“…grossness for the sake of grossness…the world will not be proud of it in that distant tomorrow which irrevocably sets the true value on books of today.”
The Literary World
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
Here is a supported glossary on the parts of speech that, if you teach them, could accompany any lesson on English usage or the parts of speech.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Antihero: A protagonist who lacks traditional heroic virtues and noble qualities and is sometimes inept, cowardly, stupid, or dishonest, yet sensitive. The type is best represented in modern fiction and drama, although it appears as early as 1605, in Don Quixote, James Joyce’s Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon in Lucky Jim, and Joseph Heller’s Yossarian in Catch 22 are antiheroes.”
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 fiction/literature, readings/research
“Mental activities associated with self-control, attention, focus, or concentration that allow an individual to achieve specific goals. Problems in executive function are associated with dysfunction at the frontal part of the brain. Mild or nonspecific deficits of executive functions are common in the general population. Executive functions also may be impaired by injury to the brain, fatigue, depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and various psychological disorders, including learning disability, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Problems with attention, self-regulation, planning, and impulse control may be connected to differences in the processing of neurotransmitters, especially dopamine, in the brain.
Executive functions control four kinds of mental activities. Working memory is essential to the problem-solving process. Information must be held in mind and internalized while a task is being completed. Internalized or private speech allows people to use complex sets of rules in problem solving. These include rules for using sets of rules. Third is the control of emotions and impulses, which allows and individual to remain focused and to continually return to a path of progress toward a desired goal. This allows an individual to set aside the attraction of immediate gratification. The achievement of deferred greater gratification is the product of this kind of self-regulation. Fourth is reconstitution, a process of observing behaviors and then synthesizing components into new combinations. This function is essential to problem solving and survival in a complicated world.
Individuals with ADHD and learning disabilities may have problems in reading long assignments or completing writing projects, since these tasks require executive functions. These difficulties may be connected to differences in the way certain brain chemicals are processed in the prefrontal lobes.
Some individuals with executive function difficulties are also very impulsive, having a hard time considering alternatives and consequences before they act. In solving problems, they are likely to select the first alternative without weighing other possibilities. They often speak without thinking of the consequences of their statements. Some students with these problems get so fidgety that it is hard for them to sit through a 50- or 90-minute class session.
Many individuals with executive function difficulties experience problems with time. Understanding the passage of time and planning for the future or the completion of a task by a particular point in time can be challenge. These individuals may frequently arrive late to appointments or classes. Long-term academic projects are among the greatest challenges for students who have executive function difficulties.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Memorandum (noun): A brief note or reminder or a record kept for future reference; a particular interoffice notice or staff communication; directive; informal diplomatic summary or outline, as of a decision or policy; official statement or observation for the record. Plural: memorandums, memoranda.
‘The authors evidently failed to understand that a memorandum for the President was only a writer’s device to sell books, not a framework that had to be taken literally…. Instead of capturing the emotion and suspense of politics at the center, the authors have indeed produced an overlong memorandum.'”
Edward Cowan, The New York Times
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
“Allusion: Usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer. An allusion may enrich the work by association (q.v.) and give it depth. When using allusions a writer tends to assume an established literary tradition, a body of common knowledge with an audience sharing that tradition and an ability on the part of the audience to ‘pick up’ the reference. The following kinds may be roughly distinguished: (a) a reference to events or people (e.g. there are a number in Dryden’s and Pope’s satires); (b) reference to facts about the author himself (e.g. Shakespeare’s puns on Will; Donne’s puns on Donne, Anne, and Undone; (c) a metaphorical allusion (there are many in T.S. Eliot’s work); an imitative allusion (e.g. Johnson’s to Juvenal in London).”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, poetry, term of art
“On two occasions I have been asked—‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine the wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ In one case a member of the Upper, and in another a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a question.”
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher ch. 5 (1864)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“What all this means only Mr. Pinter knows, for as his characters speak in non-sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings, they are unable to explain their actions, thoughts, of feelings. If the author can forget Beckett, Ionesco, and Simpson he may do much better next time.”
Manchester Guardian 1958
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
“Writing is a code for what you say, not what you think. All known writing systems code the sound of spoken language.
So, on the first day of school, before any reading instruction has begun, every child in the class has bicameral mental representations of words: the know the sound of a word (which scientists called phonology), and its meaning (which scientists call semantics).”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“’Saint John saw the beast ‘rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy,’ which seems to fit temptingly close to the old Phoenician-Canaanite myth of a sea monster Lord of Caos (Yam/Lotan) coming up out of the deep to do battle with a hero god like Baal/Hadad. In amongst the complex imagery of John’s Book of Revelations, some commentators have argued that the seven-headed beast also represents the seven Roman emperors who had been responsible for the degradation of the Temple, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the persecution of Judaism and its heretical offshoot—early Christianity. Counting back from John’s contemporary, Domitian, these seven emperors would be Titus, Vespasian, Nero, Claudius, Caligula, Tiberius, and Augustus.
But it is the 666 number that most resonates, the numerical value John ascribes as the mark of the beast: ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that have understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred, three-score-and-six.’ This hint at numerological coding allows (with different values given to each letter) that 666 would seem to identify ‘Nero Caesar’ when written in Hebrew (it was Nero who organized the first popular pogrom against the Christians after the great fire of Rome). 666 is also the number created when you list—or add—the first six symbols of the Roman numeral notation together, as in D (500), C (100), L (50), X (10), V (5), and I (1).
In Chinese, 666 is a tonal equivalent for ‘things go smoothly’ and a favored number. It also has an alliance with the roulette table, as the sum of all the numbers on the wheel.”
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.
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