What would you do if you opened your front door and saw Dracula, Frankenstein, a ghost, a ghoul, the Hulk, King Kong, a mummy, Quasimodo, a skeleton, a werewolf, a witch and a zombie standing on your steps? Hope it’s Halloween. We human beings are fascinated by monsters. We are somehow drawn to their ugliness. […]
Next Saturday, from 9 am to 4 pm at the Town & Country Hotel in Mission Valley, the U-T will offer its 9th annual Successful Aging Expo. Please explore the special Expo section in tomorrow’s paper. Free and worth every penny, the Expo will feature an aggregation of exhibitors, all-day entertainment and expert speakers on […]
As a former Usage Editor of a major dictionary, I am pleased to present a special usage column designed to whet your appetite — rather than wet your appetite. Great Expectorations! The spelling of the verb is indeed whet because the metaphor here compares the sharpening of a knife on a whetstone to the […]
My recent column, “Here’s How You Can Tell If You Are a True Book Lover,” generated a billowing mail bag of luminous responses, so many that I have had to excerpt those that follow and place additional submissions on my website, www.verbivore.com. I have loved reading books since my wonderful grandmother taught me to […]
William Shakespeare is alive and well and living robustly in America’s Finest City. On Monday, October 8, starting at 7:30 pm, the San Diego Shakespeare Society will present its 17th Annual Celebrity Sonnets. Through readings, comedy, music, song and dance, local celebrities and performers will dramatize sonnets to a Bard-loving audience. The venue is […]
Here are readers’ statements about books. The August 25 Union-Tribune Festival of Books, set in Liberty Station attracted between 15,000 and 20,000 book lovers. No surprise there, as San Diego is routinely ranked by Amazon among the nation’s Most Well Read Cities. What may surprise you is that reading books helps us to live […]
DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: Regarding your recent column about language bias against women, I will be delighted when the Museum of Man is called something else! –Marilyn Riley Me too. After 70 years of service, the San Diego Museum of Man is looking for a new name. Through a survey the museum is asking people […]
In early September each year, Americans celebrate National Grandparents Day, to honor the many contributions that grandmothers and grandfathers make to humanity. It was about 30,000 years ago that grandparents were invented. That’s when homo sapiens started living long enough to see their children have children and could thus educate their grandkids about the […]
In bygone days, an essential part of a wandering peddlers’ business was the buying and selling of old gold. To test the value of gold, the peddler would file a shallow groove in that item and touch it with nitric acid. Color reactions from the acid would reveal the approximate gold content.. This procedure […]
I, Richard Henry Lederer (which means “powerful estate ruler leather worker”), will bet the farm, my bippie, and my bottom dollar that you, valued reader, have a name. I’m confident about that assertion because almost all human beings do. In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution titled Rights of the Child, […]