For those of you Word Fans who also enjoy my poetry blog, I’ve put my Kindle book of Morning Meander poetry on a 99-cent sale this week, so that we can all walk, write, create, meditate, and pray together from September 23d to November 1.
chat
In my other life…
There’s a world outside of words? What could it be??? Don’t worry, Word Fans, my other life is also about words. I’m ticked to have Kindle-published a collection of poetry. Self-publications, of course, are un-curated, except by the bots which assure us that I have not violated copyright or decency laws. And Theodore Sturgeon’s adage remains relevant.
But this blog is un-curated – I’m the content chooser and approver. What an odd little world.
However! I hope you enjoy the poetry, there’s always more where it came from.
New Lexos Features!
Friends, I knew that the wonderful Lexos folks had been adding features and goodness since my Lexos-analyzing heyday in 2015. Today I had cause to give it all a good look-see*. I am head over heels.
Expect some new and very sassy graphs, friends. Very. Sassy. Graphs.
*Look-see, a perfectly cromulent hyphenated word according to OED, and the related non-word “make-see” just took me down a vast and mighty rabbit-hole. You have been warned.
“look-see, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/110145. Accessed 6 March 2019.
Exiles, Outcasts, and Orphans
I am listening to Verlyn Flieger’s lectures of the “Tolkien’s World of Middle Earth” course at Signum University. I hope to showcase the marvelous words which she holds up for consideration. Right there in Lecture 1, she exhorts us to look for exiles, outcasts, and orphans throughout Tolkien’s work. I searched for every variation on exile, outcast, orphan, and widow. Here we go:
1.017 and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons?
14.033 and aid for our widows
14.033 and orphans?’
Both “widow” and “orphan” are common words for our purposes; I’ll run and add them to the concordance. Now it is for someone else to follow up with the other works!
Your word trivia for today is that “exile” has an obsolete meaning of “Slender, shrunken, thin; diminutive.” Thank you, OED, it’s nice to be back in your shelter.
“exile, adj. and adv.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/66233. Accessed 5 October 2018.
Happy Birthday, Oxford English Dictionary!
In honor of the ninety year anniversary of the publication of the first edition, the Oxford English Dictionary offers individual subscriptions for £90 or $90 during this celebratory year. I gratefully accept! My institution no longer can afford its OED subscription, so I have been foundering a bit. What to do without access to my much loved resource? With these happy news about the special price, I have obtained my own subscription for the year: let the birthday candles glow!
I dearly hope they have a hundred-and-eleventh birthday event as well…
Works Cited so Far For Hyphen Project
Good morning, Word Fans!
It will be my pleasure to talk about hyphens at the Tolkien in Vermont conference in early April with fellow scholars – perhaps I’ll see you there? Folks can find my references right here for their convenience. The slides are posted here as well.
Works Cited
Alden, L. F. S. “A Tolkien Concordance”. Words That You Were Saying: An adventure through the words of The Hobbit. WordPress, 2015. https://wordsthatyouweresaying.blog/concordance/
Alden, L. F. S. “Hyphen Mini-Concordance”. Words That You Were Saying: An adventure through the words of The Hobbit. WordPress, 2017. https://wordsthatyouweresaying.blog/2017/05/13/hyphen-mini-concordance/
Alden, L. F. S. “Uncommon Words Revealing Adventures in Mirkwood” Words That You Were Saying: An adventure through the words of The Hobbit. WordPress, 2015. https://wordsthatyouweresaying.blog/2015/06/14/uncommon-words-revealing-adventures-in-mirkwood/
Burroughs, F. G., Jr. Old English. Bowdoin College. Autumn, 1984. Lecture.
Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass. Project Gutenberg, 2016. E-book.
Drout, Michael. “Germanic languages allow compounding…” Michael Drout: Timeline. Facebook, September 19, 2017. Informal post with disclaimer.
Flieger, Verlyn (2002-01-28). Splintered Light: Tolkien’s World, Revised Edition (Kindle Locations 931-940). Kent State University Press. Kindle Edition.
GIMP: GNU Image Manipulation Program. Open source software. Web. https://www.gimp.org/
LeBlanc, M.D., Drout, M., Kahn, M., Kleinman, S. Lexomics Tools. Wheaton College, 2013. Web. http://lexos.wheatoncollege.edu/
OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015, http://www.oed.com. Various dates 2015-2017.
Olsen, Corey. Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.
Parsons, Catriona NicIomhar. Gàidhlig Immersion Week. Colaisde na Gàidhlig. August, 1996. Lecture.
Tolkien, J. R. R. A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages, edited by Dimitra Fimi and Andrew Higgins. HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Faerie Stories.” The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966 (first Printing). Print.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit. Revised and expanded edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Print.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit: or There and Back Again. The Children’s Book Club.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
“One of the nerdiest Tolkien projects”
I finally feel like it’s OK to brag a little. Brenton Dickieson, Tolkien scholar and lecturing professor at Signum University, has called this project “one of the nerdiest Tolkien projects I know about.” I’m just over the moon with this compliment – Dickieson would know from nerdy. His delicious blog, A Pilgrim in Narnia, has a new post about C. S. Lewis, Inklings, fantasy, and other treats at least weekly.
