I want to praise a book—A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler—but I cannot at this moment find the right words to do justice to the object of my admiration.
Instead, I’ll give an example of what I admire (which incidentally confirms and elucidates one of my long and vehemently held beliefs):
try. The idiom [...]
Archive for the ‘conjunctions’ Category
try and understand me …
Posted in H.W. Fowler, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, dialogue, eccentric, indirect discourse, language, latin, letters, wit on April 9, 2009 | 2 Comments »
and the winners are …
Posted in anyone, conjunctions, cosmos, eccentric, exceptions, mania, necessity, nooks, novel, pretentious, raffle, the grackle on April 6, 2009 | 8 Comments »
Izzy P will receive the complete (to date) three volumes of the Grub Street Grackle!
Tomas will receive a subscription!
Kateri, Melissa A, and Becca will each receive their choice of any issue of the Grackle (past, present, or future)!
I will send the Grackles to you or a friend of your choice. Skreak about it! Be a [...]
My Aim
Posted in God, Socrates, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, cosmos, dialogue, greek, history, language, logic, love? on April 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In his beautiful reflection on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition given at Regensburg Pope Benedict affirms the “profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the Biblical understanding of faith in God.” He points to this “profound harmony” at work in the beginning of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning [...]
something I wrote for my Lucretius class
Posted in Aphrodite, God, Homer, Lucretius, Venus, anyone, beginnings, conjunctions, fate, greek, history, ladies, language, latin, love?, sailing, sun, traffic, voluptas, water, wind on February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
y calling Venus “Aeneadae genetrix” Lucretius both accepts a mythic inheritance and returns it to his reader strangely transformed. The phrase focuses our attention on the overwhelming nearness of Aphrodite to Anchises that produced Aeneas, and seeks to extend the brilliance and force of that strange and momentary relationship of the human and divine – “hominum divumque voluptas” – over the begetting of each of the Aeneadae. But, by an odd sort of logic, the poet’s extending her particular role in the birth of Aeneas over the births of men in general, Venus herself, the brilliant, dissembling, shame-faced goddess who shines in the Homeric hymn is allowed to recede farther from our sphere. The intimacy of Aphrodite’s union with Anchises is evoked mutedly here only to release her from it into the more general and metaphorical motherhood that befits the respectful distance Lucretius grants the gods. By “pluralizing” this union, this highest pleasure of men and gods – “hominum divumque,” Lucretius prepares us to let that “and” assume a more disjunctive and subdued force, in contrast to the conjoining violence at the meeting-point of gods and men which is the center of the Homeric cosmos.
