“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Modern Art: In strict historical terminology, modern art began in the middle of the 19th century with the realism of Gustave Courbet. At that time, art began to free itself from the strict requirements of subject matter and developed increasingly toward preoccupation with form. In general, it also repudiated many of the techniques of pleasing the viewer devised by past canonical artists.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Individual. As a noun, this word means something that cannot be considered as divided, a unit. But it is incorrect to call a man, woman, or child an individual, except with reference to mankind, to society, or to a class of persons. It will not do to say ‘An individual stood in the street,’ when no mention of allusion has been made, nor is going to be made, to some aggregate of individuals considered as a whole.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Catchword (noun): A word associated with a particular person or thing or crystallizing an issue; identifying slogan; in printing, a guideword at the top of the page; as in a dictionary, to indicate the first or last word on that page; a striking, catchy, attention-getting word heading an advertisement.
‘As he turned away, I saw the Daily Wire sticking out of his shabby pocket. He bade me farewell in quite a blaze of catchwords, and went stumping up the road.’ G.K. Chesterton, in The Man Who Was Chesterton.
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Editor: A person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff and to see that the chaff is printed.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Judging by this memoir, it would seem the Hemingway estate is prepared to dribble out some very small beer indeed in the name of the master. This book was apparently completed in Cuba in 1960 and, for all the good it is likely to do Hemingway’s reputation, it could very well have stayed there—permanently.”
Geoffrey Wagner, Commonweal
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Manifesto: A term closely associated with the Avant-Garde Modernists and used primarily during the 20th century. Often the work of writers rather than artists, manifestos were published to proclaim new or revolutionary movements that spanned the arts, as in the Futurist and Surrealist manifestos.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Catchphrase (noun): A common or appealing phrase in popular, often unthinking,, usage; watchword or slogan. ‘…American style…overworks its catchphrases until the become not merely meaningless playtalk, like English catchphrases, but sickening, like overworked popular song.’ Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler Speaking”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Miss Ferber, who was fond of wearing tailored suits, showed up at the Round Table one afternoon sporting a new suit similar to the one Noel Coward was wearing. ‘You look almost like a man,’ Coward said as he greeted her.
‘So,’ Miss Ferber replied, ‘do you.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“Amerigo Vespucci: (1454-1512 Italian-Spanish navigator and explorer of the New World. Born in Florence, he entered the Medici family business and in 1419 was sent to Seville, where he helped outfit the ships for Christopher Columbus’s expeditions. By 1496 he was manager of the Seville agency. He took part in (or four—the number is disputed) voyages to the New World; he was navigator on a Spanish expedition (1499-1500) that probably discovered the mouth of the Amazon River, and he led a Portuguese expedition (1501-2) that discovered Guanabara Bay (Rio de Janeiro) and the Rio de la Plata. In the accounts of they voyages (published 1507), the terms America and New World were used to describe the lands visited by Amerigo Vespucci (in Latin, Americus Vespucius). As chief navigator for the Seville-based Commercial House for the West Indies (from 1508), he prepared maps of newly discovered lands from data supplied by ships’ captains.”
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
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