Christian Bok’s Eunoia sounds like an interesting read. The BBC has a review of the book, complete with some (interesting) excerpts:
Eunoia is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels - and it means “beautiful thinking”. It is also the title of Canadian poet Christian Bok’s book of fiction in which each chapter uses only one vowel.
Mr Bok believes his book proves that each vowel has its own personality, and demonstrates the flexibility of the English language.
Strunk and White’s Elements of Style is one of the most popular and influential writing guides available. By replacing a few key words, it can be used as a text on programming style and the craft of software.
2.12. Choose a suitable design and hold to it.
A basic structural design underlies every kind of writing programming. Writers Programmers will in part follow this design, in part deviate from it, according to their skills, their needs, and the unexpected events that accompany the act of composition. Writing Programming, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer programmer, but not necessarily in the order in which those thoughts occur. This calls for a scheme of procedure… in most cases, planning must be a deliberate preclude to writing programming. The first principle of composition software development, therefore, is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.
via Kottke
Think you’ve read that book review before? It’s probably a bad case of reviewers lexicon.
In Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing, Bob Harris adds ‘poignant’, ‘compelling’, ‘intriguing’, ‘eschew’, ‘craft’, ‘muse’ and ‘lyrical’ to the ageing—but still achingly poignant—list of words that reviewers and publishers love too much (where ‘achingly beautiful’, ‘darkly comic’, ‘deceptively simple’, ‘penetrating insights’, and ‘that rare thing’ make an appearance, among others).
via Intelligent Life
Michael Quinion, the British etymologist, documents the meaning and derivation of words and phrases in the English language.
Covering etymology, grammar and neologisms (among others), my favourite aspect of World Wide Words (where he “writes on international English from a British viewpoint”) is the front page Sic! section highlighting common—yet amusing—errors:
Charlotte Metcalf’s food column in the Spectator for 13 September: “If anything, luxury food sales are rocketing and appear to be recession-proof. Mary Adams, buyer at Fortnum & Mason, says: ‘Grouse are literally flying off the counter.’”
With the media frenzy over the LHC’s ‘first beam’ eventually abating, Slate looks at the failing of science journalists to write coherent and accurate articles on this and other scientific topics of interest to the general public.
No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of proverbial inscrutability with rocket science, and nonscientists are understandably reluctant to dig in. But the best way to meet that challenge is to address it head-on, with clear analogies and straightforward language. The puzzles of the subatomic world […] are interesting and entertaining in their own right; dressing them up in florid language only adds another layer of confusion between the author and the reader.
On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists. This isn’t due to the fact that physicists understand the subject matter better—if anything, people who spend all day in the lab are often the worst at explaining the big picture. Rather, they’re better at writing about physics because they don’t try so hard to make you care. They don’t believe their readers must be seduced with colorful wordplay or end-of-the-world melodramas. Journalists writing popular treatments of subatomic physics could take a lesson from the scientists: Tell it straight and have a little faith that the subject matter itself—a major advance in our understanding of the cosmos—can generate its own wonder and excitement.