whyisthisinteresting

The Prisencolinensinainciusol Edition

Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything.

themarginalian.org

The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Wonderfully Untranslatable Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions

We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture's parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel. It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.

noahpinion.blog

Where to eat in San Francisco

Culinary experiences are not very uniform across the population, so we haven't been able to develop as much of a shared vocabulary to describe what we're tasting — if I've eaten Sichuan pepper and you haven't, it's a little like trying to describe the color red to a blind person.

theparisreview.org

Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists

The man read and read, moving his lips; now and then his whole body started moving and then the words entered him like spirits.

whyisthisinteresting

The Singlish Edition

Yet Singlish not only survived but became a marker of identity, something that distinguished Singaporeans from Malaysians, from expats, from mainland Chinese, from anyone who hadn't grown up inside the particular crucible of the city-state. The government's suppression attempts arguably accelerated its cultural value, the way prohibition makes a drink taste better.

theparisreview.org

Paris Review - Writers, Quotes, Biography, Interviews, Artists

"The man read and read, moving his lips; now and then his whole body started moving and then the words entered him like spirits, and began to work their mischief."

3quarksdaily.com

Siri Hustvedt recalls her life with the writer Paul Auster

Before their wedding dinner, Hustvedt writes, a poet friend of Paul's lifted a glass and said, "To the bride and groom, two people so good-looking I'd like to slice their faces with a razor."

3quarksdaily.com

Writing Advice from Scott Alexander

The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

themarginalian.org

A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.

themarginalian.org

Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul's cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.

longreads.com

They Would Not Dream of Flowers: Translating Through the Tehran Blackout

While I struggled to find Persian words for Trías's tales of quiet loss, the air outside was thick with the scent of gunpowder and the final breaths of a generation.

3quarksdaily.com

The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink

Every modern American dictionary that you've consulted owes something to the Third —even if that something is that the dictionary you're consulting is not the Third.

themarginalian.org

Where Love Goes When It Goes

It is also a peculiar question, lexically and syntactically, for it presupposes two things about the life of the heart: a movement and a destination, as if love rose to its feet one day and headed for an elsewhere, left without a map, got lost, lost to seasons and cycles, lost like the mammoth and the human dorsal fin and the surnames of millennia of daughters.