“Minutiae (noun plural): Minor or trivial details. Singular: minutia. ‘But its relentless detail and technical concentration are exhausting for the undisciplined armchair historian who might prefer the flavorful bacon of opinion to the dry minutiae of Rumanian pig exports in discussions of inter-war foreign policy and diplomacy.’ Neal Johnston, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Abolitionism: A term associated with protest on grounds of inhumanity and call for the abolition of: first, slavery (see, for example, the work of William Wilberforce, 1759-1833); and, more recently, prisons and imprisonment. The latter stance developed within Scandinavian criminology (see T. Mathiesen, The Politics of Abolition, 1974) but has since been taken up within wider critical criminology. Abolitionists argue that prisons are ineffective, their justification untenable, and their violations of human rights widespread. The abolitionist stance rejects reformism on the grounds that this perpetuates and legitimizes the existing system. Abolitionism proposes new responses to crime, offending, and disputes—for example, community-based alternatives to incarceration—and argues that the urge to punish and inflict pain must be challenged.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
“Situationism: The Situationist International was founded in 1957 with the merging of three European avant-garde literary and artistic groups. With roots in Dada’s assault on bourgeois sensibilities, the situationist movement emerged in Western Europe primarily in the 1960s. The situationists were highly politicized and theoretical, seeking, in their writings and art, to bring back meaningful social interactions to members of a depoliticized consumer society. Some artworks, such as paintings larger than buildings, blurred the boundaries between art forms. Others were altered reproductions of famous works, prefacing the reappropriated works of the 1980s and 1990s. The movement’s influence provided a theoretical base for students involved in the French general strike of 1968.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Rastafarianism: Movement originating in the West Indies which takes its name from Ras (a term of respect in Africa) Tafari Makonnen (1892-1975) crowned Emperor of Ethiopia with the title Haile Selassie in 1930. Haile Selassie has a mystical role in the cult as has Ethiopia itself: as the one part of African that was never colonized, it is seen as the spiritual home of the black man. Life in the West Indies or in Britain is seen as time in Babylon by analogy with the sufferings of the Israelites as slaves in exile.”
Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.
“experiential learning: Learning based on experiences, rather than lectures or reading. Experiential learning, also referred to as hands-on learning, can be especially helpful to students with a learning disability since it allows them to learn without being hindered by difficulties in reading or writing. An experiential approach to education and learning is based on the belief that students are more motivated and will remember concepts better when they have a direct physical experience.
Experiential learning also may have a strong basis in the nature of memory, especially for individuals with learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders. For many students, learning techniques that incorporate sight and touch are much easier for them to remember and retrieve. Evidence suggests that many individuals with learning disabilities or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have a hard time remembering concepts, rules, and verbal information (semantic memory), while finding it much easier to remember events, people, places, and experience (episodic memory).
To some degree, experiential learning activities may provide a means of bridging those two basic forms of memory, and for enabling individuals to use strengths in one area to compensate in one area for weaknesses in another.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“What is the difference between a folio and a quarto? An octavo and a duodecimo? All of these terms refer to book sizes. In the first centuries of printing, book pages were of a standard size—13½ inches by 17 inches. These ‘foolscap’ sheets, when folded one or more times, produced a ‘signature,’ a section that was bound with other signatures to produce the book. A folio was a signature of two leaves, a quarto four leaves, an octavo eight leaves, and a duodecimo twelve leaves.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“Rhetorical Question: A question that expects no answer. The answer may be self-evident (If she doesn’t like me why should I care what she thinks?) or immediately provided by the questioner (What should be done? Well, first we should…). The question is often asked for dramatic effect. Rhetorical questions are sometimes announced with such a phrase as I ask you (when nothing is in fact being asked): ‘Garn! I ask you, what kind of a word is that? / It’s Ow and Garn that keep her in her place / Not her wretched clothes and dirty face’ (Alan Jay Lerner, My Fair Lady, 1956).”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“Pastiche (noun): A literary work that draws on styles, formats, etch., of other sources and thus is eclectic and derivative, and often whimsical or irreverent (but not with humor as a primary intent); book or story made up of borrowings from other writers; hodgepodge; stylistic imitation of a writer at work; parody. Noun: pasticheur.
‘His novels were pastiches of work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him.’
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
Posted in English Language Arts, Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, term of art
Here’s a Cultural Literacy worksheet on the “act of god” as a legal concept. Since there is a pretty good chance that your students will purchase insurance some time in their lives, this is a term–and concept–they definitely should know.
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.
“etymology: The study of the historical relation between a word and the earlier from or forms from which it has, or has hypothetically, developed. Thus the etymology of sheep relates it, with German Schaf and others, to a reconstructed Common Germanic skoepa; that of street relates it, through Old English straet, to a borrowing into Germanic of Latin (via) strata ‘paved road.’
Loosely described as a study of the ‘origins of words’; but any form may have an earlier prehistory, over many thousands of years, of which we can know nothing.”
Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
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