“Lardner once visited Paducah to interview Irvin Cobb, later reporting, ‘Mr. Cobb took me into his library and showed me his books, of which he has a complete set.'”
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 class of visual arts in which lines, marks, or characters are impressed on a flat surface, usually paper. These include drawing, engraving, etching, lithography (which are grouped with fine art) and also processes such as typography and printing, when they are intended for more than utilitarian purposes.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
“The study of the relationship between brain function and behavior. This field includes neuropsychologists who work in experimental and clinical settings; experimental neuropsychologists who work with both human and animal models; and clinical neuropsychologists who look for procedures that will help people with neurologically based disorders by studying brain and behavior relationships.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“Thirty-three is an ancient number of completion: the age when Christ was crucified; the years in which King David reigned. It also marks the number of divinities in the public festivals of the Persian Empire, and in the Hindu tradition three sets of eleven deities appear frequently as an auspicious pantheon of thirty-three. In Muslim tradition the ninety-nine beautiful names of God are recited with rosaries made from thirty-three prayer beads each used thrice, while the Hizb al-Wiqaya is a prayer of personal protection collected from thirty-three verses that invoke Koranic protection and divine names.
In broader cultural contexts, the number was chosen by Dante to structure his Divine Comedy (composed of three sets of thirty-three chapters); it expresses the number of spiritual ranks within Freemasonry; and the blows with which Shakespeare records death being delivered to Julius Caesar (‘When think you that the sword goes up again? Never, till Caesar’s three and thirty wounds be well avenged’).”
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 English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, readings/research
[This botched assessment refers to Bernard Malamud’s second novel, published in 1957, produced as a movie, and included in Time’s All-TIME 100 Novels.]
“Despite its occasional spark of humanity and its melancholy humor this is on the whole too grim a picture to have wide appeal.”
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
Tagged literary oddities, readings/research
“A character in writing which represents a word as a whole. Distinguished especially from a phonogram, which represents a sound or group of sounds; also from a pictogram or an ideogram, which represent an object or idea independently of words.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art
“A wartime oratorio by Michael Tippett (1905-98) with a libretto by the composer. The work was written in 1939-41 and first performed in 1944. The ‘child’ of the title is Herschel Grynspan, a Polish-Jewish student whose assassination in Paris of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on 7 November 1938 led to the infamous Kristallnacht, a night of violence against Jews and their property on 9-10 November. Escalating official persecution followed. Tippett uses Negro spirituals at important points in the score, as Back had used the chorales in his passions. The title, stressing the universality of the story, was suggested by that of a novel (1938) by the German-Hungarian writer and diplomat Odon von Horvath (1901-38), Ein Kind unserer Zeit.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged music, readings/research
“Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.”
Bertrand Russell, “Mathematics and Metaphysicians” (1901)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists the circulation of the blood.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
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