“It [the assassination of John F. Kennedy] was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ I said that the hate in white people had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, had finally struck down the nation’s Chief Magistrate.”
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
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 black history, united states history
“Who is the hero of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)? He has no name. He is a young man from the south who finds his way to a hidden existence in a coal cellar in New York.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Bard: (Welsh, bardd; Irish, bard) Amont the ancient Celts a bard was a sort of official poet whose task it was to celebrate national events—particularly heroic actions and victories. The bardic poets of Gaul and Britain were a distinct social class with special privileges. The “caste” continued to exist in Ireland and Scotland, but nowadays are more or less confined to Wales, where the poetry contests and festivals, known as the Eisteddfodau, were revived in 1822 (after a lapse since Elizabethan times). In modern Welsh a bardd is a poet who has taken part in an Eisteddfod. In more common parlance the term may be half seriously applied to a distinguished poet—especially Shakespeare.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, readings/research, term of art
“What type of apples did you buy?
They are cooking apples.
What are those people doing in the kitchen?
They are cooking apples.
This example may seem unusual, but many, if not most, sentences have more than one grammatically correct interpretation. A classic example is “Time flies like an arrow.” Most people interpret it metaphorically—time moves quickly, as an arrow does. But it could also mean that a particular type or insect (time flies) feel affection for arrows. Or “time” could be a command, with the sentence meaning I want you to assess the pace of those flies, and I want you to do it in the way you would assess the pace of an arrow. There are actually at least two other grammatically acceptable interpretations of this sentence.
Grammatically acceptable, but not acceptable to common sense. There’s not a variety of flies called “time flies.” And who would tell someone to get out their stopwatch and time some flies in the same way they would time an arrow? Who times files or arrows? Just as in the “eating apples” example, readers bring knowledge to bear on the sentence, not just grammar, to arrive at the correct interpretation. But in those examples, the knowledge is not provided in the text. The reader had to know it before reading the text.
The influence of meaning on the processing of a sentence is most obvious when grammar renders the sentences ambiguous, but meaning also has an impact on the speed and ease of processing even if the grammar is ambiguous. For example, the sentence “I cut up a slice of cooked ham” will be read more slowly when it is preceded by a few sentences describing the protagonist getting dressed, compared to a context where the protagonist was described as in a kitchen. That slowing can be avoided by adding one word at the start of the sentence: “Later, I cut up a slice of cooked ham.” So clearly, we’re not just extracting meaning from sentences, we are coordinating the meaning of sentences with the meaning of what we’ve read before, and we’re doing that as we process each sentence.”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel T. The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017.
“recall: Political process similar to reselection, except that the local party can demand a representative to appear before it and explain its actions whenever it chooses, that is, during the lifetime of a parliament and not only at the end of his term of office.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged term of art
“Gravitation, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain—the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, science literacy
“Saxon math: A mathematics program that relies on explicit, incremental instruction. The series was created by John Saxon, a former mathematics teacher and U.S. Air Force officer who believed that he had found a superior way to teach mathematics, based on the step-by-step instruction that he had encountered in the military. Each day, students work on a limited number of concepts, solving problems until they have mastered each concept and then moving on to the next. Every new assignment is a cumulative review of previously studied materials. The Saxon textbooks are popular with homeschooling families and some charter schools, but are shunned by many school districts because they do not teach discovery and inquiry methods.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Invisible Man: (1952) A novel by Ralph Ellison. Although he wrote only two novels, Invisible Man firmly established Ellison’s reputation. This powerful story is about a nameless black man’s search for his own identity in a world that is essentially inimical to him. Through the narrator’s transition from an initial acceptance of the guise invented for him by the whites of a southern town, to his identification and eventual rejection of his role in a Black Nationalist Group in Harlem, where he becomes no more than a puppet and a pawn, Ellison portrays the irony of the African-American search for self, a portrayal that avoids excessive emotionalism through the use of irony and wit. The narrator’s struggle for identity, though perceived through the black/white racial dichotomy, is universal. In its perception of the absurdity of human existence, and its handling of this central existential theme, it has been ranked with the works of Camus and Sartre….”
[This entry in Benet’s goes on to erroneously identify Shadow and Act, a book of Ralph Ellison’s essays, as a novel. Hence the ellipses, which omits that error. That said, Mr. Ellison’s Collected Essays, which includes Shadow and Act, is a supremely edifying book. And, while searching for the preceding link, I noticed that The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison was published in December of 2019. I will certainly be on the lookout for that volume, and very much look forward to reading it.]
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“What does the “T” in Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) stand for? He was born Booker Taliaferro. He adopted the name “Washington” during his school years. His works include the autobiography Up from Slavery (1901).”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.”
Things Fall Apart ch.1 (1958)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
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