Caught in the Web of Words

Caught in the Web of Words is the biography of James A. H. Murray, the Victorian lexicographer who was the chief editor of the incomparable Oxford English Dictionary. Drawing upon unpublished Murray family records as well as Oxford University Press files, his granddaughter Elisabeth Murray has given us a far more detailed account of the man than was previously possible: not merely his 35-year struggle to turn an undigested mass of several million citations sent in by volunteer readers into a dictionary designed to show the historical development of each word from twelfth-century Englan onward, but also his effort to educate himself from boyhood through early manhood

Logogensis

Logogenesis n. the creation of new words, neologistics

Approaches adopted in the teaching of poetry for the upper secondary school students in Tawau town area

The main aim of conducting this study was to investigate the various techniques adopted among the teachers teaching poetry in the upper secondary schools in the Tawau town area. The researcher would like to find out the types of techniques that are preferred the most as well as the least in the teaching of poetry to the upper secondary school students and examine the factors that affect the selection of these techniques.The techniques put forward in this study that the teachers should have been exposed to are Language Based Approach, Personal Response Based Approach, Stylistic Approach, Information Based Approach and Moral Philosophical Approach.This survey research targeted forty-five English language teachers teaching the literature component to secondary four and five students at seven secondary schools in the Tawau town area. Three research instruments which were utilized in this study are the questionnaire, classroom observation and the interview. The result of the questionnaire was later triangulated using classroom observation and the interview,which was conducted with one representative (teacher) who was randomly selected from each school. It was found that the Moral Philosophical Approach was the most preferred while the Stylistic Approach was the least preferred technique.It was also discovered that some techniques advocated under each approach specified in this study were more preferred than others. Hence, the information gained has been used especially by the researcher and her colleagues in the teacher training college to propose practical suggestions and recommendations on how to improve the teaching processes using poetr

Mycenaean Textile Memories in Homeric Terminology

The present paper aims at investigating continuity and disruption between Mycenaean and Homeric Greek in the field of technical terminology pertaining to the textile craft. The objective of the work is a reconsideration of the main verbs (ὑφαίνω, τολυπεύω, ῥάπτω, ἐπικλώθω), bearing the notion of "to weave", into these two phases of the Greek language. Surprisingly we can also highlight the semantic shift – in the reason of the different chronology and contexts of use – which characterises the textile terminology. We know, indeed, that the use of the terminology of work (particularly of the manual labour) in relation with the terminology for intellectual activities (planning, ideation, writing, playing music etc.) can be considered a topos in many Indo-European traditions. Following this path of reasoning, most of the terms in the Linear B tablets drawn for manufacturing crafts (such as carpentry or weaving) assume in the Homeric epics a metaphorical meaning

Alzheimer’s: A Quiet Story. A photographic series and solo exhibition.

This series of 20 artworks was developed by Plouviez looking at the experience of memory loss, photography and how the everyday routine can become unfamiliar. Work from the series was shown as a billboard in CIVIC, the first international festival of billboard art, Sunderland UK (November 2011), and as part of the Action Field Kodra photography festival in Thessaloniki, Greece (October 2012). The full series of work is exhibited in Thessaloniki, Greece (22 November 2013-17 January 2014) as part of PhotoBiennale, an international photography festival organized by the Museum of Photography, and at Panna Foto Studio, Jakarta, Indonesia (23 November-14 December 2013)

Describing Spaces: Topologies of Interlace in the St Gall Gospels

The ways in which ideas of the book intersect with notions of space are manifold from Antiquity onwards. As vessels of ideas and knowledge, books and their use invited spatial metaphors based on notions of collecting and storage which were closely bound to the idea of memory.1 The notion of the book as space surfaces in metaphors of the book as a garden, library or building throughout the Middle Ages. For Christian writers, notions such as the ‘inner library,’ the heart as a library of Christ are central, and they pervade patristic texts.2 Accordingly, the metaphorical realm of books connects the book and the body, and is not necessarily spatial in a dimensional sense. It goes beyond the specific object of scroll or codex, aiming instead at the texts and their use and reception

Copyright and mass social authorship: a case study of the making of the Oxford English dictionary

Social authorship ventures involving masses of volunteers like Wikipedia are thought to be a phenomenon enabled by digital technology, presenting new challenges for copyright law. By contrast, the case study explored in this article uncovers copyright issues considered in relation to a nineteenth century social authorship precedent: the seventy-year process of compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary instigated by the not-for-profit Philological Society in 1858 which involved thousands of casually organised volunteer readers and sub-editors. Drawing on extensive original archival research, the article uses the case study as a means of critically reflecting on the claims of existing interdisciplinary literature concerning copyright and ‘authorship’: unlike the claims of the so-called Romanticism thesis, the article argues that copyright law supported an understanding of NED authorship as collaborative and democratic. Further, in uncovering the practical solutions which lawyers considered in debating issues relating to title and rights clearance, the article uses the nineteenth century experience as a vantage point for considering how these issues are approached today: despite the very different context, the copyright problems and solutions debated in the nineteenth century demonstrate remarkable continuity with those considered in relation to social authorship projects today

Headlines I Have Loved

The headline writers for our local newspaper, the Town Talk, have to be closet punsters. There\u27s no other explanation for the play-on-words banners which so frequently appear in boldface. Here are my favorites, most of which are self-explanatory