“What are the Ten Days that Shook the World? They are the days of the Russian Revolution of 1917, which brought an end to the imperial rule of the czars and replaced it with communism. The title refers to the 1919 eyewitness account of the revolution by American writer and sympathizer John Reed (1887-1920).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Harappan Script: That of the Harappan civilization, flourishing in the Indus valley in the 3rd-2nd millennia BC. Undeciphered and not demonstrably connected to later Indian scripts.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Postpositive: Placed after another word or words, or suffixed, e.g. ‘murder most foul.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
“Troubadours: Poets of southern France, northern Italy, and Catalunya who flourished from the 12th to the 13th century and wrote primarily in Occitan. The term is derived from the Occitan verb trobar, to compose. Troubadour poetry is best known through the elaborately formal lyrical Canso which celebrated courtly love and chivalry, and for proposing a fusion of aesthetic sensibility with the ability to love. During the 13th century nonlyrical genres, such as the sirventes, and the narrative works, such as the Canso de la crozada, became prevalent. Eleanor of Aquitaine was a noted patron of troubadours who introduced troubadour themes and lyrical conventions at the courts of northern France. The trobairitz were female poets of southern France who wrote in Occitan in the same period. Most trobairitz, such as Beatrice de Dia, Cara d’Andeza, and Na Castelloza practiced the Canso and other lyric genres. (See TROUVERES; GUILLAUME IX; BERNARD DE VENTADOR; and BETRAN DE BORN.)”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Prepositive: Placed before another word or words, or prefixed, e.g., ‘most foul murder.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Rotten Reviews: The Prelude (William Wordsworth)
‘The story is the old story. There are the old raptures about mountains and cataracts. The old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics; the endless wilderness of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle…,”
T.B. Macaulay, in his journal
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Strong Verb: A term in the description of Germanic languages for a verb that indicates such differences as tense by modifying its vowels: English ring, rang, rung. In contrast, weak verbs add inflections: play, played, played. These terms are usually replaced in grammars of modern English by regular verb (in place of weak verb) and irregular verb (in place of strong verb). In Old English, strong verbs could have as many as four different vowels, since the first- and third-person singular in the past differed from all the other past forms: compare was and were in the Modern English past of the verb be. An example from Old English is the verb helpan, with e in the present tense, but past healp (first- and third-person singular) and hulpon, and the past participle holpen (with the -en inflection found in some Modern English irregular verbs: shaken, taken). In Modern English, this verb has become weak (help, helped), a change that his affected many other strong verbs over the centuries, such as climb, step, walk. The strong verbs that have survived into Modern English seldom retain the original distinctions, and all (except the highly irregular be, with was and were) have lost the two forms for the past. In some Modern English verbs, the vowels or the past and the past participle have become identical (sting, stung), and in others all three forms are the same (put). Some originally strong verbs have regular variants (swell, swelled, or swollen). A few originally weak verbs have become strong, such as wear, dig, fling. Differences may occur between varieties: (1) dive, dived in British English, but often dive, dove in American English; (2) sell, sold and tell, told in standard English worldwide, but sell, sellt, tell, tellt in Scots. Occasionally, for facetious purposes, people play with strong forms: I thunk very hard about it and Where were you brung up? In general, new verbs in Modern English are regular; that is, formed on the pattern of weak verbs, the pronunciation of the -ed inflection as /(e)d/ or /t/ varying systematically according to the immediately preceding sound. Verbs formed by prefixation or compounding usually take the same forms as the verbs on which they are based: offset, babysit, and (both regular and irregular) deepfreeze. Some phrasal verbs prefer a weak form (contrast The card sped up the hill and The car speeded up).”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
This week’s Text is a lesson plan on the verb to be used in the present progressive tense. I open this lesson with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the idiom “Bone to Pick,” as in “I’ve got a bone to pick with you.” In the event the lesson spills over into a second day, here is a worksheet on the homophones prophet and profit.
You’ll need the worksheet at the center the lesson to do the work; you’ll probably also want (but you don’t necessarily need) this word bank as a learning support. Finally, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.
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.
“Partitive: Indicating restricting, setting off, or only a part of, e.g. ‘a scrap of food,’ ‘one of your friends.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“cloze reading: A test or exercises of reading comprehension in which the student must supply words that have been purposely removed from the sample piece of writing.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
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