The Museum of Wonky English, a Japanese Exhibition Dedicated to Hilarious Mistranslations

I got hooked on Duolin­go a few years ago. Since then, I’ve used it dai­ly to prac­tice lan­guages like French, Span­ish, Finnish, Chi­nese, and Japan­ese. But none of those cours­es is quite as pop­u­lar with as many users as the one for Eng­lish, which is wide­ly spo­ken around the world — and, inevitably, almost as wide­ly mis­spo­ken around the world. Even non-Eng­lish-speak­ing coun­tries tend to put up some Eng­lish-lan­guage sig­nage, sparse and strange though it can often be: a hand­writ­ten gro­cer’s sign warn­ing cus­tomers not to “fin­ger the peach­es”; a notice mount­ed just above a uri­nal that urges vis­i­tors to “please uri­nate with pre­ci­sion and ele­gance.”

These exam­ples come, unsur­pris­ing­ly, from Japan, whose awk­ward but vivid­ly mem­o­rable writ­ten Eng­lish has long cir­cu­lat­ed in West­ern media. That made Tokyo the ide­al loca­tion for the Muse­um of Wonky Eng­lish, a pop-up col­lab­o­ra­tion between Duolin­go Japan and cre­ative agency Ultra­Su­perNew that, as the lat­ter’s site describes it, exhibits “six­teen of the best exam­ples of wonky Eng­lish found all over Japan.”

When “vis­i­tors look at the signs, menus, clothes, and oth­er objects exhib­it­ed in the muse­um — objects that can make them chuck­le, gasp, think, and reflect — they will notice there’s more depth to wonky Eng­lish than they ini­tial­ly thought and become more embold­ened to learn a for­eign lan­guage.”

You can still see some of the Muse­um of Wonky Eng­lish’s prized lin­guis­tic arti­facts in the pro­mo­tion­al video above (which pro­vides the orig­i­nal Japan­ese phras­es from which these odd trans­la­tions sprang), as well as in the pic­tures accom­pa­ny­ing this Japan­ese-lan­guage arti­cle. “Please do not eat chil­dren and elder­ly.” “When cof­fee is gone. It’s over.” “Crap your hands.”

Though uni­d­iomat­ic at best, these phras­es and oth­ers exert a kind of pow­er over the imag­i­na­tion. When close­ly scru­ti­nized, they also illu­mi­nate the mechan­ics of the under­ly­ing Japan­ese lan­guage and its dif­fer­ences with Eng­lish. And though the Muse­um of Wonky Eng­lish was open for only a week, a run that end­ed last week, I can assure you — liv­ing, as I do, in Korea — that wonky Eng­lish itself remains in rude health.

via Spoon and Tam­a­go

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Breaks Down Five Com­mon Word Usage Mis­takes in Eng­lish

“Weird Al” Yankovic Releas­es “Word Crimes,” a Gram­mar Nerd Par­o­dy of “Blurred Lines”

Steven Pinker Iden­ti­fies 10 Break­able Gram­mat­i­cal Rules: “Who” Vs. “Whom,” Dan­gling Mod­i­fiers & More

What Are the Most Effec­tive Strate­gies for Learn­ing a For­eign Lan­guage?: Six TED Talks Pro­vide the Answers

The Restau­rant of Mis­tak­en Orders: A Tokyo Restau­rant Where All the Servers Are Peo­ple Liv­ing with Demen­tia

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How to Read Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A British Museum Curator Explains

If you want to learn to read hiero­glyph­ics, you must first learn that (with apolo­gies to the artists behind “You Nev­er Knew”) there are no such things as hiero­glyph­ics. There are only hiero­glyphs, as the British Muse­um’s cura­tor of ancient writ­ing Ilona Regul­s­ki explains in the video just above, and hiero­glyph­ic is the adjec­ti­val form. You may remem­ber Regul­s­ki from anoth­er British Muse­um video we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, about what the Roset­ta Stone actu­al­ly says — which she knows because she can actu­al­ly read it, not just in the ancient Greek lan­guage, but in the ancient Egypt­ian one. Here, she explains how to inter­pret its once utter­ly mys­te­ri­ous sym­bols.

