Happy Friday, Asymptote! Did you miss the roundup last week? The podcast went up instead, and if you missed it, take a listen (especially recommended for traffic jams and spring cleaning sessions). This episode features highlights from our fifth-anniversary New York event—FOMO, begone.
This week in linguistics: do you even language, bro? Here’s why nouns become verbs (and vice versa). Because science, of course. And if you’re wondering when, why, and how “water closet” became “bathroom” became “restroom,” you have the answer somewhere on the euphemism treadmill.
In thinkpiece news: lest you think our reviews are a waste of space, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott argues for the absolute necessity of criticism, filmic or otherwise. And while the Vatican tried to keep this film out of Italian cinemas, the effort to subdue this art-house LGBT film totally and predictably backfired. But let’s hope the first book to be banned in Ireland in 18 years won’t enjoy similar success.
News we don’t like to hear, for the most part: readers don’t appear to care about the quality of a translation, according to Tim Parks from the New York Review of Books. Translators might as well be invisible angels, but don’t tell that to this Russian translation power couple. Maybe you might not want to translate at all, depending.
Korea‘s “swashbuckling” Hong Gildong is now in the spotlight again, thanks to a brand-new translation by Minsoo Kang. But the country’s contemporary literature is on the up-and-up, too: here’s an interview with The Vegetarian author Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith.
Meanwhile, the week in awards: check out the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards, which gave top honors to Argonauts’ Maggie Nelson and Paul Beatty of The Sellout. As my mother always says: William Shakespeare never won an award. But you might take advantage of these ten tips to learn to write like he did.