“In Babylonian mythology, the primeval sea seen as a dragon goddess. The wife of Apsu, the ancient god of the fresh waters, Tiamat was the mother of all the gods. In the famous creation myth of the War of the Gods, she fights against the younger gods, but is killed by Marduk, who, splitting her body, makes heaven of the upper half and earth of the lower.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“The supreme Babylonian god of the earth and atmosphere, called the god of lords. Said to have created man and the universe, Bel symbolizes male generative power. Bel is the same word as Baal in Phoenician and Hebrew.
In Bel and the Dragon, an Old Testament Apocryphal book appended to the book of Daniel, Daniel exposes the trickery of the priest of Bel in Babylon and convinces the king that Bel is only an image and not an actual living deity.”
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 asian-pacific history
“Yang Chen Ning, known as Frank Yang (b. 1922) Chinese-U.S. theoretical physicist. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1945 and studied with E. Teller at the Univ. of Chicago. He showed that parity is violated when elementary particles decay. This and other work in particle physics earned him and Tsung-Dao Lee (b. 1926) a 1957 Nobel Prize. His research focused mostly on interactions involving the weak force among elementary particles. He also worked in statistical mechanics.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Matsuo Basho (1644-1694): Japanese haiku poet. Basho is generally acknowledged as the developer and greatest master of this form. His haiku went through many phases, evolving from the pedantic verse of his early youth to his lighthearted poetry of his last years. The work of his peak period is characterized by evocations of man’s ultimate harmony with nature. A wanderer for much of his life, Basho also wrote travel sketches interspersed with haiku. Oi no kobumi (1688; tr The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, 1966) is famous for its opening passages, which reveal his basic beliefs, but the best work in this genre is Oku no hosomichi (1689; tr The Narrow Road to the Deep North, 1966), which, outwardly describing his journey to rural areas of northeastern Japan, inwardly traces his spiritual quest for a beauty and lyricism all but lost in urban life.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“From the standpoint of the educator…the various studies represent working resources, available capital. Their remoteness from the experience of the young…is real. The subject matter of the learner…cannot be identical with the formulated, crystallized knowledge of the adult…. Failure to bear in mind the difference…is responsible for most of the mistakes made in the use of texts and other expressions of preexisting knowledge.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
I. “Understanding unlike explaining, is not preemptive; for example, one way of construing the fall of Rome narratively does not rule out other interpretations. For narratives and their interpretations traffic in meaning, and meanings are intransigently multiple…. Since no one narrative construal rules out alternatives, narratives pose a very special issue of criteria.”
II. “In a word, narrative accounts can be principled or not but do not rest on stark verification alone, as with scientific explanations. Any constitutional lawyer worth his salt can tell you how Justice Taney’s way of construing history in the Dred Scott decision was excruciatingly tunnel-visioned, unmindful of competing perspective, and therefore lethal in its consequences.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Coming out of a midtown restaurant, Benchley spotted a uniformed man at the door. ‘Would you get us a taxi, please,’ he asked the man. ‘I’m sorry,’ the man said coldly, ‘I happen to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy.’ ‘All right then,’ said Benchley, ‘get us a battleship.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“The famous foundling reared by apes in the African jungle was created in 1912 by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950), Tarzan has had countless adventures in novels and films, in which he communes with animals, rescues damsels in distress and discovers long lost civilizations. The first novel of 24 in which he appears is Tarzan of the Apes (1914). In the ‘monkey language’ that Burroughs invented for him, his name means ‘white’ from tar, and zan, ‘skin.’ He is given this name by his foster-mother, Kala the ape. The name came to be adopted for any apparent ‘he-man’ and was bestowed by the media on the Conservative politician Michael Heseltine (b. 1933), not only for his height and blond hair but also with reference to an incident of 1976 when he brandished the House of Commons mace to protect it. Tarzana, now a suburban residential section of Los Angeles, was named in honour of Tarzan.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“What detective did Edgar Allen Poe invent? C. Auguste Dupin, the coolly logical amateur sleuth of three stories published in the 1840s: ‘The Murders in the Rue Morque,’ ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter.’”
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
“No experience is educative that does not tend both to knowledge of more facts and entertaining of more ideas and to a better, a more orderly arrangement of them…. Experiences in order to be educative, must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter…. This condition is satisfied only as long as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
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