“Woollcott enjoyed a close relationship with Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and occasionally visited them at the White House. In a letter to Mrs. Roosevelt, the purpose of which was to solicit the First Lady’s hospitality for an approaching vacation, he wrote: ‘I would like to come for a week or so. If you haven’t room for me, there are plenty of other places for me to go. I prefer yours.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“etymology: The study of the historical relation between a word and the earlier from or forms from which it has, or has hypothetically, developed. Thus the etymology of sheep relates it, with German Schaf and others, to a reconstructed Common Germanic skoepa; that of street relates it, through Old English straet, to a borrowing into Germanic of Latin (via) strata ‘paved road.’
Loosely described as a study of the ‘origins of words’; but any form may have an earlier prehistory, over many thousands of years, of which we can know nothing.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Matronym, Matronymic (noun): A name derived from that of one’s mother or a maternal ancestor, usually by addition of a suffix or prefix. Adjective: matronymic, matronymical; adverb: matronymically. Also METRONYMIC”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Rationalization: The act of justifying discreditable actions after the event, or a justification or excuse put forward in this way. In psychoanalysis, a defense mechanism in which a false but reassuring or self-serving explanation that in reality arises from a repressed wish. The term was first used in the narrower psychoanalytic sense in 1908 by the Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones (1879-1958) in an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology entitled ‘Rationalization in Everyday Life.’”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Encoding: Converting information into a different form or representation, especially (in psychology) the process whereby physical information is transformed into a representation suitable for storage in memory and subsequent retrieval.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Candidate for Aspirant. In American politics, one is not a candidate for office until formally named (nominated) for it by a convention, or otherwise, as provided by law or custom. So when a man who is moving Heaven and Earth to procure the nomination protests that he is ‘not a candidate’ he tells the truth in order to deceive.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
“All our institutions, our traditional attitudes, our laws, our morals, our customs, give evidence of the fact that they are determined and maintained by privileged males for the glory of male domination. These institutions reach out into the very nurseries and have a great influence on the child’s soul.”
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“by-election: Election of a member to a representative body to fill a vacancy caused by the death or resignation of a former member during a normal term of office.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
How did Edgar Allan Poe die? In October, 1849, the forty-year-old writer was found lying unconscious near a polling place in Baltimore. According to some reports, he had been fed liquor and dragged to various polling places to vote repeatedly. He was taken to a hospital where he remained semi-comatose for three days. On October 7, at 3 A.M. he died of “congestion of the brain” and possibly intestinal inflammation, a weak heart, and diabetes.
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“A southern writer named John Kennedy Toole wrote a comic novel about life in New Orleans called A Confederacy of Dunces. It was so relentlessly rejected by publishers that he killed himself. That was in 1969. His mother refused to give up on the book. She sent it out and got it back, rejected, over and over again. At last she won the patronage of Walker Percy, who got it accepted by the Louisiana State University Press, and in 1980 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, readings/research
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