “favs” and those of some of her Suits co-stars. I caught a couple of little gems in The Duchess’s post — both sparkling prettily in the same paragraph. Can you spot them? (Clue: I wrote about one of them in a very recent Glosso post. The other one just made me giggle.) Here’s the paragraph in question: Continue reading

Historic 8-way tie at national spelling bee

Winners, l to r: Abhijay Kodali, Sohum Sukhatankar, Saketh Sundar, Rishik Gandhasri, Shruthika Padhy, Christopher Serrao, Erin Howard, and Rohan Raja

Last night the 92nd Scripps National Spelling Bee came to a close just after midnight with a historic eight-way tie.

“A superhuman group of adolescents broke the Scripps National Spelling Bee on Thursday, with eight contestants crowned co-champions after the competition said it was running out of challenging words. … It was a stunning result…for the 92nd annual event, which has had six two-way ties but had never before experienced such a logjam at the top. After the 17th round, Jacques Bailly, the event’s pronouncer, announced that any of the eight remaining contestants who made it through three more words would share in the prize.” The New York Times has the story.

The 92nd Scripps National Spelling Bee had 565 contestants and was won by eight co-champions who had lasted through 20 rounds.

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In the news (April 11): a typeface makeover, a capital city name-change, a multilingual pop artist & more

In recent language news: a trilingual pop artist, singing trilingually; a dating trend gets a trendy name; a capital city changes its name; a typeface makeover; and more … Continue reading

In the news: two new words we learned this week (and one is especially horrid)

The Right Honourable Boris Johnson

We’re going to focus on just two news stories this past week, both of which gave us a lesson in English vocabulary that we really didn’t need. We were introduced, respectively, to a vulgar slang word and an old derogatory term for unmarried women. The first lesson was taught to us by a Right Honourable former Member of Parliament – who has served, incidentally, as Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary, and who (I believe) still has his eye on the Big Job in Britain – during a radio interview. The other was given to us in a very dubious tweet — but not (somewhat surprisingly) from the great orange Tweeter himself. …

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Is Mary Queen of Commas right about Mary Queen of Scots?

François Clouet: Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-87) / Wikimedia Commons

At the end of her recent (and fabulously entertaining) New Yorker piece about Mary Queen of Scots the movie, Mary Norris throws in a little punctuation lesson about the comma (or lack of it) in the Scottish queen’s name. “Mary Queen of Scots – both the regal title and the movie title – takes no comma,” argues Norris. “There is more than one Mary; the title is restrictive. She is Mary the Queen – you know, like Cedric the Entertainer or Chance the Rapper. Off with the comma!”

But is Mary Queen of Commas right about this? Continue reading