What are Jekyll and Hyde’s first names? In the 1886 work by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll is the London doctor who creates the potion that turns him into Edward Hyde.
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
“Ruth Gordon once described to G.S.K. [George S. Kaufman] a new play in which she was appearing: ‘In the first scene I’m on the left side of the stage, and the audience has to imagine I’m eating dinner in a crowded restaurant. Then in scene two I run over to the right side of the stage and the audience imagines I’m in my own drawing room.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, humor, literary oddities
“Anticlimax: According to Dr. Johnson’s definition (and he appears to have been the first to record the word) it is “a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.” In fact, a bathetic declension from a noble tone to one less exalted. The effect can be comic and is often intended to be so. A good example occurs in Fielding’s burlesque (q.v.), Tom Thumb:
King [Aruther, to his queen Dolallola]
…Whence flow those tears fast down thy blubber’d cheeks,
Like swoln Gutter, gushing through the streets?
The effect can also be unintentionally comic. There is a well-known example in Crashaw’s Saint Mary Magdelene, or the Weeper:
And now where e’er He Strays,
Among the Galilean Mountains,
Or more unwelcome ways,
He’s followed by two faithful fountains;
Two walking baths, two weeping motions;
Portable & compendious oceans.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“A model for teaching that draws on the power of the story, then, will ensure that we set up a conflict or sense of dramatic tension at the beginning of our lessons and unit. Thus, we create some expectation that we will satisfy at the end. It is this rhythm of expectation and satisfaction that will give us a principle for precisely selecting content…. We need, then, to be more conscious of the importance of beginning with a conflict or problem whose resolution at the end can set such a rhythm in motion.”
Teaching as Story-Telling: An Alternative Approach to Teaching and Curriculum in the Elementary School
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“Functionary, n. A person entrusted with certain official duties. That great and good man, the late President Buchanan, once unluckily mentioned himself with commendable satisfaction as ‘an old public functionary.’ The description fitted him like a skin and he wore it to his grave. When he appeared as the Judgement Seat, and his case was called, the Recording Angel ran his finger down the index to the Book of Doom and read off the name: ‘James Buchanan, O.P.F.’ ‘What does that mean?’ inquired the Court. And with that readiness of resource which in life had distinguished it from a garden slug, that truthful immortal part replied: ‘Oncommonly phaultless filanthropist.’ Mr. Buchanan was admitted to a seat in the Upper House.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
“Apposition: Two consecutive, juxtaposed nouns or noun phrases are in apposition when they refer to the same person or thing, and when either can be omitted without seriously changing the meaning or the grammar of a sentence. Mrs. Thatcher and the British Prime Minister are in apposition in Mrs. Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, became leader of the Tory party in 1975. Here, both Mrs. Thatcher became leader…and The British Prime Minister became leader…could serve equally well alone. The term is often used when these criteria only partly apply, some grammarians using terms like partial or weak apposition to distinguish various types of lesser acceptability: ‘The heir to the throne arrived, Prince Charles’ (where only the second noun phrase can be omitted).
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
“There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”
Atlantic Monthly
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
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Allude to for Mention. What is alluded to is not mentioned, but referred to indirectly. Originally, the word implied a playful, or sportive reference. That meaning is gone out of it.”
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
“Down and Out in Paris and London: An autobiographical study (1933) by George Orwell (1903-50), the author’s first published book. It is an account of working with the poor in London’s East End, and performing menial jobs in a working-class district of Paris, while trying to get his writing published. A useful piece of advice in the book is to stick to the cheaper restaurants in Paris, as in the more glamorous establishments the waiters are likely to spit in the soup.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”
Mark Twain
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
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