Context is everything! Cats and dogs in the Bible
I spotted this quote in a magazine this week … “The dog is mentioned in the Bible 18 times — the cat not even once.” –W E Farbstein, on the…
Read more »Check your popularity with n-grams
Y’all know about n-grams, right? Wikipedia nails ’em: … an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items can be phonemes,…
Read more »Literary Putdowns
In America, only the successful writer is important, in France all writers are important, in England no writer is important, and in Australia you have to explain what a writer…
Read more »Can’t seem to get any writing done today . . .
… I’m not sure what the problem is … [fblike]
Read more »Interesting origins
The derivation of well-known words and phrases. Many familiar English words and phrases have interesting derivations, and because Britain was once a great sea power, a surprising number come from…
Read more »Voting now on for the Oddest Book Title of the Year
Forget the Oscars. The finalists for the 38th Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year have been announced. The seven finalists are: Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed…
Read more »Prolific writers
According to Guinness World Records, L. Ron Hubbard is credited with having the most published works by one author (1,084). But the man who once said, “You don’t get rich…
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