“When did Thoreau live in his hut at Walden Pond? For two years from 1845 to 1847. His account of the experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods, appeared in 1854.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Risk aversion: A widespread characteristic of human preferences, first discussed in 1738 by the Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli (1700-82), according to which most people tend to value gains involving risk less that certain gains of equivalent monetary expectation. A typical example is a choice between a sure gain of 50 units (Swiss francs, dollars, pounds sterling, or any other units) and a gamble involving a 50 percent probability of winning 100 units and a 50 percent probability of winning nothing. The two prospects are of equivalent monetary expected value, but most people prefer the sure gain to the gamble, which they typically value equally to a sure gain of about 35 units.”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Principal Verb: The predicating verb in a main clause or sentence.”
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
“At for By. ‘She was shocked at this conduct.’ This very common solecism is without excuse.”
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
They are two commonly used words in English, so here is a worksheet on differentiating the use of the nouns regime and regimen–two nouns that look a lot alike, but mean different things, indeed quite different things. So, if you want to start with a new exercise regimen, don’t call it a regime, which better applies where politics and government are concerned.
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.
“Ancient Near Eastern Art: Collective term for the art of ancient cultures (ca. 3500 B.C. to ca. 650 A.D.) in Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Levant. Some of the most important were Sumerian (Mesopotamia), Assyrian (Mesopotamia, the Levant), Hittite (Anatolia), and Achaemenian, Parthian, and Sassanian Persian (Iran).”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Prepositional Phrase: A group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any of the object’s modifiers. Georgia on my mind.”
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
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, punctuation, term of art
“War of Attrition Situation in which, as on the Western Front in World War I, both sides appear equally balanced, are unable to conduct a war of movement, and are restricted to wearing the enemy down militarily, industrially, and psychologically.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art, united states history
“The works of William Burroughs…have been taken seriously, even solemnly, by some literary types, including Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer. Actually, Burroughs’s work adds up to the world’s pluperfect put-on.
Time
“…the merest trash, not worth a second look.”
New Republic
“…The book is unnecessary,”
Granville Hicks, The New Republic
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, readings/research
“One Hundred Years of Solitude: (Spanish title Cien anos de soledad). A novel (1967; English translation 1970) by the Columbian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1928-2014), generally regarded as the archetypal example of Latin American magical realism. The setting is the small, isolated Columbian village of Macondo, a fictional community that had previously appeared in Garcia Marquez’s La hojarasca (1955; Leafstorm and Other Stories) and in La mala hora (1962; In Evil Hour). The novel follows seven generations of the increasingly inbred Buendia family, the founders of the village, and their story parallels the history of Columbia itself.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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