“How old is The Epic of Gilgamesh? The Babylonian epic dates back to about 2000 B.C. It concerns the adventures of the hero Gilgamesh and the “wild man” Enkidu, and Gilgamesh’s grief over Enkidu’s death.”
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, Social Sciences
“Angkor: The capital of the Khmer empire, in Kampuchia [sic], founded in c9AD. Most of the surviving ruins date from c!2. They were lost in jungle and rediscovered in the last century. The city of Angkor Thom was 2.8 km square and moated, with the fantastically sculptured temple of the Bayon at its center. Other temples such as Ta Prohm and Angkor Vat [sic] cluster in the neighbourhood.”
Excerpted from: Bray, Warwick, and David Trump. The Penguin Dictionary of Archaeology. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“On a voyage across the Pacific, Broun and his fellow passengers one day decided to provide themselves with an evening of entertainment. Heywood was asked to box three rounds with a man whose stature closely matched his own 240-pound frame. Before accepting the offer, Heywood engaged the other fellow in a chat, presumably to discover what he was up against. In the course of their talk, the man said to Heywood, ‘I’m going to ask you a question which I have wanted to ask someone ever since I got on this ship. What is this “demitasse” they have on the bill of fare?’ Heywood later sought out the chairman of the entertainment committee and announced, “I’ve changed my mind about boxing with that chap. Any man who doesn’t know what a “demitasse” is must be a tough guy.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“Monday’s child is full of face * Tuesday’s child is full of grace * Wednesday’s child is full of woe * Thursday’s child has far to go * Friday’s child is loving and giving * Saturday’s child works hard for living * And the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe, good and gay
This poem was first printed in a collection of Devon folk-tales in 1838, though it had a widespread English oral tradition for many centuries before this, Should you recite it to a child who turns out to be born on a Wednesday, you should know that there is a useful version that swaps fates with Friday’s child. You can also, at will, exchange the Scot-sounding phrase of ‘bonny and blithe’ for ‘happy and wise.'”
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.
“authoritarian personality: A term coined by Theodor Adorno and his associates through a book of the same name first published in 1950, to describe a personality type characterized by (among other things) extreme conformity, submissiveness to authority, rigidity, and arrogance toward those considered inferior.
Adorno was a member of the Frankfurt School who fled the Third Reich, first to Britain and then to the United States, where he conducted extensive empirical research on the anti-Semitic, ethnocentric, and fascist personalities. In attempting to explain why some people are more susceptible to fascism and authoritarian belief-systems than are others, Adorno devised several Likert attitude scales which revealed a clustering of traits which he termed authoritarianism. Several scales were constructed (ethnocentric, anti-Semitic, fascist) and part of the interest in the study came from examining these scales. During interviews with more than 2,000 respondents, a close association was found between such factors as ethnocentrism, rigid adherence to conventional values, a submissive attitude towards the moral authority of the in-group, a readiness to punish, opposition to the imaginative and tender-minded, belief in fatalistic theories, and an unwillingness to tolerate ambiguity. These authoritarian attitude clusters were subsequently linked, using Freudian theory, to family patterns. Intensive interviewing and the use of Thematic Apperception Tests identified the authoritarian personality with a family pattern of rigidity, discipline, external rules, and fearful subservience to the demands of parents.
The Authoritarian Personality is a classic study of prejudice, defense mechanisms, and scapegoating. The term itself has entered everyday language, even though the original research has attracted considerable criticism. Among other weaknesses, critics have suggested that the Adorno study measures only an authoritarianism of the right, and failed to consider the wider ‘closed mind’ of both left and right alike; that it tends, like all theories of scapegoating, to reduce complex historical processes to psychological needs; and is based on flawed scales and samples. For a detailed exposition and critique see John Madge, The Origins of Scientific Sociology (1962). See also CRITICAL THEORY.
Excerpted from: Matthews, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Yippie: Close contemporary of the hippy, but more actively involved in political action, particularly in protests against American involvement in Vietnam and the methods of US police. The term was coined by one of the movement’s leaders, Jerry Reuben [sic], and is derived from the initials of the Youth International Party and hippy. The Yippie movement faded in the early 1970s, possible because of the cessation of US involvement in Vietnam. ”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged readings/research, term of art, united states history
“A priori: From the previous: proceeding form cause to effect, or reasoning form a premise or assumption to its logical conclusion; deductive, or according to rational consequences, rather than from the facts of experience; preliminary of prior to examination; accepted without question or examination; arbitrary or presumptive (contrasted with a posteriori). Adj. aprioristic; adv. a priori, aprioristically; n. a priori, apriorist.
‘Sometimes she went even further by insisting he had had a crisis when he thought he had merely a bad cabdriver, but when he accused of her of a priori reasoning, she simply reminded him that he was a classic wunderkind and that all wunderkinder tend to deny they have mild-life crises.’ Nora Ephron, Scribble, Scribble”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“In 1955 Laurence Wylie, Harvard’s esteemed professor of French civilization, sent the manuscript of a sensitive chronicle of French country life, A Village in the Vaucluse, to Knopf. Back it came with a letter of rejection which said, ‘It is so far from being a book for the general reader that nothing can be done about it.’ Wylie did nothing ‘about’ it–he sent it on to the Harvard University Press, which published it in the next year. It became and has remained an extremely popular book for the general reader and the scholar alike.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, 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 fiction/literature, literary oddities
“The next thing that the earliest people discovered was how to make pots out of clay, which they soon learned to decorate with patterns and fire in ovens, although by this time, in the late Stone Age, they had stopped painting pictures of animals. In the end, perhaps six thousand years ago (that is, 4000 BC), they found a new and more convenient way of making tools: they discovered metals. Not all of them of once, of course. It began with some green stones which turn into copper when melted in a fire. Copper has a nice shine, and you can use it to make arrowheads and axes, but it is soft and gets blunt more quickly than stone. But once again, people found an answer. They discovered that if you add just a little of another, very rare metal, it makes the copper stronger. That metal is tin, and a mixture of tin and copper is called bronze. The age in which people made themselves helmets and swords, axes and cauldrons, and bracelets and necklaces out of bronze is, naturally, known as the Bronze Age.”
Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“heuristic: A rule of thumb or procedure that works to provide a satisfactory if not optimal solution to a problem; a technique of discovery, invention, and problem solving through experimental or trial-and-error techniques. Some examples of heuristics include throwing out parts of a problem and solving the simplified version; breaking a problem into parts and solving each one separately; and means-end analysis–defining the current situation, describing the end state, and then taking steps to reduce the differences between them.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
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