It would take an incu­ri­ous view­er indeed not to be cap­ti­vat­ed by their first glimpse of hiero­glyphs, which pos­sess a kind of detail and beau­ty lit­tle seen in oth­er writ­ing sys­tems. Or at least they do when carved into stone, Regul­s­ki explains; in more every­day con­texts, the impres­sive arrange­ments of owls, ankhs, bas­kets, eyes, and bread loaves took on a more sim­pli­fied, abstract­ed form.

Either way, it makes use of a com­plex and dis­tinc­tive gram­mat­i­cal sys­tem about which we can draw a good deal of insight from exam­in­ing a sin­gle inscrip­tion: in this case, an inscrip­tion on a lin­tel glo­ri­fy­ing Amen­emhat III, “one of the most famous kings of ancient Egypt.”

Those who feel their his­tor­i­cal-lin­guis­tic curios­i­ty piqued would do well to vis­it the British Muse­um’s cur­rent exhi­bi­tion “Hiero­glyphs: Unlock­ing Ancient Egypt,” which runs until Feb­ru­ary 19th of next year. If you can’t make it to Lon­don, you can still go a bit deep­er with the video below. Drawn the Great Cours­es series “Decod­ing the Secrets of Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs,” it fea­tures Egyp­tol­o­gist Bob Brier’s break­down of such rel­e­vant con­cepts as phonet­ics, deter­mi­na­tives, and ideograms, as well as guid­ed exer­cis­es in sen­tence trans­la­tion and name translit­er­a­tion. After demon­strat­ing admirable hiero­glyph­ic pen­man­ship (cer­tain­ly com­pared to most mod­erns), Brier leaves us with a home­work assign­ment — just the sort of thing the ancient Egyp­tians them­selves were doing a few mil­len­nia ago.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Writ­ing: From Ancient Egypt to Mod­ern Writ­ing Sys­tems

You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egypt­ian Hiero­glyphs

What Ancient Egypt­ian Sound­ed Like & How We Know It

An Ancient Egypt­ian Home­work Assign­ment from 1800 Years Ago: Some Things Are Tru­ly Time­less

3,200-Year-Old Egypt­ian Tablet Records Excus­es for Why Peo­ple Missed Work: “The Scor­pi­on Bit Him,” “Brew­ing Beer” & More

A 4,000-Year-Old Stu­dent ‘Writ­ing Board’ from Ancient Egypt (with Teacher’s Cor­rec­tions in Red)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Discover Nüshu, a 19th-Century Chinese Writing System That Only Women Knew How to Write


Lit­er­a­cy in Chi­nese may now be wide­ly attained, but it isn’t eas­i­ly attained. Just a cen­tu­ry ago it was­n’t wide­ly attained either, at least not by half of the Chi­nese speak­ers alive. As a rule, women once weren’t taught the thou­sands of logo­graph­ic char­ac­ters nec­es­sary to read and write in the lan­guage. But in one par­tic­u­lar sec­tion of the land, Jiangy­ong Coun­ty in Hunan province, some did mas­ter the 600 to 700 char­ac­ters of a pho­net­ic script made to reflect the local dialect and now called Nüshu (女书), or “wom­en’s writ­ing.”

In its hey­day, Nüshu’s users had a vari­ety of names for it, “includ­ing ‘mos­qui­to writ­ing,’ because it is a lit­tle slant­ed and with long ‘legs,’ ” writes Ilar­ia Maria Sala in a Quartz piece on the scrip­t’s his­to­ry. Its great­est con­cen­tra­tion of prac­ti­tion­ers lived in “the vil­lage of Shangjiangxu, where young girls exchanged small tokens of friend­ly affec­tion, such as fans dec­o­rat­ed with cal­lig­ra­phy or hand­ker­chiefs embroi­dered with a few aus­pi­cious words.”

Oth­er, more for­mal occa­sions for the use of Nüshu, includ­ed when girls decid­ed to “make a full-fledged pact of close­ness with one anoth­er that they were ‘best friends’ — jiebai zimei or ‘sworn sis­ters’ — a rela­tion­ship that was rec­og­nized as valu­able and even nec­es­sary for them in the local social sys­tem. Such a once-obscure chap­ter of Chi­nese his­to­ry has proven irre­sistible to read­ers from a vari­ety of cul­tures in recent decades.

