“Fables of Bidpai: An Arabic version of a collection of Indian fables common to Buddhism and Brahminism, also known as Kalilah and Dimnah. They were collected in the Sanskrit Panchatantra and translated into Persian about AD 55. Bidpai means court scholar, and the allegorical animal stories are told as a wise man’s advice to a young Indian price.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Maxine Hong Kingston originally Maxine Hong: (b.1940) U.S. writer. Born to an immigrant family in Stockton, California, she has taught at various schools and universities. Her novels and nonfiction works explore the myths, realities, and cultural identities of Chinese and American families and the role of women in Chinese culture. Her widely admired The Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) blend fact and fantasy to tell aspects of her family’s history; Tripmaster Monkey (1988) concerns a young Chinese-American man.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“I think, therefore I am.”
Rene Descartes, Le Discours de la Method (1637)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“How long was the first run of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)? The play opened in New York in 1947 and ran for 855 performances.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“sound/symbol association: The idea that certain sounds are paired with specific symbols.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Declared for Said. To a newspaper reporter no one ever seems to say anything; all ‘declare.’ Like ‘alleged’ (which see) the word is tiresome exceedingly.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Cliché (noun): An expression so overused as to be trite, such as a hackneyed idiom or dead metaphor; stereotyped, overworked idea; evident commonplace. Adjective: cliché, clichéd.
‘The language is a double-depressant of numbing, cliché-ridden prose that ranges from Lady Bountiful pitter-patter to tearoom philosophizing.’ Colman McCarthy, The Washington Post”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Matte Surface: A dull, flat surface without gloss.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Melanie Klein originally Melanie Reizes (1882-1960) Austrian-British psychoanalyst. Born in Vienna, she married at 21 and had three children before undergoing psychoanalysis with Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest before World War I. She studied the psychoanalysis of young children, joining the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (1921-26), and later moving to London. In works such as The Psychoanalysis of Children (1932) and Narrative of a Child Analysis (1961), she asserted that children’s play was a symbolic way of controlling anxiety and that observation with free play with toys could serve as a means of determining early psychological impulses.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
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