In a few days, we will enter the golden gates of National Poetry Month. “There’s no money in poetry,” quoth poet laureate Robert Graves, “but there’s also no poetry in money.” While it is true that rhyme doesn’t pay, poets gain a foothold on eternity through their poems, and that luminous immortality outshines the evanescent […]
Americans have fallen deeply in love with that beguiling conspiracy of light and darkness and color and silence and sound and music that we call the movies. Film megastar Matt Damon says it this way: “Movies are one of the few things that bind us, that allow people to experience the same dreams and memories […]
DEAR RICHARD: In a recent edition of the Union-Tribune, I read the following sentence: “Santee leaders passed an ordinance banning children under age 12 from riding e-bikes in December.” Why only in December? – James Huizenga, Clairemont James Huizenga offers a spot-on example of what happens when one’s modifiers go south — or north or […]
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of our national birth certificate and mission statement, half my columns this year will be about the great American adventure. National symbols are objects or ideas that become a shared language among the people of a nation. Such structures act to remind Americans of our history and point us to the […]
Many mean things have been said about politicians. They have even been skewered by a fanciful etymology for the word politics: poly, as in polygon, polygamy, polyglot, and polytheistic, means “many” — and ticks, well, ticks are blood-sucking parasites! Have you heard that they’re now replacing laboratory rats with politicians? First, there is a shortage […]
Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) generally gets credit for finding America. In grade school, many of us learned this ditty: In fourteen hundred ninety two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. And he did. On his first voyage, he sighted the Bahamas and made land on Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). On three subsequent voyages (1493, […]
The year 2026 marks the 250 th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — our national birth certificate and mission statement. Throughout 2026, half of my “Lederer on Language” columns will be about American history, starting with this one. Over the course of this year, I hope that my new series will lead you to […]
According to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, while both male and female reindeer grow antlers in the summer, males shed their antlers in the beginning of winter. Females, on the other hoof, keep their antlers until spring. This means that all of Santa Claus’s reindeer on Christmas Eve must be female. We should […]
Here’s a little finger exercise. Make a circle with the fingers on your left hand by touching the tip of your index finger to the tip of your thumb. Now poke your head through that circle. If you unsuccessfully tried to fit your head through the small digital circle, you thought that the phrase “poke […]
Thanksgiving Day is mainly a celebration of the harvest, giving thanks for bountiful crops. Traditionally, a particular meal in 1621 is thought to be the first Thanksgiving. Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians sat down together to an autumn feast of venison and wild fowl. On November 26, 1789, George Washington established the first national celebration […]