“Fail. ‘He failed to note the hour.’ That implies that he tried to note it, but did not succeed. Failure always carries the same sense of endeavor; when there has been no endeavor, that is no failure. A falling stone cannot fail to strike you, for it does not try; but a marksman firing at your may fail to hit you; and I always hope he always will.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged diction/grammar/style/usage, humor, literary oddities
“During a period when Benchley roomed with Charles MacArthur at the Shelton Hotel, MacArthur took a temporary job as a public relations counsel for a mausoleum in New Jersey. As his first promotional campaign, MacArthur convinced the firm that it should establish a ‘Poet’s Corner’ and change its name to Fairview Abbey. Next, he decided that the firm should at least try to obtain the bones of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and inter them in its new Corner. To show his sincere intentions he sent a letter to James Michael Curley, mayor of Boston, saying that Boston had forfeited its right to Longfellow’s bones on the ground that a Longfellow poem—lines from which read, ‘Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not the goal’—obviously proved that that poet did not wish to be buried in an ordinary grave, but rather in a crypt, or, best of all, in a Poet’s Corner—like the one at Fairview Abbey.’
When Curley sent back a sincere reply to the effect that some mistake must have been at the bottom of this action, and that, at any rate, Longfellow was born in Cambridge, under the present jurisdiction of Mayor Flynn, MacArthur got Benchley to team up with him. The two sat down and made out a series of messages to Curley, including such threats as: ‘THE COUNTRY DEMANDS THE BODY OF HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW; IF YOU VALUE YOUR JOB YOU WILL FORWARD IT TO ME IMMEDIATELY,’ and ‘COME CLEAN WITH THAT BODY’, and ‘ROLL DEM BONES.’ Curley made serious attempts at getting warrants for their arrests in New Jersey.”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, united states history
“Barbarism (noun): A word or expression considered ill-conceived usual language standards, such as dubious coinage that is a hybrid of Greek and Latin elements or a crude, ill-adapted neologism, e.g. ‘complected’ (rather than “complexioned”), ‘legalcy,’ or ‘suavitude.’
‘On the other hand, some widely popular examples of sportspeak are barbarism whose use should be a misdemeanor if not a capital offense.’ Red Smith, The New York Times.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Delaware * Pennsylvania * New Jersey * Georgia * Connecticut * Massachusetts * Maryland *South Carolina * New Hampshire * Virginia * New York * North Carolina * Rhode Island
These thirteen states rebelled against the British Crown in the eighteenth century and are represented by the thirteen parallel bars of the Union Flag. Curiously, the Founding Fathers adapted their design from a flag used by the East India Company, which had created its own version of the mercantile Red Ensign with thirteen red and white bars instead of a plain red field. On an early version, thirteen stars complemented the bars, then more and more stars were added as the American state expanded into Indian lands to their west.
Another curiosity is that, just as thirteen states rebelled against their royal motherland, it would be thirteen states that would later rebel against the republican union:
South Carolina * Mississippi * Florida * Alabama * Georgia * Louisiana * Texas * Virginia * Arkansas * Tennessee * North Carolina * Missouri * Kentucky
It is not always remembered that all thirteen of the Confederate states seceded from the Union between December 1860 and December 1861, after the process of a democratic vote, either a popular referendum or a vote from their House of Representatives. They had imagined the Union was a free compact, which they were entitled to leave, just as they had joined it. After four years of war, the northern armies of the Union had either destroyed or occupied all the territories of those who had attempted to secede.”
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, Social Sciences
[Loud comment about computer intelligence, made in an AT&T cafeteria:] “No, I’m not interested in developing a more powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”
Alan Turing, Quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence (1983)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“Essential for Necessary. This solecism is common among the best writers in the country and England. ‘It is essential to go early’; ‘Irrigation is essential to the cultivation of arid lands’ and so forth. One thing is essential to another thing only if it is part of the essence of it—an important and indispensable part of it, determining its nature, the soul of it.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four: A dystopian novel (1949) by George Orwell (1903-50). The book comprises a prophecy of the totalitarian future of mankind, portraying a society in which government propaganda and terrorism destroy human awareness of reality. It is generally thought that Orwell named the novel by reversing the last two figures of the year in which it was written, 1948, but an article by Sally Coniam in the Times Literary Supplement of 31 December 1999 proposed another theory. In 1934 Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, published a poem, ‘End of the Century 1984,’ in The Chronicle, the school magazine of Sunderland Church High School, where she had been a pupil in the 1920s. The poem was written to mark the school’s 50th anniversary, looking back then forward to the future and to the schools centenary in 1984. It seems likely that Orwell could have adopted the year accordingly, although for him it was a random date. Support for this lies in the poem’s mention of ‘telesalesmanship’ and ‘Telepathic Station 9,’ terms strangely modern for their time, which seem to prefigure Orwell’s own ‘Newspeak,’ teleprogrammes,’ and ‘telescreen.’
Following the publication of Orwell’s novel, the year 1984—until it came and went—was long regarded as apocalyptic, and as such was even entered in the Oxford English Dictionary. Appropriately enough, a film version entitled 1984 starring John Hurt and Richard Burton was released in 1984.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Connoisseur, n. A specialist who knows everything about something and nothing about anything else.
An old wine-bibber having been smashed in a railway collision, some wine was poured upon his lips to revive him. ‘Pauillac, 1873,’ he murmured and died.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Rotten Reviews: Invisible Man
“It has its faults which cannot simply be shrugged off—occasional overwriting, stretches of fuzzy thinking, and a tendency to waver, confusingly, between realism and surrealism.”
Atlantic Monthly
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, literary oddities
“The only qualities for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. The capacity to steal other people’s words and phrases…is also invaluable.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
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