January 28, 2021
In a recent conversation, I heard the word awkness in reference to a socially awkward situation. I hadn’t heard it before, but its meaning was obvious in context. After all, its cousin awks ‘awkward’ has been around a while; I’ve even used it myself.
When I looked into awkness, I had a surprise. It sounds, as I said on Twitter, like a millennial coinage – and it is, more or less. But not originally: the OED dates awkness to the late 16th century, defining it thesaurusily as ‘wrongness, irrationality, perversity, untowardness, awkwardness, ineptitude’.
The first citation is from a 1587 religious book by Philippe de Mornay (tr. Philip Sidney & Arthur Golding): ‘The skilfull can work much upon little, and by his cunning ouercome the awknesse of his stuffe.’ The citations continue till 1674, with the word also spelled awknesse, awknes, and aukness.
And then: obsolescence.
Well, not exactly.
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etymology, language, language history, lexicography, linguistics, morphology, slang, wordplay, words | Tagged: awk, awkness, awks, clippings, dictionaries, etymology, inkhorn terms, language, language history, lexicography, linguistics, morphology, neologisms, OED, slang, wordplay, words |
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Posted by Stan Carey
May 11, 2020
An early highlight of my reading year has been Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories. Many of her stories put a slight and strange and startling twist on consensus reality (or a fresh insight that amounts to the same), sometimes combined with a self-conscious linguistic flourish:
I am reading a sentence by a certain poet as I eat my carrot. Then, although I know I have read it, although I know my eyes have passed along it and I have heard the words in my ears, I am sure I haven’t really read it. I may mean understood it. But I may mean consumed it: I haven’t consumed it because I was already eating the carrot. The carrot was a line, too.
This synaesthesia-adjacent report is one of fifteen self-contained entries in a story titled ‘Examples of Confusion’.
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books, literature, wordplay, writers, writing | Tagged: American literature, books, language, linguistics humour, literature, Lydia Davis, short stories, stories, wordplay, writers, writing, writing tips |
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Posted by Stan Carey
April 1, 2020
If you’re lucky enough to have books and time at hand, here’s something fun you can do in lockdown: book spine poetry.
*
All the Pieces Matter
I choose to live
a life in parts –
insects’ flight
from dream to dream,
through the woods
beyond the sea.
I only say this
because I love you:
All the pieces
matter.
*

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books, literature, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: Alannah Robins, Bob Gibbons, book spine poem, bookmash, books, Bryan Cranston, Deborah Tannen, Emily Carroll, found poetry, Jonathan Abrams, literature, Oona Frawley, Paul Lynch, photography, poetry, Sabine Dardenne, visual poetry, wordplay |
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 15, 2019
Here’s a new book spine poem (aka bookmash). For the uninitiated: This is a game where you make a visual poem from the spines of books on your shelf.
*
Secret Place
Wild flowers, the wild places,
The birds of the innocent wood –
The secret place on the black hill,
Half a life still life,
The living mountain
Changing my mind.
*

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books, literature, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: A.S. Byatt, book spine poem, bookmash, books, Bruce Chatwin, Deirdre Madden, found poetry, literature, Nan Shepherd, nature, nature poetry, photography, poetry, Richard Fitter, Robert Macfarlane, Tana French, V.S. Naipaul, visual poetry, wordplay, Zadie Smith |
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Posted by Stan Carey
March 20, 2019
I almost forgot how much fun it is to make book spine poems. My last one was about a year ago (and led to an interview at the OED), so it’s about time I did another. This one tells a miniature story.
*
When the Lights Go Down
Stranger on a train, heading inland,
Civilwarland in bad decline.
Autumn-dark voyage,
The light of evening,
The signal and the noise.
One shot without conscience
when the lights go down:
Death in a white tie, a brilliant void.
Reader, I murdered him.
*

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books, literature, poetry, wordplay | Tagged: Alan Furst, Ali Smith, book spine poem, bookmash, books, Edna O'Brien, found poetry, Jack Fennell, Jen Green, Jenny Diski, Lee Child, literature, Nate Silver, Ngaio Marsh, Nicola Barker, Pauline Kael, poetry, Robert Hare, visual poetry, wordplay |
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Posted by Stan Carey
August 2, 2018
If you enjoyed my quiz on nouning and verbing, you might like my new quiz on portmanteau words, now up on the Macmillan Dictionary site. It will test your knowledge of novel portmanteaus such as plogging, smombie, theyby, and zoodles. It’s multiple choice, so you can guess at any strange ones.
Portmanteau words are words that blend two or more others in structure and meaning, like smog (smoke + fog), brunch (breakfast + lunch), and portmonsteau (portmanteau + monster). That last one hasn’t caught on yet. They should be distinguished from compound words like teapot and seawater, which also combine words but don’t blend them.
I like a good portmanteau word, and by browsing Macmillan’s Open Dictionary (which is crowd-sourced but lexicographer-edited – this ain’t Urban Dictionary) I see a lot of shiny new ones soon after they enter circulation. Hence the portmanteau quiz. Let me know how you score.
Now follows a bit on the etymology of portmanteau, for anyone unfamiliar with it.
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humour, language, morphology, wordplay, words, writers | Tagged: etymology, language, Lewis Carroll, Macmillan Dictionary, morphology, neologisms, portmanteau words, quiz, Through the Looking Glass, wordplay, words, writers |
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Posted by Stan Carey
June 4, 2018
Some weeks ago I made a visual poem from book spines to mark the 90th anniversary of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED editors liked it enough to republish it on their website; they also asked me a few things about language, dictionaries, and book spine poetry.
You can read my short interview on the new OED blog. If dictionaries and word history interest you, I recommend the rest of the blog – click the image below – which looks at the OED‘s reception in 1928, the work of editors past and present, and dialect words from around the world, among other things.
For more book spine poems, aka bookmashes, see the archive.

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books, language, language history, lexicography, personal, poetry, words | Tagged: book spine poem, bookmash, books, dictionaries, found poetry, language, language history, lexicography, OED, OED90, personal, poetry, visual poetry, wordplay, words |
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Posted by Stan Carey