“Dative: Indicating indirect object (action or feeling toward) or the object of certain prepositions, e.g., ‘He gave me the leftovers,’ ‘The scarf is for her.’”
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, readings/research, term of art
“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
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
Tagged philosophy/religion, poetry
“Meritocracy: A social system in which status is achieved through ability and effort (merit), rather than ascribed on the basis of age, class, gender, or other such particularistic or inherited advantages. The term implies that the meritorious deserve any privileges which they accrue. In practice it is difficult to find reliable measures of merit about which social scientists can agree.
The term was coined by Michael Young in The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) to refer to government by those identified as the most able high achievers, with merit defined as intelligence plus effort. His fantasy attempted to foresee the extreme consequences of a society which fully implemented the goal of equality of opportunity through the educational system, with the most able rising to the upper echelons, leaving intellectual dullards to carry out the humble manual work. The book warned that the new focus on intelligence and ability in the educational system merely institutionalized inequality of intellectual ability in place of inequality based on social class. Since judgements about what constitutes effort are inescapably moral (does a lazy genius merit rewarding? And, if so, why not reward a hard-working dullard?) the term remains highly contested (see, for example, John Goldthorpe, ‘Problems of “Meritocracy’) in Robert Erikson and Jan O. Jonsson (eds.). Can Education be Equalized?, 1996).”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Site Specific: Artwork created, designed, or selected for a specific indoor or outdoor site. It may take shape as publicly displayed monumental sculpture commissioned by either city arts agencies or private corporations, or as earth art, often located away from urban centers. Beverly Pepper’s Fallen Sky, located in Barcelona, merges park with sculpture. This undulating earthen mound covered in multi-colored tiles is a recent tribute to Gaudi and the city’s art nouveau heritage. See also INSTALLATION, PUBLIC ART.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Louise Bourgeois: (1911-2010) Franco-American painter and sculptor, Bourgeois was born in Paris to a family that operated an art gallery specializing in historic tapestries. Dissatisfied with the conservatism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, she pursued her education at a number of independent academies and in the studios of modernist painters Fernand Leger, Andre Lhote, and others. Her early paintings are notable for their feminist content. In 1949, Bourgeois gave up painting and began experimenting with new sculptural materials that ranged from concrete to marble. Later, Bourgeois focused on naturalistic and amorphous forms. By the seventies, her engagement with feminism had led her to a more assertive depiction of women and further exploration of sexual themes. Her works vary in scale and media, but most often evoke bodies, or parts of them, in order to call into question how the human body is perceived.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Orthography (noun): The writing of words with proper or accepted letters or symbols; the written or printed representation of speech sounds; the study or field of spelling or characters in a language; specific mode or system of spelling; correct spelling. Adjective: orthographic, orthographical; adverb: orthographically.
‘In these records we find numerous misused words, neologisms, and phonetic spellings remarkable even in that relatively freewheeling orthographic age, spellings like kow ceeper and piticler, pharme, and elc, engiane, and injun.’ Mary Dohan, Our Own Words.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Five Ws: The questions that must be answered when writing journalistic prose: who, what, when, where, and why. Together, the questions act as a formula for getting the basic story on an issue or a topic.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Impressionism: The 19th-century movement, well developed by the time of the first impressionist exhibition in 1874, that is now regarded as the culmination of realism. The impressionist painters analyzed natural effects with devoted intensity. They devised the spectrum palette and relied on optical mixing to capture the impression of light at a given moment. The most important of them include Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“…evidence of a diseased mind and lacerated heart.”
John Dunlop, The History of Fiction 1814
“A counsel of despair.”
George A. Aitken, Gulliver’s Travels 1896
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 humor, literary oddities, readings/research
Acheron * Cocytes * Phlegethon * Lethe * Styx
Which is to say: the river of sorrow, the river of damnation, the river of fire, the river of oblivion, and the river of hate, upon whose waters even the gods swore.
Some classical writers imagined Lethe as a pool of oblivion and added the pool of Mnemosyne (memory) beside it. Others envisaged flat, featureless misty land beside the rivers which they named the fields of Asphodel. The Plain of Tartarus was reserved for more active punishment just as the Fields of Elysium or the Isles of the Blessed were reserved for blameless heroes. But even for such a proud hero-warrior as Achilles, it would be better to be the meanest ploughboy on its green earth than Emperor of all the Dead. That monarch was Hades Plouton—rich in lost souls and mineral wealth and married for all eternity to Persephone, the iron queen.
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.
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