Showing posts with label haiku-like. Show all posts
Showing posts with label haiku-like. Show all posts

Monday, October 28, 2013

There's a word for that...


"There ought to be a word for 'the limbo-like precincts of an airport baggage claim, where groggy travellers gather around the motionless treads of empty conveyor belts.' It is a singularly desolate scene, and there should be a succinct way for a forlorn luggage-seeker to text a quick apology to the friend who is idly circling the airport roads. Now, there is: 'baggatory.'

     That clever turn is just one of a couple hundred neologisms coined by Liesl Schillinger in her new book, Wordbirds: An Irreverent Lexicon for the 21st Century. […]
     The word 'neologism' dates to the seventeen-seventies, taken from Greek via French, meaning 'new speech.' But the practice of coining new words goes back to the beginning of language itself. It accelerated as culture accelerated, and by the nineteenth century conservative types were worried that industry and science were flooding the linguistic marketplace with all kinds of shoddy fad words, and that the language had to be protected from interlopers. Others embraced the dynamism. In a letter to John Adams, in 1820, Thomas Jefferson, a man of business and science as well as politics, wrote, 'I am a friend to neology. It is the only way to give to a language copiousness and euphony.'”
— Ian Crouch, The New Yorker
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Sunday, July 14, 2013

"… all the puddles on the street"


"On a recent summer evening, on the second-floor suite of the Refinery Hotel, in midtown, Yoko Ono, who is eighty but looks sixteen, was perched on the edge of a couch wearing very dark black sunglasses, a military-style black denim jacket, and a fedora jauntily cocked to one side. She was about to walk into a party celebrating her new book, Acorn, a hundred haiku-like instructions ('Count all the puddles on the street / when the sky is blue.') accompanied by intricate dot drawings of organic, amoeba-like shapes that twist and turn lightly on the page….
     Rose Salane and Alice Yang, two twentysomething women wearing casually stylish outfits who are about to enter their senior year at Cooper Union, are waiting in line to have their books signed. They finagled invitations from a friend. Ono is one of their artist-heroes for her bold sixties performances, like 'Cut Piece.' As they edge closer to Ono, Yang remarks drily that Acorn 'feels like the stuff you do after a break-up.'...
     Salane withdraws a popsicle from her bag—clear blue with a touch of red. She places it on the table in front of Ono, who peers at it over her sunglasses, then looks up at its maker. 'It’s a sculpture,' Salane explains, 'made of rubber.' Ono touches it gingerly, and says thank you. Her assistant, who is seated next to her, picks it up. 'I’ll just put this away for now,' he says. Salane looks a bit dejected."
— Claire Barliant, The New Yorker
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