“Most inter­pre­ta­tions and head­lines have been about a ‘secret lan­guage’ that women used, prefer­ably to com­mu­ni­cate their pain,” writes Sala, which struck her as evi­dence of peo­ple tak­ing the sto­ry of Nüshu and “read­ing into it what they want­ed, regard­less of what it meant.” Yet such an inter­pre­ta­tion has sure­ly done its part to spread inter­est in the near-extinc­t’s scrip­t’s revival, described by BBC.com’s Andrew Loft­house as orig­i­nat­ing in “the tiny vil­lage of Puwei, which is sur­round­ed by the Xiao riv­er and only acces­si­ble via a small sus­pen­sion bridge.” After three Nüshu writ­ers were dis­cov­ered there in the eight­ies, “it became the focal point for Nüshu research. In 2006, the script was list­ed as a Nation­al Intan­gi­ble Cul­tur­al Her­itage by the State Coun­cil of Chi­na, and a year lat­er, a muse­um was built on Puwei Island.”

There train­ing is pro­vid­ed to the few select “inter­preters or ‘inher­i­tors’ of the lan­guage, learn­ing to read, write, sing and embroi­der Nüshu.” Iron­i­cal­ly, Loft­house adds, “much of what we know about Nüshu is due to the work of male researcher Zhou Shuoyi” who hap­pened to hear of it in the nine­teen-fifties and was lat­er per­se­cut­ed dur­ing Mao Zedong’s Cul­tur­al Rev­o­lu­tion — a treat­ment that includ­ed 21 years in a labor camp — for hav­ing researched such an arti­fact of the feu­dal past. Once a use­ful tool for express­ing emo­tions and per­form­ing social rit­u­als social­iza­tion, Nüshu had become polit­i­cal­ly dan­ger­ous. What it becomes now, half a cen­tu­ry lat­er and with its renew­al only just begin­ning, is up to its new learn­ers.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

The Improb­a­ble Inven­tion of Chi­nese Type­writ­ers & Com­put­er Key­boards: Three Videos Tell the Tech­no-Cul­tur­al Sto­ry

The World’s Old­est Mul­ti­col­or Book, a 1633 Chi­nese Cal­lig­ra­phy & Paint­ing Man­u­al, Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Oakland Public Library Puts Online a Collection of Items Forgotten in Library Books: Love Notes, Doodles & More

Librar­i­ans are cham­pi­ons of orga­ni­za­tion, and among its best prac­ti­tion­ers.

Books are shelved accord­ing to the Dewey Dec­i­mal sys­tem.

Cat­e­gories are assigned using Library of Con­gress Rule Inter­pre­ta­tions, Library of Con­gress Sub­ject Head­ings, and Library of Con­gress Clas­si­fi­ca­tion.

And Sharon McKel­lar, the Teen Ser­vices Depart­ment Head at the Oak­land Pub­lic Library, col­lects ephemera she and oth­er staffers find in books returned to the OPL’s 18 loca­tions.

It’s an impulse many share. 

Even­tu­al­ly, she began scan­ning them to share on her employ­er’s web­site, inspired by Found Mag­a­zine, a crowd­sourced col­lec­tion of found let­ters, birth­day cards, kids’ home­work, to-do lists, hand­writ­ten poems, doo­dles, dirty pic­tures, etc.

As Found’s cre­ators, Davy Roth­bart and Jason Bit­ner, write on the magazine’s web­site:

We cer­tain­ly didn’t invent the idea of found stuff being cool. Every time we vis­it our friends in oth­er towns, someone’s always got some kind of unbe­liev­able dis­cov­ered note or pho­to on their fridge. We decid­ed to make a bunch of projects so that every­one can check out all the strange, hilar­i­ous and heart­break­ing things peo­ple have picked up and passed our way.

McKel­lar told NPR that her project “lets us be a lit­tle bit nosy. In a very anony­mous way, it’s like read­ing peo­ple’s secret diaries a lit­tle bit but with­out know­ing who they are.”

The finds, which she stores in a box under her desk pri­or to scan­ning and post­ing, are push­ing 600, with more arriv­ing all the time.

Search­able cat­e­gories include notes, cre­ative writ­ing, art, and pho­tos.

