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I have seen the word “linguaphile” (meaning word lover or language lover) on Dictionary.com and the Free Dictionary, but it’s not there in the Oxford English Dictionary. It no longer tries to be comprehensive. “The language is expanding so fast this may be an impossible mission,” said Edmund Weiner, deputy chief editor of the Oxford
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I was reminded of this sweet old song, To Know Him Is To Love Him, while reading about grammar. No kidding. And the grammarian even referred to this song: I Put a Spell on You. (The Creedence Clearwater Revival version at the end of this post.) What has music, or magic spells, got to do
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Who says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from
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Who says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from
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If you love mysteries, read Flesh and Blood. The ending is an absolute stunner. The author, John Harvey, is probably better known for his Charlie Resnick novels. But here the detective is Frank Elder. Divorced and retired from the police force, he follows up an old case when one of the two men convicted is
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I love the Beach Boys’ song, I Can Hear Music. The ardour of young love and the sweet harmony capture all that is beautiful in life. Yes, it’s just a teenage love song, but listen to the jangling guitars, insistent beat and plaintive voices. Isn’t that what life is all about: wishing and hoping and,
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What a coincidence that India celebrates its independence on August 15 while Singapore’s National Day is August 9. Singapore’s founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, arrived on the island in on 29 January 1819 from Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India. Even the ship he sailed on was named Indiana. I couldn’t find details of the ship but
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Sparkling with wit, Jane Austen’s graceful style is even more reader-friendly than the language of newspapers. So are the first chapters of literary classics like David Copperfield and Sons and Lovers. They are all easier to read than newspapers. That’s what I found in a readability test that looked at the number of words in
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The proportion of Indians in Singapore has increased to pre-independence levels. The 353,000-strong community makes up 9.2 per cent of the population, according to the Singapore Department of Statistics. We are referring to the 3.73 million resident population, comprising Singaporeans and permanent residents, and not the 4.99 million total population, which includes foreigners.Indians made up
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Fifty years ago this month, an unknown young writer from Alabama published her first novel. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, still sells almost a million copies a year. Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, the only biography of the writer, talks about her in this interview
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