by Jamie Chavez | Mar 4, 2017 | Miscellany, Words & Language
One looks for the good, I think. So recently some of us have been repeating that old saw, May you live in interesting times. A Chinese curse, we’re told. Or a blessing. May you live in interesting times. But … it’s not Chinese. 🙂 I know, I know, I’m a wet blanket...
by Jamie Chavez | Feb 16, 2017 | Books You Might Like, The Book Biz
Persimmon is the name my mama gave me, after the fruit she stole off a tree down in the woods while she was carrying me, and Wilson is the name of the man that last owned me. I don’t want to call that man master here, but for the pupose of making this easier to read...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 21, 2016 | Miscellany, Words & Language
Stationery is an old-fashioned word. Or maybe I just think it’s old-fashioned because I learned it a long time ago and I don’t see it used much any more, given our electronic culture. But no, my fave dictionary lists it as having appeared in 1688—which is old enough,...
by Jamie Chavez | Jul 28, 2016 | Books You Might Like
On Friday morning, January 25, 2013, fifteen jihadis entered the restoration and conservation rooms on the ground floor of the Ahmed Baba Institute in Sankoré, the government library that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had taken over the previous April. For nearly a...
by Jamie Chavez | Jun 16, 2016 | Your Editor Says …
How much or how little “natural” ability anyone has is nearly impossible to gauge. When Emily Dickinson composed the lines that filled the pages she kept in her lonely desk, she could not know that her pure apprehension of the language, her immutable style and...
