Search Results for: New Yorker

You’ve Been Singing It All Wrong

A common cause of mondegreens, in particular, is the oronym: word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided multiple ways. One version that Pinker describes goes like this: Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise. The string of phonetic sounds can be plausibly broken up in multiple ways—and if you’re not familiar with the requisite proper noun, you may find yourself making an error. In similar fashion, Bohemian Rhapsody becomes Bohemian Rap City. Children might wonder why Olive, the other reindeer, was so mean to Rudolph. And a foreigner might become confused as to why, in this country, we entrust weather reports to meaty urologists or why so many people are black-toast intolerant. Oronyms result in not so much a mangling as an incorrect parsing of sounds when context or prior knowledge is lacking.

Other times, the culprit is the perception of the sound itself: some letters and letter combinations sound remarkably alike, and we need further cues, whether visual or contextual, to help us out. In their absence, one sound can be mistaken for the other. For instance, in a phenomenon known as the McGurk effect, people can be made to hear one consonant when a similar one is being spoken. “There’s a bathroom on the right” standing in for “there’s a bad moon on the rise” is a succession of such similarities adding up to two equally coherent alternatives. (Peter Kay offers an auditory tour of some other misleading gems.)

Maria Konnikova, writing in The New Yorker about the “mondegreen,” or a misheard word or phrase that makes sense in your mind, but is actually incorrect. The piece ran in December 2014.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photograph by Will Mebane for The New Yorker

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.
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Reality TV and the Rise of Celebrity-CEOs

Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into an opportunity to sell her cocktail brand for $120 million dollars. Widdicombe examines Frankel and other “celebreneurs” who leverage visibility and idolatry to build their own commercial empire.

Frankel’s twin vocations are, in some sense, the same. “I’m a marketer,” she told me, explaining her role in business and in television. “I know how to communicate to people, and I think that’s what marketing really is.” It’s also an apt definition of celebrity. In 1944, the German sociologist Leo Löwenthal coined the phrase “idols of consumption” to describe the burgeoning celebrity culture. With their clear skin and fabulous wardrobes, stars give us something to aspire to─and an excuse to buy stuff we don’t really need.

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How Michael Cunningham Writes About the Pains, Pleasures, and Psychedelia of Childhood

Michael Cunningham’s short story “White Angel” (The New Yorker; paywalled) is a vibrant masterpiece in miniature about two young brothers in suburban Cleveland pursuing the promises and pleasures of the sixties. Told through the eyes of 9-year-old Robert, the story travels an elegant curve – from the wonder, joy, and power imbalance of the brothers’ collusion, to a crashing and tragic denouement – that is at once funny, insightful, and utterly heartbreaking. “White Angel” was originally published in The New Yorker in 1988, and later became a key chapter in Cunningham’s novel A Home at the End of the World (1990):

Here is Carlton several months before his death, in an hour so alive with snow that earth and sky are identically white. He labors among the markers and I run after, stung by snow, following the light of his red knitted cap. Carlton’s hair is pulled back into a ponytail, neat and economical, a perfect pinecone of hair. He is thrifty, in his way.

We have taken hits of acid with our breakfast juice. Or rather, Carlton has taken a hit and I, considering my youth, have been allowed half. This acid is called windowpane. It is for clarity of vision, as Vicks is for decongestion of the nose. Our parents are at work, earning the daily bread. We have come out into the cold so that the house, when we reenter it, will shock us with its warmth and righteousness. Carlton believes in shocks.

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‘Writing Is Selection’: John McPhee on the Art of Omission

Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got.

-John McPhee, writing in the The New Yorker, on the art of “greening,” or whittling down your writing, and deciding what to leave out.

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On the Other Hand

Jon Irwin | Kill Screen | September 2015 | 22 minutes (5,439 words)

 

We’re excited to present a new Longreads Exclusive from Kill Screen—writer Jon Irwin goes inside the life of a man who helped keep the Muppets alive after Jim Henson’s death. For more from Kill Screen, subscribe. Read more…

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Longreads Pick

Our favorite stories of the week, featuring CityBeat, Pacific Standard, Guernica, The New Yorker, and Jarry Mag.

Author: Editors
Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 4, 2015

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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On Learning & Losing Language: A Reading List

Photo: Mark

Language shapes every facet of our lives—how we communicate, how we act, how we feel. When we can name something, we feel comfort and security (think of the medical diagnosis, the new baby’s name). We feel relief: common gestures while haggling in a marketplace, cognates in a textbook. Without language, we are lost. But what happens when language gets lost—violently uprooted by colonialism, for example, or dissipated in the annals of time? Can language be reclaimed? These six articles explore how language is disseminated, preserved, decoded, and, ultimately, cherished.

1. “How an Artificial Language from 1887 is Finding New Life Online.” (Sam Dean, The Verge, May 2015)

Lernu! When L.L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto in the late 19th century, he hoped it would erase language barriers and bring about world peace. Today, Esperanto is gaining traction in the digital language-learning community due to its enthusiastic adherents, relative simplicity and logical structure. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

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Read more…