“If you think you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”
Quoted in Thurman W. Arnold, The Symbols of Government
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
[In this squib, Stanley Kaufmann alludes to Truman Capote’s famously snarky remark about Jack Kerouac’s prose, to wit, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.]
“One can say of this book–with sufficient truth to make it worth saying: ‘This isn’t writing. It’s research.'”
Stanley Kaufmann, The New Republic
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“Articulate the word ‘Sun’ and you soon find yourself thinking of the Moon. Man and Woman, Love and Hate, Right and Wrong, Farmer and Shepherd, Left and Right, Queen and King, North and South, Positive and Negative, Heaven and Hell, East and West, Life and Death, Victory and Defeat, Earth and Sky, Sunrise and Sunset. So, two is an inauspicious number in its cracking of unity.”
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
Tagged literary oddities
“A brief account of or a story about an individual or an incident. The anecdotal digression is a common feature of narrative in prose and verse. In the history of English literature and of literary characters the anecdote has a specific importance. In his Dictionary Samuel Johnson defined the term as “something yet unpublished; secret history”. During the 18th century and interest in “secret” histories increased steadily, and no doubt there is some connection between this and the growing popularity of –ana, table-talk and biography (qq.v) at that time. During the second half of the 18th century there was almost a craze for “secret” histories. In the last thirty years of it over a hundred books of anecdotage were published in England. Isaac Disraeli, father of Benjamin, became one of the best known and most assiduous gleaners of anecdotes. In 1791 he published three volumes titled Curiosities of Literature, consisting of Anecdotes, Characters, Sketches, and Observations, Literary, Historical, and Critical. These he followed with other collections: Calamities of Authors (1812-1813) in two volumes, and Quarrels of Authors (1814) in three volumes. In 1812 John Nichols published the first of nine volumes in a series titled Literary Anecdotes of the 18th Century. Such works remained popular during the Victorian period. Nor is the appetite for collections of anecdotes assuaged. In 1975 there was The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“When you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it.”
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, united states history
“…The book is unnecessary.”
Granville Hicks, Saturday Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, 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
“Hell, n. The residence of the late Noah Webster, dictionary-maker.”
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
“bestiaries: Allegorical poems or books giving descriptions of various animals or stories concerning them, with Christian application or moral appended to each. Although the characteristics and habits assigned to each animal were largely legendary, bestiaries were often treated during the Middle Ages as treatises on natural history, as well as moral instruction, and were highly popular.
The beast-fable, popular from Aesop to the medieval Roman de Renart, was usually satirical and pragmatic in its moral; a 4th-century work in Greek was probably the first to turn animal descriptions into specifically Christian allegory, and its translations into Latin Physiologi were the basis of most English and Continental bestiaries. The best known are the Latin Physiologus (11th century) by the abbot Theobaldus, the Bestiary by the Anglo-Norman poet Phillippe de Thaun, and an anonymous Middle English Bestiary (c1250).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, science literacy
“Which for That. “The boat which I engaged had a hole in it.” But a parenthetical clause may rightly be introduced by which; as, The boat, which had a hole in it, I nevertheless engaged. Which and that are seldom interchangeable; when they are, use that. It sounds better.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Antony and Cleopatra * Justinian and Theodora * Ferdinand and Isabella * William and Mary
Antony and Cleopatra are the archetypal lover-monarchs, They met at a magnificent conjunction of fleets off the coast of modern Turkey in the autumn of 41 BC. Antony was in command of the eastern half of the Roman Empire; Cleopatra ruled over the Hellenistic monarchy of Egypt; they met in order to forge a diplomatic alliance, but became lovers. Their attempt to conquer the East was destroyed by Octavian, but the pair gained immortality with their double suicides, their colorful descendants (Caligula, Nero, and Queen Zenobia), and their leading Shakespearian roles.
The Emperor Justinian’s long reign, which saw the definitive establishment of the Byzantine Empire, was aided by his truste wife, Theodora, who brought a street-fighter determination to the partnership. Her mother had been a dancer and her father a bear-trainer, and she had grown up working in the circuses, brothels, and dance halls of Constantinople.
Ferdinand of Aragon was a womanizing, ruthless warrior-king of Aragon; Isabella, the intellectual heir of the richer but troubled Kingdom of Castile; they were cousins and their marriage began as an elopement. But their long reign was a political triumph, marked by their joint conquest of Moorish Granada (and notorious expulsion of Muslims and Jews) and the lucky patronage of Columbus and the discovery of America, which helped to forge the nation of Spain.
Britain’s most famous joint monarchs were William (of Orange) and Mary (Stuart): A personal union of cousins that ended the Anglo-Dutch naval wars and created a Protestant bulwark against Louis XIV’s expansionist Catholic kingdom of France. Their union allowed them to be ‘jointly offered the throne’ by Parliament when their uncle/father, James II, had been deposed. Mary miscarried their child in the first year of their marriage and was never able to conceive again, but kept an affectionate relationship with her husband, who had just one mistress and one boyfriend–his ex-pageboy Arnold van Keppel (who he elevated to Earl of Abelmarle). The appeal of the Keppels as royal companions has remained constant, with Edward VII and, most recently, Prince Charles, falling in love with Arnold’s descendants.
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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