“Richly sweet and smooth in speech or tone; resonant and flowing; honeyed. Adverb: mellifluously; noun: mellifluousness.
‘The best American essay on him, in my opinion, was by Edmund Wilson, dry and to the point, There was not mellifluous English nonsense about the ‘inimitable’ and ‘incomparable.’”
V.S. Pritchett, The Tale Bearers
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“The splitting of a hair into forty parts was believed in the magically inclined early times to have been achieved by the six great physicians of antiquity–Plato, Hippocrates, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, and Galen. The physicians then used it to make a ladder in which science could ascend to the heavens, but there they failed to find a cure for death and returned to earth. Sometimes their number is extended by allowing King Philip II of Macedon to join this band.”
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, philosophy/religion
“Pier: Massive solid masonry that functions as vertical structural support. Also, often used to designate Romanesque and Gothic pillars of noncylindrical form.”
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
“A critical term, the first recorded definition of which comes from Dr. Samuel Johnson: ‘a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.’ It is often used deliberately for comic effect to create an ironical letdown by descending from a noble tone or image to a trivial or ludicrous one. For example, in Henry Fielding’s burlesque The Tragedy of Tragedies (1931), Lord Grizzle addresses Huncamunca: ‘Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, Oh!/ Thy pouting breasts, like Kettle-Drums of Brass,/Beat everlasting loud Alarms of joy….’ Bathos is an unintentional anticlimax.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, fiction/literature, term of art
“As poet James Russell Lowell put it, ‘books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.'”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel. The Reading Mind. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017
“Optimism: The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.”
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, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“In the summer of 1928, Aleck Woollcott invited Harpo Marx to spend the summer with him on the French Riviera. Harpo refused, protesting, ‘I can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock.’
(An interesting postscript: On Saturday, May 19, Aleck Woollcott, Beatrice Kaufman, novelist Alice Duer Miller, and Harpo sailed for Europe.)”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“In the Indo-Aryan West, 9 was always a most propitious number, for each aspect of a ruling trinity could be multiplied by 3 to create a pantheon of 9. It is not difficult to see that this was the likely origin for our choirs of nine angels, nine heavenly spirits and nine muses. The number also has an innate reference to the nine months in which a child is created within the womb.”
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 numeracy, readings/research
“I am relieved to find the critics shrink from saying that Mr. Yeats will ever be a popular author. I should really at last despair of mankind, if he could be…absolutely empty and void. The work does not please the ear, nor kindle the imagination, nor hint a thought for one’s reflection… Do what I will, I can see no sense in the thing: it is to me sheer nonsense. I do not say it is obscure, or uncouth or barbaric or affected–tho’ it is all these evil things; I say it is to me absolute nullity…I would not read a page of it again for worlds.
That he has any real paying audience I find hard to believe.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.”
Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Pt. I, Ch. 2 (1857)
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
Tagged fiction/literature
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