Sorting

After many grueling hours, I now have my books and DVDs sorted into (admittedly eccentric) categories on the bookshelves, in the various places the movers put the shelves. This task creates a series of insoluble puzzles in categorization, which I have been inclined to solve in an assortment of ad hoc ways. There’s one giant category of linguistic structure, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, arranged (in a desperate faute de mieux move) alphabetically by author — which is truly not useful, but resists breakup because so many of my interests cut across subareas. Similarly for a giant agglomeration of public-intellectual books, many (but not all) touching on matters of language; this is where you’ll find Geoff Nunberg, Arika Okrent, Steve Pinker, and Ben Yagoda. Then there are more specialized topic collections: your library probably doesn’t have a subcollection on male prostitution or comics studies, but mine does. I’ve done less breaking down…