“Voice: The attribute of a verb that indicates whether its subject is active (Janet played the guitar) or passive (The guitar was played by Janet).”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“It’s hard to believe that a lady from Kansas City with a house in the best residential section, one full-time maid, one mink coat and a Lincoln for her very own, should finish up as timorous and ephemeral as a lunar moth on the outside of a window.”
Florence Crowther, New York Times Book Review
“It is hard to imagine a creep like Bridge ever lived. If he did, so what? Connell fails to show that he has any relevance to what’s happening in America, 1969.”
Cleveland Press
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, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Gesamtkunstwerk: (Ger., total work of art) Term applied to the art of the Baroque and Rococo periods, which sought unification of architecture, sculpture, painting, and sometimes even the applied and decorative arts into a ‘total work of art.’ For example, Gianlorenzo Bernini’s execution of the Coronaro Chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome. By extension, the same idea applies to other periods.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Okay, folks, it’s Friday again. This week’s Text is this lesson plan on areas or surfaces, contrived from Barbara Ann Kipfer’s excellent reference book The Order of Things. You’ll need this list as reading and its comprehension questions to deliver this lesson.
Incidentally, this is one of fifty of these I’ve written since this pandemic began last March. For years I’d perused Ms. Kipfer’s book, recognizing in it the potential for a wide variety of lessons to build literacy and procedural knowledge in working with a variety of symbolic systems. I’ve also worked up a unit plan and users’ manual (both of which I’ll post on the “About Posts & Texts” page) to explain and rationalize the use of these lessons.
So be on the lookout for those materials. About half of the unit is already posted on this site–just search “The Order of Things.”
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Verbal: A verb form that functions in a sentence as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb rather than as a principal verb. Thinking can be fun. An embroidered handkerchief. (See also gerund, infinitive, and participle.)”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Bilateral agreement: Agreement to which there are two parties as opposed to a multilateral agreement involving several parties.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art, united states history
Bar for Bend. ‘Bar sinister.’ There is no such thing in heraldry as a bar sinister.
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“When did ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘ first appear? The anti-Semitic forgery first appeared in a St. Petersburg newspaper in 1903. It purported to document the conspiracy of Judaism to take over the world. It may have been written by Czar Nicholas II’s secret police.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Brains Trust: Nickname given to a group of economists and businessmen in the USA who acted as advisers to Pres. Roosevelt (1882-1945) in formulating the New Deal policy. The term has since been widely used to denote bodies of experts believed to have influence on government policy. In the UK the term ‘brains trust’ was extended to include groups of experts assembled to answer questions put to them by the public, especially the BBC’s wartime panel of experts who broadcast on the wireless.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
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