Twilight Librarian--Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

 Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

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Twilight Librarian:

Jim Rettig's ruminations on libraries, librarianship, the infosphere, and more

e-mail: Jim Rettig

Why is this named Twilight Librarian?

Jim Rettig is University Librarian at the University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia, United States of America. Opinions expressed in Twilight Librarian are the author's and do not speak for the University of Richmond.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The new orality? [Permalink]

Thu Dec 21 22:24:38 EST 2006

lower case series sans commas phonetic spellings alphanumeric spellings

Seeing a recent blog post that included a series of names in which commas did not separate the names prompted me to wonder if text messaging, email, and blogging have become the new orality. Oral speech is not completely without punctuation--emphasis, pauses, pitch, and the like help convey meaning. So, to those who are favorably disposed towards them, do emoticons in computer communications. Oral speech is our most spontaneous use of language and, to a Romantic sensibility, is "the real language of men," as Wordsworth acclaimed in his 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads. immediate informal structured but Ø necessarily artfully arranged 4 effect evanescent

What are the implications for libraries? What do we organize and preserve from the records of this new orality? How much of the culture does it convey and how will it stand the test of time for significance as a window into the present and its sensibility?

I certainly don't have answers to these questions. But information professionals, especially librarians with our heritage of preserving both "high" culture and popular culture, should play a leading role in devising answers.

Eggcorns [Permalink]

Wed Aug 09 22:13:54 EDT 2006

Today I read some student comments about our library. One includes a positive statement about our "study carols." This immediately brought to mind an article I had read earlier in the day in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In "Like a Bowl in a China Shop," [subscribers only] writing teacher Mark Peters recommended that eggcorns present a teaching opportunity richer than sending a student to a dictionary to learn (if the student knew where to look) that the correct spelling is "acorns." Yet from those little nutty eggs mighty oaks do rise.

The editor of the Eggcorns Database explains that

"here, we take the stance that the errors we collect and they are lexical errors, no doubt about that are noteworthy because they are interesting. They tell us something about how ordinary speakers and writers make sense of the language they use. And eggcorns are not like just any amusing erroneous substitution: they are special because they arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term's or its constituents' meanings, origins or the underlying metaphors."

Other eggcorns are boggled down, girdle one's loins, on the spurt of the moment, getting one's dandruff up, and manner from heaven. I am not sure that "study carol" qualifies as an eggcorn, but it does appear in unexpected places--even on an Ivy League Website and the Website of a library at another prominent university.

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