Article Results (Showing 1 - 10 of 27) RSS Alert
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Classical blather: trickster treats
Hallowe'en falls neatly on a date equidistant between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice; it is one of four cross-quarter days (1) in the...
Verbatim, 12/22/05 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: wordplay
It is a safe bet that whoever first said that the pen was mightier than the sword was a writer, not a gladiator. The fact remains that swords have...
Verbatim, 09/22/05 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: Words of Power
Readers of a certain age may experience a certain queasy frisson on reading the title of this column, recalling Dr. Wilfred Funk's Six Weeks to...
Verbatim, 06/22/05 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: death's masks
Ah the power of speech. Horses, we are told, respect us because they know we can talk and they can't. (1) With the right words properly delivered...
Verbatim, 03/22/05 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: eons and -eons
"People, look east!" So advised Eleanor Farjeon, in her Familiar Christmas carol. (1) And it is tempting to turn our eyes thither--at least as far...
Verbatim, 12/22/04 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: stuff and nonsense
"Stuff and nonsense!" Thus Alice characterized Wonderland's novel notion of having a sentence first and a verdict afterward. (1) English has a rich...
Verbatim, 09/22/04 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: whatsisnames and thingamajigs
It is an ethnographic commonplace that language discontinuously maps itself onto reality, such that the continuum of all the things we might name...
Verbatim, 06/22/04 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Classical blather: amongst our weaponry
Arma virumque cano: "Arms and the man I sing," begins Vergil's Aeneid, squarely in the middle of a literary tradition whose discourse of weapons...
Verbatim, 03/22/04 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
It's only music, don't be Scherzo
"Recent neuroimaging data," writes Aniruddh Patel, "suggests an overlap in the processing syntactic relations in language and music." (1) Perhaps...
Verbatim, 09/22/03 by Nick Humez · More from publication -
Pants on fire
Though some vices and virtues seem culture-specific, in that a frailty that one society may view with indifference may be considered a serious...
Verbatim, 06/22/03 by Nick Humez · More from publication
