The responses to yesterday’s “Commonplace Book” post prompts me to list here ten favorite lines from children’s literature. (And please see yesterday’s post for quotations from Crockett Johnson and Dr. Seuss, and yesterday’s comments for great lines from E. B. White and Louis Sachar.) To get very far he was going to need a lot…
People once kept commonplace books – personal, portable anthologies of favorite quotations. Today, the “Favorite Quotations” section on Facebook offers a brief, public version of the commonplace book. This practice has, I think, mostly faded. At any rate, here are ten quotations that would be in my commonplace book. But, luckily, he kept his wits and…
If you’ve not already seen Matt Rogers‘ brilliant kinetic typography video of Stephen Fry‘s critique of linguistic pedantry, then you’ll want to watch it. Â And if you have already seen it, then you’ll want to watch it again. Before my fellow teachers raise an objection to Stephen Fry’s injunction that writers be less constrained by…
How many people have lent their names to a speech act? I’m not thinking of proper nouns that denote a literary style (Dickensian, Kafkaesque, Proustian), but of a specific syntactical, grammatical, or other linguistic act named for a person. This is what I’ve come up with. Bowdlerize: named for Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825), who in who…
