Language & Literature I began this project after I looked one day for a free dictionary of word origins online and found that there was none. So I decided to make one. I hope this map of the wheel-ruts of English will be useful or amusing to a lot of people
Language
From reading to writing. You find a passage that thrills you in print, and another on the same topic that is so dull you need another cup of coffee just to finish it. When you want to write, you have to get clinical with the mother tongue, find out what it does well, what it does poorly, how to make it sing or cry
Old English
The poet Julia Kasdorf wrote somewhere about the Old Order Mennonite community where she was raised, that its dialect only has words enough for farming and gossip. Old English has something of that innocence
To Be
Be, am, is, were -- they're not even the same word, but they mean the same thing. "To be" is the most irregular verb in modern English, as well as the most common. In fact, it is a franken-verb in all the Germanic languages
Thee and Thou
In the Middle Ages, people began to use plural "you" instead of singular "thee," at first as a sign of respect to superiors, then as a courtesy to equals. By the 1600s, the singular forms had come to represent familiarity and lack of status, and fell from use except in the case of a few dialects
Wolf and Werewolf
The Anglo-Saxons, like many old European peoples, seemed to have a double perception of wolves. On the one hand, wolves were feared and hated. On the other hand, the word Wulf is one of the commonest compounds in Anglo-Saxon names. The wolf, it seems, held esteem for ferocity and courage.
How to Insult a Viking
Insulting a Viking is easy: Vikings, like 14-year-old boys, almost always used sexual put-downs. But beware of the consequences.
Literature
"Ulysses" is a secular Dante, an ordered view of a disorderly world In its final paragraphs it rises to spiritual ecstasy. Even the minor characters are tasty, and the funny bits are hilarious. Who wouldn't want to go get all liquored up with "stately, plump Buck Mulligan"?
Poetry
Take Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "powerful emotion recollected in solitude," or Frost's tighter version, "enthusiasm tamed by metaphor," and you see that form, or at least the awareness of it, is half of what allows poetry to be poetry. It is the magic ritual that allows us to approach the most terrifying aspects of our selves and our lives
Ezra Pound
I confess that the poet I find most moving, brilliant and technically perfect is Ezra Pound. The "Cantos" were the most ambitious poetic project undertaken by one person in about 500 years, and they're probably an ambitious failure. But within them is great poetry, once you pick it out from the bad history and worse economic theory
Robert Graves
Books don't get much more eccentric and idiosyncratic than Robert Graves' "Greek Myths" and his wider-ranging "The White Goddess"
Ancient Greece
The first attempt to teach me Greek mythology came in 7th grade, under the sour, rigid tutelage of a teacher who had such distaste for the ribald gods and goddesses that she mashed the juice out of them and served them to us in a dry-as-dust Edith Hamilton lesson
Favorite Poems
In high school, my friend Peter and I were intensely romantic and intensely shy. We sat in my room or in his room after school, and listened to Beatles albums and read poetry
J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien was a man of faith, a devout Catholic. He meant "Lord of the Rings" to tell a story that was essentially Christian. But whatever his personal faith, as a scholar Tolkien was deeply immersed in the pessimistic, pagan world that he studied and taught every day. And his book, whatever his intention, is rooted in the world of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Origin of Zero
The daunting realization, for heirs of "Western Civilization," is that the Greek and Roman cultures we revere were benighted mathematically, plodding along in the most primitive of number systems while India made the great discovery
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