The stuff of art: from dictionaries to salt

Award-winning photographer and sculptor Young Kim does cool stuff with portraits in salt but he started his career "grappling" (his word) with lexicons. Here's a profile from the Greensboro, North Carolina News & Record (the photo is from the Washington Post): http://tinyurl.com/y9axs82.

Thesauruses, Dictionaries and Dachshunds

I've an assortment of lexicography news to share this morning:
Henry Hitchings, author of The Secret Life of Words and Defining the World has written an enthusiastic review of Oxford's new Historical Thesaurus of the English Language, which he calls "a monumental feat of scholarship [and] in a world infatuated with speed, ... a testament to the value of patiently accumulated learning." To read the rest of the article, visit the Telegraph at http://tinyurl.com/yz8ds2z.

Here's a wonderful photograph from the Boston Globe, illustrating an article on the Boston Book Festival. The photo, "Dictionary," is part of a series by photographer and MassArt teacher Abelardo Morell. The photos are collected in A Book of Books, Bulfinch Press, 2002.



And then there's this happy tale from aptly named El Dorado, Kansas: On Sunday, Michael Myers scratched off one or two Bonus Crossword instant tickets and found he'd won a top prize of $20,000. “I wanted to hide the ticket until I could claim it, so I put it in my dictionary under ‘M’ for ‘money,’” Myers revealed. “And then I put the dictionary up high. Doxies like to chew and I wasn’t going to take any chances.” (See the full story The El Dorado Times at http://tinyurl.com/yh2eeog).

Dictionaries at the Venice Biennale

"Richard Wentworth's hanging mobile of dictionaries pierced by wires also produced a few appreciative smiles. Stand underneath it, like a baby in a cot beneath a set of pink rabbits, and you can read the titles, Finnish by A.H.Whitney, Learn Teluga in 30 Days, Collins Italian Dictionary, A Dictionary of Current American Usage. Each one is strung out below a dark iron frame and secured by a steel knot." So writes Peter Stothard on his TimesOnline blog. I found the photo at http://universes-in-universe.org/eng/bien/venice_biennale/2009/.