Save the Words: Linguistic Intervention

Adoption drives, endangered literary species, and how to nerd your way to the latest buzzword.

We’re obsessed with words. Unfortunately, more than half of the world’s 6,800 or so languages?are expected to disappear before the century is over. While English may be missing from the book of endangered linguistic species, in the age of social media shorthand and vowelless acronyms, the average English speaker’s eloquence, linguistic dexterity and breadth of vocabulary is rapidly declining. Today, 90% of what we write is communicated using just 7,000 of the quarter-million words in the English language, a mere one-third of one percent.

Save the Words is a delightful language conservation effort from the makers of the Oxford English dictionary, the complete compendium of every word that ever existed in English. Driven by the simple insight that the best way to keep a word from dying is to use it often enough, the site offers a virtual wall of endangered lexemes that you’re invited to adopt, complete with playful sound effects as you hover over a word and it scrambles to grab your attention and get you to pick it.

Whether you’re a seplasiary (n. seller or producer of perfumes and ointments) or an Agonyclite (n. member of a religious sect that stood rather than kneeled), let’s face it — you could use a linguistic botox shot, rejuvenating your lexicon with a healthy dose of forgotten lingo. You can also sign up for a word-of-the-day email, delivering a daily new word fresh-packed in Oxford each morning.

The one downfall: The Flash-based design makes deep-linking impossible and individual words unsharable — yet another tragic missed opportunity from the sexy-over-shareable department.

Save the Words reminds us of lexicographer Erin McKean’s wonderful Wordnik, with a touch of Free Rice playfulness and a quirky twist. And if you play your cards right, you may even excavate a lexic gem to bring back as a hip new buzzword or, at the very least, a catchy Twitter hashtag.

via VSL

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Leave Your Sleep: Natalie Merchant Sets Victorian Children’s Poetry to Song

Musty libraries, otherworldly storytelling, and how dead poets wrote the year’s most moving album.

The cross-pollination of disciplines, which is the seedbed of some of humanity’s greatest creative achievements, hardly gets more bewitching than the intersection of literature and music. (An intersection I hold particularly dear.) That’s what Natalie Merchant accomplishes with great elegance and genius in Leave Your Sleep — a brilliant and beautiful musical adaptation of near-forgotten Victorian children’s poetry, a decade in the making.

The album, her first studio recording in seven years and co-produced with Venezuelan musician-composer Andres Levin, a frequent collaborator of David Byrne and creator of the eclectic Red Hot charity series, samples from the entire spectrum of literary fame and obscurity, including poets like Rachel Field, Robert Graves, Christina Rossetti and — our favorite — e e cummings, as well as little-known geniuses like Brooklyn poet Natalia Crane, who published her first book in 1927 at the age of ten.

What I really enjoyed about this project was reviving these people’s words, taking them off the dead flat pages, bringing them to life. Bringing them to light.

What makes the album all the more special is that in the six years Merchant spent researching the poets, sifting through newspaper microfilm from the 1800’s and spending countless hours in musty Victorian libraries, she grew increasingly curious about and inspired by their lives and decided to write a book about them. Poetry inspiring music inspiring prose, a beautiful metaphor for the cross-pollination of the arts. Coupled with Merchant’s unforgettable powerhouse of a voice, the album is one of the most inspired projects to come out this year.

We were fortunate enough to experience Merchant’s absolutely breathtaking live performance at TED earlier this year, which, though not doing justice to her live stage charisma, you can sample below. The rich emotion oozing from Merchant’s voice as her melodic storytelling unfolds is just otherworldly.

Sophisticated, playful, bittersweet and utterly haunting, Leave Your Sleep spans as rich an emotional spectrum as it does a musical range, leaving us dangerously close to infatuation in a way that no single recording has managed to in longer than we can remember.

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Tom Waits Reads Bukowski

On finding light in darkness, knowing chances and the ownership of life.

Short and sweet, our 2010 wish to Brain Pickings readers, from the lips of Tom Waits reading “The Laughing Heart” by the great Charles Bukowski.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

In 2009, we spent more than 200 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,400 hours for the year — the equivalent of 24 feature-length films, 60 music albums or 800 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right and helps us pay the bills.

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Uncovered Gem: Bono Reads Bukowski’s “Roll The Dice”

“If you’re gonna try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.”

Today, we’re doing a short-and-sweet on the convergence of two cultural icons — Bono reading Bukowski, easily the most influential and most imitated contemporary poet.

“Roll The Dice” comes from the brilliant What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, Bukowski’s second posthumous collection spanning 200+ poems from the 70’s through the 90’s.

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