Word: englishness
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...ancestors, he makes you think of Telly Savalas playing Macbeth, or he would if Savalas had been somebody who could use a word like polysemous to explain those electronic chimneys. (That means they have more than one meaning.) While anyone who can come up with polysemous speaks perfectly competent English, Nouvel's is a bit idiosyncratic. As he indicates a large window that looks over the river, he says, "We want to keep it open so you can feel the noise of the river." Then again, he may mean just what he says about feeling the noise. Paradox, disassociation...
...words, of no fewer than three letters, are interlocked. And nothing naughty, please. Reagle, one of the puzzlemakers who appears in Wordplay, mourns that he is forbidden to use vowel-rich words like urine and enema. (I'd guess that somebody somewhere has created R- or X-rated crosswords - English is as at least as rich in obscenities as it is in four-letter words for Irish slave - but I haven't seen them...
...Farrar was succeeded by Will Weng, and then by Eugene Maleska, a New York City school teacher. I remember being pleased to read of Maleska's accession, for I knew his name as a Dell puzzle constructor. But Maleska was a conservative chap, a one-man Academie Francaise of English. He seemed to believe that the language had frozen decades before. Cultural references tended toward opera trivia and the novels of long-dead white males...
...vote by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Thursday to approve (with some exceptions) a new English translation of the daily Mass may seem like a minor piece of religious linguistic business. But in reality, it amounts to the swallowing of some very bitter medicine administered by the Vatican. Or, perhaps, it could be better described as part of a slow-motion kick in the bishops' teeth, with repercussions for all English-speaking believers...
...could say it's over-translated. The Church's second Vatican Council of 1962-65 decreed that every Catholic should be able to experience the Mass in his or her own language, in addition to Latin. The Church produced an initial English version, which everyone agreed would have to be refined; and the bishops from the world's English-speaking dioceses appointed an expert committee that completed most of the job in the 1980s - or at least that's what most of its participants thought...