“A society of free individuals in which all, through their own work, contribute to the liberation and enrichment of the lives of others, is the only environment in which any individual can really grow normally to his full stature.”
John Dewey (1859-1952)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“By giving each letter a number from its order in the alphabet you can deconstruct the name ‘Bach’ as follows: 2 for the B, 1 for the A, 3 for the C, 8 for the H—which makes 14. A pleasing mirror, or reversal, of this number can also be formed from ‘J.S. Bach’—which gives 41. This pseudo-science of substituting numbers for letters is known as gematria, (or abjad in Arabic) and has innumerable variations depending on whether or not you include vowels or which language you translate back to or transcribe into. It has often appealed to creative minds and may have been behind Bach’s playful manipulation of the number 14, achieved by itself (in the fourteen canons of the Goldberg Variations for instance) or in pairs of sevens that occur throughout his work.
Gematria is a very ancient tradition, particularly in the Near East, where it has often had official sanction, with poetic inscriptions commissioned by rulers to reveal the date of the publication of a book or the construction of a building. There are examples dating back to Sargon II of Assyria (in the eighth century BC). In the first century AD gematria became a recognized tool of Jewish hermeneutical scholarship and it was tradition respected by many of the Ottoman Sultans. It seems only to have taken root in the imagination of Western Europe, however, in the seventeenth century.”
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.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged music, numeracy, philosophy/religion
“Mot Juste (mo zhust): The perfect, fitting word or phrase; precisely apt expression. Plural: mots justes.
‘It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste—the one and only correct word to use—the man who had taught me to distrust certain adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.’
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast“
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“metamemory: Knowledge or beliefs about one’s own memory, its strengths and weaknesses, whether one has remembered particular items, and so on. The word is also used to denote regulation or control of memory, as described under metacognition.
[From Greek meta beside or beyond + English memory]”
Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“luminism: American landscape school associated chiefly with the Hudson River School. Luminist paintings are characterized by a fascination with water and light in landscape, by an absence of brush marks, and my masterful control of tonal gradations in atmospheric perspective.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“After the first stage performance of Our Town, the producers reportedly found Woollcott—a true sentimentalist—sobbing openly on a fire escape in the theater alley. ‘Pardon me Mr. Woollcott,’ one of them asked, ‘will you be endorsing the play?’
Rising, Aleck replied, ‘Certainly not! It doesn’t need it. I’d as soon think of endorsing the Twenty-third Psalm.’”
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, readings/research
“In Asia and Africa, ancient bones have been found. These were our ancestors who may have already been using stones as tools more than a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. They were different from the Neanderthal people who appeared about seventy thousand years earlier and inhabited the earth for about two hundred thousand years. The Neanderthal people had low foreheads, but their brains were no smaller than those of most people today.”
Excerpted from: Gombrich, E.H. Trans. Caroline Mustill. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005
“An elegy on the death of President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) by the US poet Walt Whitman (1819-92), published in 1865-6 and incorporated into Leaves of Grass in 1867. Lincoln was assassinated on the evening of 14 April 1865, and died the following morning. It was lilac time.
‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.’
There is a musical setting for soloists, chorus and orchestra (1970) by the US composer Roger Sessions (1896-1985). The US writer Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) entitled one of his early collections of poetry When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d (1973).”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“The Last of the Plainsmen (1908)
I do not see anything in this to convince me you can write either narrative or fiction.
Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
It is offensive to broadminded people who do not believe that it is wise to criticize any one denomination or religious belief.”
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
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
“In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer, I beg to submit it is the first.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
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