One arti­fact, the scat­o­log­i­cal one-of-a-kind zine Mr Men #48, excerpt­ed above, spans four cat­e­gories, includ­ing kids, a high­ly fer­tile source of both humor and heart­break.

There’s a dis­tinct­ly dif­fer­ent vibe to the items that chil­dren forge for them­selves or each oth­er, as opposed to work cre­at­ed for school, or as presents for the adults in their lives.

McKel­lar admits to hav­ing a sweet spot for their inad­ver­tent con­tri­bu­tions, which com­prise the bulk of the col­lec­tion.

She also cat­a­logues the throw­away fly­ers, tick­et stubs and lists that adult read­ers use to mark their place in a book, but when it comes to place­hold­ers with more obvi­ous poten­tial for sen­ti­men­tal val­ue, she finds her­self won­der­ing if a library patron has acci­den­tal­ly lost track of a pre­cious object:

Does the per­son miss that item? Do they regret hav­ing lost it or were they care­less with it because they actu­al­ly did­n’t share those deep and pro­found feel­ings with the per­son who wrote [it]?

Actu­al book­marks are not exempt…

Future plans include a pos­si­ble writ­ing con­test for short sto­ries inspired by items in the col­lec­tion.

Browse the Found in a Library Book col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Pub­lic Library Receipt Shows How Much Mon­ey You’ve Saved by Bor­row­ing Books, Instead of Buy­ing Them

Free Col­or­ing Books from World-Class Libraries & Muse­ums: Down­load & Col­or Hun­dreds of Free Images

The New York Pub­lic Library Cre­ates a List of 125 Books That They Love

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Watch Sir Ian McKellen’s 1979 Master Class on Macbeth’s Final Monologue

If only we could have had a teacher as insight­ful as Sir Ian McK­ellen explain some Shake­speare to us at an impres­sion­able age.

Above, a 38-year-old McK­ellen breaks down Macbeth’s famous final solil­o­quy as part of a 1978 mas­ter class in Act­ing Shake­speare.

He makes it clear ear­ly on that rely­ing on Iambic pen­tame­ter to con­vey the mean­ing of the verse will not cut it.

Instead, he calls upon actors to apply the pow­er of their intel­lect to every line, ana­lyz­ing metaphors and imagery, while also not­ing punc­tu­a­tion, word choice, and of course, the events lead­ing up to the speech.

In this way, he says, “the actor is the play­wright and the char­ac­ter simul­ta­ne­ous­ly.”

McK­ellen was, at the time, deeply immersed in Mac­beth, play­ing the title role oppo­site Judi Dench in a bare bones Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny pro­duc­tion that opened in the company’s Strat­ford stu­dio before trans­fer­ring to the West End. As McK­ellen recalled in a longer med­i­ta­tion on the trick­i­ness of stag­ing this par­tic­u­lar tragedy:

It was beau­ti­ful­ly done on the cheap in The Oth­er Place, the old tin hut along from the main the­atre. John Napi­er’s entire set cost £200 and the cos­tumes were a rag­bag of sec­ond-hand clothes. My uni­form jack­et had but­tons embossed with ‘Birm­ing­ham Fire Ser­vice’; my long, leather coat did­n’t fit, nor did Ban­quo’s so we had to wear them slung over the shoul­der; Judi Dench, as Lady Mac­beth, wore a dyed tea-tow­el on her head. Some­how it was mag­ic: and black mag­ic, too. A priest used to sit on the front row, when­ev­er he could scrounge a tick­et, hold­ing out his cru­ci­fix to pro­tect the cast from the evil we were rais­ing.

The New York Times raved about the pro­duc­tion, declar­ing McK­ellen “the best equipped British actor of his gen­er­a­tions:”

Mr. McK­el­len’s Mac­beth is wit­ty; not mere­ly the hor­ror but the absur­di­ty of his actions strikes him from the out­set, and he can regard his down­fall as an inex­orable joke. His wife pulls him along a road that he would trav­el any­way and he can allow him­self scru­ples, know­ing that she will be there to mop them up. Once her pro­sa­ic, lim­it­ed ambi­tion is achieved, she is of no more use to him and he shrugs her off; “she would have died here­after” is a moment of exas­per­a­tion that dares our laugh­ter.

