Sublime

In a prime spot just across the yellow-tape road from the lemon trees, he tended his own dark grove of bookshelves, and beside them a field of legal boxes, which held thousands of menus from restaurants famous and obscure. Whenever I passed Horace’s collection, there was someone flipping through the menus with the furious intensity of a DJ digging

later divisions found in medieval Hebrew manuscripts, which indicate verse endings by a musical note (called a silluh-a vertical line) under the final word, as well as what…

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Look up “villain,” for instance, and you’ll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure back from centuries of iniquity, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immorality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You’ll find ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, repro

The argument for runes as an elite privilege received a decisive blow in the mid-twentieth century with discoveries in the Norwegian harbour towns of Bergen and Trondheim. Hundreds of small wooden slips, inscribed with runes, were found preserved intact in the medieval waterlogged deposits of the dockside streets. They had served a fascinating vari

He’d lost perhaps half an inch in height, and gained perhaps an inch in breadth; but generally speaking the years had glanced off him without damage, and he was as unaltered as Bethesda’s pews.

Descriptivists believe that language should be defined by those who use it; they observe and record, and so “correctness” is an ever-changing notion based on how people are writing and speaking at any given time.