On Language Log, Geoffrey K. Pullum invites readers to send in the earliest citation of the use of periods to indicate slow, intense speech. On page 28 of Robert Harris’s novel Archangel (Hutchinson, London, 1998, hardback edition), a character who was tortured for a long time to get information out of him says with pride,…
—Text to Speech (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s…
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” —Reagan’s ‘tear down this wall’ speech 20 years later (USA Today | AP) Similar:So Why Do People Shrug?…
The quotation that caused all the furor involves a 14th-century dialogue between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The pope quotes the emperor, who says: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his…
With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers’ bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library. So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: “Every time I’ve seen you, you’re out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You’re all sitting around…
Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author “seems like a bitter man.” In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there. Except she didn’t just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the…
—Top 100 Speeches (American Rhetoric) Full-text of all, and audio versions of most. Part of a good collection of rhetoric links on Metafilter. Similar:No, Kirk and Uhura didn't share the first interracial kiss on televisionSee Also: Star Trek: The Next Gener…CultureWhat the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they …AcademiaPope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory…
—Technorati’s Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati) What Technorati used to call its “Link Cosmos” appears to have been replaced by “Web Conversations.” The speech bubble icon that calls up a list of inboud links referencing a particular website is now part of the Technorati logo. Much less new-agey, much more down-to-earth. I haven’t time to investigate that…
“Not only are we going to New Hampshire …, we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York! And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we’re going to Washington, D.C. to take…
Howard Dantzler stood among a sea of people on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., 40 years ago today. | He was 29 years old then. He had been in the service. He had earned a master’s degree. | But he was not free. —King speech still rings true for retired professor (Tribune-Review) A man looks…
“Not only is the First Amendment pressed into service at the drop of a hat (especially whenever anyone is disciplined for anything), it is invoked ritually when there are no First Amendment issues in sight. | Take the case of the editors of college newspapers who will always cry First Amendment when something they’ve published…
“But since many bloggers have no background in publishing, they often come to the medium unaware of the rules that apply, and complaints are becoming more common. Many people publish [weblogs] as if they were untouchable, assuming that because what they write appears in a virtual world, it won’t come back to burn them in…
“I have anguished over the embarrassment my speech-writing process has brought to our community. Ultimately, I concluded that it is in Hamilton’s best interest that I step down as president.” — Eugene M. Tobin —Hamilton College President Resigns — Plagiarized Welcoming Speech to Freshmen (Hamilton College) Similar:Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonizing the red planet is…
“By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.” George W. Bush —The President’s Speech Similar:We…
Dimitri Sklyarov is an unlikely poster boy for American freedom. The Russian programmer was arrested after he spoke at the “Def-Con” hacker convention in Las Vegas about a program, offered for sale by his employer Elcomsoft, which cracks the encryption in Adobe’s e-book software. The Irish Times —Confusion Over Free Speech and Copyright Similar:In August…