When librarians get death threats

So much for free speech in the US

Amanda Jones, wearing an anti-censorship t-shirt

1. The librarian against book bannings in the US

2. Reading is thinking

3. From evil rodent to hand-held device

4. From blessed to silly

5. The flat prose of the world’s bestselling novelist

1. Death threats have been made against librarian Amanda Jones for her strong stand against book banning and censorship in the US. “You can’t hide. We know where you work and live … you have a LARGE target on your back,” read one online attack. “I travel with a weapon, multiple weapons,” Jones says. “We have security all round our home. I have escape routes in my head wherever I go. I get groceries delivered. I don’t go out in public in my community, because the things they say online are so horrible.” The Guardian

2. […N]o information technology yet invented has been able to match the sophistication of the book. Indeed, the internet, with its bewildering chaos of disconnected trivia, only serves to emphasise the sophistication of books that are not dense in information but rich in context and logical connections. And unlike scrolling, reading is not a merely passive activity. Books demand engagement, concentration and thought. As the writer Ezra Klein recently put it, when reading a book you are not merely “downloading information into your brain”, you are “spending time grappling with the text, making connections”. Reading is thinking. To adapt [the writer Joan] Didion again: we read to find out what we think. - James Marriot in The Times

3. “The meanings of words are constantly changing and multiplying— a process termed by linguists as semantic change. We have a hint of this from our own lifetimes: is a wicked mouse an evil rodent or an excellent hand-held input device for a computer? The word table once only referred to a piece of furniture with a flat top, but has not only become a verb, but one with two opposing meanings. In the UK, 'to table' means the process of presenting a proposal, while in the US, 'to table' means postponing the consideration of a proposal.” From The Language Puzzle by Steven Mithen

4. More from The Language Puzzle. An example of how the meaning of a word can change: “The Old English word sœlig meant 'blessed'. By c.1200 its meaning had changed to 'innocent'; by c.1300, it had further changed to 'harmless' and then 'weak'; by the 1570s it had come to mean 'feeble in mind and lacking in reason', which is close to the meaning of scelig's modern spelling: silly.

5. Agatha Christie, according to her website, is ‘the world’s bestselling novelist’. In 2018 John Lanchester in The London Review of Books asked why: “It’s not as if anyone, even her hardest-core fans, ever makes any claims for Christie as a writer per se. Her prose is flat and functional, her characters on a spectrum between types, stereotypes and caricatures; so, you might well ask, what’s to like?”