“…too long, too static, too repetitious, too ponderous and a long list of other negative ‘toos’…he has no novelistic sense whatever; he just tells you every blessed thing the characters said and did and thought in the the order in which it occurred…most of the time it is solidly, monumentally boring.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
Ok, before I leave for a faculty meeting, here is a reading on Joe Namath and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that attends it. Once students understand who Namath is and was, these documents tend to self-transmute into high-interest materials.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Badinage (noun): Lighthearted, teasing talk; playful conversation; banter.
‘The movie is blatantly cartoonish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t saying anything. I think we’re meant to believe that its profane badinage and even its most exaggerated racial animosity have a deep, gritty truth in them, and that because it’s a comedy it can go deeper than “serious” movies.’” Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here, at the end of an unbelievably dismal, pointless day of work, is a set of five homophone worksheets on the noun canvas and the verb–used both intransitively and transitively–canvass.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“cognate: (Languages, words, etc.) that have developed from a common ancestor. E.g. English beam is cognate with German; likewise English beam is cognate with German Baum ‘tree.’”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
I’m not sure it it’s something high-schoolers need to know, though I’ll confess that I would have liked to have known about the concept of the zero-sum game as an adolescent. There is a Cultural Literacy worksheet under that hyperlink on the zero-sum game.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“blitzkrieg (Germ., lightning war). Penetration in depth by armoured columns, usually with preceding aerial bombardment to reduce enemy resistance; a technique perfected by Gen. Guderian in France in 1940. In Britain the term was abbreviated to ‘blitz’ and used to describe the massive air attacks on London and other cities between September 1940 and May 1941.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun acrimony. I suspect that its adjectival form, acrimonious, is probably in more common usage in the English language. In any case, acrimony and the concept it represents probably ought to be a part of a high school student’s linguistic toolkit.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“A scene in one of his numerous movie shorts required Benchley to be strung up in a mass of telephone wires above a city street. While waiting for the final camera, he called to his wife Gertrude, who was on location: ‘Remember how good in Latin I was in school?’
‘I do,’ she replied.
‘Well, look where it got me.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
Health teachers and others involved with the sciences, here is a reading on the common cold and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it, if you need them.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
 | A Measurement Conver… on An Elegantly Simple Cooking Co… |
| A Measurement Conver… on The Weekly Text, October 25, 2… |
 | markstextterminal on Cree |
 | panzer046a139293db on Cree |
| markstextterminal on Cree |
Mark's Text Terminal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.