“Candidate for Aspirant. In American politics, one is not a candidate for office until formally named (nominated) for it by a convention, or otherwise, as provided by law or custom. So when a man who is moving Heaven and Earth to procure the nomination protests that he is ‘not a candidate’ he tells the truth in order to deceive.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage
“All our institutions, our traditional attitudes, our laws, our morals, our customs, give evidence of the fact that they are determined and maintained by privileged males for the glory of male domination. These institutions reach out into the very nurseries and have a great influence on the child’s soul.”
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“by-election: Election of a member to a representative body to fill a vacancy caused by the death or resignation of a former member during a normal term of office.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
How did Edgar Allan Poe die? In October, 1849, the forty-year-old writer was found lying unconscious near a polling place in Baltimore. According to some reports, he had been fed liquor and dragged to various polling places to vote repeatedly. He was taken to a hospital where he remained semi-comatose for three days. On October 7, at 3 A.M. he died of “congestion of the brain” and possibly intestinal inflammation, a weak heart, and diabetes.
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 fiction/literature, literary oddities
“A southern writer named John Kennedy Toole wrote a comic novel about life in New Orleans called A Confederacy of Dunces. It was so relentlessly rejected by publishers that he killed himself. That was in 1969. His mother refused to give up on the book. She sent it out and got it back, rejected, over and over again. At last she won the patronage of Walker Percy, who got it accepted by the Louisiana State University Press, and in 1980 it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.”
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 fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, readings/research
“Cliometrics: A term formed by compounding the muse of history and the concept of measurement, devised by its practitioners to describe the ‘new quantitative economic history’ which developed in the United States during the late 1950s, and rapidly became controversial in the American and European historical community. Cliometricians applied sophisticated statistical techniques (such as regression analysis) to historical data, and (to cite the example of the most prominent studies) attempted to calculate the profitability of slavery in the period before the American Civil War, and to quantify the contribution of the American railroads to economic growth (see R.W. Fogel and S.L. Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1974, and Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth, 1964).
Cliometric work was controversial, not only because of the usual distrust of the (usually reconstructed) numerical data and the (occasionally questionable) use of advanced statistical techniques, but also because the most prominent studies framed their hypotheses in the novel form of explicit counterfactuals. That is, for example, they asked the question ‘What would have happened if the railroads had not been built?’ Most also rested on what were deemed to be the rather narrow behaviorist assumptions of neo-classical economics.
With hindsight, it is easy to see that the new quantitative history was not in fact all that novel, since many of the leading economists and economic historians of the early twentieth century made liberal use of quantitative historical data and neo-classical theory respectively. The use of large-scale data-sets, further encouraged by developments in computer technology, is now established practice in modern history. In contemporary usage, the term cliometrics is still commonly applied to attempts to apply social science theory and statistical analyses to historical data, but it no longer describes a sharply defined school. Cliometric analyses are now found across a wide range of substantive historical subject areas.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged numeracy, professional development, readings/research, term of art
“North Atlantic * South Atlantic * Arctic * Antarctic * Indian Ocean * North Pacific * South Pacific
These vast oceans are the seven seas that we now list—however, the concept of the seven seas is ancient and also very variable. We know the Sumerians had a list (from a reference in the hymn of the Enheduanna) but not what was on it. By the time of the Phoenicians, there was a canonical list for the seven seas within the Mediterranean, upon which their black ships traded. Working west from their homeland, there was the Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic, whilst west of Sicily stretched the Tyrrhenian, Ligurian, Balearic, and sea of Alboran (the straits of Gibraltar).
For a Muslim Arab trader the seven seas referred to that vital sinew of trade that took them east to the coast of China, beginning with the Persian Gulf, then the Gulf of Khambhat (Sind and Gujarat), Harkand (the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal), Kalah (the Malacca straits), Salahit (the straits of Singapore), Kardani (the waters of Siam) and Sanji (the South China sea). Medieval Christian traders, such as the Venetians and Genoese, made lists of seven that included the Adriatic, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Red Sea, Mediterranean, Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean.”
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.
[The Oxford Comma is a fairly contentious issue among writers, and this squib doesn’t address that issue in punctuation usage. If you want this material in typescript form click on that hyperlink.]
In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.
Thus write,
Red, white and blue
Gold, silver, of copper
He opened the letter, read it, and made a note of its contents.
This comma is often referred to as the “serial” comma.
In the names of business firms the last comma is usually omitted. Follow the usage of the individual firm.
Little, Brown and Company
Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette
Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.
“Reciprocal Pronoun: A term sometimes used for the compound pronouns each other and one another, which express a two-way interaction: Romeo and Juliet love each other/one another )Romeo loved Juliet and Juliet loved Romeo). In meaning, reciprocal pronouns contrast with reflexive pronouns: The Montagues and the Capulets loved themselves (The Montagues loved the Montagues, and the Capulets loved the Capulets). Reciprocal pronouns are, however, like reflexives in not normally being used as subjects: not They wondered where each other/one another was.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
“Aggravate for Irritate. ‘He aggravated me by his insolence.’ To aggravate is to augment the disagreeableness of something already disagreeable, or the badness of something bad. But a person cannot be aggravated. Even if disagreeable or bad. Women are singularly prone to misuse of this word.”
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
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