Literacy: July 2007 Archive Page

bootlegs are wierd the only time i gop online is to blog on this my space woich juliet you are free to bring oiver to m,y site as its mine and i own it, anyway i dont know i told all myf riends an dyou too to be there 1030 sharp because weve been allabout goping on time and i was told 1030- then there was one of the mopst remarkable technicaL PVERSIOGHTs in my entire career- the oplder dudes whove done hgouse sound from, SIR a jillion times forgot to TURN ON THE SUBWOOFERS. so i beeged for 15 mopre minutes to figure out why the hell a real band wich would be moine sounded like a trebley backing band to an american idol songbird, tweeters are the hiogh end and woofers tge low but sib woofers are the bass and the toms and kick growl and i rtold stu the truth= chicks just do not end up with drummers of his strentgth and aptitude- whatver that fguy nedsx to keep him happy - wich sinc ehe has a farm on tghe Isle of Wight and just nothing fazes him - isnt to hard- hi sintetion is just to play cdrums and imA bit of a dudem, im thinking and i think im right abou tthis we need obne more Samantha level ro0kc ballsy song - even though has that fine razors edge al;mist cheeze but not bridge wich quuickly turns ballsy= mne and pete wrote one "car crash" wich wqe doid at studio b when LP was prepping for her biog and hey i aint getting in any trouble again so no fucking names- --Courtney Love --nyc wtf?Warning, horrific spelling and grammar per usual! (Courtney Love's MySpace)

This is sort of a random chunk out of a 7000-word blog entry. One single paragraph in the middle is about 3500 words long.

I had previously blogged a speech Love gave in 2000, which was a well-argued, detailed explanation of how the recording industry makes millions off of bands that (according to Love) barely make any money at all. I found that speech persuasive and enlightening, but I find what she wrote in her MySpace page to be completely incomprehensible. The really funny thing is that people are leaving comments praising Love and thanking her what she wrote...

Wow. I guess it really is the thought that counts.

It should be a great moment for the publishing industry, which for years has been limping along with flat sales. But amid this avalanche of commerce and pre-publication hype, the book business is ruefully taking note of a startling incongruity: Very few U.S. booksellers will be making big money from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." --Josh Getlin and Martha Groves --Harry Potter and the diminished returns (CalendarLive.com | LA Times)

Confusing ''b'' and ''d'' (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Hold your hands like this, and imagine an "e" in between them, and you've got the word "bed".

My five-year-old daughter was having so much trouble telling the difference between her ''b'' and ''d'' that my wife urged me to look up dyslexia on the internet. Along the way, I came across several sites selling stickers or posters showing the word "bed" superimposed over the image of a bed, but Carolyn's thumbs worked just fine for her. When she's guessing, I sometimes have to remind her to "do the thumbs," but she often does it on her own.

We're still working on getting her 5s and 3s to face the right way, but the b and d problem seems to be solved.

Taylor Mali Poetry Slams (''What Do Teachers Really Make?'' and ''The Impotence of Proofreading'')YouTube)

Wow. I needed that.

The summer's more than half over, and I've got to start focusing on getting things off of my summer "to-do" list.

--Bull Run Victim Photo -- Editing QuibblesYahoo | AP (will expire))

No, Lenahan lies on a hospital bed.

The redundancy of "as shows" and "showing" and "he was gored" and "were gored" also bothers me. And the inconsistency doesn't do much for me, either. The same caption refers to "traditional bullrun" and "morning bull run," and a little later also says "the bulls horn entered beneath his skin."

It's impossible to remove all such mistakes from a stream of copy that goes out around the world, but so many mistakes in one caption suggests something other than carelessness. Where was the editor?

Something about that smug little grin tells me that Mr. Lenahan is unlikely to care.

"The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags," says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year's International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds.

"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as more people moved into urban centres, the use of underwear increased -- which caused an increase in the number of rags available for paper-making." --From Rags to Riches, Or How Undergarments Improved Medieval Literacy (Alpha Galileo)

Filing this for a future "history of the book" unit. Via Language Log.