Category Archives: fun

Dictionary Stories

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On the Canadian radio news show As it Happens last night I heard about something that is really cool. A gentleman in California has started a blog where he writes short stories that are made up entirely of example sentences from dictionaries. My favorite dictionary is the OED (and, thankfully, I have online access to it through my university) so I hadn’t noticed how crazy example sentences are. The OED’s jam is to put a word in its historical context so all of the example sentences come from texts in which the word was used. The sentences can be very dramatic but they can also be very funny as a word’s meaning may change over time. But, some dictionaries include sentences that have been made up to illustrate the definition of the word. These are the sentences that Jez Burrows is using to make his stories. The stories Burrows have come up with are clever and short. They make for a fun read. This one made me laugh this morning:

The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

A retired teacher. A topiary gardener. An army officer of fairly high rank. A brilliant young mathematician. A highly esteemed scholar. President Kennedy. One of the great stars in the American golfing firmament. Detective Sergeant Fox. The Honorable Richard Morris Esquire, chief justice of the supreme court of our state. When you put these men together, you’re bound to get fireworks. Unfortunately, we do not have the time to interview every applicant.

You can find these short stories here.

#TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter

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A little fun for you all today.  A few days ago, author Joanne Harris, started a hashtag on twitter #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter and it was twitter gold!  Entertainment Weekly was kind enough to collect some of the best but nothing can top The Outsiders author S.E. Hinton’s contribution.

Check out the tag and keep in mind the next time you go to your next book signing.

At the Movies

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And we are back.  Well, I am.  As I’m writing this Kate is on a plane on her way home.  New Orleans was great!  We both had a lot of fun.  It’s such a chill city.  It was a lot of fun walking around and seeing the sights. I do hope we get to go back again some day.

But back to business. The movie adaption of Insurgent by Veronica Roth comes out tomorrow.  I have mixed feelings about the movie of Divergent, I overall liked it but I have reservations about this one.  First the trailer makes it pretty clear they did some major changes and I’m not sure if that’s going to be good or bad.  Insurgent was a hard book to read because Tris suffers from PTSD and no one tries to help her and it was beyond frustrating.  I’m not sure how that will play on screen or if they will sort of gloss over it kinda like they did with Katniss in Mockingay Part 1.  I guess I’ll find out when I see it later this or next week.

There are other YA movie adaptations coming soon that I’m pretty excited.  Of course Mockingjay Part 2. That’s definitely going to be brutal.  Moviefone highlighted a few that are in the works.  Some that I knew of like The 5th Wave and Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. The former should make a good movie and the latter, well hopefully with Tim Burton at the helm it will be better then the book. I didn’t know that Daughter of Smoke and Bone, Grasshopper Jungle, Immortal Rules and Shadow and Bone have all been optioned.  That’s awesome!  I think both Kate and I have said how much we loved Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor.  That will be really interesting to see how that plays out on the big screen.  Immortal Rules by Julie Kagawa is excellent Vampire Dystopian novel.  I also think that Smoke and Bone by Leigh Bardugo is being produced by David Heyman of Harry Potter fame. So I have a lot faith that will be well done.  And Edgar Wright is attached to direct Grasshopper Jungle?  Yes please! I know we have talked a lot about this book lately and it’s flaws but it was an entertaining book and I actually think if done right will make a better movie.

So book fans, we have a lot of good books being made into movies in the upcoming years.  Let’s hope that they are all more like Harry Potter and Hunger Games and less like The Giver or Percy Jackson.

P.S. Not mentioned in the article but Maggie Stiefvater’s Scorpio Races and Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park have also been optioned.  I’m not sure where Scorpio Races is in development but I do know that Miss Rowell was asked to write the screenplay for Eleanor and Park and well I can’t wait for both of these!

Sometimes the Internet is Awesome!

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I do love reading YA dystopian novels.  The Hunger Games and Divergent are probably the most well known books in the genre but may I also suggest The Dustlands series by Moira Young and The Hunt Trilogy by Andrew Fukuda.  Knowing my love for the genre, on our Facebook page, my friend Jack alerted us to this awesome twitter account. Dystopian YA Novel is a parody twitter account, telling a Dystopian YA novel one tweet at a time.  It’s kind of brilliant.  So far the author has already hit on several themes.  She has already established a heroine, Valentine, who sees herself as nothing special but obvisously is.  There is a love triangle.  A sorting of teenagers into groups that will determine where they belong or what they will do for the rest of their lives.  A threat of being ostracized if one does not conform and even a possible fight to death.  So far, I don’t think she has left anything out.  Here’s a sample.

Those are just the beginning.  If you’re on twitter and like me loved the The Hunger Games I suggest you follow because it’s great!. And if will indulge me in a little self promotion, follow us on Facebook, as well.  There’s been a lot of great conversations going on there that I don’t think you want to miss.

Reading Challenges

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As 2014 comes to a close many readers are considering how to challenge themselves in 2015. Tomorrow Beth and I will be discussing our 2015 challenges but until then you can check out this fun list of reading challenges published by popsugar.

What do you think of this list? Could you do it? (How many boxes can a single book check?)

Ola!

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I would like to diverge a minute from our regularly scheduled broadcasts of discussion of published works to rep for a friend doing some awesome work.

I spent much of my summer at the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang for short) which is a biennial summer language program for linguists, language revitalization experts and speakers of any and all languages. While at CoLang I met an awesome woman named Hali Dardar, who was working with Houma Language Project. Houma is a language of Lousiana, it is endangered, and the speakers are looking for ways to change that for the better. At CoLang, Hali put together the first draft of an excellent guide for language investigation, specifically, language investigation in small groups with some native speakers and some learners. Since this summer she has continued to work on it and it now has a kickstarter! This book that she has put together is a guide to language discovery for small groups. If you, or anyone you know, is interested in practical language acquisition in small groups working with native speakers, I recommend you check this out!

Or, if you yourself are interested in what linguists do when they go to the field, you may want to check it out, too. A mere 15 bucks would get you a copy of the book!