I was listening to Fresh Air on National Public Radio last week, and heard a story on Jane Austen. During the course of the discourse (haha), several words were used that I had to jot down, with the sole purpose of bringing them to you:
Idiom: the language peculiar to a people or to a district, community, or class
Idiom: the language peculiar to a people or to a district, community, or class
Querulous: habitually complaining
Juvenilia: compositions produced in the artist's or author's youth
Anachronism: an error in chronology; especially : a chronological misplacing
of persons, events, objects, or customs in regard to each other
Pedantry: narrowly, stodgily, and often ostentatiously learned
Strew: to spread by scattering
Obtuse: lacking sharpness or quickness of sensibility or intellect
The piece, in particular, deals with the allegations that Jane Austen was a "sloppy writer", not able to spell or use punctuation correctly. I loved this sentence, as the narrator (linguist Geoff Nunberg) summed up his notion of anyone clucking their tongues as they apply what is a modern-day-notion of correctness:
"It's nice to know where a semi-colon's supposed to go, but it's nothing to swell your chest over. The artistry is in being able to write sentences that require one."
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