Language Log

Today's Frazz:

(…and with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation…)

Like many other online text sites, the New York Times now offers synthetic text-to-speech readings for (most of) its stories. TTS quality has improved enormously since the 1980s, when I worked with Bill Dunn from Dow Jones Information Services on (the idea of) a pre-internet version of digital news delivery, including synthesized audio versions. (See "Thanks, Bill Dunn!", 8/6/2009, for a bit more of the story.)

And this morning, while doing some brainless form checking, I listened to the audio version of Victor Mather and Jesus Jiménez, "After 7 Years, P’Nut the Squirrel Is Taken Away and Then Put Down", NYT 11/1/2024, which starts this way:

P’Nut, a pet squirrel with a popular Instagram page, was seized by state government officials on Wednesday in Pine City, N.Y., and later euthanized to test for rabies.

And why doesn't she have a Wikipedia page?

I came across her works in a recent search for background information. The Penn Library's Online Books Page offers links to 35 of her publications; The Internet Archive offers 90 results, 87 of which seem to be valid;  Amazon offers links to 92 (versions of her) publications; Google Books oddly returns only 7 results.

All of Johnsen's works, as far as I can tell, were published by the H.W. Wilson Company, which does have a Wikipedia page. And most of her publications were (annotated) compilations of works by other authors, published as part of the company's "Reference Shelf":

(though some seem to have been published before that series was started.)

We've looked at the Chinese of the first item en passant before (here), but not in detail, and the English of this version merits investigation: