Winona Ryder as Abigail
...a new book offers rich pastures for even those with the gift of the gab. In its pages, office underlings can find fresh terms of abuse for their overlords, disgruntled husbands will discover new words to describe the mother-in-law and the wag in the pub need never be silenced again.Read on...There are gems such as a seagull used to describe the kind of manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps over everything and then leaves, or a shubie, one of those sorry souls who buys all the latest surfing gear but doesn't surf.
The Wonder of Whiffling, which is published today, takes readers on a delightful tour of the extraordinary words in the English language, from ancient and now disused words to trailer park slang. Its chapters include rarely used terms such crambazzled -- to be aged prematurely through drink -- to words we have sadly lost from everyday use such as mushfaker -- someone who repairs umbrellas -- and stadge -- the date of issue stamped on a coin....
The book helps to keep wordsmiths up-to-date with the latest editions to the language, such as ham, used to describe legitimate email, as opposed to spam and popular textonyms, the name given to predictive text software coming up with the wrong word, such as 'book for cool', 'carnage for barmaid' and 'poisoned for Smirnoff'.
Lee's surrender at Appomattox -- historic or historical?The surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox is a historic event.One source I found offers a helpful mnemonic device: “it ‘al’ happened in the past.” (By the way, a mnemonic device is one that aids the memory.)
What people were doing around the courthouse may be of some historical interest.
Mather's Old North Church, BostonCotton Mather, the minister of Boston's Old North church, was a true believer in witchcraft. In 1688, he had investigated the strange behavior of four children of a Boston mason named John Goodwin. The children had been complaining of sudden pains and crying out together in chorus. He concluded that witchcraft, specifically that practiced by an Irish washerwoman named Mary Glover, was responsible for the children's problems. He presented his findings and conclusions in one of the best known of his 382 works, "Memorable Providences." Mather's experience caused him to vow that to "never use but one grain of patience with any man that shall go to impose upon me a Denial of Devils, or of Witches."
Mather's Old North Church, interior
As it happened, three of the five judges appointed to the court of oyer and terminer that would hear the Salem witchcraft trials were friends of Mather and members of his church. Mather wrote a letter to one of the three judges, John Richards, suggesting how they might approach evidentiary issues at the upcoming trials. In particular, Mather urged the judges to consider spectral evidence, giving it such weight as"it will bear," and to consider the confessions of witches the best evidence of all. As the trials progressed, and growing numbers of person confessed to being witches, Mather became firmly convinced that "an Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place which is our center."
Map of Salem, 1692Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive
Includes historical maps, trial transcripts, original trial documents, biographies of notable people, etc.
Famous American Trials, Salem 1692
Includes loads of documents about the accusations, the trials, and the evidence as well as extensive background information about Salem and a history of witchcraft persecutions prior to Salem
The Cotton Mather Home Page
About all things Cotton Mather -- writings, biographies, pictures
Fire and Ice: On Puritanism
Puritan writings, history, and biographies
Time and the supernatural are also at the center of her new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” an entertaining but not terribly resonant ghost story about two generations of twins, which like all ghost stories, addresses the hold that time past exerts over time present.
Whereas “The Time Traveler’s Wife” simply used the premise of time travel as a device to look at a couple’s efforts to sustain their love through all sorts of trials and tribulations, “Symmetry” buys into the literary and cinematic ghost story genre whole hog, embracing all of its best-known traditions, no matter how hokey or contrived. The novel’s got a haunted house (well, a haunted apartment), a creepy cemetery, a family with a bizarre secret in its past and two naïve young women at the mercy of unearthly forces. True to form, the familiar daylight world of contemporary life is penetrated by a spirit from the great beyond, while the obvious Freudian implications of haunting and being haunted are dutifully explicated and explored.
With “Symmetry,” Ms. Niffenegger has streamlined her storytelling to the point of slickness. This novel charges ahead in a much more straightforward manner than “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” creating suspense through its formulaic adherence to old genre conventions. Although the reader is pleasantly carried along by the author’s ability to create credible characters and her instinctive narrative gifts, the novel lacks the emotional depth of its predecessor; none of the relationships in this novel have the intensity or poignancy of Clare and Henry’s liaison in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” What’s more, the psychological underpinnings of a crucial decision made by one of this novel’s heroines are fuzzy and unpersuasive — a fundamental flaw that undermines the cogency of the overall story.
