“For years, Benchley the theater critic carried on a war with the notorious Broadway hit Abie’s Irish Rose. Near the close of the play’s record run Benchley posted a prize for the best critical comment on the show. Harpo Marx won the contest with his capsule critique: ‘No worse than a bad cold.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in Quotes
Tagged drama/theater, humor, literary oddities, united states history
“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“semantic memory: Memory for facts, such as the information that would be contained in a dictionary or encyclopedia with no connection to time or place. People do not remember when or where they learn this type of information.
Semantic memory registers and stores knowledge about the world in the broadest sense; it allows people to represent and mentally operate in situations, objects, and relations in the world that are not present in the senses. A person with an intact semantic memory system can think about things that are not here now.
Because semantic memory develops first in childhood, before episodic memory, children are able to learn facts before they can remember their own experiences.
The seat of semantic memory is believed to be located in the medial temporal lobe and diencephalic structures of the brain.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
What was the alternative title to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? The Modern Prometheus.
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
“Monolith: A single block of stone carved into a pillar, statue, or column. Large size is implied.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Copywriting (noun): The writing of promotional, public relations, or advertising copy. Noun: copywriter.
‘The narrator’s admission that he is using the language of the advertising copy-writer is a revealing one, and he resorts, later, to the same jargon: “The Aston-Martin started with a deep, healthy roar.”’ David Lodge, Language of Fiction”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Leviathan: A word from the Hebrew, meaning literally ‘that which gathers itself in folds,’ and given in the Bible to a mythical sea serpent (Job 41:1; . 27:1; Ps. 104:26). The name is also applied to the whale and the crocodile, and by extension it has come to mean something vast and formidable of its kind.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged drama/theater, fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“strand: A group of related themes or concepts within an overall curricular area. For example, a social studies curriculum might be divided into such strands as citizenship, history, economics, geography, legal systems, political systems, and so on.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Bewildered by the torrent of fantastic incident, mystified by what Gunter Grass intends by it all, one feels like a zoologist who discovers some monstrous unrecorded mammal gobbling leaves. It may have beautiful horns, but what is it?”
New Statesman
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
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