Tag Archives: literary oddities

Harold Rosenberg on Literary Critics

Posted on June 23, 2023 | Leave a comment

“No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating.”

Harold Rosenberg

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

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Bowdlerize

Posted on June 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

“bowdlerize: To expurgate a book. In 1818 an English physician, Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), gave to the world a ten-volume edition of Shakespeare’s works ‘in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.’ Bowdler later treated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in the same way. Hence, we have the words bowdlerist, bowdlerizer, bowdlerism, bowdlerization, etc.”

Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.

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Oscar Wilde on Hypocrisy

Posted on June 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

Oscar Wilde

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

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Write It Right: Defalcation for Default

Posted on June 8, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Defalcation for Default. A defalcation is a cutting off, a subtraction. A default is a failure in duty.”

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

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The Doubter’s Companion: Amorality

Posted on April 28, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Amorality: A quality admired and rewarded in modern organizations, where it is referred to through metaphors such as professionalism and efficiency.

Amorality is corporatist wisdom. It is one of the terms which highlights the confusion in society between what is officially taught as a value and what is actually rewarded by the structure.

Immorality is doing wrong of our own volition. Amorality is doing it because a structure or an organization expects us to do it. Amorality is thus worse than immorality because it involves denying our responsibility and therefore our existence as anything more than animal.”

Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.

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Henry Adams on Estimating Intelligence

Posted on April 21, 2023 | Leave a comment

“There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.”

Henry Adams

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

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Write It Right: Declared for Said

Posted on April 21, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Declared for Said. To a newspaper reporter no one ever seems to say anything; all ‘declare.’ Like ‘alleged’ (which see) the word is tiresome exceedingly.”

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

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Rotten Reviews: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Posted on April 12, 2023 | Leave a comment

“The publisher promises that anyone who has a deep love for the well-made English sentence will find these stories richly rewarding. Perhaps so. But there is every chance that the rest of us—those who prefer to curl up with a good book—will be left gasping with boredom instead.”

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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George Orwell on Credulity

Posted on April 6, 2023 | Leave a comment

“There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.”

George Orwell

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

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R.D. Laing on Insanity

Posted on January 27, 2023 | Leave a comment

“Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.”

R.D. Laing

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

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