Category Archives: language

Take a Stanza – Mother, Summer, I

It’s time once again for a little poetry. Wait! Don’t run and hide! This is a good poem, and it uses simple language, and it isn’t hard to “figure out.” Larkin can be so curmudgeonly at times that he makes Oscar the Grouch look like Sweet Mary Sunshine, but this poem seems to hold something tender beneath its contrary exterior…

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Take a Stanza – Little Gidding

It would be terribly irresponsible of me not to post a little poetry before the month ends. After all, April is National Poetry Month. The presumptive poem of the month is T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” because it starts with these timely lines:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
But I’d like to take us back in the calendar a month or two, back to the “midwinter spring” of Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” the last of his FOUR QUARTETS. . .

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Memory, Autobiography, and The Road Not Taken

By now just about everyone reading this blog has heard about the big scandal involving best-selling author James Frey and his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. In a lengthy expose, The Smoking Gun confirmed what others had suspected: Some events in the book were either creative embellishments or complete fiction–in other words, lies. Since then, Oprah phoned Larry King to defend Frey, after which she invited Frey back on her own show to give him a public spanking. A lot of journalists and

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More Words of the Year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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