“A term used to distinguish anything out of its proper time. Shakespeare’s references to cannons in King John, a play which takes place before cannons came into use, to clocks in Julius Caesar, and to billiards in Antony and Cleopatra, are examples of anachronisms. In literature, anachronisms are sometimes used deliberately as comic devices to emphasized universal timelessness.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“A satirical novel (1980) by the US novelist John Kennedy Toole (1937-1969). Thanks to the efforts of his mother it was published more than ten years after he committed suicide, and went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is set in New Orleans, and the central character, Ignatius Reilly, is an overweight, argumentative layabout who interrelates with a cast of equally eccentric and accident-prone characters. The title comes from Jonathan Swift:
‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him.
Swift: Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting (1711)'”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“In most human affairs, the idea is to think globally and act locally.”
Rene Dubos
“The Despairing Optimist,” American Scholar, Spring 1977. The Motto “Think Globally, Act Locally” first appeared as the title of an interview with Dubos in the EPA Journal, Apr. 1978.
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged readings/research, science literacy
“It contains unpleasant elements.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“In 1935 Broun made this statement: ‘Nobody need worry any more that Washington is going left. Indeed, nobody need worry that the Washington of today is going anywhere.'”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor
“Any systematic account of the structure of the language; the patterns that it describes; the branch of linguistics concerned with such patterns.
Often restricted to the study of units that can be assigned a meaning. Distinguished in that light from phonology, e.g. singing is a grammatical unit as are sing and –ing, while s or the syllable si are phonological. Also opposed, thought not always, to a dictionary or the lexicon. E.g. the meanings of sing belong to its entry in the lexicon; the functions of -ing to grammar, where they are described for verbs in general. When limited in both of those ways, the study of grammar reduces to that of morphology and syntax.
Chomsky’s term in the 1960s for the knowledge of a language developed by a child who learns to speak it. A grammar in the widest sense was thus at once a set of rules (32) said to be internalized by members of a speech community, and account, by a linguist, of such a grammar. This internalized grammar is effectively what was later called I-language.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
“General term encompassing all artwork, architecture, and decorative art produced in Spain under Muslim and Christian reigns and the resulting hybrid styles. Dates from the 8th to the 16th centuries.”
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
“These six physicians were heroes of the medieval era, both to the Christian West and the Muslim East. Dante places them amongst the classical poets in the outer circle of hell, which was set aside for virtuous pagans–a place of green fields overlooked by a castle with seven gates for the seven virtues.”
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 numeracy, philosophy/religion, readings/research
“Swedish diplomat. While working as a businessman in Budapest in 1944, he was entrusted by the Swedish government with the protection of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. Wallenberg helped some 95,000 Jews escape death by issuing them Swedish passports. When Soviet forces took control of Budapest in 1945 he was arrested, taken to Moscow, and imprisoned. Although the Soviet authorities stated that Wallenberg had died in prison in 1947, his fate remains uncertain and there were claims that that he was still alive in the 1970s.”
Excerpted from: Wright, Edmund, Ed. The Oxford Desk Encyclopedia of World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of just as they die of any other disease.”
Oscar Wilde
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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