One of the best known of American poems begins: O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done; The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won. In this poem by Walt Whitman, the captain is Abraham Lincoln. As a young man, Lincoln read and re-read the King James Bible, Aesop’s Fables, […]
On the night of June 21, 1932, in Madison Square Garden, Joe Jacobs, the manager for boxer Max Schmeling, heard the judges award a decision to Schmeling’s opponent, Jack Sharkey. Enraged, Jacobs grabbed the announcer’s microphone and shouted to the world, “We was robbed!” Turns out that Jacobs fashioned his patch of rhetorical and […]
Ulysses S. Grant claimed to smoke 7 to 10 cigars a day. When word got out of the president’s love of stogies, people sent him more than ten thousand boxes of cigars. Grant finished his 200,000- word Personal Memoirs only a few days before his death from throat cancer, so he never saw the work […]
This coming Wednesday, we celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. Anyone who has imbibed the experience of Stephen Spielberg’s eloquent film Lincoln knows how Lincoln loved to infuse his statements with jokes that took on elements of parables. Of our 16th president a contemporary wrote, “When Lincoln tells a joke in a fireside group, […]
Because language defines the human experience, we humans naturally wish to trace the act of speech back to its very beginnings. Modern linguists know that humankind was not born with a ready-made language. They contend that our kind, over the course of millennia, evolved language and that our words trembled into birth. Estimates of […]
When the SDSU basketball team summited the mountain of a 20-0 record as the only undefeated team in Division I this season, U-T sports columnist Bryce Miller waxed ecstatic in praise of the Aztecs’ suffocating defense. He went on to applaud the players’ productive offense: “This team, a Frankenstein’s monster of coach Brian Dutcher’s […]
One of the popular items that circulate through the internet is a bubble-off-plumb set of rules along the lines of “Thimk,” “We Never Make Misteaks,” and “Plan Ahe . . .” — injunctions that call attention to the very mistakes they seek to enjoin. I’ve been collecting such items for half a century and, […]
I call apostrophe catastrophes “prepostrophes.” These crimes against civilized punctuation include house signs that read The Smith’s when they should read The Smiths or The Smiths’. Other folks promiscuously throw in an apostrophe before an s at the end of a word that’s a plural, not possessive, as in (gasp!) apple’s. The violators spy […]
A New Year’s resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other. In fact, 80 percent of all New Year’s resolutions are broken by the end of February. May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions. When they drop the ball in Times Square, it’s a nice reminder […]
Late in the last century I was several times a speaker at the Dutch Treat Club, a group of New York writers and artists who met each Tuesday at Sardi’s restaurant. Those convivial gatherings were punctuated with laughter, music and bright conversation. Each time I visited the Dutch Treaters I watched Isaac Asimov, with […]