“New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.”
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding “Dedicatory Epistle” (1690)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“visual motor skills: A subcategory of perceptual motor skills involving the ability to translate information received by sight into a physical response. In education, visual motor skills are often used when copying information from a blackboard or reproducing letters or numbers. Individuals with problems in this area often have poor handwriting, and may also have more subtle and pervasive difficulties in school performance.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Absolute: Nothing is absolute, with the debatable exception of this statement and death, which may explain why political and economic theories are presented so seriously.
Absolutism is a deadly serious business. If even a hair’s breadth of space is left around the edges of a theory, doubt may be able to squeeze through. The citizen may then begin to smile and wonder whether the intellectual justifications of power are really nonsense. Few within the expert elites see themselves as ideologues and yet they quite happily act as carriers of truth in whatever their field.
Whether it reveals the dictatorship of the proletariat or the virtues of privatization, truth is ideology. Not their truths, our elites say. They are simply delivering the inevitable conclusions of facts rationally organized. Absolutism is the weakness of others. Our elites have the good fortune simply to be right.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
“Fable: A short tale, usually epigrammatic, with animals, men, gods, and even inanimate objects as characters. The action of a fable illustrates a moral which is usually (but not always) explicitly stated at the end. This moral often attains the force of a proverb. The fable form appears early in man’s cultural development, being a common part of the oral folk literature of primitive tribes. It appeared in Egyptian papyri of c1500 BC, and in Greece a recognizable fable was included in the works of Hesiod in the 8th century BC. By far the most famous fables are those attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave who lived about 600 BC. In India the fable also appeared early, the great Indian collection, the Panchatantra, having been composed in the 3rd century. Modern fables have been dominated by the genius and style of La Fontaine, the great French fabulist of the 17th century, who wrote fables in polished and witty poetry that have been widely translated and imitated.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Au Contraire To the contrary, quite the opposite.
‘Nor can it be said that they produce canvases of any greater than those to be found along Washington Square, or in the cold-water flats of New York’s lower east side. There is, au contraire, more than a little truth to the contention that the east side has a certain edge over Montparnasse, and this in spite of the justly renowned Paris light.’ James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“teaching for understanding: A pedagogical method that focuses on teaching students to understand new concepts rather than memorize discrete facts. Although this term has been used to refer specifically to deep, meaningful learning, it’s really the goal of all instruction: all teachers want their students to understand, not just recall and recite, whatever was taught.”
Excerpted from: Ravitch, Diane. EdSpeak: A Glossary of Education Terms, Phrases, Buzzwords, and Jargon. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 2007.
“Illuminism: A pseudoscientific movement of mystics and visionaries in the 18th century which influenced literature in the 19th century. At first inspired by Christian doctrines, illuminists sought to live according to the Gospel and to regenerate their souls by direct contact with the divine. They also, however, believed in spiritism, magnetism, alchemy, and magic and professed to invoke the invisible and the arcane. Among the more famous illuminists were Swedenborg, who conversed with the dead; Lavater a believer in black magic , who thought to contact God by magnetism; Claude de Saint Martin (“the unknown philosopher”), who sought to hasten the coming of Christ by meditation and prayer; Mesmer (see MESMERISM); the Comte de Saint-Germain, who pretended to be several hundred years old and to possess the elixir of eternal life; Franz Joseph Gall, who founded the pseudoscience of phrenology, the study of the relationship of skull shape to character traits; and the famous “Count” Alessandro di Cagliostro, a charlatan who performed feats of magic and alchemy, founded a secret Masonic sect, and narrowly escaped death at the hands of the Inquisition. A reaction against 18-century rational philosophies, illuminism under many names (e.g. millenarianism, syncretism, neopaganism, pythagorism, theosophy, etc.) influenced some writers of the romantic period. It revived a sense of religious exaltation and created, or recreated, a need for the infinite merged with a sense of the inner life.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Arthur Tappan: (1786-1865) U.S. merchant and philanthropist. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, he operated various mercantile businesses, including a silk-importing firm in New York (1826-1837) with his brother Lewis Tappan (1788-1873); they also founded the first commercial credit-rating service (1841). He used his wealth to support missionary societies and the abolitionist crusade, helping found the American Anti-Slavery Society and serving as its first president (1833-40). After breaking with William Lloyd Garrison, he created the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1840). The brothers later supported the Underground Railroad.”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Assonance (noun): Resemblance of sound in words, or closeness or correspondence of syllables with similar sounds and particularly vowel sounds; vowel recurrence. Adj. assonant, assonantal, assonantic; n. assonant; v. assonate.
‘Dinted, dimpled, wimpled—his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration even further and further from the point. He was enamored with the beauty of words.’ Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Mannerism: Style of art and architecture that emerged in the period from ca. 1520 to ca. 1590, characterized by a reaction to harmony of the High Renaissance, an ideal of virtuosity for its own sake, and a concomitant preoccupation with the ambiguous and discordant. Exemplified in the works of El Greco, Pontormo, Parmigianino, and (late) Michelangelo.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
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