“Life isn’t all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman’s education.”
Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Pt. I, Ch. 2 (1857)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature
[Nota bene that the Latin word root lex means “word, law, reading,” in other words, language and its uses.]
“Lexeme: 1. A word considered as a lexical unit, in abstraction from the specific forms it takes in specific constructions, e.g. the verb ‘sing’ or ‘to sing,’ in abstraction from the varying word forms sing, sings, sang, sung, singing. Compare lemma. 2. Any other unit, e.g. a morpheme, seen has having lexical rather than grammatical meaning.
Lexical: 1. Assigned to, or involving units assigned to, a lexicon. Thus a lexical entry is an entry in the lexicon; a lexical item or lexical unit may be any word, etc. which has such an entry; rules are lexically governed if they apply only to structures including certain lexical units. 2. Specifically of words etc. distinguished as having a lexical as opposed to a grammatical meaning, or to members of a lexical as opposed to a functional category.
Lexicon: An aspect of language, or part of a linguist’s account of language, that is centered on units that have individual meanings. Distinguished as such from grammar or syntax as concerned with structures in the abstract. But structures in grammar themselves reflect the properties of the lexical units that enter into them, which may be very general or very specific. Therefore the precise scope of a lexicon, as a description of the properties of or assigned to individual units, will vary from one theory of language to another. In one account, it has been a simple subcomponent of a generative grammar, in others the basis, in itself, for most if not all specific grammatical patterns; in some an unstructured list, in others an elaborate network of entries related by lexical rules, and so on.
Usually distinguished as a theoretical concept, from a dictionary, as part of a practical description: hence e.g. a posited mental lexicon, not ‘mental dictionary.’”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“A fantasy novel (1964) by Roald Dahl (1916-90), in which Charlie Buckett wins a ticket that allows him to visit a chocolate factory owned by Mr Willy Wonka and manned by tiny men called Oompa-Loompas. It was filmed as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka. Dahl’s sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, was published in 1971.”
[A second filmed version of this book, starring Johnny Depp, appeared in 2005 as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.]
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Style of art and architecture that emerged in the period from ca. 1520 to ca. 1590, characterized by a reaction to the harmony of the High Renaissance, an ideal of virtuosity for its own sake, and a concomitant preoccupation with the ambiguous and discordant. Exemplified in the works of El Greco, Pontormo, Parmigianino, and (late) Michelangelo.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged art/architecture/design
“‘Whom did some classical writers call the ‘tenth muse?’ Sappho (b. 612 B.C.), a lyric poet whose work exists only in fragments. Married, she lived in Lesbos and led a group of women who were devoted to music and poetry.”
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
Tagged music, philosophy/religion, poetry, readings/research
“It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
Robert Benchley
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“A minimal unit of grammar into which a sentence or a word within a sentence can be divided. E.g. Come inside can be divided into the minimal units come, in, and side; distasteful into dis, taste, and ful.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“The Septuagint is the name for the Greek translation of the Hebrew Testament made in Alexandria in Egypt in the fourth century BC. Believed to be either a miraculous harmony of scholars working separately to produce an identical textual translation, or a body of seventy scholars working together to produce a single agreed text—which is arguably an even more miraculous occurrence.”
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.
[This refers to the novel by Owen Wister, which is available as a free e-book from Project Gutenberg.]
“A burlesque and grotesque piece of nonsense…it is mere fooling and does not have the bite and lasting quality of satire.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“In American architecture, this style occurred twice: ca. 1830-1850 and 1920-1930. Used mostly for public monuments and commercial buildings, the forms are heavy, often pylon-like. Reeded columns, palm capitals, and other ornaments are distinctively Egyptian.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
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