Category Archives: language

More Words of the Year

December 16, 2005
A recent check of the big list of 2005 lists at fimoculous.com revealed a number of new word lists popping up around the web. Here are a few of my favorites…
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Take a Stanza – Happiness

December 11, 2005
This little poetry feature of mine is long overdue, so here are two stanzas from a four-stanza poem by Jane Kenyon. That’s right–two for the price of one…
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2005 Word of the Year: Podcast

December 7, 2005
It’s time once again for the word of the year, this time brought to you by the New Oxford American Dictionary. As you may recall, last year’s top word, according to Merriam-Webster, was “blog.” Now we have “Podcast,” a technology popularized by blogs…
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Word of the Day Turns One

September 25, 2005
A year ago a new section of my website, the English Rules Word of the Day, was born. I started it after chatting with a couple friends at work about words and bemoaning the lack of inspiration in the words … Continue reading →
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Gilead

August 30, 2005
I finished reading Marilynn Robinson’s novel Gilead over a month ago, the same day that I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Since then I’ve been on a hiatus from reading fiction, though I’m not sure why. Either Harry Potter cast a spell on me or the melancholy beauty of Gilead lulled me into a contented stupor. All I know is that I was on a fiction-reading binge for months, and it felt good. Now other responsbilities are squeezing me a bit. I’m not even managing to keep up with all the New Yorker issues that keep streaming in through my mail slot…
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Take a Stanza – Musee des Beaux Arts

July 1, 2005
It’s time once again for the monthly stanza. This one appears at the end of a poem by W. H. Auden, one of the great 20th century poets. Some of you may remember the Auden poem that the Scottish chap read for his dead friend in Four Weddings and a Funeral. This is a different poem…
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An Odd Relationship with Words

June 6, 2005
Jose Saramago’s writing is so peculiar that three weeks after I finished reading his latest novel, The Double, I’m still baffled by how he pulls it off. It wasn’t just the long, sinuous sentences or the simultaneously disturbing and comical events that teeter on the brink of absurdity, but also the odd voice of the narrator, who most of the time seems omniscient, though never omnipotent, and, at times, almost ineffectual, that made me love this maddening book so much…
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Take a Stanza: Spring and Fall

May 29, 2005
May almost slipped away before I got a chance to post the month’s stanza. This poem, “Spring and Fall,” was written by one of my favorite poets of all time, Gerard Manley Hopkins. A couple of the lines are hard to unpack, and the syntax is a little convoluted in places, but most of the sense of it is pretty straightforward…
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The Problem with Student Evaluations

May 11, 2005
In a blog entry titled “What’s wrong with academia, part two hundred and twenty-four,” the pseudonymous B**ch PhD complains that the student evaluation is typically “the only regular feedback [professors] get on any aspect of our jobs.” Let me tell you, her entry, as well as many of the 110 comments, gave me the willies–because of how much I could identify with the sentiments…
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Words I’ll Probably Never Use in a Sentence

May 9, 2005
There are some words that I may not use because they are too vulgar. Others I try to avoid because they may offend someone (and I try my best never to offend). And then there are those I won’t touch because I don’t have the gravitas that such words require. Here is a small sample of the many words I can’t get away with saying–or couldn’t utter without giggling…
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