Stan Carey has another excellent post at Sentence first, about J.R.R. Tolkien?s "deep interest in language"; I urge you to read it and savor Tolkien's anecdote about "a little man... in a dirty wet marquee," a fellow soldier during WWI (which Stan takes from Arika Okrent's wonderful book), but what I will quote here is a bit from a letter from Tolkien to his son Christopher:Nobody believes me when I say that my long book [The Lord of the Rings] is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real.
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A U.S. soldier who pleaded guilty Wednesday to the murders of three Afghan civilians was sentenced to 24 years in prison after saying "the plan was to kill people" in a conspiracy with four fellow soldiers. Read Post
When the news came down yesterday that a heretofore unpublished book by J.R.R. Tolkien will be hitting bookstores in May, I was a little surprised that I, an avowed Tolkien dilettante, felt a genuine twinge of excitement. Although I... Read Post
Stan Carey has another fine post at Sentence first ("An Irishman's blog about the English language") discussing John Honey's 1989 book Does Accent Matter? The Pygmalion Factor. He has some excellent quotes and anecdotes (one of whic... Read Post