What fuels him most is envy, reach­ing incred­u­lous­ly for­ward (“The seed of Ban­quo kings?”) and back­ward to col­or the despair of “Dun­can is in his grave.” The words, and the mind behind them, are ran­cid, and it is this mood that takes pos­ses­sion of his last scenes. Every­thing dis­gusts him, and his only rea­son for fight­ing to the death is that the thought of sub­jec­tion is the most dis­gust­ing of all.

McK­ellen begins his exam­i­na­tion of the text by not­ing how “she would have died here­after” sets up the final solil­o­quy’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with time, and its pas­sage.

Tomor­row, and tomor­row, and tomor­row,

Creeps in this pet­ty pace from day to day,

To the last syl­la­ble of record­ed time;

And all our yes­ter­days have light­ed fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief can­dle!

Life’s but a walk­ing shad­ow, a poor play­er,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Sig­ni­fy­ing noth­ing.

McK­ellen makes a true meal of  “out, out, brief can­dle”,  relat­ing it to Lady Macbeth’s final appear­ance, the fools pro­ceed­ing to their dusty death ear­li­er in the mono­logue, and Eliz­a­bethan stage light­ing.

He spec­u­lates that Shakespeare’s descrip­tion of life as a “poor play­er” was a delib­er­ate attempt by the play­wright to give the actor an inter­pre­tive hook they could relate to. In per­for­mance, the the­atri­cal metaphor should remind the audi­ence that they’re watch­ing a pre­tense even as they’re invest­ed in the character’s fate.

The pro­duc­tion’s suc­cess inspired direc­tor Trevor Nunn to film it. McK­ellen recalled that every­one was already so well acquaint­ed with the mate­r­i­al, it took just two weeks to get it in the can:

The claus­tro­pho­bia of the stage pro­duc­tion was exact­ly cap­tured. Trevor had used a sim­i­lar tech­nique with Antony and Cleopa­tra on the box. No one else should ever be allowed to tele­vise Shakespeare…There is so much I was proud of: dis­cov­er­ing how to play a solil­o­quy direct into the eyes of every­one in the audi­ence; mak­ing them laugh at Mac­beth’s gal­lows humor; work­ing along­side Judi Dench’s finest per­for­mance.

For more expert advice from McK­ellen, Patrick Stew­art, Ben Kings­ley and oth­er nota­bles, watch the RSC’s 9‑part Play­ing Shake­speare series here.

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and cre­ator, most recent­ly of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Nietzsche’s 10 Rules for Writing with Style

The life of Russ­ian-born poet, nov­el­ist, crit­ic, and first female psy­chol­o­gist Lou Andreas-Salomé has pro­vid­ed fod­der for both sala­cious spec­u­la­tion and intel­lec­tu­al dra­ma in film and on the page for the amount of roman­tic atten­tion she attract­ed from Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als like philoso­pher Paul Rée, poet Ranier Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Niet­zsche. Emo­tion­al­ly intense Niet­zsche became infat­u­at­ed with Salomé, pro­posed mar­riage, and, when she declined, broke off their rela­tion­ship in abrupt Niet­zschean fash­ion.

For her part, Salomé so val­ued these friend­ships she made a pro­pos­al of her own: that she, Niet­zsche and Rée, writes D.A. Bar­ry at 3:AM Mag­a­zine, “live togeth­er in a celi­bate house­hold where they might dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and art.” The idea scan­dal­ized Nietzsche’s sis­ter and his social cir­cle and may have con­tributed to the “pas­sion­ate crit­i­cism” Salomé’s 1894 bio­graph­i­cal study, Friedrich Niet­zsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reap­praisal, Bar­ry argues, as “a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait.”

In Niet­zsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sor­row­ful ail­ing and tri­umphal recov­ery, incan­des­cent intox­i­ca­tion and cool con­scious­ness. One sens­es here the close entwin­ing of mutu­al con­tra­dic­tions; one sens­es the over­flow­ing and vol­un­tary plunge of over-stim­u­lat­ed and tensed ener­gies into chaos, dark­ness and ter­ror, and then an ascend­ing urge toward the light and most ten­der moments.” We might see this pas­sage as charged by the remem­brance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the con­cept of the Eter­nal Recur­rence ‘in a qui­et voice with all the signs of deep­est hor­ror.’”

