“Commerce, n. A mind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E.”
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
“Very nearly a parody of the Southern Gothic novel…written in imitation Faulkner–a wearisome and hopeless style.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities
“Finnegan’s Wake: A radically experimental modernist novel (1939) by James Joyce (1882-1941). He began work on it in 1922, but was too superstitious to reveal the title; sections were published (1927-1930) in New York as ‘Work in Progress.’ Finnegan’s Wake is a record of a night, in which the mind of the sleeping H.C. Earwicker is interpreted with great virtuosity and invention of language, with meaning piled upon meaning. Joyce illustrated his literary method by saying that he was tunneling through a mountain from two sides. The structure largely follows the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), who divided human history into three ages, divine, heroic, and human, to which Joyce added a fourth, return, emphasizing Vico’s theory of evolutionary cycles in civilizations. The circularity of Joyce’s work is emphasized by the fact that the last sentence merges into the first:
‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve to shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’
The punning title derives from and Irish-American ballad about Tim Finnegan, a drunken hod-carrier who falls from his ladder and is killed. A splash of whiskey at his wake awakes him and he exclaims ‘Do ye think I’m dead then?’ The title also suggests the return (awakening) of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, mythical hero of the Ossianic cycle of stories.
Among the many coinages in Finnegan’s Wake, one in particular has come into wider usage. It was from Joyce’s phrase ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark” that the US physicist Murray Gell-man (1929-2019) took the word ‘quark,’ which he applied to what were then hypothetical elementary particles making up the protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. Intriguingly, quarks have such properties as charm colour, and strangeness.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
“Just how much unknown stuff can a text have in it before a reader will just declare mental overload! and call it quits? This quantity surely varies depending on the reader’s attitude toward reading and motivation to understand that particular text. Still, studies have measured readers’ tolerance of unfamiliar vocabulary, and have estimated that readers need to know about 98% of the words for comfortable comprehension. That may sound high, but bear in mind that the paragraph you’re now reading has about 75 unique words. So 98% familiarity means that this and every paragraph like it would have one or two words that are unfamiliar to you.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“What classical writer told the story of Jason and the Argonauts? The most complete treatment is the Argonautica by third-century poet Apollonius of Rhodes.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
“Proton (positive) * Neutron (neutral) * Electron (negative)
The proton is stuck like a plumb pudding together with its neutron partners, wround which whiz the much smaller electron particles, within a space known as the electron cloud. This whole mysterious building block of life is held together by the power of electromagnetism to form atoms, which are listed in all their wonderful variety in that evocative list known as the Periodic Table of Elements.
Democritus, who brilliantly analyzed that the entire universe was ‘all in flux’ back in the fifth century BC, was the first to speculate about an atom–though our focus on the essential building block of life has somewhat shifted back a bit, since we have learned that quarks like beneath the surface of both protons and neutrons.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, readings/research, science literacy
“Indo-Aryan: Branch, within Indo-European, of Indo-Iranian: first attested by texts in Vedic (Sanskrit) dating from the 2nd millenium BC, and by transcriptions from the first. Also called ‘Indic.’
The modern Indo-Aryan languages are indigenous to most of the north and centre of the Indian subcontinent, with outliers in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and the Maldives. Hindi-Urdu and Bengali are by far the largest; of the remainder, Marathi, in the south of the main area, Gujarati in the south-west, Sindhi to the west, Punjabi in the north-west, Assamese in the east, Oriya in the south-east, and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka all have a current literary standard and are linked to major political units. Others, such as Bhojpuri or Maithili, also have speakers in the tens of millions.
Across the main area, separate languages have arisen largely by divisions within a geographical continuum. Hence internal branches are not definitively established.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Indo-European: Family of languages including, at historically its major limit, most of those spoken in Europe and, at its eastern limit, the major languages of all but the southern part of the Indian subcontinent. Usually divided into eleven main branches: in the order in which they are first attested, Anatolian (now extinct), Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (represented by the modern Romance languages), Celtic, Germanic (which includes English), Armenian, Tocharian (extinct), Slavic (Slavonic), Baltic (represented by Latvian and Lithuanian), and Albanian. Groupings larger than these are problematic to varying degrees: the safest hypothesis is that of a common Balt-Slavonic.
The comparative method has its origin in the intensive study of Indo-European, especially in the German-speaking universities, from the early 19th century. The size and complexity of the family, in comparison with many others that can be established with the same certainty, reflects in part the early date at which the forms in several branches can be compared.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged professional development, term of art
“The Ice Age lasted for an unimaginably long time. Many tens of thousands of years, which was just as well, for otherwise these people would not have had time to invent all these things. But gradually the earth grew warmer and the ice retreated to the high mountains and people—who by now were much like us—learned, with the warmth, to plant grasses and then grind the seeds to make a paste they could bake in the fire, and this was bread. In the course of time, they learned to build tents and tame animals which until then had roamed freely around. And they followed these herds, as people in Lapland still do. Because forests were dangerous places in those days, home to large numbers of animals such as wolves and bears, people in several places (and this is often the case with inventors) had the same excellent idea: they built “pile dwellings” in the middle of lakes, huts on stilts rammed deep in the mud. By this time they were masters at shaping and polishing their tools and used a different, harder stone to bore holes in their axe-heads for handles. That must have been hard work! Work which could take the whole of the winter. Imagine how often the axe-head must have broken at the last minute, so they had to start all over again.”
Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Fine Art: Describes solely those categories of artworks traditionally judged to be the most prominent in forms of aesthetic significance. They include architecture, painting, sculpture, and many of the graphic arts, and are contrasted with decorative and applied art, in which function is as important as aesthetic considerations. Within painting, history painting was considered most important, followed by portraiture and landscape.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
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