“What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen?”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
What is Daisy Miller’s real name? Annie Miller. She appears in Henry James’s short novel Daisy Miller (1878).
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
Moving right along with differentiated material I developed for the 11th-grade English class I co-taught over the past two years, here is a sample annotations for “Henry Trafton’s Independence,” a short story by Horatio Alger. My father, who taught Alger at the University of Wisconsin, taught me, alas, to ridicule Alger’s contrived and even precious rags-to-riches stories. Nonetheless, this story showed up in this English class.
Incidentally, in researching this post, I learned that Horatio Alger, in his role as a Unitarian clergyman in Brewster, Massachusetts was found to have engaged in “the abominable and revolting crime of gross familiarity with boys.” I think, in this post-Catholic-clergy-scandal era, you know what that means. My father had a great deal to say about Richard “Dick” Hunter, the protagonist of Alger’s “Ragged Dick” stories. Dick’s name, my father told me, suggested a great deal about Horatio Alger himself.
I myself am agnostic on all of this.
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.
“Refugee Intellectuals: (1930-1940) During the 1930s, a galaxy of European intellectuals–authors, artists, scholars, scientists–fled European totalitarianism and found refuge, permanent or temporary, in the United States. Their contributions to the nation’s cultural life–and later to its war effort–were incalculable. The hundreds of refugee intellectuals included:
Excerpted from: Rosenbaum, Robert A. The Penguin Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Penguin, 2003.
“diamond: [ME] The name of the gem derives from a medieval Latin alteration of Latin adamans ADAMANT. Adamant was a legendary rock or mineral of many supposed properties. One of these was hardness, which was a reason why people sometimes identified it with diamond. A diamond is forever was used as an advertising slogan for De Beers Consolidated Mines from the late 1940s onwards, and in 1956 Ian Fleming used Diamonds are Forever as the title of his latest James Bond thriller, but the idea was first expressed by the American writer Anita Loos, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925). ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend‘ was a song written by Leo Robin and Jule Styne for the 1949 stage musical of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”
Excerpted from: Creswell, Julia. Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
“Auctioneer, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.”
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
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, united states history
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Tahiti. This is a half-page worksheet with a reading of two sentences, the second of them a bit long, but not so long that students–even emerging and struggling readers–can’t make sense of it.
Even in two sentences, the reading mentions Tahiti’s allure to Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson, summoning both of them to the Island to create art extolling the its beauty.
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.
Edmund Wilson: (1895-1972) U.S. critic and essayist. Born in Red Bank, New Jersey, he attended Princeton University and initially worked as a reporter and magazine writer. Much of his writing, in which he probed diverse topics with scholarship and common sense in clear and precise prose, appeared in The New Republic and the New Yorker. Among his influential critical works are Axel’s Castle (1931), a survey of the Symbolist poets; To the Finland Station (1940), a study of the thinkers who set the stage for the Russian Revolution; and Patriotic Gore (1962), analyzing the American Civil War literature. His other writings include plays, poetry, the short-story collection Memories of Hecate County (1946), and five volumes of posthumously published journals. He was widely regarded as the leading critic of his time.
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Dialogue (noun): Conversation between two or more people, or the literary representation of direct speech; quoted utterance; a work written entirely in the form of a colloquy, especially in philosophy; and exchange of ideas or opinions. Adjective: dialogic; adverb: dialogically.
‘He was for long thought to write very bad English, and indeed he gave you the impression or writing with the stub of a blunt pencil; his style was labored, an uneasy mixture of the classical and the slangy, and his dialogue as such that could never have issued from the mouth of a human being.’ W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
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