"Hold the bilious termagant's arms akimbo, urchin, or the shad virago will addle my galligaskins."That sentence counts for 8 vocabulary words. I'm sure you can beat that.
Hardscrabble: (adj.) Earning a bare subsistence, as on the land; yielding little by great labor, marginal: the sharecropper's hardscrabble life; meager, meagerly, meagre, scrimpy, stingyI remember it being green and humid, nothing like this hardscrabble land.-- Elmore Leonard, Cuba LibreMost inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising.-- Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.A scenic town fed by rich snowbirds who reside a few months a year in gated communities, High Balsam also is home to the hardscrabble residents who frequent Margaret's food-pantry giveaways.-- Deirdre Donahue, "A sweet 'Evensong", USA Today, December 2, 1999
First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.
"Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue.
If you want to book a particular room in a hotel and you find that the room is already booked, the hotel could offer you alternative accommodation.
If a shop is not open every day but say on Monday/Wednesday/Friday, you would say it was open alternate days in the week.
Soviet agitprop poster circa World War II
Adapted from folklore and folk ballad, the motif ususally runs something like this: a young man, on the verge of being married to his true love, dies suddenly, but returns from the grave to claim his bride, who typically has "betrayed" him by marrying another man. There are lots of variations on this basic idea, including the betrayal of the woman by the man, among others. A number of Gothic-tradition writers have turned their hand to this theme. It carries the dramatic power of a romance tale, of course — love beyond the grave, love gone bad, all that sort of thing — but also has the capacity to engage issues of gender dynamics, of the balance of cultural power between men and women.Here's a list of "spectre bride/groom" works:
William Harrison Ainsworth (attributed), "The Spectre Bride"
Göttfried Bürger, "Lenore"
F. Marion Crawford, Man Overboard!
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Wedding Knell"
William Hunt, "The Spectre Bridegroom"See the note to "The Suffolk Miracle" ballad, below.Washington Irving, "The Spectre Bridegroom"
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter"
Jack London, "Even Unto Death" and "Flush of Gold"The latter is an expanded version of the former.Matthew Lewis, "Alonso the Brave and the Fair Imogene"One of the poems from Lewis' famed Gothic novel The Monk.Charles Maturin, "Leixlip Castle"
E. Nesbit, "John Charrington's Wedding"
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "That Never Was on Sea or Land"
Edith Wharton, "Bewitched"
Sarah Wilkinson, "The Midnight Embrace"
In reading through "The Spectre Bridegroom" did you wonder exactly what Odenwald means and what it is? Did you look it up? Here are some clues:First, oden means odes (as in sagas) and wald means forest; thus odenwald means forest of sagas. That's significant because the Odenwald is a place filled with many traditional German legends, particularly ghost stories. Irving's choice of setting is not incidental.
The Odenwald is located in southwestern Germany.The northern and western Odenwald belong to southern Hesse, with the south stretching into Baden. In the northeast, a small part lies in Lower Franconia in Bavaria. People from Hesse, of course, are called Hessians. The Hessians rented out mercenaries to the English to fight the American rebels in the American Revolutionary War. You will recall that the Headless Horseman of legend was a Hessian soldier.
There aren't many titles of novels that actually become "catch phrases" or popular idioms, but Joesph Heller's Catch-22 is one of them. Americans use the phrase Catch-22 to indicate a situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently illogical rules or conditions. It is a no-win dilemma or paradox. Here's the most famous Catch-22: You can't get a job without experience, but you can't get experience unless you have a job--it's Catch-22.
Ichabod Crane: "The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield."Watch the animated clip of Brom Bones telling the story of the legendary headless horseman at the Van Tassel estate. Does Ichabod seem like an eligible bachelor?
Brom Bones: "The most formidable was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation, Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood. He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff but not unpleasant countenance, having a mingled air of fun and arrogance. From his Herculean frame and great powers of limb he had received the nickname of BROM BONES, by which he was universally known. He was famed for great knowledge and skill in horsemanship, being as dexterous on horseback as a Tartar. He was foremost at all races and cock fights; and, with the ascendancy which bodily strength always acquires in rustic life, was the umpire in all disputes, setting his hat on one side, and giving his decisions with an air and tone that admitted of no gainsay or appeal. He was always ready for either a fight or a frolic; but had more mischief than ill-will in his composition; and with all his overbearing roughness, there was a strong dash of waggish good humor at bottom."
