jmenn
jmenn on Hacker News
He was, by all modern standards, a rather terrible writer, though _Pelham_ is rather interesting if read as throwback
eighteenth-century fiction or a precursor to detective novels. If nothing else, 'his mouth full of truth and turbot' is a rather brilliant phrase.
My university went through an accessibility remediation process recently, and it was a rather nightmarish undertaking. Many universities have multiple (thousands) of individual microsites that are largely untouched for years at a time, and I've always wondered if these would be targeted by people looking to bring a complaint.
Our HTML was more or less fine (though we found and fixed a few bugs), but the unbelievable number of PDFs and un-captioned videos nearly broke us. The culture shift has been difficult, particularly with people who want to post videos or PDFs but don't have the resources or training to make those pieces of content accessible.
Apologies if this is mentioned and I missed it, but does this account for changes in word meaning or context over time? Earlier literature, such as Austen, could be considered “not-vivid” unless you’re clued in for particular hints/phrases. I’m thinking of, perhaps, the use of “Et cetera” for pudenda.
After reading Sloan's _Sourdough_, I ended up buying FWSY and have been making sourdough for about 6-9 months. I find the entire process remarkably fun, relaxing, and exciting. Unfortunately, I still can't get that real "sour" taste from my breads.
They're probably a lot worse inside academia for those fields. That said, everyone I know with an MA in English is doing really well for themselves, both inside and outside the academy. Maybe it's my small sample size though.
I've taken up woodworking. Though I'm still remarkably terrible at it, it's nice to feel something material that I built. At first it was mentally exhausting but still rewarding, and as I'm getting more used to the various tools, the mental load is relaxing a bit. It does, however, require at least a little bit of space where one can handle producing a bit of sawdust.
I work at a university so getting books hasn't been too big an issue for me, but the public libraries near me have been pretty good about offering classes to a broad group of people, and pushing their makerspace & 3-D printers. I know my craftier friends are there frequently for the 3-D printers.
Not sure if this counts as engineering or a war story, but in my first job as an undergrad, I was hired as a "web intern" to setup a CMS for a non-profit. They offered me two CMSs from which to choose, Drupal or Joomla, a list of functionalities they wanted, and let me run loose. I was making progress, right up until the Executive Director told me I wasn't allowed to write "custom code" due to the possibility that I may one day leave. No HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc. that wasn't by default output from the CMS. The ED didn't believe I could write modules, so I ended up doing that, saying "look it's a default from this module in the CMS," and somehow that got the okay. A year later, when the ED retired, they hired me as a freelancer to redo everything in a more sensible way.
I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.
This sort of took me aback in the article; this is a relatively well-known piece of libertine literature for those who study early-modern lit/culture.
In my field (English / English Lit) one of the motivations for the monograph is tenure. That's likely worth more than any royalties off the actual book sales.
The cutoff at 1800 seems odd given Louis Eustace Ude's _The French Cook_ comes out in French in 1813, and had a strong foothold in England prior to 1800. [1] If I understand correctly, he was also one of the first to bring what we now consider modern gastronomic techniques into British cooking. He may present an interesting case study for the period before Grimod and Brillat-Savarin.
http://www.cooksinfo.com/louis-eustache-ude
Same, but English literature PhD student keeping an eye on being employable in the future if tenure disappears. Generally find myself writing Python as a hobby or for my dissertation.
Disclaimer: I'm in an English PhD program.
Regarding the parent's comment about adjuncting, no one who goes into an English PhD program expects they'll get a tenure track job out of it, and if they do believe such a thing, they likely shouldn't be in the program in the first place. Professors and the Modern Language Association remind us of the awful working conditions we can expect. No one goes into this field thinking we've found the next big lucrative market to exploit. Most of us would be ecstatic if we landed an R1 gig, but except for those at the top universities, we realize it's highly unlikely.
Learning to write and communicate should be emphasized more in English programs, but I fear the turn to a strictly compositional program will detract from what English majors actually do: read and interpret really well. My limited understanding of Computer Science undergraduate courses suggests that you don't actually learn "to program," you learn to solve problems in algorithmic ways with code; the code itself is merely a means to an end.
As a side note (and I don't do much work in this particular subfield), the work being done with code in English departments seems to be breathing new life into the field. The work on automated genre detection, and, more generally, the move from 200-some canonical texts to 'large datasets,' is bringing us unexpected funding while encouraging students to learn enough code to squeak by at an entry-level job.
The non-research/terminal MS may also be useful for those wishing to teach computer science at the junior/community-college level.