What happens when two words combine to form something new? Something pretty linkalicious.
Would Jane Austen be published today? Maybe if she wrote more quidditch in? (via Maud Newton)
How many people in your town own a library card? Winnipeg may win in a per capita battle. (via ArtsJournal)
“‘In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells a story about the invention of writing, in which the Egyptian god Thoth shows his written characters to another god, Ammon, who rebukes him: “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves.’ There were stories and songs–and songs that told stories–long before there was any writing, and they were kept alive not in libraries but through a cycle of reciting, listening, memorizing, and reciting anew.”
Speaking of memorization, on Conquerers and Poetry: ” Verse was used for all orders so that verbal commands were not forgotten or altered through successive retellings throughout the military. Mongol poetry is alliterative, with repeating sounds on initial syllables, well suited for memorization in a mostly illiterate community.”