“There is a certain cheapness, even and intellectual dishonesty, in pretending that the suburbanites…are pseudo-vertebrates who bend in the middle when confronted by the pressures of living their own lives.
New York Herald Tribune Lively Arts
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 fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Alleged. ‘The alleged murderer.’ One can allege a murder, but not a murderer; a crime, but not a criminal. A man that is merely suspected of a crime would not, in any case, be an alleged criminal, for an allegation is a definite and positive statement. In their tiresome addiction to this use of alleged, the newspapers, though having mainly in mind the danger of libel suits, can urge in further justification the lack of any single word that exactly expresses their meaning; but the fact that a mud-puddle supplies the shortest route is not a compelling reason for walking through it. One can go around.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Annotation (noun): An explanatory of critical note accompanying a text; gloss; authorial or scholarly comment. Adj. annotative, annotatory; n. annotator; v. annotate
‘What do you expect me to do? Go into a monastery? Or spend the rest of my life keeping up with your precious cult—editing and annotating and explaining you, until people get sick of the sound of your name?’ Christopher Isherwood, The World in the Evening”
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 Sciences
“Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure, in short, is to learn how things are related…. To take an example from mathematics, algebra is a way of arranging knowns and unknowns in equations so that the unknowns are made knowable. The three fundamentals involved…are commutation, distribution, and association. Once a student grasps the ideas embodied by these three fundamentals, he is in a position to recognize wherein “new” equations to be solved are not new at all. Whether the student knows the formal names of these operations is less important for transfer than whether he is able to use them.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Parents were invented to make children happy by giving them something to ignore.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Analogue: A word or thing similar or parallel to another. As a literary term it denotes a story for which one can find parallel examples in other languages and literatures. A well-known example is Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, whose basic plot and theme were widely distributed in Europe in the Middle Ages. The tale is probably of oriental origin and a primitive version exists in a 3rd century Buddhist text known as the Jatakas; but the version usually taken to be the closest analogue to Chaucer’s tale is in the Italian Libro di Novelle e di Bel Parlar Gentile (1572) which is nearly two hundred years later than Chaucer’s story.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Who is featured in Plutarch’s Lives? The Parallel Lives (first century A.D.) pairs biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, such as the orators Demosthenes and Cicero. The book provided background for some of Shakespeare’s plays, including Julius Caesar.”
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, Social Sciences
“A mental disorder of infancy or early childhood (beginning before age 5 years) characterized by disturbed and developmentally inappropriate patterns of social relating, not resulting from mental retardation or pervasive developmental disorder, evidenced either by a persistent failure to initiate or respond appropriately in social interactions (inhibited type), or by indiscriminate sociability without appropriate selective attachments (uninhibited type). By definition, there must also be evidence of pathogenic care, assumed to be responsible for the disturbed social relating, in the form of persistent disregard for the child’s basic emotional or physical needs or repeated changes in major attachment figures.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Few citizens really know what’s going on in their schools. They settle for the familiar and ignore the substance.”
Theodore R. Sizer (1932-2009)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“(1919, 1921, 1923, 1936; Supplement One, 1945; Supplement Two, 1948; 4th ed, abridged with supplements annotations, and new material by Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1963) A philological treatise by H.L. Mencken. Believing at first that the American language and English were diverging, Mencken found that, by 1923, American English had become the more powerful tongue and was leading British English along with it. He set out to examine the two streams of language and their differences in vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation. His study gave particular attention to American slang, proper names, and the incorporation of non-English dialects in America. Ironically, Mencken’s work won him a place among the scholars he had attacked and scorned.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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