Welcome! I decided to migrate from my old Tumblr to something a bit more substantial. While I will still post the occasional odd find, I will be using this space for musings on research, dissertation writing, digital archives work, and current issues in the field.
Which means I should probably explain the name. “The Uneasy Half-Literate” is a reference to a reference. On an episode of Judge John Hodgman (which I highly recommend), the correct pronunciation of “often” became a point of discussion. As evidence, the plaintiff presented the entry for “often” from H.W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. The entry reads:
The sounding of the t, which as the OED says is ‘not recognized by the dictionaries’, is practised by two oddly contorted classes–the academic speakers who affect a more precise enunciation than their neighbours’…and the uneasy half-literates who like to prove that they can spell.
Given my tendency to butcher the names of theorists, it seemed like a good fit.
Christopher P. Sawula 