We should also, per­haps pri­mar­i­ly, see Salomé’s impres­sions as an effect of Nietzsche’s tur­bu­lent prose, reach­ing its apoth­e­o­sis in his exper­i­men­tal­ly philo­soph­i­cal nov­el, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra. As a the­o­rist of the embod­i­ment of ideas, of their inex­tri­ca­ble rela­tion to the phys­i­cal and the social, Niet­zsche had some very spe­cif­ic ideas about lit­er­ary style, which he com­mu­ni­cat­ed to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teach­ing of Style.” Well before writ­ers began issu­ing “sim­i­lar sets of com­mand­ments,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, Niet­zsche “set down ten styl­is­tic rules of writ­ing,” which you can find, in their orig­i­nal list form, below.

1. Of prime neces­si­ty is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suit­ed to the spe­cif­ic per­son with whom you wish to com­mu­ni­cate. (The law of mutu­al rela­tion.)

3. First, one must deter­mine pre­cise­ly “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writ­ing must be mim­ic­ry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in gen­er­al have for his mod­el a very expres­sive kind of pre­sen­ta­tion of neces­si­ty, the writ­ten copy will appear much paler.

5. The rich­ness of life reveals itself through a rich­ness of ges­tures. One must learn to feel every­thing — the length and retard­ing of sen­tences, inter­punc­tu­a­tions, the choice of words, the paus­ing, the sequence of argu­ments — like ges­tures.

6. Be care­ful with peri­ods! Only those peo­ple who also have long dura­tion of breath while speak­ing are enti­tled to peri­ods. With most peo­ple, the peri­od is a mat­ter of affec­ta­tion.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wish­es to teach, the more one must first entice the sens­es.

9. Strat­e­gy on the part of the good writer of prose con­sists of choos­ing his means for step­ping close to poet­ry but nev­er step­ping into it.

10. It is not good man­ners or clever to deprive one’s read­er of the most obvi­ous objec­tions. It is very good man­ners and very clever to leave it to one’s read­er alone to pro­nounce the ulti­mate quin­tes­sence of our wis­dom.

As with all such pre­scrip­tions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s per­spec­tivism has been (mis)interpreted as wan­ton sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, his ven­er­a­tion for antiq­ui­ty places a high val­ue on for­mal con­straints. His prose, we might say, resides in that ten­sion between Dionysian aban­don and Apol­lon­ian cool, and his rules address what lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors once called the Triv­i­um: gram­mar, rhetoric, and log­ic: the three sup­ports of mov­ing, expres­sive, per­sua­sive writ­ing.

Salomé was so impressed with these apho­ris­tic rules that she includ­ed them in her biog­ra­phy, remark­ing, “to exam­ine Nietzsche’s style for caus­es and con­di­tions means far more than exam­in­ing the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can lis­ten to his inner sound­ings.” Isn’t this what great writ­ing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Niet­zsche not only mas­tered lan­guage but also tran­scend­ed its inad­e­qua­cies.” (As Niet­zsche him­self com­ment­ed in 1886, notes Hugo Dro­chon, he need­ed to invent “a lan­guage of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-dis­ci­plined writ­ing found a com­ple­ment in Salomé’s bold­ly keen analy­sis. From her we can also per­haps glean anoth­er prin­ci­ple: “No mat­ter how calum­nious the pub­lic attacks on her,” writes Bar­ry, “par­tic­u­lar­ly from [his sis­ter] Elis­a­beth Förster-Niet­zsche dur­ing the Nazi peri­od in Ger­many, Salomé did not respond to them.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2016.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Code of Charles Dickens’ Shorthand Has Been Cracked by Computer Programmers, Solving a 160-Year-Old Mystery


We can describe the writ­ing of Charles Dick­ens in many ways, but nev­er as impen­e­tra­ble. The most pop­u­lar nov­el­ist of his day, he wrote for the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence, seri­al­iz­ing his sto­ries in news­pa­pers before putting them between cov­ers. This hard­ly pre­vent­ed him from demon­strat­ing a mas­tery of the Eng­lish lan­guage whose mark remains detectable in our own rhetoric and lit­er­ary prose more than 150 years after his death. But Dick­ens wrote both pub­licly and pri­vate­ly, and in the case of the lat­ter he could write quite pri­vate­ly indeed: in doc­u­ments for his own eyes only, he made use of a short­hand that he called it “the devil’s hand­writ­ing,” and which has long been dev­il­ish­ly impen­e­tra­ble to schol­ars.

