“Silhouette: A profile likeness of a person or scene cut from black paper and usually mounted against a white background. Named for French amateur practitioner of the art, Etienne de Silhouette, Louis XV’s finance minister.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but ‘pervades and regulates the whole.’ He has the last word on everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“Privative: Indicating lack of loss of, absence of, or negation, e.g., the prefixes ‘un-,’ ‘a-,’ ‘non-,’ the suffix ‘-less.'”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Leveled reading emphasizes students’ current limitations, rather than increasing their possibilities, especially for the least advantaged of our students. We can do better.”
“Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read: Why It Reduces Their Opportunity to Learn.” American Educator 44.2 (Summer 2020): 17. Print.
“Broun, known for his always unkempt appearance, devoted an article to the topic ‘Best-Dressed Women of the World.’ In it he commented on his own experiences in such contests: ‘While I was running for Best-Dressed Senior in the graduating class of Horace Mann High School, I often spent as much as three or four minutes in the morning deciding which pants I ought to wear. The grey or the blue. The blue or the grey. I generally decided to take the ones which possessed the closest appearance to a crease.’”
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, literary oddities
“Social Engineering: Planned social change and social development; the idea that governments can shape and manage key features of society, in much the same way as the economy is managed, assuming that adequate information on spontaneous trends is available through social indicators and social trends reports. For example, the extent of women’s employment is clearly determined in part by government policy to promote or impede women’s paid work.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development, term of art
“Megaera * Tisiphone * Alecto
The furies (Erinyes) were also known in Athens by the cautious euphemism of the Eumenides—‘the kindly ones’—and were worshipped in a cave below the Parthenon. Megaera the jealous, Tisiphone the blood avenger and Alecto the unceasing were elemental figures of human power—the relentless winged spirits of Conscience, Punishment and Retribution hunting down the guilty.
Later traditions identified them as the daughters of Gaia, inseminated when the bloody testicles of the ancient god Uranus, who was castrated by his son Cronus, fell to the earth. They are sometimes depicted like a winged spirit of victory, sometimes like a Medusa figure dripping with gore and a scalp sprouting a mane of thrashing serpents.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“What are the Ten Days that Shook the World? They are the days of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought an end to the imperial rule of the czars and replaced it with communism. The title refers to the 1919 eyewitness account of the revolution by American writer and sympathizer John Reed (1887-1920).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Harappan Script: That of the Harappan civilization, flourishing in the Indus valley in the 3rd-2nd millennia BC. Undeciphered and not demonstrably connected to later Indian scripts.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Postpositive: Placed after another word or words, or suffixed, e.g. ‘murder most foul.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
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