“Beatrice Kaufman, who held little appreciation for music of any sort, once accompanied Oscar Levant to Carnegie Hall to hear Stokowski conduct Bach’s B Minor Mass. While en route to the theater Beatrice realized they were going to be late and urged her escort, ‘In heaven’s name let’s hurry or we’ll miss the intermission.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
“If I didn’t have writing, I’d be running down the street hurling grenades in people’s faces.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
“Monarch, n. A person engaged in reigning. Formerly the monarch ruled, as the derivation of the word attests, and as many subjects have had occasion to learn. In Russia and the Orient the monarch has still a considerable influence in public affairs and in the disposition of the human head, but in western Europe political administration is mostly entrusted to his ministers, he being somewhat preoccupied with reflections relating to the status of his own head.”
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 humor, literary oddities
“The American Mercury: An iconoclastic magazine founded in 1924 and edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Among its contributors were Lewis Mumford, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Sandburg, and Vachel Lindsay. After Mencken’s retirement in 1933, it was published as a pocket-sized miscellany of conservative tendencies by Lawrence E. Spivak. It eventually became a rightist organ of limited circulation owned by millionaire J. Russell Maguire.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Fabliaux: 12th-14th centuries) Short humorous tales, often ribald or scurrilous. Highly popular in the Middle Ages, they are situation comedies burlesquing the weaknesses of human nature; women, priests, and gullible fools are often the butts of the buffoonery, which sometimes becomes savagely bitter. The material derives from the oral folk tradition of bawdy anecdotes, practical jokes, and clever tricks of revenge, but the term fabliau was first specifically applied to a medieval French literary form, a narrative of three hundred to four hundred lines in octo-syllabic couplets. About 150 of these are still extant. Similar prose tales became popular all over Europe, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Apparently only a few narratives in the style of the fabliau were written in England; the most notable are the ones Chaucer included in his Canterbury Tales, such as the Miller’s, the Reeve’s, the Friar’s, the Summoner’s, and the Shipman’s tales.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, poetry, readings/research
“Every time we tell anybody to cheer up, things might be worse, we run away for fear we might be asked to specify how.”
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
“Abroad, adj. At war with savages and idiots. To be a Frenchman abroad is to be miserable; to be an American abroad is to make others miserable.”
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 humor, literary oddities
“Sun * Moon * Venus * Mercury * Mars * Jupiter * Saturn
Our sky-watching, hunter-gathering ancestors had 7 marked out as a number of enormous importance for tens of thousands of years. For this is the number of the visible planets—‘the five wanderers,’ plus the sun and the moon.
This respect for the 7 became ever more ingrained as the first agricultural civilizations allowed for accurate fixed observations from the calendar-keeping priests, whose temples throughout the ancient Middle East were all equipped with star-watching terraces above their cult chambers. It is an intriguing element within the cult of the 7 that the planets are not all visible at once: Mercury and most especially Venus (whose horns are occasionally visible) are the morning and evening stars. Bright Jupiter, luminous Saturn, and the more elusive red Mars belong to the full night. So we have always known that we have been watched, influenced, and enclosed by these 7 who right from the dawn of our consciousness have intriguingly different characteristics and hours of dominance and passageways through the heavens.
Although most of mankind probably now accepts that the earth is a planet which circles around the sun, and the moon is a planet of the earth, the mystery of our 7 encircling heavens still haunts our imagination. But this once immutable number of 7 keeps changing. First we knocked the seven down to five (as the sun and moon were taken off the list), then, in relatively modern times, it grew to nine. Uranus was discovered in 1781, followed by Neptune in 1846, then Pluto in 1930 (though this was later demoted to a dwarf planet to bring us back down to eight planets). So, currently, we have eight planets and five dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris), as well as five named moons orbiting around Pluto.”
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 Independent Practice, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, numeracy, readings/research, science literacy
“The tediousness of continued allegory, and that too seldom striking or ingenious, has also contributed to render the Faerie Queen peculiarly tiresome…Spenser maintains his place upon the shelves, among our English classics; but he is seldom seen on the table.”
David Hume, in The History of Great Britain 1759
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 humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion, poetry, readings/research
“1066 and All That: A classic humorous survey of British history (1930) by W.C. Sellar (1898-1951) and R. J. Yeatman (1898-1968), comprising ‘a subtle mixture of schoolboy howlers, witty distortions, and artful puns.’ The book was designed to satirize the smugness of the English and the teaching of history by rote, but ironically itself became a cultural icon. A typical definition is ‘The Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).’ 1066, as the date of the Norman Conquest, probably still remains the best known date in British history, ‘all that’ being the blur of dates and events that occurred before and after it.
Ten for 66 and All That is the title of the autobiography of the Australian leg-spin bowler Arthur Mailey (1886=1967), punning on the title of Sellar and Yeatman’s books and celebrating his feat of taking ten wickets for 66 runs for the Australians against Gloucestershire in 1921. In 2001 England’s World Cup hat-trick hero, Sir Geoff Hurst, published an autobiography with the punning title 1966 and All That.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged games/sports, humor, literary oddities, readings/research
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