“Causative: Indicating causation by the sentence subject, e.g., ‘He sets them down,”’ ‘They felled two trees,’ The suffix ‘-en’ in ‘widen.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
[Over the years a number of colleagues, and a couple of students, have asked me what I know about copyright. Here’s a post that gives a history of copyright as a concept, as well as its legal dimensions.]
“copyright: The exclusive right by statute to reproduce, publish, and sell works of literature, music, art, drama, choreographic work, motion pictures, and other audiovisual works and sound recordings. The first copyright act in England was that of 1709, subsequently subjected to various modifications and additions. In 1842, a new act was passed, granting copyright for forty-two years after publication or until seven years after the author’s death, whichever should be the longer period. This act was superseded by the copyright act of 1911, under which the period of protection was extended to fifty years after the death of the author, irrespective of date of publication. The act deals also with copyright in photographs, engravings, architectural designs, musical compositions, and phonograph records.
The first copyright act in the U.S. was enacted by the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts in 1783, following vigorous agitation by Noah Webster. The first national statute, passed in 1790, was modeled upon the then-existing British law. Additional acts were passed in 1846, 1856, 1859, 1865, and 1909. U.S. copyrights may be secured under a copyright act effective January 1, 1978, for a period of seventy-five years from publication or one hundred years from creation, whichever is shorter. The term for works created on or after January 1, 1978, lasts for the author’s life plus an additional fifty years. Under the law, all visually perceptible copies of a work were required to bear the symbol ©, the word copyright, or its abbreviation, the name of the owner of the copyright, and the date of publication. Copyright protection has been extended to original works of authorship fixed in any tangible means of expression, known now or later developed. The Copyright Act of 1989 brought U.S. practice into agreement with the Berne Convention, and a copyright notice is no longer necessary to secure protection.
Influenced by lobbyists for book manufacturers reluctant to extend U.S. copyright to books manufactured abroad, the U.S. did not sign the Berne International Copyright Convention, under the auspices of UNESCO, a certain confusion existed in the field of U.S. international copyright. The U.S., most other Western countries, the former Soviet Union, which signed in 1973, and many Asian countries have signed the Universal Copyright Convention, but a worldwide international copyright does not yet exist.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development, term of art
“Anticipate for Expect. ‘I anticipate trouble.” To anticipate is to act on an expectation in a way to promote or forestall the event expected.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
“Black Consciousness: Movement in South Africa formed to reestablish black people’s confidence and pride. It was banned by the South African apartheid regime and its leader Steve Biko died under suspicious circumstances while in police detention on 12 September 1977 at the age of 30.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
“It [the assassination of John F. Kennedy] was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ I said that the hate in white people had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, had finally struck down the nation’s Chief Magistrate.”
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged black history, united states history
“Who is the hero of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)? He has no name. He is a young man from the south who finds his way to a hidden existence in a coal cellar in New York.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Bard: (Welsh, bardd; Irish, bard) Amont the ancient Celts a bard was a sort of official poet whose task it was to celebrate national events—particularly heroic actions and victories. The bardic poets of Gaul and Britain were a distinct social class with special privileges. The “caste” continued to exist in Ireland and Scotland, but nowadays are more or less confined to Wales, where the poetry contests and festivals, known as the Eisteddfodau, were revived in 1822 (after a lapse since Elizabethan times). In modern Welsh a bardd is a poet who has taken part in an Eisteddfod. In more common parlance the term may be half seriously applied to a distinguished poet—especially Shakespeare.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, readings/research, term of art
“What type of apples did you buy?
They are cooking apples.
What are those people doing in the kitchen?
They are cooking apples.
This example may seem unusual, but many, if not most, sentences have more than one grammatically correct interpretation. A classic example is “Time flies like an arrow.” Most people interpret it metaphorically—time moves quickly, as an arrow does. But it could also mean that a particular type or insect (time flies) feel affection for arrows. Or “time” could be a command, with the sentence meaning I want you to assess the pace of those flies, and I want you to do it in the way you would assess the pace of an arrow. There are actually at least two other grammatically acceptable interpretations of this sentence.
Grammatically acceptable, but not acceptable to common sense. There’s not a variety of flies called “time flies.” And who would tell someone to get out their stopwatch and time some flies in the same way they would time an arrow? Who times files or arrows? Just as in the “eating apples” example, readers bring knowledge to bear on the sentence, not just grammar, to arrive at the correct interpretation. But in those examples, the knowledge is not provided in the text. The reader had to know it before reading the text.
The influence of meaning on the processing of a sentence is most obvious when grammar renders the sentences ambiguous, but meaning also has an impact on the speed and ease of processing even if the grammar is ambiguous. For example, the sentence “I cut up a slice of cooked ham” will be read more slowly when it is preceded by a few sentences describing the protagonist getting dressed, compared to a context where the protagonist was described as in a kitchen. That slowing can be avoided by adding one word at the start of the sentence: “Later, I cut up a slice of cooked ham.” So clearly, we’re not just extracting meaning from sentences, we are coordinating the meaning of sentences with the meaning of what we’ve read before, and we’re doing that as we process each sentence.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“recall: Political process similar to reselection, except that the local party can demand a representative to appear before it and explain its actions whenever it chooses, that is, during the lifetime of a parliament and not only at the end of his term of office.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art
“Gravitation, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain—the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.”
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, science literacy
 | 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.