“How are Gargantua and Pantagruel related? In Rabelais’s French satire Gargantua and Pantagruel (1533), Gargantua is Pantagruel’s father. Both are giants who go on humorous adventures.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
OK, here is a short glossary of the parts of speech adapted from The Elements of Style.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“(Russian title: Odin den Ivana Denisovicha). A novel (1962; English translation 1963) by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), first published outside the USSR. Live on one of Stalin’s labour camps in 1950 is seen through eyes of an inmate; the author was himself in such a camp from 1950 to 1953. A film version (1971), directed by Caspar Wrede and starring Tom Courtenay, was a fairly faithful adaptation of the original, with all its harrowing detail.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Thirteen is a famously unlucky number in the Western world. I certainly grew up with the belief that to invite thirteen guests to sit around the table doomed the last to some nameless dread–so, to avoid that fate, out table was always laid to include fourteen. It was a belief shared by Napoleon, F.D. Roosevelt and John Paul Getty, and concern over the number 13 is the most common form of Western superstition. Hotels often have no room 13, tower blocks tend to avoid a 13th floor, and travel agents know that the thirteenth of a month (especially if it falls on a Friday) will be short of bookings.
The most common explanation of unlucky thirteen is the Last Supper, where thirteen sat down to eat, one of whom was a traitor plotting the arrest and judicial murder of his host and master. But similar stories can be found in many other cultures, such as the Viking Norse, who remembered how Loki stumbled into a gathering of twelve gods (from which he had been excluded) and in his envy started plotting the events that would lead to the end of the world.
Robert Graves enthusiastically listed in The White Goddess the various mythological companies of thirteen that tend to lead to the betrayal, if not sacrificial death, of one of their members: be they Arthur and his twelve nights, Odysseus and his twelve companions, Romulus and the twelve shepherds, Roland and the twelve peers of France, Jacob and his twelve sons, of Danish Hrolf and his twelve Berserks. Not to mention the thirteen dismembered portions of Osiris’s body recovered by Isis from the Nile.
The ultimate cause of our attitude to thirteen may be that the thirteenth month of the year was always weak and withered. For, although twelve lunar months almost fill up our solar year (to produce 360 days from twelve sets of 29 and a half days), there was always the issue a left-over period of five days. This was considered in ancient cultures to be the thirteenth month, a five-day oddity, often believed to be a period of immensely bad luck where the world was not policed by the normal powers, and evil spirits held brief reign. Some cultures made this into a Saturnalia-like carnival, where the norman roles of society were reversed; others deemed it a needful time for sacrifice.”
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.
“If the object of poetry is obscurity, Howard Nemerov is a great poet… I am, perhaps, a confirmed reactionary in poetry, preferring ‘I stood upon a little hill’ and…’Pepsicola hits the spot for just a nickel you get a lot’… Nuts, I say.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Ovation. In ancient Rome an ovation was an inferior triumph accorded to victors in minor wars or unimportant battle. Its character and limitations, like those of the triumph, were strictly defined by law and custom. An enthusiastic demonstration in honor of an American civilian is nothing like that, and should not be called by its name.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“You don’t have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for everyone.”
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
“An epic novel (published serially, 1864-9) by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). He originally planned to call it 1825, then, as he realized the core of his story lay during the Napoleonic Wars, he called it 1805, and this was the title used in the initial published episodes. At one point he re-titled it All’s Well That Ends Well, conceiving at that point that it would end happily. But as Tolstoy became more and more immersed in developing his philosophy of history, and his theories on the nature of war, he settled on the final sweeping title.
There have been two film versions. The first (1956) is a Hollywood production, directed by King Vidor, and lasts nearly three and a half hours. The second (1967) is a much-admired Soviet production directed by Sergei Bondarchuk; it was originally in four parts, totalling nearly nine hours, and was shown in the UK in two parts totalling over seven hours, reduced to something over six hours for the USA. The BBC TV serial of the novel, adapted by Jack Pulman and with Anthony Hopkins as Pierre, was broadcast in 1972-3. Tolstoy’s novel also formed the basis of the opera, opus 91 (1941-53), by Prokofiev (1891-1953) to a libretto by the composer and Mira Mendelson.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Process of acquiring modifications in existing knowledge, habits, or tendencies through experience, practice, or exercise. Learning includes associative processes, discrimination of sense-data, psychomotor and perceptual learning, imitation, concept formation, problem solving, and insight learning. Animal learning has been studied by ethologists and comparative psychologists, the latter often drawing explicit parallels to human learning. The first experiments concerning associative learning were conducted by Ivan Pavlov in Russia and Edward Thorndike in the U.S. Critics of the early stimulus-response (S-R) theories, such as Edward C. Tolman claimed they were overly reductive and ignored a subject’s inner activities. Gestalt-psychology researchers drew attention to the importance of pattern and form in perception and learning, while structural linguists argued that language learning was grounded in genetically inherited ‘grammar.’ Developmental psychologists, such as Jean Piaget, highlighted stages of growth in learning. More recently, cognitive psychologists have explored learning as a form of information processing, while some brain researchers, such as Gerald Edelman, have proposed that thinking and learning involve an ongoing process of cerebral pathway building. Related topics of research include attention, comprehension, motivation, and transfer of training.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
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