Dick­ens “learned a dif­fi­cult short­hand sys­tem called Brachyg­ra­phy and wrote about the expe­ri­ence in his semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal nov­el, David Cop­per­field, call­ing it a ‘sav­age steno­graph­ic mys­tery,’ ” says The Dick­ens Code, a web site ded­i­cat­ed to solv­ing that mys­tery.

A for­mer court reporter, “Dick­ens used short­hand through­out his life but while he was using the sys­tem, he was also chang­ing it. So the hooks, lines, cir­cles and squig­gles on the page are very hard to deci­pher.” The Dick­ens Code project thus offered up t0 any­one who could tran­scribe his short­hand a sum of 300 British pounds — which might not sound like much, but imag­ine how grand a sum it would have been in Dick­ens’ day.

Besides, the inter­net’s cryp­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts hard­ly require much of an incen­tive to get to work on such a long-uncracked code as this. “The win­ner of the com­pe­ti­tion, Shane Bag­gs, a com­put­er tech­ni­cal sup­port spe­cial­ist from San Jose, Calif., had nev­er read a Dick­ens nov­el before,” writes the New York Times’ Jen­ny Gross. “Mr. Bag­gs, who spent about six months work­ing on the text, most­ly after work, said that he first heard about the com­pe­ti­tion through a group on Red­dit ded­i­cat­ed to crack­ing codes and find­ing hid­den mes­sages.”

The doc­u­ment being decod­ed is a copy of a let­ter from 1859, the year Dick­ens was seri­al­iz­ing A Tale of Two Cities. Writ­ing to Times of Lon­don edi­tor John Thad­deus Delane, “Dick­ens says that a clerk at the news­pa­per was wrong to reject an adver­tise­ment he want­ed in the paper, pro­mot­ing a new lit­er­ary pub­li­ca­tion, and asks again for it to run,” report Gross. This seem­ing­ly triv­ial inci­dent inspires the kind of “strong, direct lan­guage in the 19th cen­tu­ry that showed the writer was angry.” Though 70 per­cent of this deco­rous­ly bad-tem­pered let­ter has now been deci­phered, The Dick­ens Code still has work to do and con­tin­ues to enlist help from vol­un­teers to do it, albeit with­out the prize mon­ey that is now pre­sum­ably in Bag­gs’ pos­ses­sion. Let’s hope he uses it on the hand­somest pos­si­ble set of Dick­ens’ col­lect­ed works.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Charles Dick­ens’ Life & Lit­er­ary Works

The Writ­ing Sys­tem of the Cryp­tic Voyn­ich Man­u­script Explained: British Researcher May Have Final­ly Cracked the Code

Stream a 24 Hour Playlist of Charles Dick­ens Sto­ries, Fea­tur­ing Clas­sic Record­ings by Lau­rence Olivi­er, Orson Welles & More

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

Alice in Won­der­land, Ham­let, and A Christ­mas Car­ol Writ­ten in Short­hand (Cir­ca 1919)

Charles Dick­ens (Chan­nel­ing Jorge Luis Borges) Cre­at­ed a Fake Library, with 37 Wit­ty Invent­ed Book Titles

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Harper Lee Gives Advice to Young Writers in One of Her Only Interviews Captured on Audio (1964)

You know the char­ac­ter Boo Radley? Well, if you know Boo, then you under­stand why I wouldn’t be doing an inter­view. Because I am real­ly Boo. 

– Harp­er Lee, in a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion with Oprah Win­frey

Author Harp­er Lee loved writ­ing but resist­ed inter­views, grant­i­ng just a hand­ful in the fifty-six years that fol­lowed the pub­li­ca­tion of her Pulitzer Prize win­ning 1960 nov­el, To Kill a Mock­ing­bird

Go Set a Watch­manher sec­ond, and final, nov­el began as an ear­ly draft of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird, and was pub­lished in 2015, a year before her death.

