Tag Archives: readings/research

Book of Answers: The Transcendentalists’ Resting Place

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

Where are Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne buried? In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Massachusetts.

Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.

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Anachronism

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Anachronism: [Stress: “a-NA-kronizm’] In rhetoric, the appearance of a person or thing in the wrong epoch, such as the clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Linguistic anachronisms are generally a matter of awareness, context, and expectation: for example, the archaism wight (person, man) may be appropriate at a seminar on the Elizabethan poet Spenser, but is incongruous and probably unintelligible elsewhere. Similarly, a character in a period novel who says OK long before the phrase was current rings false for anyone who knows (or senses) that its time is out of joint.”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Academie Francaise

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Academie Francaise: The French academy. Originating in secret meetings of literary men in Paris around the year 1630, the Academy was established by order of the king, at Cardinal Richelieu’s urging, in 1635. Made up of forty members, supposedly the most distinguished living men of French letters, the Academy took as its purpose the protection and perfection of the French language and began compiling an authoritative dictionary in 1639; the task has not yet been completed. The Academy also undertook the composition of definitive treatises on grammar, poetry, and rhetoric. Ordered by Richelieu to censure Corneille’s Le Cid, the Academy early adopted a policy of advocating old rules and traditions at the expense of innovation and change. In the late 18th century, the Philosophes gained a majority in the Academy and briefly influenced it with their views. Inactive during the Revolution, the Academy was reestablished in 1803 by Napoleon as part of the Institut de France and two years later took up headquarters in the Palais Mazarin, which it still occupies. Inevitably, the Academy is a conservative body, reflecting the tastes of its membership—those, by definition, of age and secure reputation, including many of the most significant names in past and present French literature, criticism, and philosophy, the membership nonetheless reveals several surprising omissions, most regrettably that of Moliere. In this century, the Academy may be said to have fairly represented the cultural life of France and, in general, to have exercised a beneficent effect upon the preservation of the language. In 1981 Marguerite Yourcenar became the first woman to be elected to the Academy.”

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

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An Introductory Learning Support on Using the Comma

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

Here is an introductory learning support on using the comma. This is the first of fifteen of these I will post in the next few weeks, which I expect merits an explanation.

Somewhere, either in Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, or Tropic of Capricorn (I read all three in one compulsive gulp about thirty years ago), i.e. Henry Miller’s “Obelisk Trilogy,” the author asserts (I paraphrase, but closely, because in spite of hours of research, I cannot find the direct quote online, and I don’t want to spend the money or time to buy the books and find the sentence) that it’s easier to describe the philosophy of Nietzsche than it is to teach adequately the proper use of the comma. Oscar Wilde famously made his own remarks about the use of the comma, which is a little easier (but much more complex in its origin) to track down, which I was able to do thanks to the excellent website Quote Investigator.

Commas tend to bedevil me as well; indeed, I have had a tendency to overuse them. For years, I have meant of create an extensive reference library on the multitudinous uses of the comma in prose. Using what I think is the best punctuation manual in print, I have at last done so. As I post each of them, should you choose to download them, you will notice they vary considerably in length. After thinking about this for several weeks, I decided to use the same major subdivisions that the author uses in her manual.

However, as you may see, there are numerous minor subdivisions within most of these documents. It may be that these need to be broken up further. Because these are Microsoft Word documents, you are able to manipulate these materials to suit your needs. If I’d broken them up myself, this project would have taken much longer than it did, which was plenty long per se.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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32 Grains of an English Coin

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

“Thirty-two grains of English wheat, taken from the middle of an ear of corn (so as to confound cheats and counterfeiters) was the official weight of an English silver penny according to the reforms of old King Offa of Mercia (757-796), undertaken in parallel with those of the Emperor Charlemagne in mainland Europe. Twenty of these pennies should weigh in at an ounce (to give the equal of the old Latin solidus coin of the Romans and the English shilling) and twelve such ounces produced the royally approved standard of a Tower Pound, worth 240 silver pennies. All of which said, in 1284 King Edward I switched the currency off the wheat standard back to the barley grain.”

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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Reproduction

Posted on January 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

OK, science and health teachers, here is a reading on reproduction along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As is generally true of the readings from the Intellectual Devotional series, this one-page reading is a remarkably thorough introduction to reproduction in the plant and animal kingdoms.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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The Normal Curve

Posted on January 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

Here is a reading on the normal curve along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. If statistics are your bailiwick, I would appreciate a comment on whether or not you think this is a good general introduction to the subject. Even for an innumerate dolt (with, I concede, not much interest in the subject) like myself, this reading makes sense.

But what do you think?

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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Earth Art

Posted on December 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

“Earth Art: An umbrella term for related movements originating in the mid-1960s in which substances like dirt, rocks, snow, and grass are embraced as the artist’s media. Works range in size from gallery pieces to large tracts of land, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), which jutted 1,500 feet into the Great Salt Lake. As with many site-specific works, these may be known to the public primarily through photographic documentation. Amalgams from the 1980s have resulted in new trends termed eco-feminism, eco-Dada, and environmental protest art. Compare Environment Art.”

Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.

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Saturday Night Live

Posted on December 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you or your students can use them, here is a reading on Saturday Night Live along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The show is soon to arrive, amazingly, at its fiftieth anniversary. As a friend of mine once put it, it gave us a reason to stay home on Saturday nights when we were young–which was probably a good thing in terms of our financial and physical (and perhaps moral) health. The reading, for all that, is relatively short.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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John J. Audubon

Posted on December 27, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you can use it, and I say that with the confidence of experience, because the study of John J. Audubon at the primary and secondary secondary levels of education isn’t much done, here is a reading on John J. Audubon along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. As with most readings from the Intellectual Devotional series, this one-page text does an excellent job of encapsulating a complex life, particularly Audubon’s, uh, unorthodox working methods. What is doesn’t report, which I learned in the process of preparing this post, is that Audubon was a slaveholder.

So, what a bitter irony that he is buried in Harlem.

This post would not be complete without mentioning Audubon’s achievements, particularly his majestic and magisterial Birds of America, the double elephant folio he produced, and which is now a high spot in American antiquarian book collecting. Most copies–there are 120 known in all–of the book are in the possession of research libraries around the United States–the Beinecke Library at Yale keeps its copy (like its copy of the Gutenberg Bible, which came out of the Melk Abbey) out for display in its main gallery. When I followed various of the great research libraries on Twitter e.g. The Huntington Library, the Lilly Library, The Newberry Library, and, again, the Beinecke at Yale, a couple of them filmed and posted the turning of pages of Birds of America, a ritual worth watching.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

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