Norman Invasion
-
On weird spelling.
Conquest, graft, and mispronunciation gave rise to the weird we know and love today.
Alexander Smart, archaic English, Beowulf, Bible, Chaucer, divination, Dutch h, dyslexia, English, English spelling, etymology, ghost, Gutenberg, history of spelling, i before e, King James, monks, Norman conquest, Norman Invasion, OED, Old English, Oxford English Dictionary, professional scribes, reading tea leaves, Shakespeare, spelling, spelling bee, tasseography, tea leaves, typesetters, weird, wierd, William Morris, written language, wurd, wyrd, wyrde
-
On writing poetry in English.
Throughout the month of November, in “celebration” of betrayals both past and present (Thanksgiving, land grants, sovereignty, smallpox, Christianity, Standing Rock), my co-teacher and I brought poetry by contemporary Native American writers into the jail. One week, my co-teacher (JM) began class with an impromptu riff about the fact that, although English-speaking people had betrayed…
-
On crashing waves of violence and Paul Kingsnorth’s ‘The Wake.’
People are raving about the new film “Racing Extinction.” What might impending extinction feel like for those last few survivors?
ancient humans, Beowulf, CK Scott Moncrieff, distribution of wealth, economics, extinction, Homo sapiens, human evolution, inequality, land holdings, land rights, Marcel Proust, mass extinction, Neanderthals, Norman Invasion, Old English, Paul Kingsnorth, Sapiens, Seamus Heaney, Stonehenge, The Wake, Translation, wealth, Yuval Noah Harari
Frank Brown Cloud 