Category Archives: Reference

These are materials for teachers and parents, and you’ll find, in this category, teachers copies and answer keys for worksheets, quotes related to domain-specific knowledge in English Language Arts and social studies, and quotes on issues of professional concern. See the Taxonomies page for more about this category.

Write It Right: Democracy for Democratic Party

Posted on April 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Democracy for Democratic Party. One could as properly call the Christian Church ‘the Christianity.’”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Term of Art: Stretch It Out

Posted on April 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

“stretch it out: A replacement for the customary expression ‘sound it out,’ referring to a technique for analyzing an unfamiliar word. When a student who has had little exposure to phonetic methods of analyzing letters and words confronts a new word, the literacy coach may tell the student to ‘stretch it out like a rubber band’ in hopes of finding the meaning of the word or perhaps similar associations.”

Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.

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Corruption

Posted on April 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Corruption (noun): Change of an unfamiliar term or form to one more familiar, or departure form correct of standard word use; debased or unorthodox word form; perverted wording of a text or document. Adjective: corrupt; verb. Also BASTARDIZATION

‘His voice was polite again; he even chuckled. ‘After the first shock of seeing the Scrolls destroyed, we realized you’d actually given us a unique opportunity. All the texts are corrupt, you know, even these—copies of copies of copies, full of errata and lacunae—but we never could agree on a common reading, and of course the old Scrolls acquired a great spurious authority for sentimental reasons, even thought the contradict each other and themselves.’ John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy”

Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.

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Word Origins: Fascism

Posted on March 28, 2025 | Leave a comment

“fascism: [E20th] The term fascism was first used of the right-wing nationalist regime of Mussolini in Italy (1922-1943), the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party), and later applied to the regimes of Franco in Spain and the Nazis in Germany. It comes for the Latin fascis “bundle.” In ancient Rome the fasces were the bundle of rods, with an axe through them, carried in front of the magistrate as a symbol of his power to punish people.”

Excerpted from: Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

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Lillian (Mary) Baylis

Posted on March 28, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Lilian (Mary) Baylis: (1874-1937) British theatrical manager and founder of the Old Vic. She assisted her aunt, Emma Cons, in the operation of the Royal Victoria Hall and Coffee Tavern, and on Cons’s death in 1912 she converted the hall into the Old Vic, which became famous for its Shakespearean productions. Between 1914 and 1923 the theater staged all of William Shakespeare’s plays, a feat no other playhouse had attempted. In 1931 she took over the derelict Sadler’s Wells Theatre and made it a center of opera and ballet.”

­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Posted on March 28, 2025 | 3 comments

“Elizabeth Barret Browning: (1806-1861) English poet. In childhood she suffered a spinal injury and, until her meeting with Robert Browning, seemed to be doomed to invalidism and seclusion from the world. Barrett and Browning’s courtship under the eyes of her jealous, tyrannical father, their elopement, and subsequent happy married life in Italy form one of the most celebrated of literary romances. Hawthorne describe Mrs. Browning as ‘a pale, small person scarcely embodied at all,’ and this ethereality of her physical appearance is reflected by the palpitating fervor and unworldly tenderness and purity of her work. Often, however, these qualities decline into stridency, diffuseness, and confusion. Her themes were dictated by her broad humanitarian interests; a deep if unorthodox religious feeling, her affection for her adopted country, Italy; and her love for Browning. Her greatest work, Sonnets from the Portuguese, a sequence of love sonnets addressed to her husband, remains an extraordinary and living achievement. Her other works include Essay on Mind, with Other Poems (1826), a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1833), The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), Poems (1844), Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856), Poems before Congress (1860), and Last Poems (1862). See THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN, LADY GERALDINE’S COURTSHIP.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Colette

Posted on March 21, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Colette in full Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette: (1873-1954) French writer. Her first four Claudine novels (1900-03), the reminiscences of a libertine ingenue, were published by her first husband, an important critic, under his pen name, Willy. She later worked as a music hall performer. Among her later works are Cheri (1920), My Mother’s House (1922), The Ripening Seed (1923), The Last of Cheri (1926), Sido (1930), and Gigi (1944; musical film, 1958), a comedy about a girl raised to be a courtesan. Her novels of the pleasures and pains of love are remarkable for their exact evocation of sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and colors. She collaborated with Maurice Ravel on the opera L’enfant et les sortileges (1925). In her highly eventful life, she freely flouted convention and repeatedly scandalized the French public, but by her late years she had become a national icon.”

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Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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Sarah Barnwell Elliot

Posted on March 21, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Sarah Barnwell Elliott: (1848-1928) American writer and feminist activist. Elliott was one of the “local color” (or regionalist) writers, and is best known for her novel Jerry (1891). Her most powerful fiction represents the displaced slave-owning class into which she was born, as it confronts hard economic times and a new social order. Elliott was a feminist activist in the South and led the fight for Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment. Her fiction is often valued for its liberal attitudes toward women, as in The Making of Jane (1901). Her stories about race relations during Reconstruction are extremely problematic: the portraits of ex-slaves in An Incident, and Other Stories (1899) are both nostalgic and derogatory, and seem to contradict her family’s sense of noblesse oblige and well-known resistance to virulent racism. The title story is the first representation in American literature of a black man pursued by a lynch mob for raping a white woman. Elliott’s work raises questions about the attitudes toward race among Southern white women and the roles they played in reestablishing white supremacy in the postbellum South.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Rebecca [Blaine] Harding Davis

Posted on March 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Rebecca [Blaine] Harding Davis: (1808-1889) American author. Davis was one of the earliest American realists, known for her attempts to deal in fiction with the life of industrial workers, the problems of black Americans, and political corruption. Her first success was as a muckraker with Life in the Iron Mills, published in the Atlantic Monthly in April, 1961. This was followed by Margaret Howth (1862), a novel set in an Indiana milltown. Waiting for the Verdict (1868) was a story about racial bias; John Andross (1874) was a tale of political corruption. She also raised a large family and, from 1869 to the mid-1870s, was an associate editor of the New York Tribune.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Ruth Benedict

Posted on March 14, 2025 | Leave a comment

“Ruth Benedict originally Ruth Fulton: (1887-1948) U.S anthropologist. Born in New York City, she received her PhD under Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1923 and taught at Columbia from 1930 until her death. In Patterns of Culture (1934), her most famous work, she emphasized how small a part of the range of human behavior is elaborated or emphasized in any one society. She described how these forms of behavior are integrated into patterns or configurations, and she supported cultural relativism, or the judging of cultural phenomena in the context of the culture in which they occur. In The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), she applied her methods to Japanese culture. Her theories had a profound influence on cultural anthropology.” 

­­­­­­­Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.

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