“Rotten Reviews: The Wreckage of Agathon
’”Wreckage’ is appropriate…more hysterical than historical.’
Library Journal
Rotten Reviews: October Light
‘Within this great welter of word, symbols, and gassy speechifying and half-hatched allegory there was once, I suspect, a good lean novel, but I can’t find it….’
Peter Prescott, Newsweek”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Criticize for Condemn or Disparage. Criticism is not necessarily censorious; it may approve.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Yankee, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States, the word is unknown. (See DAMYANK.)”
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
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Critically for Seriously. ‘He has long been critically ill.’ A patient is critically ill only at the crisis of his disease.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“To learn English, you must begin by thrusting the jaw forward, almost clenching the teeth, and practically immobilizing the lips. In this way the English produce the series of unpleasant little mews of which their language consists.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“…dreadfully long and padded and it often degenerates into drivel…as a philosophical novel, it is a sham. Stripped of its excesses, however, it does not have enough substance to have made a good Raymond Carver short story.”
Saturday Review
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, readings/research
“Convoy for Escort. ‘A man-of-war acted as the convoy to the flotilla.’ The flotilla is the convoy, the man-of-war the escort.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Government, n. A modern Chronos who devours his own children. The priesthood are charged with the duty of preparing them for his tooth.”
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 fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Consent for Assent. ‘He consented to that opinion.’ To consent is to agree to a proposal; to assent is to agree to a proposition”.
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Benchley and Dorothy Parker shared a tiny $30-a-month office for a time in the Metropolitan Opera House studios. As Benchley described it, ‘One cubic foot of space less and it would have constituted adultery.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
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