A blog about books, words, history and the spaces in between. by Cristian Ispir
Among the many buzzwords of our age, efficiency is one of the most binding. Nearly everything is being brought to the Tribunal of Measured Efficiency, where verdicts are passed by the wigged magistrates of Speed, Cost and Outcome, the Triumvirate of the industrial and postindustrial ages. An efficiency inquest may also be conducted against language. … Continue reading In praise of inefficiency
The modern age is about making distinctions. Distinctions between novelty and antiquity, truth and falsehood, mind and body, reason and emotion, knowledge and superstition, science and religion, as well as between writing and orality, text and non-text, centre and periphery. In the modern worldview, everything must have its place according to reason, and things are … Continue reading Porosity
The same Latin verb dare, to give, gave us both the word ‘date’ and ‘data’. It must be the language’s most generous word. And we cannot avoid this inheritance, as our culture is based on the mastery of time and on the data and facts informing and guiding many of our private decisions and public … Continue reading Dates and data
‘Remember that time is money’, wrote Benjamin Franklin in his short essay Advice to a Young Tradesman published in 1748. His words have been used time and time again as a warning against wasting time. The problem with time is its elusiveness. If time is intangible, then likening it to money makes its loss as … Continue reading Time is not money
Preview(opens in a new tab) The knowledgeable and obsessive type is not a modern creation. Geeks have always accompanied every age. The classical world had its ancient geeks, peculiar individuals who would insist on a certain topic, activity or way of life, and who would attract the curiosity of those around them. Ancient geeks were … Continue reading Geeks and ancient Greeks
Translations never make the headlines. Translators don’t enjoy the same reputation as authors do, although a translation is, by many accounts, a work of authorship. And yet, cultures would have been very different if translations hadn’t existed. The background noise to a literate culture is made up of translations. In Western Europe, Christianity triumphed over … Continue reading Groundbreaking translations
There’s no other way to say this: there is a lot of rubbish online, on websites, fora, social media, blogs (none is immune). But behind the rubbish, like any rubbish, is unchecked dissipation, in this case writing incontinence. Again, nobody is really immune, and this short rant might just be proving the point. Everything goes … Continue reading The blinking cursor
Thank God for words like dépaysement. There’s nothing more [uncoined cognate adjective] to a language than words which don’t really belong. We refer to these words as ‘loanwords’, which is a bit doltish. On loan until when? It seems to me that no loanwords have ever been returned to their owner. Despite their half-baked name, … Continue reading Dépaysement
Each age decides what’s newsworthy and especially when news happens. For our 0-lag age, news happens around the clock. We find out about it as it happens, and by virtue of our ability to record and broadcast the world around us almost in real time, we can be generators of news. Before radio and television … Continue reading Soundbite news
We’ve been blocking undesired and uninvited people in our lives long before Facebook, Twitter or Whatsapp put us in charge of the block killswitch. Sometimes, we can go so far as to eliminate someone from our lives so completely that we’d even escape the dreaded ‘you’re dead to me’. There’s no worse block than that. … Continue reading ‘You’re dead to me’
