Ashifa Kassam reports for the Guardian on some research that falls very much in the remit of this blog:

When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely. While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying. […]

“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”

When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.

The study, which looked at taboo words in 13 languages from Serbian to Cantonese and Dutch, and across 17 countries, revealed other differences. The word “shit”, or its translated equivalent, for example, ranked among the most frequently used in several languages, including English, Finnish and Italian, but was not in the top rankings in French, Dutch, Spanish or German.

In contrast, words that sought to disparage women, such as “bitch,” turned up across cultures. “I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”

Click that last link for the study (which is open access); thanks, Trevor!

Bianca Giacobone and Guido G. Beduschi report on an intriguing acquisition:

In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.

It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of facts contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva could offer guidance on how to navigate the moment, demonstrating that “what’s happening now has, in fact, been happening since the very invention of language and writing,” Havens said.

His pitch was successful. Johns Hopkins University acquired the collection for an undisclosed amount and housed it in the wainscoted library room of the Evergreen Museum and Library, a 19th-century mansion in Baltimore.

The sellers were Arthur and Janet Freeman, a couple of book merchants who made their name in the tight-knit world of antiquarian booksellers by collecting fascinating literary forgeries. Their venture started in 1961, when Arthur Freeman, then a graduate student of Elizabethan drama at Harvard University, began acquiring sources on John Payne Collier. Collier, a well-respected 19th-century scholar, had caused a ruckus among his contemporaries when he claimed to have found thousands of annotations to a copy of Shakespeare’s Second Folio, which he said had been penned by a contemporary of Shakespeare — but was in fact forged by Collier himself.

In the decades that followed, Freeman, who died in 2025, assembled a vast array of literary fakes, collecting books whose content is deceiving in nature. These included poetry purported to have been written by Martin Luther, who was not much of a poet, or reports of Pope Joan, a woman who, in the Middle Ages, disguised herself as a man and was elected Pope, only to be caught out when she suddenly gave birth in the middle of a procession in Rome. The latter myth was perpetuated for centuries and was not firmly debunked until the 17th century.

There’s more at the link; we’ve discussed imaginary books (not quite the same thing) in 2014 and 2024. Thanks, Nick!

Chef Andres giving out food during the 2018/2019 federal shutdown

Continuing Coverage of Chef Jose Andres Being Awesome Cont.

Thanks to all who messaged us – I was driving back from Shenandoah!!

From the José Andrés Group:

480 7th Street, NW

418 7th Street, NW

401 7th Street, NW

beggars-opera:

piratecat:

beggars-opera:

beggars-opera:

I remember hearing in a video years ago that the most popular ride to work at in Disney World was the Tower of Terror, because it was the only place you didn’t have to pretend to be happy all the time - gloominess was part of your character.

I am SO pleased to see that the staff at the Edward Gorey museum have embraced this. I would gladly go back to a minimum wage front desk position if I got to tell guests “I suppose I must let you in. Feel free to wander the first floor. The director might come downstairs and give a talk. He might not. Life is full of disappointments.” A++, only made better by the many children running around underfoot trying to find various murder weapons in the gashlycrumb tinies scavenger hunt

This is their contact page btw

Signs from behind the desk at the Edward Gorey House

#very reasonable asks

theprofessional-amateur:

theprofessional-amateur:

I am forever grateful to an archivist mentor I worked with in grad school for some resume advice she gave me and thought maybe others would also benefit from it.

Keep a Master Resume.

This is not the resume you send out. This is a detailed resume of every job (with dates and location, supervisor and location phone number are a bonus) and as many skills/duties/accomplishments you can possibly think of for each and every one of the jobs and education programs you can think of.

She showed me hers, it was about 25 pages long, and formatted exactly like a regular resume for ease. Every time she would learn a new program/skill, she’d add it. Change in title or duties, add it. Complete something big/special/complicated/new to her/professionally significant, she would add it. This way when she went up for a promotion or raise, she had a detailed record of highlights to pick from to show she deserved it. There was no “when was that? Did I submit that last round of reviews?”

Applying to a new job? Pick and choose items from your Master Resume to plug in to the resume or CV you will be sending based on the job posting. You don’t need to rewrite it, just cut and paste relevant details.

