Tag Archives: literary oddities

Write It Right: Allow for Permit

Posted on July 13, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Allow for Permit. ‘I allow you to go.’ Precision is better attained by saying permit, for allow has other meanings.”

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

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Henry Miller, Presciently, on Politicians

Posted on July 9, 2020 | Leave a comment

“One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.”

Henry Miller

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

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Oscar Levant on Politicians

Posted on July 1, 2020 | Leave a comment

“I once said cynically of a politician, ‘He’ll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.’”

Oscar Levant

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

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The Devil’s Dictionary: Idiot

Posted on June 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but ‘pervades and regulates the whole.’ He has the last word on everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech and circumscribes conduct with a dead-line.”

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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The Algonquin Wits: Heywood Broun his Sartorial State

Posted on June 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Broun, known for his always unkempt appearance, devoted an article to the topic ‘Best-Dressed Women of the World.’ In it he commented on his own experiences in such contests: ‘While I was running for Best-Dressed Senior in the graduating class of Horace Mann High School, I often spent as much as three or four minutes in the morning deciding which pants I ought to wear. The grey or the blue. The blue or the grey. I generally decided to take the ones which possessed the closest appearance to a crease.’”

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

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3 Furies

Posted on June 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Megaera * Tisiphone * Alecto

The furies (Erinyes) were also known in Athens by the cautious euphemism of the Eumenides—‘the kindly ones’—and were worshipped in a cave below the Parthenon. Megaera the jealous, Tisiphone the blood avenger and Alecto the unceasing were elemental figures of human power—the relentless winged spirits of Conscience, Punishment and Retribution hunting down the guilty.

Later traditions identified them as the daughters of Gaia, inseminated when the bloody testicles of the ancient god Uranus, who was castrated by his son Cronus, fell to the earth. They are sometimes depicted like a winged spirit of victory, sometimes like a Medusa figure dripping with gore and a scalp sprouting a mane of thrashing serpents.”

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.

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Rotten Reviews: The Prelude (William Wordsworth)

Posted on June 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Rotten Reviews: The Prelude (William Wordsworth)

‘The story is the old story. There are the old raptures about mountains and cataracts. The old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind; the old crazy mystical metaphysics; the endless wilderness of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle…,”

 T.B. Macaulay, in his journal

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

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The Algonquin Wits: Dorothy Parker on Narcissism among the Upper Classes

Posted on June 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Margot Asquith, an English countess, published an autobiography which filled four large volumes, a literary endeavor that Dorothy Parker found tedious and over-personalized. Mrs. Parker predicted: ‘The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.’”

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

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Harry S Truman on Politics as a Vocation

Posted on May 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”

Harry S Truman

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

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20 Fingers and Toes

Posted on May 21, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Twenty is perhaps the oldest, most natural large number for mankind to relate to, for it is the number we achieve by counting up all our fingers and toes. Echoes of this unit (called Vigesimal) can still be found in both the French and English language. The French still express eighty as ‘quatre-vingts’ (four twenties), while English keeps a special word (‘score’) for this number, as in the expression ‘four score and ten.’ And until decimalization was introduced in 1971 the English monetary unit was still so ordered, with twenty shillings to the pound.”

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.

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