WORK
“What we’re losing when we tweet and e-mail people and send Facebook messages rather than write letters is a formal, considered form of correspondence. When you sit down to write a letter, you’re in a completely different frame of mind than you are when you write an e-mail or a tweet, and you really kind of dig deep rather than just, you know, having ten tabs open at once and flicking backwards and forwards and never properly focusing on the job at hand. So I think we’re losing something really quite deep.”
—Shaun Usher (publisher of Letters of Note)
—from a PRI radio interview (listen)
WORD(S)
mugient. adjective. Making a lowing or bellowing sound. From Latin mūgīre (to bellow)
“He, like myself, hates the final mugient M in Latin.” (Samuel Parr)
“That a Bittor maketh that mugient noise, or as we term it Bumping, by putting its bill into a reed as most believe […] is not so easily made out.” (Thomas Browne)
WEB
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Hey bae, check out what’s on “Lake Superior State University’s 40th Annual List of Banished Words”. The complete historical list contains some buried treasure.
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FiveThirtyEight examines the diversity (and not) of “Best of 2014” lists. Book lists are the most diverse, naturally.
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Add the Human Clock, which tells the time using a variety of user-submitted images (some more of a stretch than others) depicting hours and minutes, and the Colour Clock, which depicts the time using the hours, minutes and seconds as color values, to the previously mentioned Literary Clock and All The Minutes Twitter clock.
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Emma Munger’s Pin-Ups series re-imagines iconic characters from television shows (including Twin Peaks) and classic movies as old-school Sailor Jerry tattoo characters.
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Today is the anniversary of both the Battle of Assunpink Creek (1777) and The Big Bottom Massacre (1791). That is all (cut me a little slack…I’m still recovering from food poisoning).
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
- Readers B., E., J., K. and S. wish prosperous, happy, great, happy and fulfilling new years to the Clamor and to myself. Thank you!
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