I am applying to a job not exactly my field but with enough skill cross over that I feel I would be a good fit. Being able to build out a resume by cutting and pasting from the Master Resume is saving me so much time and energy. The info is there, I just need to plug it in to the file I send. Since both are already formatted, piece of cake!

I can’t recommend it enough.

“As every member of the bar of every federal court knows (or is presumed to know),” the federal court pointed out to some of its members, Rule 8 requires that complaints be limited to “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” But if every lawyer knows it, why did the judge need to say it? Because he had just been forced to read an 85-page complaint in which the first 79 pages were devoted to “often repetitive … but superfluous allegations” that mostly praised the lawyers’ client while also insulting the defendants.

Why would someone write a complaint in such a way? The citation itself offers a clue. See Trump v. New York Times Co., No. 8:25-cv-2487-SDM, 2025 WL 2680597 (M.D. Fla. Sept. 19, 2025).

This is one of the many cases that the President of the United States has filed in order to complain that somebody said something bad about him. He is frequently right about that, but tends to overlook the fact that the speakers are frequently right, too. And even if they aren’t, because he is a “public figure” the First Amendment still protects them unless he can prove “actual malice.”

Well, feel free to debate the merits of this and other such cases amongst yourselves. The people we are directly mocking here are the lawyers who needed or agreed to write 85 pages (with 77 pages of exhibits) to state two simple defamation claims. The “short and plain statement” part of Rule 8 is rarely invoked against anyone who isn’t already a prison inmate (their complaints are often short but rarely “plain”), but the judge was within his discretion to invoke it here.

Personally, I would invoke it against any complaint that includes a first paragraph like this one, the kind that, as I have bitched about before, repeats information that was in the caption just a few inches above and assumes the reader is a complete idiot who won’t be able to figure out who’s who unless you define even obvious things for them:

Plaintiff, PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP, by and through his counsel, sues Defendants, NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY (the “New York Times” or the “Times”), SUSANNE CRAIG (“Craig”), RUSS BUETTNER (“Buettner”), PETER BAKER (“Baker”), MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT (“Schmidt”), and PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC (“Penguin”) (collectively, “Defendants”), and alleges as follows:

See, e.g., “A Note From Kevin (Hereinafter, “Me”) to All Attorneys (Hereinafter, “You”)” (Feb. 20, 2020); and “THIS AGAIN (Hereinafter, ‘This’)” (Mar. 23, 2022), and even “How to Start a Brief” (Feb. 8, 2013).

I just noticed that the only person not treated this way in the paragraph above is PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP himself, and I’m guessing that wasn’t an oversight.

Anyway, paragraphs like that are unfortunately not enough to trigger Rule 8 (yet), much less the caning they deserve. Here it was the 70-some pages that followed, mostly devoted to statements like this: “With the overwhelming victory [in 2024], President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.” Compl. ¶ 2. Well, we can all agree that losers like Neil Armstrong (“Armstrong”) and Abraham Lincoln (“Lincoln”) should be embarrassed by their paltry contributions, but the point here is whether this allegation might lend support to a viable defamation claim. Some would say no, because even if one disagreed with the assertion above, and the defendants very well might, that would be an opinion, not a fact, and therefore not actionable.

Nor is it immediately clear, for example, why the fact that [the name of] Donald Trump has written [appears on] many books would be relevant (or why the covers of those books must be shown), or whether his dad was “successful,” or whether The Apprentice‘s ratings were directly attributable to the identity of the host, or … well, you get the idea.

In any event, here the judge did not reach the merits, holding only that 79 pages of the foregoing is more than a reader should have to endure, and under the circumstances, more than Rule 8 allows. He struck the complaint and said any amended version may not exceed 40 pages.

It didn’t bode well for the plaintiff that this case was assigned to Judge Steven Merryday, not because Merryday is known to be anti-Trump but because he is known to be anti-BS and also quite creative. He’s already been mentioned here at least three times for those reasons, including in “How to Start a Brief,” cited above. See also “Judge Denies Motion for Continuance Based on Eclipse” (Aug. 21, 2017); “Judge Won’t Continue Trial so Attorney Can Enter Hemingway Look-Alike Contest” (June 29, 2012). None of that means this plaintiff won’t get a fair hearing from Merryday, but it does mean the amended complaint should come in under 40 pages.

We’ll know in a few weeks (if the government is open by then).

       

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