“We do not believe in the permanence of his reputation…. Fifty years hence, most of his allusions will be harder to understand than the allusions in The Dunciad, and our children will wonder what their ancestors could have meant by putting Mr. Dickens at the head of the novelists of his day.”
Saturday Review, 1858
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“History n. An account mostly false, of events unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools.”
Ambrose Bierce
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“The price of your hat isn’t a measure of your brain.”
African Proverb
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, humor, social-emotional learning
“Your manuscript is both good and original; the the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
“There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers.”
H.L Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Do you have people in your life with poor personal boundaries? Do they approach you and seek to retail what my students have designated (from texting usage, I must assume) “TMI”–too much information? Do these people–even worse–elicit your advice, or, heaven forfend, presume to offer you advice? The legendary dramatist George S. Kaufman dealt with these people, and, as this hilarious anecdote from Jon S. Winokur’s The Portable Curmudgeon (New York: Plume, 1992) shows, Mr. Kaufman didn’t suffer them gladly:
“On the television show This Is Show Business, a youthful Eddie Fisher complained that girls refused to date him because of his age, and he asked Kaufman’s advice. Kaufman replied. ‘Mr. Fisher, on Mount Wilson there is a telescope that can magnify the most distant stars up to twenty-four times the magnification of any previous telescope. This remarkable instrument was unsurpassed in the world of astronomy until the construction of the Mount Palomar telescope, an even more remarkable instrument of magnification. Owing to advances and improvements in optical technology, it is capable of magnifying the stars up to four times the magnification and resolution of the Mount Wilson telescope.
“Mr. Fisher, if you could somehow put the Mount Wilson telescope inside the Mount Palomar telescope, you still wouldn’t be able to detect my interest in your problem.'”
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged drama/theater, humor
I’ve always enjoyed this squib from David Grambs’ The Random House Dictionary for Readers and Writers (New York: Random House, 1990) which appears, alas, to be out of print.
“Timestyle, Time-ese n. The characteristically heady and melodramatically compressed prose style of Time magazine, with particular reference to its zesty verbs, marshaled characterizing adjectives and hyphenated compound words, clever coinages and puns, and above all (formerly) the frequent use of verbs at the beginnings of sentences and hence inverted syntax.
Brain child of joke-making, china-dog-collecting, cordovan-shoe-wearing Briton Hadden more than Time co-founding, beetle-browed, baggy-britched Henry Luce was Timestyle. Wrote Wolcottt Gibbs in a New Yorker profile of Luce: ‘Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind. Where it will end, knows God!’ Ended has inversion since Godwent Luce.'” –John B. Bremner, Words on Words
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
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