“Syncretism: In a religious context, syncretism refers to the worship of one god using the form or tradition of another god. Thus, for example, the Hebrew prophets constantly condemned the tendency to revert to worshipping Yahweh using forms associated with local ‘baalim’ or deities.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged philosophy/religion, term of art
“Tintype: A photographic process in which a direct positive image is produced by a small, lightweight iron plate by a variation of the Collodion Wet Plate process. Popular until the late 19th century, especially with itinerant portrait photographers, who made and sold them cheaply. Also called ferrotype.”
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
“Book of Changes * Book of Documents * Book of Poetry * Record of the Rites * Spring and Autumn Annals * Records of Music (missing)
As the son of an officer in the service of his ducal state, Confucius’s life was informed by the middle-class respect for textual learning. Even in his youth (he was born in 551 BC), he yearned for a golden past of decency, harmony and respect, and dressed in eccentric outmoded fashion.
He worked tirelessly to collect the records of the past—indeed, all of these six classics existed in some form before his edition. Four works would later be added to the five Confucian classics that survived (the Records of Music was lost) to create a larger canon of Nine Confucian Classics.
Confucius’s conservative philosophy championed the family unit as the basis for society, reinforced by respect for elders by their children, just as the elders venerated their ancestors and gave the same loving obedience to the Emperor that they expected from their own wives, and which his followers gave to the man they called ‘The Great Sage’ and ‘The First Teacher.’ His golden rule was ‘Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.’
It is pleasing to note that, though the families of all the imperial dynasties of China have faded away, the Kongs (the descendants of Confucius) maintain the oldest, largest, and most continuous genealogy in the world, currently mapping out eight-three male generations since the death of the ‘model teacher for ten thousand ages’ in 479 BC.”
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.
“Allow for Permit. ‘I allow you to go.’ Precision is better attained by saying permit, for allow has other meanings.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Oedipus tearing at his eyes, Lear in his demented eloquence upon the moors, Gloucester weeping from those ’empty orbs’—these are the metaphors of cultural self-mutilation in a stumbling colossus. Eyeless at Gaza, Samson struggled to retain the power to pull down the pillars that destroyed him and his enemies together. The U.S. Bureau of the Census meanwhile sends out printed forms to ask illiterate Americans to indicate their reading levels.”
Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America (1985)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Stigma: Although the term has a long history (in classical Greece it is referred to a brand placed on outcast groups), it entered sociology mainly through the work of Erving Goffman (Stigma, 1960). It is a formal concept which captures a relationship of devaluation rather than a fixed attribute. Goffman classifies stigmas into three types—bodily, moral, and tribal—and analyzes the ways in which they affect and effect human interactions.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Appositive: A noun or noun phrase that renames or adds identifying information to a noun it immediately follows. His brother, an accountant with Arthur Andersen, was recently promoted.”
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
OK, here is an English usage worksheet on differentiating the use of the nouns aisle and isle. When I was writing this yesterday, I had a sense of deja vu. So I checked the archives here at the Text Terminal and sure enough, I’ve previously written five homophone worksheets on these two words.
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.
“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Sheffield Plate: Objects made during the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries in England using a thin sheet of silver fused to a sheet of copper.”
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
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