“Anagram: (Greek ‘writing back or anew’) The letters of a word or phrase are transposed to form a new word. For instance, the word ‘Stanhope’ can be turned into the word ‘phaetons.’ A common feature of crosswords. Samuel Butler’s title Erewhon is an anagram of ‘nowhere.'”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.”
Gertrude Stein, in Dictionary of Biographical Quotation 1978
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, poetry
“Sanity is a cozy lie.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged health, social-emotional learning
Scratch * Duck * Love * Nil
“Sport makes much use of the concept of zero, loading it with a multitude of names. There is scratch in golf, coined from ‘scratching out’ any trace on a score card. In cricket, a batsman who gets zero scores a duck–the slang for a bird that lays an egg, the shape of a zero. And that is the origin, too, of the word ‘love’ in tennis, corrupted from the English trying to copy the French for egg–oeuf. Football, meanwhile, favours the Latin nil, from nihil–nothing.”
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 Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged games/sports, literary oddities, numeracy
“Oracle (noun): A shrine where deities were consulted for prophecies or revelations; a priest or other interpreter of supernal pronouncements or prophecies; any person thought to be a source or medium or divine communication, or one revered for his profound knowledge, foresightful wisdom, or authoritative counsel; a divinely inspired utterance, especially an enigmatic or ambiguously allegorical statement; a wise or purportedly wise opinion. Adjective: oracular, oraculous; adverb: oracularly; noun: oracularity, oracularness.
‘Presumably he prefers the anonymous ‘it’; and likes to see an expression like ‘I think that…’ replaced by ‘it is hypothesized…’ which, (apart from expurgating the dirty word “to think”) ministers to the bureaucratic underlings predilection for submissive autonomy combined with oracular authority.'”
Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“…do you not know that there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagry [sic] from the scriptures? I allow and rejoice that Christ only appealed to the understanding and affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me and Milton himself barely tolerable.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letters 1796
“I could never read ten lines together without stumbling over some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the schoolroom, worse than either.”
Edward Fitzgerald, Letters, 1876
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, poetry
“Preference, n. A sentiment, or frame of mind, induced by the erroneous belief that one thing is better than another.
An ancient philosopher, expounding his conviction that life is no better than death, was asked by a disciple why, then, he did not die. ‘Because,’ he replied, ‘death is no better than life.’ It is longer.”
Ambrose Bierce
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
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“The understanding that words are made of sounds and sounds are written with letters in the right order. Students who understand this can blend sounds associated with letters into words and can separate words into component sounds for spelling and writing.
Students should be assessed to determine if they can hear sounds in spoken language prior to letter-sound instruction.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“What was the name of Socrates’ wife? Famed for her shrewishness, the wife of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian philosopher was named Xantippe.”
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
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“If we were not all so excessively interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
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