Tag Archives: literary oddities

Write It Right: Chance for Opportunity

Posted on August 18, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Chance for Opportunity. ‘He had a good chance to succeed.’”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Noam Chomsky, Famously, on Grammar and Meaning

Posted on August 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

“The notion ‘grammatical’ cannot be identified with ‘meaningful’ or ‘significant’ in any semantic sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical, but…only the former is grammatical.

(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures ch. 2 (1957)

Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

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The Algonquin Wits: George S. Kaufman on Geography

Posted on August 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Conducting a survey for a question-and-answer book he was editing, George Oppenheimer once quizzed Kaufman on geography—a subject that thoroughly bored G.S.K. One of the questions read: ‘What is the longest river in South America?’

After a moment. Kaufman queried, ‘Are you sure it’s in South America?’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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Rotten Reviews: Annie Dillard

Posted on August 17, 2021 | Leave a comment

 “Rotten Reviews: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

‘I have never seen frogs in Virginia ‘shout and glare’…”

Loren Eiseley, Washington Post Book World

Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.    

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Write It Right: Casket for Coffin

Posted on August 16, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Casket for Coffin. A needless euphemism affected by undertakers.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Andrew Lang on Statistics

Posted on August 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts…for support rather than illumination.”

Andrew Lang

Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Accountable

Posted on August 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Accountable, adj. Liable to an abatement of pleasure, profit, or advantage; exposed to the peril of a penalty.” 

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000. 

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Write It Right: Casualties for Losses in Battle

Posted on August 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Casualties for Losses in Battle. The essence of casualty is accident, absence of design. Death and wounds in battle are produced otherwise, are expectable and expected, and, by the enemy, intentional.”

Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.

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Book of Answers: Winston Churchill’s Nobel Prizewinning Book

Posted on August 9, 2021 | Leave a comment

“When and for what work did Winston Churchill win the Nobel Prize in Literature? In 1953 for The Second World War.”

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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The Algonquin Wits: Heywood Brown on the Marx Brothers

Posted on August 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Broun, who was totally captivated by the Marx Brothers, went to see their shows—each one—as many times as possible (he saw Cocoanuts twenty-one times). Concerning this particular passion, he remarked: ‘Very likely my epitaph will read, “Here lies Heywood Broun (who?), killed by getting in the way of some scene shifters at a Marx Brothers show.”’”

Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.

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