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June 18, 2022 by libroshombre
International Tolerance Day won’t roll around until November 16, but it’s increasingly obvious we ought to celebrate “sympathy or …
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Category: blogs, books, communication, demagoguery, democracy, humor, jokes, language, politicians, politics, profanity, words
| Tags: Annie Rauwerda, Depths of Wikipedia, exploding trousers, Godwin's Law, loaded laanguage, Mike Godwin, Nazis, rashism, Russian, tolerance, Ukrainian, wikipedia, Wikipedia's Unusual Articles
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June 18, 2022 by libroshombre
“Foist,” “to introduce surreptitiously,” is a word I like, perhaps because librarians enjoy foisting books and information, albeit overtly, …
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Category: libraries, railroads, trains, words, writing, writing well
| Tags: Anu Garg, crash vs accident, foisst, pedantry, portmanteaux, railroads, Rex Stout, stochastic terrorism, wordsmithing
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May 23, 2022 by libroshombre
Once upon a time, back when literacy was really rare, no one ever read silently to themselves, and all …
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Category: archeology, books, librarians, library history, library school, literacy, public libraries, reading, royalty, science
| Tags: Ashurbanipal, Henry Layard, hygrometers, Jean Andre Deluc, Njegos, silent reading
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May 13, 2022 by libroshombre
Our family’s Kentucky Derby brunch turned out to be fertile ground for intellectual speculation, ranging from sandwiches to parasocial …
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Category: animals, food, polution, psychology, relationships, social science, sports
| Tags: emotional flooding, freaking out, Kentucky Derby, nanoparticles, sandwiches, ultrafines
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May 9, 2022 by libroshombre
LIBRARY COLUMN Contact Greg Hill, 479-4344 May 5, 2022 The Chilean-American writer Isabel Allende and I must smell …
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Category: authoritarianism, demagoguery, democracy, racism, taste
| Tags: cumin, Ku Klux Klan, paw-paw
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April 23, 2022 by libroshombre
American writer H.L. Mencken’s word-smithing, the courage of his convictions, and his pioneering work on our version of English, …
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Category: eugenics, intelligence, Intelligence Quotiant, librarians, library school, pedantry, punctuation, reading, reference books, reference librarians
| Tags: David Starr Jordan, Henry Herbert Goddard, interrobang, IQ test, morons, Stanford University
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April 23, 2022 by libroshombre
In “A History of Reading,” Alberto Manguel wrote, “At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of …
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Category: Bible, book banning, censorship, e-reader, etymology, language, reading, word origins, words, writers, writing
| Tags: Archie Goodwin, Babar, Billy Budd, Billy Budd KGB, Dav Pilkey, Dr. Seuss, J. Edgar Hoover, Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout, ted geisel
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April 23, 2022 by libroshombre
You won’t find me arguing with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that “One must be an inventor to read well. …
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Category: interlibrary loan, inventors, language, languages, librarians, libraries, libraries and librarians, library history, linguistics, scientists
| Tags: Fred Kilgour, OCLC, pants, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Turfan Man, William Gilbert
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March 19, 2022 by libroshombre
The Lone Tones is the name of the acapella doowop group in Austin that I’ve sung with for forty-plus …
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Category: autobiography, libraries, libraries and librarians, musicians, numbers, public libraries
| Tags: carl barks, elephants, Jimmy Reed, Keith Richards, Scrooge McDuck
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March 12, 2022 by libroshombre
Eric Hoffer, the American longshoreman philosopher, noticed that “Whenever you trace the origin of a skill or practices which …
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Category: art, books, classics, fruit, illustrations, illustrators, librarians, libraries, plants, public libraries, reference librarians, trash
| Tags: bananas, Eric Hoffer, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, nix, phloems, Rockwell Kent, Vladimir Putin, White Wings