“A term used to distinguish anything out of its proper time. Shakespeare’s references to cannons in King John, a play which takes place before cannons came into use, to clocks in Julius Caesar, and to billiards in Antony and Cleopatra, are examples of anachronisms. In literature, anachronisms are sometimes used deliberately as comic devices to emphasized universal timelessness.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
As we count down the days to the beginning of the school year, it may be a good time, particularly if you’re teaching English in the upper grades, to post this short reading on Beowulf and this reading comprehension worksheet that attends it.
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 satirical novel (1980) by the US novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969). Thanks to the efforts of his mother it was published more than ten years after he committed suicide, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is set in New Orleans, and the central character, Ignatius Reilly, is an overweight, argumentative layabout who interrelates with a cast of equally eccentric and accident-prone characters. The title comes from Jonathan Swift:
‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.
Swift: Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting (1711)'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
This week’s Text is four parsing sentences worksheet for nouns. These are pretty simple literacy exercises designed to get students reading and understanding the structure of basic declarative sentences by analyzing the parts of speech in 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.
Here is a worksheet on the Greek root morph/o, which means form. It can also, naturally, means shape. As you will see, this is a very productive root in English, and is at the base of quite a few big abstract nouns.
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.
“It contains unpleasant elements.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun covenant, for which I can think of a variety of uses. I wrote it to help students understand it as an agreement, specifically the restrictive or racial covenants that racism wears in real estate transactions.
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.
“In 1935 Broun made this statement: ‘Nobody need worry any more that Washington is going left. Indeed, nobody need worry that the Washington of today is going anywhere.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor
Here for all you social studies teachers, if you can use it, is an independent practice worksheet on latitude and longitude that I assign early on in the freshman global studies cycle. If students are to read maps, they need these words and the concepts they represent.
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.
“Any systematic account of the structure of the language; the patterns that it describes; the branch of linguistics concerned with such patterns.
Often restricted to the study of units that can be assigned a meaning. Distinguished in that light from phonology, e.g. singing is a grammatical unit as are sing and –ing, while s or the syllable si are phonological. Also opposed, thought not always, to a dictionary or the lexicon. E.g. the meanings of sing belong to its entry in the lexicon; the functions of -ing to grammar, where they are described for verbs in general. When limited in both of those ways, the study of grammar reduces to that of morphology and syntax.
Chomsky’s term in the 1960s for the knowledge of a language developed by a child who learns to speak it. A grammar in the widest sense was thus at once a set of rules (32) said to be internalized by members of a speech community, and account, by a linguist, of such a grammar. This internalized grammar is effectively what was later called I-language.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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