While there were many promising choices, such as “sharknado,” “struggle bus,” and “slash,” the American Dialect Society voted “because” the 2013 Word of the Year. Jason Riggle, associate professor of Linguistics and voting member of the society, explained the choice for Chicago Tonight.
“This is the year that language nerds had their day,” said Riggle. The recent update in usage of “because” allows the word to introduce a noun, adjective, or other part of speech, and no longer requires it to be followed by “of” or a full clause.
Learn more about the language trends of 2013 and watch Riggle’s full interview online at Chicago Tonight.
With help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a collaborative project between UChicago and Oxford University will digitize books essential to eighteenth–century intellectual history. The “Commonplace Cultures” project will use data analysis techniques to develop a digital commonplace book.
In the eighteenth century, commonplace books gathered excerpts and quotations from many different works and organized them by subject, helping readers to track new thinkers and ideas. Identifying and analyzing these commonplaces will shed light on how knowledge spread and transformed in the early modern period, according to Robert Morrissey, one of the leaders of the “Commonplace Cultures” project.
Commonplace books were “a way of managing information that made texts, ideas, and words accessible,” explained Morrissey, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures. "Commonplace Cultures" builds on Morrissey's ongoing ARTFL project that collaborates with the French government to digitize and offer full-text versions of French sources.
To read more about the “Digging Into Data” award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, visit UChicago News.
Literature is an affair of the nerves, says Malynne Sternstein, associate professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures. In her fall quarter class on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Sternstein, AB’87, AM’90, PhD’96, taught her students to respond to the tingling of the nervous system created by reading Nabokov’s prose.
For Sternstein, Lolita turns not on plot, but on Nabokov’s use of language. Sternstein teaches her students to pay close attention to the text, progressing slowly but carefully to page nine of the novel by the fourth meeting of class.
To learn more about Sternstein’s close reading techniques in class discussion, visit The University of Chicago Magazine.