“bond: Binding agreement, used as a means of compulsion as well as security; for example, to enforce a commercial contract or to ensure good behavior. Bonds generally have two sections: the bond proper and the condition which, if ignored, cause a sum of money, specified in the bond proper, to be paid as forfeit.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
“Banquet. A good enough word in its place, but its place is the dictionary. Say, dinner.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, humor, literary oddities
I just returned from a CVS store, where the “seasonal” aisle, already freighted with Christmas merchandise, kind got me down. I assure you that my post of this English usage worksheet on the adjectives seasonable, seasonal, unseasonable, and unseasonal is purely coincidental.
That said, these are solid, commonly used words that students probably ought to be able to use. If nothing else, though, this document meets the Common Core standard on teaching English usage.
If you find typos in this document, 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.
“Transition: A word or group of words that aids coherence by showing the connections between ideas. William Carlos Williams was influenced by the poetry or Walt Whitman. Moreover, Williams’s emphasis on the present and the and the immediacy of the ordinary represented a rejection of the poetic stance of his contemporary T.S. Eliot. In addition, Williams’s poetry….”
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
“Art for Art’s Sake: English equivalent of the French l’art pour l’art, which is embodied in The Poetic Principle by Edgar Allan Poe:
There neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified…than the poem which is a poem and nothing more—the poem written solely for the poem’s sake.
The doctrine which this represents, that the aim of art should be creation and the perfection of technical expression rather than the service of a moral, political, or didactic end, has been evolving ever since the romantic period. It was adumbrated by Coleridge and given early expression by Poe in the above treatise, flowered among the French symbolist poets and their English associate Walter Pater, and reached its culmination in the aesthetic theory of I.A. Richards. It was the dominant theory of art and especially of poetry until the 1930s, when the proletarian and Marxist movements in literature threatened for a time to revive the 18th-century didactic theories. After the beginning of World War II in 1939, the latter movements began to lose much of their influence.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Corrupt, adj. In politics, holding an office of trust or profit.”
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, united states history
“Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Tense: The time of a verb’s action or state of being, such as past, present, or future. Saw, see, will see.”
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
“The prime motivation behind the power of 10 is that you can with some authority recite your list of laws, prophets or gods as you tick off each of your ten fingers from a pair of hands, So the decision to decimate a rebel legion, to take tithe of a tenth of the harvest as tax or to rule for a decade seems logical, absolute, and ordained. The decimal system which now rules our numerical world, our wealth, our conception of time and distance derives from dekm—the Indo-Aryan word for ‘two hands,’ the power of ten.”
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, Social Sciences
“Balance for Remainder. ‘The balance of my time is given to recreation.’ In this sense, balance is a commercial word, and relates to accounting.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
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