“Pier: Massive solid masonry that functions as vertical structural support. Also, often used to designate Romanesque and Gothic pillars of noncylindrical form.”
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
“A critical term, the first recorded definition of which comes from Dr. Samuel Johnson: ‘a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.’ It is often used deliberately for comic effect to create an ironical letdown by descending from a noble tone or image to a trivial or ludicrous one. For example, in Henry Fielding’s burlesque The Tragedy of Tragedies (1931), Lord Grizzle addresses Huncamunca: ‘Oh! Huncamunca, Huncamunca, Oh!/ Thy pouting breasts, like Kettle-Drums of Brass,/Beat everlasting loud Alarms of joy….’ Bathos is an unintentional anticlimax.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, fiction/literature, term of art
“As poet James Russell Lowell put it, ‘books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.'”
Excerpted from: Willingham, Daniel. The Reading Mind. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017
“Optimism: The doctrine, or belief, that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“In the summer of 1928, Aleck Woollcott invited Harpo Marx to spend the summer with him on the French Riviera. Harpo refused, protesting, ‘I can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock.’
(An interesting postscript: On Saturday, May 19, Aleck Woollcott, Beatrice Kaufman, novelist Alice Duer Miller, and Harpo sailed for Europe.)”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“In the Indo-Aryan West, 9 was always a most propitious number, for each aspect of a ruling trinity could be multiplied by 3 to create a pantheon of 9. It is not difficult to see that this was the likely origin for our choirs of nine angels, nine heavenly spirits and nine muses. The number also has an innate reference to the nine months in which a child is created within the womb.”
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
Tagged numeracy, readings/research
“I am relieved to find the critics shrink from saying that Mr. Yeats will ever be a popular author. I should really at last despair of mankind, if he could be…absolutely empty and void. The work does not please the ear, nor kindle the imagination, nor hint a thought for one’s reflection… Do what I will, I can see no sense in the thing: it is to me sheer nonsense. I do not say it is obscure, or uncouth or barbaric or affected–tho’ it is all these evil things; I say it is to me absolute nullity…I would not read a page of it again for worlds.
That he has any real paying audience I find hard to believe.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“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.
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