Shakespeare
-
Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" — perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say. Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused…
-
"Bottom" is another of the many words that came into my life through the medium of baseball. As soon as I was able to walk and talk, I learned that an inning has both a "top" and a "bottom." "Bottom of the ninth" was an optimistic phrase because there was always the Ebbets Field hope…
-
Many years ago, in what sometimes seems like an earlier life, I taught Shakespeare courses to both young and "mature" students. When we reached Othello, halfway through the semester, I would, of course, point out that the play did not take the traditional form of tragedy– of a great man or king gone awry as in…
-
Here on Walnut Street, we're trying to make more and better use of locatives — words that have long been underemployed and undervalued. We think that the language (and therefore the world) would be richer and more commodious if others would join with us in this endeavor. But we're not evangelizing, heck no! We honor…
-
Is there another common English word that exhibits such varied meanings as "boot?" Or one that has shown such continual transformation during my brief years on the planet? Like much of my early vocabulary, "boot" entered my life through the medium of radio baseball . In my mind's ear, I can hear the voice of…
-
The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos – pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" — "the depressing symptoms… that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home…
-
I'm detecting oxymorons in everything I read. Perhaps I'm even imagining them. Love's Labour's Lost is a "great feast of languages" and also a savory banquet of rhetorical figures. Here are some of the oxymorons (or "cross-couplers," as Puttenham called them) that I came upon in my latest re-reading of the play. Some require explanation.…
-
The oxymoron, a figure of speech in which there is a sharp contradiction between modifier and noun, has become a boon to humorists: "business ethics," "military intelligence," "pretty ugly," "jumbo shrimp," "Christian Science," "Utah Jazz." But it's a figure that has a serious side as well. The oxymoron expresses very well the contradictions inherent in…
-
Sir Smile is a "character," in a way of speaking, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. He's one the play's most fully-realized figures, even though he says no words, doesn't appear on stage, and exists nowhere but in King Leontes' diseased, paranoid fantasy life– and then only for an evanescent second. Truth to tell, Sir Smile…