“nationally normed assessment: A standardized test that has been administered to a national control group reflecting the demographic profile of the target population (e.g. 4th graders) throughout the country. The scores of all subsequent test takers are then compared with the scores of this control (or norming) group.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“Historical Materialism: A term applied by Karl Marx himself to his theory of society and history. ‘History entailed the analysis of how particular forms of society had come into existence, and the specific historical concepts within which apparently universal or eternal social forms—state, religion, market, and so forth—were located. Materialism denoted the rejection of Hegelian idealism and the primacy of socio-economic processes and relations. A sustained attempt to defend Marx’s account of the determining role in history played by the productive forces is made by William H. Shaw (Marx’s Theory of History, 1978).”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“But. By many writers this word (in the sense of except) is regarded as a preposition, to be followed by the objective case: ‘All went but him.’ It is not a preposition and may take either the nominative or objective case, to agree with the subject of the object of a verb. ‘All went but he.’ ‘The natives killed all but him.'”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
“Earhart, Amelia: (1897-1937) U.S. aviator, the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Born in Atchison, Kansas, she worked as a military nurse in Canada during World War I and later as a social worker in Boston. In 1928 she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, though as a passenger. In 1932 she accomplished the flight alone, becoming the first woman and the second person to do so. In 1935, she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. In 1937, she set out with a navigator, Fred Noonan, to fly around the world; they had completed over two-thirds of the distance when her plane disappeared without a trace in the Pacific Ocean. Speculation about her fate has continued to the present.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged united states history, women's history
“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.”
The Twelve Seasons: A Perpetual Calendar Country “February: The One We Could Do Without” (1949)
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 humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, readings/research
“indirect question: 1. A question as reported in indirect speech: e.g. where he was in I asked where he was. 2. An utterance with the force of a question which is not in an interrogative form. Thus, the sentence I would like to know his name has the form of a declarative (1); but it might be uttered as an indirect question, with the same intention, in this respect, as ‘What is his name?’ Compare indirect speech act.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Who was the first female professional author in English? Aphra Behn (1640-89), author of the play The Rover (1677) and the novel Oroonoko (1688). She wrote under the pseudonym Astrea.”
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 drama/theater, fiction/literature, readings/research, women's history
“…absolute raving…his principles are ludicrously wicked, and his poetry a mélange of nonsense, cockneyism, poverty and pedantry.”
Literary Gazette
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 humor, literary oddities, poetry
“Attributive: Indicating modifying of a noun (usually preceding it); not following a copulative verb, e.g., ‘the imposing woman.’”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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