“Decorative Arts: Imprecise collective term for such art forms as ceramics, enamels, furniture, glass, ivory, metalwork, and textiles, especially when they take forms used as interior decoration. Sometimes designated the ‘minor arts’ to distinguish them from the ‘major arts’ of architecture, sculpture, and painting. See APPLIED ARTS, CRAFT, ‘LOW’ ART.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“We are very impressed with the depth and scope of your research and the quality of your prose. Nevertheless, the length presents a unique problem, for production costs are rising and the reading public are reluctant to buy expensive novels unless the author has an established reputation such as the one enjoyed by James Michener. In any case, we don’t thing we could distribute enough copies to satisfy you or ourselves.”
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, united states history
“context clues: Using information in a sentence or paragraph surrounding a new term to help the reader understand that term. There are several items to look for when searching for context clues, including
Learning to use context clues to gain meaning is an important reading skill. A student who is able to use the context to identify an unknown word, grasp the meaning of a word, or comprehend a passage read, will become a good reader.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Here is an English usage worksheet on the nouns, singular and plural respectively, datum and data, along with a context clues worksheet on this noun pair. Why two? Well, as above, somewhere along the line, I started two and shepherded them far enough along to make it worth finishing them. In any case, the English usage worksheet is ten cloze exercises, and the context clues worksheet, also ten sentences, is a bit different than most I write in that it actually supplies the definitions up front and asks students to evaluate sentences to see whether or not datum or data are used properly.
As both worksheets explain, the usage rule on these words is shifting rapidly at the moment. My guess? There are still a few college professors out there that expect students to understand the difference between datum and data in grammar, style, and usage. Moreover, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that computer science courses require an understanding of proper application of these two words. If nothing else, these worksheets can be used to help students build and reinforce their understanding of subject/verb agreement. Most of the sentences setups use is and are as verbs, so students can use the number of the verb to determine whether or not datum or data is the right word to use.
Finally, understanding the difference between datum and data, two words of Latin origin, provides a basis for understanding usage of a similarly nettlesome Latin pair, medium and media, and a Greek pair used across the common branch curriculum, and indeed in all fields of knowledge, criterion and criteria.
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.
“Conservative for Moderate. ‘A conservative estimate’; ‘a conservative forecast’; ‘a conservative statement,’ and so on. These and many other abuses of the word are of recent growth in the newspapers and ‘halls of legislation.’ Having been found to have several meanings, conservative seems to be thought to mean everything.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Who is the title character in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826)? Uncas, the son of Chingachgook. He is killed defending Cora, his love, against Magua.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“hermeneutics: Movement in the philosophy of science, according to which the task of the human sciences is to elucidate the structure of the social institutions underlying behavior. Thus the aim of linguistics, as one human (and therefore ‘hermeneutic’) science, is to elucidate the rules of language, seen as rules that constitute such an institution.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Gerund: The -ing (form of a verb that functions as a noun: Hiking is good exercise. She was praised for her playing.”
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
“Benchley was known for carrying on a constant war with machines and inanimate objects, always coming out the loser. Once he wrote, ‘The hundred and one little bits of wood and metal that go to make up the impedimenta of daily life…each and every one are bent on my humiliation and working together, as on one great team, to bedevil and confuse me and to get me into a neurasthenic’s home before I am sixty. I can’t fight these boys. They’ve got me licked.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“Roman Classicism: An American manifestation of English Georgian architecture, favored especially by Thomas Jefferson and seen ca. 1790 to 1830. A raised first floor, a Roman-style columned portico raised on a podium, and severity of ornament characterize the style.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
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