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| Favorite Trivia – LANGUAGE & COMMUNICATION
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| “I bought a self-learning record to learn Spanish. I turned it on and went to sleep; the record got stuck. The next day, I could only stutter in Spanish.”
Steven Wright (That’s Really Funny) |
| “… as to metaphorical expression, that is a great excellence in style, when it is used with propriety, for it gives you two ideas for one.”
James Boswell |
| “We used to think that words were cheap & weak. Now I don’t know of anything so mighty. There are some to which I lift my hat when I see them sitting princelike among their peers on the page. Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire.”
Emily Dickinson in a letter to a friend |
| “If your lips would keep from slips Five things observe with care: To whom you speak, of whom you speak, And how, and when, and where.” Anonymous – Five Thousand Quotations For All Occasions, ed. by Lewis C. Henry |
| “Treat words as if they were diamonds and scatter them sparingly.”
Ann Landers |
| FUBAR – Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition – military acronym |
| “I do not know any famous chef, though I have discussed cooking with many cooks, paid and unpaid, and with as many of my fellow-feeders as I could induce to unburden themselves on such an essentially sociable topic. When other people talk about art and literature at dinner parties, of which I know as little as they do, I seek to lure my hostesses, or some guests of auspicious demeanour, into confiding in me the secrets of their tables, their paramount gastric passions, or their yet unsatisfied alimentary longings.”
P. Morton Shand – A Book of Food |
| “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
Rudyard Kipling |
| “If you don’t see it with your eyes, don’t invent it with your mouth.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
| FUBB – Fouled [Fucked] Up Beyond Belief – Pentagonese
Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: Defiant Definitive Put-Downs – Leonard Louis Levinson |
| SNAFU – Situation Normal, All Fucked Up – military acronym
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| The Letter ‘W’ is the only letter of the alphabet with more than one syllable. |
| “It is ten times harder to command the ear than to catch the eye.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
| “Yiddish, a tongue that never takes its tongue out of its cheek.”
Leo Rosten |
| “. . . his [Prince Charles] expertise at small talk is flawless. He understands the definition of manners as the ability to put someone else at their ease.”
Tina Brown – The Diana Chronicles |
| “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, figures pedantical.” Love’s Labour’s Lost – Shakespeare |
| “Language is an Inventor’s privilege.”
Sterling D. Plumpp |
| “A misadventure (not typical but useful for illustration) which exemplifies the harmful effects of language and cultural barriers during the [1918] pandemic took place at New York City’s Municipal Lodging House. Twenty-five Chinese sailors, ill with [Spanish] flu, were brought directly from their ship to the lodging house, which had been turned into an emergency hospital. There they found themselves among white-cloaked, white-masked, white people who spoke no Chinese. The only interpreter present could not make the sailors understand and, afraid of infection himself, fled. The sailors refused to take off their clothing for fear of robbery and refused to eat for fear of poison. Seventeen of 25 died.”
America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 [2nd edition, 2003] – Alfred W. Crosby |
| “Words owe their glory, their ugly bristliness, to the fact that they inhabit more than one world. Physical things, formed by the breath, uttered by the mouth, heard by the ear, set down by the fingers, seen by the eyes, they always represent things other than themselves. They are signs, but unlike other signs, each points in several directions and functions in various ways. The fire of immediate feeling, thought’s lightning illumination, are among their properties . . . Words realize the qualities of an experience intimately known that is yet, without them, inapprehensible.”
Babette Deutsch – Poetry Handbook |
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“I am young enough to learn languages by living and not the artificial acceleration or plodding of ‘book’ courses. I want people opposite me at tables, at desks, not merely books.” [February 11, 1955]
Sylvia Plath – Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. by Aurelia Schober Plath |
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“A conversationalist must not exclude others from conversation at the dinner table, as if it were his own possession, but he ought to regard mutual interchange of ideas to be the rule in conversation as in other things.” [De Officiis., I, 37.]
Cicero
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| “The figurative meaning of a metaphor is the literal meaning of the corresponding simile. Thus ‘Christ was a chronometer’ in its figurative sense is synonymous with ‘Christ was like a chronometer.'”
Donald Davidson – “What Metaphors Mean” (On Metaphor) |
| “The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.”
David Baird – A Thousand Paths to Enlightenment |
| “Like Erasmus, Montaigne was an aphorism collector and he found a novel way to display his favorites. On the bare wooden beams of the ceiling, he inscribed fifty-four aphorisms from classical and early Christian authors like Euripedes, Lucretius, St. Paul, Pliny, Socrates, and Sophocles, among others. These Latin and Greek inscriptions are still legible in Montaigne’s study, though they were written there more than four hundred years ago.”
Geary – The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism |
| “There is a law of human nature—let us call it the Confidant’s Law—that dictates that no secret is ever told to only one person; there is always at least one other person to whom we feel compelled to spill the beans.”
Janet Malcolm – The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes |
| “Oh, he’s a wondrous talker, and has the power To tell you nothing hour after hour: If, by mistake, he ever came to the point, The shock would put his jawbone out of joint.” The Misanthrope – Molière (trans. by Richard Wilbur) |
| “After a climax of verbal inebriation they would relapse into heavy silence.”
Flaubert – Sentimental Education |
| Joke: “A child comes home from school and says to his parents ‘I learned a new word at school today. I bet you can’t surmise what it is. I’ll give you three surmises.'”
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| “… a metaphor may be seen as a model for changing our way of looking at things, of perceiving the world.”
Paul Ricoeur – “The Metaphorical Process” (On Metaphor) |
| “Everywhere, it seemed, was cheerfulness, gaiety, and delight in wit and the right word, even if it was only two coach-drivers arguing about the other’s impossible driving. They were all so quick to find the most expressive insult to fit the occasion. The apt word! It meant everything to the French, it added to the clarity of life. They seldom seemed mixed up about what their thoughts and emotions were.”
