“Adjectival Modifier: A word, phrase, or clause that acts as an adjective in qualifying the meaning of a noun or pronoun. Your country; a turn-of-the-century style; people who are always late.”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
“Tricolons are a rhetorical flourish—a sonorous list of three concepts, often escalating in significance. The most famous is Julius Caesar’s proud dispatch to the Senate of Rome following his expedition to the near-mythical, mist-clouded Isle of Britain: Veni, Vidi, Vinci’ (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’). But Caesar’s tricolon is run close by those great orators Lincoln and Churchill, while in recent years Barack Obama has revived the form, sometimes going for the double tricolon, as in this speech echoing the Declaration of Independence:
‘Our generation’s task is to make these words, these rights, these values—of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—real.’
Here are some all-time classics:
‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people.’
The threefold manifestation of a fully functioning democracy as defined by Lincoln. He also, apparently in casual conversation, made a masterly analysis of the limits of the dark arts of political life:
‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’
Churchill was an enthusiast for the tricolon, most famously in his praise for that handful of gallant nights or the air who defended the shores of Britain:
‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’
Perhaps the most glorious of all is the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, taken from a sonnet by Emma Lazarus:
‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’
On a rather more crass level, there is the real estate agents’ mantra, ‘Location, location, location,’ which Tony Blair turned into his slogan “Education, education, education.’ Or the nicely bungled Homer Simpson appeal: ‘I can’t let that happen, I won’t let that happen, and I can’t let that happen.’”
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.
“Mastaba: An Egyptian burial chamber built of stone in the form of a low, truncated pyramid.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
“Frequentative: Indicating repeated action or recurrent state or situation, e.g., ‘Raindrops are falling.’ Also IITERATIVE, REDUPLICATIVE.”
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 Worlds: A term which is frequently applied to ‘universes of discourse’ through which common symbols, organizations, and activities emerge. They involve cultural areas which need not be physically bounded. Typical examples might be the ‘social worlds’ of surfing, nursing, politics, or science. They Gay Community is a self-conscious social world. The concept has a long but vague history in symbolic interactionism and is discussed most clearly by Anselm Strauss (in Norman Denzin’s edited Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 1978).”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Vernacular Architecture: Buildings made from local materials to suit localized needs, and designed with minimal reference to prevailing styles or trends.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
“Factitive: Indicating completion of a predicate, or the need of a transitive verb of calling, making, thinking, etc., for not only an object but also an object complement, e.g. ‘It turned the sea red,’ ‘They named her Cynthia.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Annexation Process whereby a state a assumes possession of a territory unilaterally and without the consent of the former owner. Unlike a protectorate, military occupation, or UN trusteeship, full sovereign rights are conferred but the population of the annexed territory become subjects of the new possessor state. Annexations may be made by force, by treaty or by other means. Examples are Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 and Israel’s annexation of Jordanian areas of Jerusalem in 1967.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
“Theory, Social Theory: A theory is a account of the world which goes beyond what we can see and measure. It embraces a set of interrelated definitions and relationships that organizes our concepts or and understanding of the empirical world in a systematic way. Thus, we may establish a statistical relationship between poverty and crime, but to explain that relationship we might have to employ a number of theories: about people’s motivation, the social meanings attached to poverty and crime, and the structural constraints which keeps sections of the population in poverty.
Generally speaking there are three different conceptions of theory in sociology. Some think of theory as generalizations about and classifications of, the social world. The scope of generalization varies from theorizing about a particular range of phenomena to more abstract and general theories about society and history as a whole. Others believe that theoretical statements should be translated into empirical, measurable, or observable propositions, and systematically tested. Thus, in the example above, we should test assumptions about motivations, social meanings, and so forth. This approach is usually characterized (rather unhelpfully) as positivism. Finally, yet others argue that theory should explain phenomena, identifying causal mechanisms and processes which, although they cannot be observed directly, can be seen in their effects. For example, Marxists might use the alleged contradiction between the forces and relations of production (unobservable) to explain fluctuations in class struggle (observable). The label realism is sometimes attached to this view.
The term social theory is also applied commonly to the most general level of theories of society—to perspectives such as structural functionalism, phenomenology, or Marxism—which embrace most or all of the social sciences. Some prefer to call this level ‘social philosophy.’”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”
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, philosophy/religion
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