Roy Newquist, inter­view­ing Lee in 1964 for WQXR’s Coun­ter­pointaboveprob­a­bly expect­ed the hot­shot young nov­el­ist had many more books in her when he solicit­ed her advice for “the tal­ent­ed young­ster who wants to carve a career as a cre­ative writer.”

Pre­sum­ably Lee did too. “I hope to good­ness that every nov­el I do gets bet­ter and bet­ter, not worse and worse,” she remarked toward the end of the inter­view.

She oblig­ed Newquist by offer­ing some advice, but stopped short of offer­ing career tips to those eager for the low­down on how to write an instant best­seller that will be adapt­ed for stage and screen, earn a peren­ni­al spot in mid­dle school cur­ricu­lums, and — just last week — be crowned the Best Book of the Past 125 Years in a New York Times read­ers’ poll, beat­ing out titles by well regard­ed, and vast­ly more pro­lif­ic authors on the order of J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez, and Toni Mor­ri­son.

“Peo­ple who write for reward by way of recog­ni­tion or mon­e­tary gain don’t know what they’re doing. They’re in the cat­e­go­ry of those who write; they are not writ­ers,” she drawled.

Harp­er Lee’s Advice to Young Writ­ers

  • Hope for the best and expect noth­ing in terms of recog­ni­tion
  • Write to please an audi­ence of one: your­self
  • Write to exor­cise your divine dis­con­tent
  • Gath­er mate­r­i­al from the world around you, then turn inward and reflect
  • Don’t major in writ­ing

Lis­ten­ing to the record­ing, it occurs to us that this inter­view con­tains some more advice for young writ­ers, or rather, those bring­ing up chil­dren in the dig­i­tal age.

When Newquist won­ders why it is that “such a dis­pro­por­tion­ate share of our sen­si­tive and endur­ing fic­tion springs from writ­ers born and reared in the South,” Lee, a native of Mon­roeville, Alaba­ma, makes a strong case for cul­ti­vat­ing an envi­ron­ment where­in chil­dren have no choice but to make their own fun:

I think … the absence of things to do and see and places to go means a great deal to our own pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tion. We can’t go to see a play; we can’t go to see a big league base­ball game when we want to. We enter­tain our­selves.

This was my child­hood: If I went to a film once a month it was pret­ty good for me, and for all chil­dren like me. We had to use our own devices in our play, for our enter­tain­ment. We did­n’t have much mon­ey. Nobody had any mon­ey. We did­n’t have toys, noth­ing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imag­i­na­tion most of the time. We devised things; we were read­ers, and we would trans­fer every­thing we had seen on the print­ed page to the back­yard in the form of high dra­ma.

Did you nev­er play Tarzan when you were a child? Did you nev­er tramp through the jun­gle or refight the bat­tle of Get­tys­burg in some form or fash­ion? We did. Did you nev­er live in a tree house and find the whole world in the branch­es of a chin­aber­ry tree? We did.

I think that kind of life nat­u­ral­ly pro­duces more writ­ers than, say, an envi­ron­ment like 82nd Street in New York.

Hear that, par­ents and teach­ers of young writ­ers?

  • Nur­ture the cre­ative spir­it by reg­u­lar­ly pry­ing the dig­i­tal device’s from young writ­ers’ hands (and minds.)

Bite your tongue if, thus deprived, they trot off to the the­ater, the mul­ti­plex, or the sports sta­di­um. Remem­ber that iPhones hadn’t been invent­ed when Lee was stump­ing for the ton­ic effects of her chin­aber­ry tree. These days, any unplugged real world expe­ri­ence will be to the good.

If the young writ­ers com­plain — and they sure­ly will — sub­ject your­self to the same terms.

Call it sol­i­dar­i­ty, self-care, or a way of uphold­ing your New Year’s res­o­lu­tion…

Read an account of anoth­er Harp­er Lee inter­view, dur­ing her one day vis­it to Chica­go to pro­mote the 1962 film of To Kill a Mock­ing­bird and attend a lit­er­ary tea in her hon­or, here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Harp­er Lee Gets a Request for a Pho­to; Offers Impor­tant Life Advice Instead (2006)

Harp­er Lee on the Joy of Read­ing Real Books: “Some Things Should Hap­pen On Soft Pages, Not Cold Met­al”

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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