If you’re sick of “tweet” and “chillaxing” then you can expect to do plenty of smug nodding at the Lake Superior University List of Banned Words.
The juiciest part of the list is the curmudgeonly complaints of fellow word nerds like Mikhail Swift of Hillman, Michigan who said tweeting is “pointless…yet has somehow managed to take the nation by storm. I’m tired of hearing about celebrity X’s new tweet, and how great of a tweeter he or she is.”
The word “app” (short for application used mostly by iPhone owners) offended Edward R. Bolt of Grand Rapids so much he was reduced to texting: “Must we b sbjct to yt another abrv?” Other words scolded were chillaxin (fairly obvious portmanteau of chilling and relaxing), “friend as a verb” (mostly blamed on Facebook) and “bromance”.
The list is the brainchild of former LSSU Public Relations Director Bill Rabe who created “word banishment” in 1975 as a New Year’s Eve party game. The university gets thousands of suggestions every year, but few Australian words make the list. It would be a tribute to the former PM if you nominated the Ruddism “working families”.
Author and gestator Monica Dux looked at the expectations placed on pregnant women and couldn’t see her own experience. In this wry look at the pregnancy happiness culture, Dux asks why are women drown out fear and anxiety of motherhood with advice to “remain positive” or worse “pamper yourself”.
Star literary agent Andrew Wylie has said that he’s prepared to take the licensing rights for his client’s e-books outside of print publishing and thinks the days of chain bookstores are numbered.
Wylie told Harvard Magazine: “‘We will take our 700 clients, see what rights are not allocated to publishers, and establish a company on their behalf to license those e-book rights directly to someone like Google, Amazon.com, or Apple.”
And Wylie’s clients – including Martin Amis, Dave Eggers and Elmore Leonard not to mention deceased authors such as Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Vladimir Nabokov – have the authorial mass to shift publishing in a new direction.
His opinions on big bookstores are characteristically cutthroat: “a combination of online booksellers like Amazon.com and independent bookstores will be the future of bookselling. The chains will go out of business – their model doesn’t work.”
Wylie’s ruthlessness as an agent earned him the nickname the Jackal when he lured Martin Amis away from his agent in the 1990s. He credits his skill as an agent to a heightened empathy. “My ability to transmit the writer’s qualities, to persuasively describe them with admiration, is strong because I have this sort of hollow core: I take on the author’s identity.”
Some may speculate that Wylie’s ‘taking my clients and going elsewhere’ approach is a just canny manoeuvre to negotiate better rates for digital rights. But the profile piece has a title that suggests Wylie’s agenting is almost godlike: “Fifteen Percent of Immortality”.
