“On his first meeting with Ruth Hale, whom he later married, Broun took the young lady for a stroll in Central Park, where she became intrigued with a squirrel which had come begging for food. After listening to Miss Hale’s repeated regrets that she had no peanuts to give the squirrel, Broun remarked, ‘I can’t help you except to give him a nickel so he can go and buy his own.’”
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, readings/research, united states history
“Fourteen is a number to avoid in any context in China and most of the Far East, for its tones sound like ‘guaranteed death.’ Do do not bother looking for a 14th floor in an apartment block, number 14 in a row of houses, or the use or ‘14’ in a number plate or telephone number. Other Chinese numbers to avoid, to a lesser extent, include 4 (which sounds like ‘death’), 5 (which sounds like ‘not’), and 6 (which sounds like ‘decline’). And, as if to bear this out, in our world lives and teaches the fourteenth Dalai Lama, a spiritual hero fated to witness the slow death of his Tibetan homeland.”
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.
“Only the educated are free.”
Epictetus, Discourses (101 A.D.)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Glasgow School: A group of painters who gathered in Glasgow, ca 1850-1918, who rejected academic conventionality and painted in a spirited style of naturalism. The best known of them include David Young Cameron and E.A. Walton.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Diacritic, Diacritical Mark (noun): A distinguishing mark given to a character or letter to indicated stress or pronunciation, such as a superscribed accent; phonetic sign. Adjective: diacritic, diacritical.
‘The ‘etymons,’ as he called them were the root terms for Pass and Fail, but inflected with prefixes, infixes, suffixes, and diacritical marks to such an extent, and so variously from fragment to fragment, that conflicting interpretations, in his opinion, could be said to figure the intellectual biography of studentdom, as has been amply demonstrated in a wealth of what he called Geistesgeschichten…. John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy.'”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Rational, adj. Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience and reflection.”
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
“Anglophile: 1. Admiring or loving England and the English and/or the English language: the anglophile party in Scotland. 2. Someone with such an attitude: unrepentant Anglophiles. The term may or may not include Britain as a whole, and non-English Britons may experience Anglophilia.
Anglophobe: 1. Also Anglophobic. Fearing or hating England and the English and/or the English language: Anglophobe reaction. 2. Someone with such an attitude: an inveterate Anglophobe. The term may or may not include Britain as a whole, and non-English Britons may experience Anglophobia.
Anglophone: [Often used without an initial capital]. 1. A speaker of English: (Africa) locally born anglophone whites; (Quebec) certified anglophones, permitted by law to send their children to English-medium schools. 2. Of speakers of English: an anglophone school. The term occurs mainly where French is also used. It contrasts with francophone (French-speaking), allophone (speaking a language other than French or English), arabophone (speaking Arabic), hispanophone (speaking Spanish), lusophone (speaking Portugese), etc.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005
“Mrs. Sontag is an intelligent writer who has, on her first flight, jettisoned the historical baggage of the novel. However, she has not replaced it with material or insights that carry equal or superior weight…. Instead she has chosen the fashionable imports of neo-existentialist philosophy and tricky contemporary techniques.”
New York Times Book Review
Excerpted from: Barnard, 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 fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“Absurd: A philosophical term for a fundamental lack of reasonableness and coherence in human existence. The philosophical and theological roots of the term can be traced to Tertullian (160?-?230), an early Father of the church who argued that the surest sign of the truth of Christianity is its absurdity. He posited that the idea of an infinite deity incarnating himself and undergoing suffering for human beings is so irrational that no one would invent such a story; therefore it must be true. Tertullian’s summary statement was Creo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). Centuries later, Soren Kierkegaard reemphasized the absurdity of Christianity. He suggested that rational ‘proofs,’ however convincing, are blocks, not aids, to faith. A faith that requires proofs is no faith at all. One can only choose Christianity, with its manifest absurdities, or choose an alternative way of life, with its latent absurdities. The choice of Christianity is a ‘leap of faith’ for which there are no strictly rational criteria.
With Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Jean-Paul Sartre, the concept of absurdity became almost completely secularized as the basis for existentialism. According to the existentialist concept, man is thrown into an alien, irrational world in which he must create his own identity through a series of choices for which there are no guides or criteria. Because man cannot avoid making choices—to refrain from choosing is a choice—man is condemned to be free. This absurdity is an inescapable part of the human situation. In his novel Nausea, Sartre regards it as the irresoluble paradox of human existence.
The concept of the absurd in modern literature originated with the early surrealists, in works such as Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi. The concept is used by Albert Camus in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus and in his novel The Stranger, where he emphasizes the psychological implications of the absurd.
Writers have also attempted to convey the concept of the absurd through deliberate distortions and violations of conventional forms, to undermine ordinary expectations of continuity and rationality. Among the most notable writers in the literature and Theater of the Absurd are Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Lyrical Abstraction: Although this term remains vague and is used differently by various writers, it generally refers to the so-called third generation of abstract expressionism, which developed in the early 1970s and was characterized by more sensuous and subjective abstract interpretations than those of the second generation of abstractionism with their geometric tendencies: POP ART, HARD-EDGE PAINTING, and MINIMAL ART, for example.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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