“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
Attributed in Robert W. Kent, Money Talks (1985)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”
Attributed in Robert W. Kent, Money Talks (1985)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“How many monsters does Beowulf kill? Three—Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon. The Old English poem Beowulf is thought to date from the eighth century.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, foreign languages/linguistics, poetry
“Alpha * Epsilon * Eta * Iota * Omicron * Upsilon * Omega
The vowels have always been linked to the seven heavens, most famously in Hebrew, where the seven unwritten vowels created the sound for God—Jehovah. The link between the language of man and the presumed languages of the seven Heavenly spheres has always been speculated upon. However, it is one of the more arcane secrets of the mystics which of the seven planets is linked to which vowel.”
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.
“Modal Auxiliaries: Any of the verbs that combine with the main verb to express necessity (must), obligation (should), permission (may), probability (might), possibility (could), ability (can), or tentativeness (would). Mary might wash the car.”
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
“Parallelism: In rhetoric, a device in which a formula or structural pattern is repeated, as in the Latin sequence veni, vidi, vici and its English translation I came, I saw, I conquered. It occurs in sayings and proverbs (such as Now you see them, now you don’t and Out of sight, out of mind) and in verse and poetic prose (‘My mother groaned, my father wept—/ Into the dangerous world I leapt’ (William Blake, Songs of Experience)).”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Outwardly, which means by the text from the book I’m using to inform these documents, this English usage worksheet on understanding the use of their and their’s addresses the problem, which you may have noticed, of using an apostrophe with the plural possessive pronoun their.
And the short reading for this worksheet does deal with this, but is also emphasizes the fact that none of the possessive pronouns require an apostrophe when used with an s, as in a construction like “The jacket is hers.” I’ve also built in some instruction on antecedent/pronoun agreement, which is one of those stylistic lapses that I can tell you from considerable experience–both as a student and a tutor–that lands students in their college’s writing centers.
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.
“Glory: A general term for the representation of an emanation of light around a sacred personage. Aureole, halo, nimbus, and mandorla are types of glories.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
“Demagogue, n. A political opponent.”
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
“Main Clause: An independent clause, which can stand alone as grammatically complete sentence. Grammarians quibble.”
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
“Slaughterhouse-Five: A novel (1969) by the US writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr (1922-2007), drawing on his experience of witnessing, as a prisoner of war, the Allied destruction of Dresden by fire bombs during the Second World War. The framework of the book concerns Billy Pilgrim, who is transported by aliens through a time warp, enabling him to witness events in the past of which he has foreknowledge. So it is that, with other US prisoners, he finds himself shut up in a slaughterhouse (Slaughterhouse-Five) in Dresden when the city is bombed. An interesting film version (1972) was directed by George Roy Hill.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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