Word: kingness
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...quiet, leafy street in the loveliest neighborhood of Colombo, Dr. Lucien de Zilwa christened his new house Tintagel. It was the height of British colonial rule in Sri Lanka, but de Zilwa didn't choose the name - that of King Arthur's legendary birthplace in Cornwall - out of any attachment to empire. He was a fashionable man, living in the most fashionable part of the city, and it was the vogue at the time among the local élite to give wistful English names to their villas...
...Arts in Pago Pago during July and August. More than any other event, this festival (held every four years; the next will be in Honiara, Solomon Islands) has helped shape the region as an arc of creativity. "It's a positive thing," says Samoan - New Zealand hip-hop artist King Kapisi, "to have Pacific island communities meet up at one place and say, Listen, we're still here and giving respect to our heritage. Once you lose your culture, you don't know where you come from...
...Samoan rapper King Kapisi would no doubt chime with these sentiments. For the King, a.k.a. Bill Urale, returning to the Pacific his family left to live in Wellington, New Zealand has brought mixed feelings. In the muscular rhythms of songs like Screams From Da Old Plantation, Urale presents Pacific culture as something to be contested, interrogated and recontextualized. "The thing I don't actually agree with," he says, "is how religion has become part of Samoa's culture. Personally, I think that culture and religion should be apart. Culture should be culture and religion should be religion. I'm just...
What's also obvious to anyone who has picked up a King-based comic or seen one of the dozens of movie adaptations, is that the author is quite nonchalant when it comes to others messing around with his words. "I've got my own work to do, and all this is something else," he says. "To me, when I finish with something, it's like dead skin. And if people want to make dead-skin sculptures, that's fine. Just give...
...some language purists insist that there is value to the top-down rules of English. "People who spell a lot of words incorrectly either aren't paying attention or don't care," says Barbara Wallraff, who writes the Wordcourt column on language and writing problems for the Atlantic and King Features Syndicate. "Why are we changing our language to accommodate - with two m's - them...