The last remaining evidence of my father's voice, the final thing that roots him and his existence in my brain, will eventually cease to exist–just like VHS tapes, and the accent he spoke with, and my memories of him, too.

Illiteracy has fallen from one in five people to almost nonexistent over a century and a bit.  But “illiteracy” clearly isn’t a single on-or-off switch. It’s not just “you can read and write or you can’t.” Literacy is a continuum of skills. Basic education now reaches virtually all Americans.  But many among the poorest have the weakest skills in formal English.

That combines with another fact: more people are writing than ever before. Even most of the poor today have cell phones and and internet. When they text or scribble on Facebook, they’re writing. We easily forget that this is something that farmhands and the urban poor almost never did in centuries past. They lacked the time and means even if they had the education.

India and America are both democracies, a top Indian official explained to me, but emotionally they are now ships passing in the night. Because today the poorest Indian maid believes that if she can just save a few dollars to get her kid English lessons, that kid will have a better life than she does. So she is an optimist. “But the guy in Kansas,” he added, “who today is enjoying a better life than that maid, is worried that he can’t pass it on to his kids. So he’s a pessimist.”

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York University and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

Today's copy editors are multitaskers who design pages, pick wire stories and process them for the Web -- all in addition to the traditional duties of line-editing, trimming to perfectly fill space and writing headlines.

Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.

For many years, Bloomberg viewed news as little more than an added service for Wall Street traders. To that end, Mr. Winkler demanded short, direct articles. He ordered reporters to avoid adverbs and adjectives, along with “but” and “however,” which he said muddled the clarity of sentences.

“The first thing you realize is that our way of thinking that we take for granted – how you look at the day-to-day stuff – is not the only way there is. … What you are losing by not knowing the earlier stuff is, if nothing else, a constant reminder that you may not be seeing the full picture.”

This is mostly just interesting — quiz: how many of these words can you define? — but it’s also a reminder that news sites are sitting on a wealth of data, from popular search terms to click rates, that can help them adjust to reader preferences. So are Times scribes being asked to rein in their vocabularies? That might be a Sisyphean (#37) task, but no, Corbett merely advised reporters to “avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense.”

"[...] Presented with something like English, you're almost derelict in your duties if you don't have fun with it, because there's so much fun to be had. You shouldn't just think, 'This is my way of getting information across to you.' No. You should have fun with it. If the writer's having fun, unless you're being hopelessly self-serving, I think you can please other people at the same time, if you do it right. [...]"

"I'm not against big words per se or fancy or obscure words, obviously I love them, but I'm opposed to using them for their own sake. If words are to form a communication, you use them as a tool to communicate to people and it's pointless to intentionally use a word that no-one else knows."

"Sexist language aside, though, the semicolon debate is a model of the way we should approach most disagreements about usage issues: as matters of taste, not law. The interesting questions, after all, aren't about using its and it's; they're the ones that have, yes, nuance and complexity."

"As the world’s population shifts, and the languages based on the Roman alphabet continue to decline in dominance, this decision will only continue to grow in importance."

"However, as Mindworks has made copy editing part of its mission, I thought I might help clean up its Careers page. Consider it a bit of reverse outsourcing."

"They fight a losing battle, an unyielding tide of misplaced apostrophes and poor spelling. But still, they fight. Why, you ask. Because, they say. Because, they must."

"There's no comparison in the coverage. For people here, there are two places to look for better news: BBC News and Spanish-language news."

"When I was younger I was a cobra/ In every case I wanted to be cool/ Now that I'm older and sub-space is colder/ I just want to say something true"

"[W]riting lyrics becomes like running multiple code-breaking programs in your head until just the right word with just the right number of syllables, tone of vowel and finally some semblance of meaning all snap into place."

"On the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale, Obama's sentence requires a Grade 12 education. On the Flesch Reading Ease scale, it comes in at 21.1 out of 100. That's hard."

"Computers have made it rather simple to determine the intelligence or grade level of a speech by measuring it with the Flesch-Kincaid test, which is found on the Tools/Options menu of Microsoft Word."

"All the dialogue is made up. The worst thing you can do is try to go around like a sociologist and record a glossary of slang. It's so mobile, it changes by the time you get it in print, it's so outdated it's embarrassing, so I just make up my own."

"In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate."

"They inhabit a world where women enjoying a drink in the bar are not social outcasts. They are not tragic figures because they are single."

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

"From time to time, a copy editor may get a nod for an exceptional headline or a thank you from a reporter or assignment editor for a good catch, but copy editors accept that most praise in the newspaper business is for reporters."

"Merill had the perfect example about how the placement of 'only' can change the meaning of a sentence. Start with 'I hit him in the eye yesterday.' "

“There’s always what we call the Mexico City lag. In the U.S. there was the college rock boom — Pavement, Sebadoh, even Nirvana — and now in Mexico City we have our own version of that. This is our own ’90s indie boom, just a decade or so late.

"My average poetry reading gets 300-400 people. On tour, about 1,000 people. Am I a rock star? No. Could I go to Yankee Stadium to read? No. I like libraries. … I am not [legendary rhythm and blues singer] Aretha Franklin."

E. Ethelbert Miller big-ups one of my favorite poems, Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."

This is going to be fun.

"We'll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn.") and is said to have called it his best work."

"What you have is a generation of teachers from the early to mid-'70s who don't know grammar, who never learned it. We have armies of teachers, elementary teachers and English teachers, who don't have the language to talk about language."

"[L]iterature was not so much words on paper as it was a complex ethical act. He saw the novel as a kind of compact between author and reader: intimate and rewarding, but rarely easy. At the crux of this compact lay rhetoric, the art of verbal persuasion.

"In California, Spanish is more important than English. I haven't found any inconvenience because I don't speak English. ... If you can speak Spanish, you can drive, employers can have clients, you can order in restaurants, you can do anything."

”'You’re kidding,' said Ann Keatings, an applied linguist, as she absorbed the news I had brought from the US, where I have lived for the past 12 years: Americans see the semicolon as punctuation’s axis of evil."

"It's very clear that early exposure facilitates the acquisition of the motor and cognitive skills required for high-level performance. Yet we don't all end up as Tiger Woods or Michelle Kwan or the Williams sisters."

"If you bump into somebody at the supermarket checkout, it's a lot quicker and easier to say 'Sorry' (pronounced with a guttural 'r') than to say 'Entschuldigung,' with its four syllables (though, of course, many Germans do say 'Entschuldigung')."

"The market research outfit Dialego discovered earlier this year that the top seven most recognized ad slogans for German companies were, perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone except the country's ad execs, in German."

"The range and depth of Shakespeare's vocabulary comes from the way in which he employs Germanic words, French words and Latin words to characterize the different people that he has in his plays."