Nancy Hale – Mary Cassatt |
| “I shall now proceed to enumerate the five principal sources, as we may call them, from which almost all sublimity is derived, assuming, of course, the preliminary gift on which all these five sources depend, namely, command of language. The first and the most important is grandeur of thought. The second is a vigorous and spirited treatment of the passions.The third is a certain artifice in the employment of figures, which are of two kinds, figures of thought and figures of speech.
The fourth is dignified expression, which is sub-divided into (a) the proper choice of words, and (b) the use of metaphors and other ornaments of diction. The fifth cause of sublimity, which embraces all those preceding, is majesty and elevation of structure.” On The Sublime – Longinus |
| Helen Keller’s first spoken word: “Water” |
| Dotting one’s i’s: proverb implying extreme exactness, derived from the early 16th c. when the more precise copyists began dotting the i to avoid two consecutive i’s being mistaken for a u. |
| “We do not dismiss or reject a metaphor as simply a false statement for we recognize it as a metaphor and know as [Donald] Davidson suggests that it alludes to something else that we might wish to notice. It preempts our attention and propels us on a quest for the underlying truth. We are launched into a creative, inventive, pleasurable act. . . to invent is to understand. For the hearer or reader of a metaphor to detect, by himself, the nature of the error and to invent his own (conjectural) version of the truth entails understanding and achievement and thus pleasure.”
Don R. Swanson – “Afterthoughts” (On Metaphor) |
| “As Ortega [y Gasset] grants, the predominant use of poetic metaphor has been to exalt the real object, ‘to embellish and to throw into relief beloved reality.'”
Karten Harries – “Metaphor and Transcendence” (On Metaphor) |
| “Be aware of the history of the English language—know at least roughly how it evolved before the Norman Conquest, and how it continued to evolve afterward. Why is the Norman Conquest so important? In 1066, the Norman French conquered England and imposed upon the conquered peoples the language of Norman French, which was a Latinate language, a language descended from the particular form of Latin (what we call Vulgar Latin) spoken in France by the invading and occupying Romans. The Norman French imposed their language on the existing language, which was Old English, a West Germanic language . . .
Lydia Davis – Essays One |
| “. . . words actually enable us to have consciousness of the phenomena they name: that we don’t fully experience something until we have a word for it. What I’m suggesting is that the more refined or elaborate or concentrated the word, the more refined or elaborate or concentrated the experience. And, so, why wouldn’t it follow that if we have a magical or sublime grouping of words, we’ll be let into the secret magic or sublimity of what might otherwise have passed us by as an ordinary minute.”
Jacqueline Osherow – Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life, eds: Bryan and Olsen |
| “Speech has been given to man to conceal his thoughts.”
Moliére |
| “. . . so metaphor presents unity and diversity simultaneously, pointing out similarity and at the same time adding diversity.”
J.G. Jennings – An Essay on Metaphor in Poetry |
| Personification as metaphor: “As in autumn the leaves lift themselves off one after the other, until the branch sees on the earth all its spoils.”
Dante’s Inferno (J.G. Jennings – An Essay on Metaphor in Poetry) |
| “As the surrealist Andre Breton argued [Manifesto of Surrealism], even the most commonplace conversation, an exchange of the simplest sentences, is a work of art—not in the sense of being an object of consistent form and interpretation . . . but in the sense that a conversation is a unique, spontaneous sequence of expressive utterances . . .”
Richard Shiff – “Art and Life: A Metaphoric Relationship” (On Metaphor) |
| “The first printing press in England had arrived in 1476. Over the ensuing two centuries, the spread of more presses had driven a dramatic increase in literacy. By 1600, about half of England’s urban population could read and write, and the percentage only continued to rise. Printing, by its very nature, placed more binding demands on language. Surely and steadily, it helped transform what had been an oral culture into a written one and forced writers, punsters included, to commit to a single spelling before the type was set.”
John Pollack – The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More Than Some Antics |
| “. . . with a nice taste and care in weaving words together, you will express yourself most happily, if a skillful setting makes a familiar word new . . . And why should I begrudge the right of adding, if I can, my little fund, when the tongue of Cato and of Ennius has enriched our mother-speech and brought to light new terms for things? It has ever been, and ever will be, permitted to issue words stamped with the mint-mark of the day. As forests change their leaves with each year’s decline, and the earliest drop off: so with words, the old race dies, and, like the young of human kind, the new-born bloom and thrive. We are doomed to death—we and all things ours . . .” [Ars Poetica]
Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. by H. Ruston Fairclough |
| “The English verb ‘to burke’ is derived from the practices of a famous felon of Edinburgh, one William Burke, well-hanged in 1829. Burke began as a corpse-snatcher for a medical school, and when newly buried corpses were unprocurable, or when it became too dangerous to steal them from the guarded graveyards, he simplified matters by making his corpses to order. As a result of its derivation the word ‘to burke’ means, in its fully extended sense, ‘to smother a victim by pinching his nose between the fingers while pressing the butt of the palm against his mouth in such a way as to produce a corpse with no visible signs of violence and therefore readily saleable to a medical school.’ It must be obvious without further investigation that there is a small chance of finding any word in any other language that has exactly the same dramatization as ‘to burke.'”
John Ciardi – How Does A Poem Mean? |
| “Macauley when only 4 years old [was an] omnivorous reader, used book language in his childish conversations. When 5 years old, [a] lady spilled some hot coffee on his legs. After a while she asked him if he was better. He replied ‘Madam the agony has abated.’ Macauley’s mother must have built his mind several years before his body.” [July 12, 1885]
The Diary of Thomas Alva Edison |
