Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

Also (excluding the refrain):

Because I was afraid to speak
When I was just a lad
My father gave me nose a tweak
And told me I was bad

But then one day I learned a word
That saved me aching nose
The biggest word I ever heard
And this is how it goes

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

If I may take this thread even further from the Jamestown Flood,
the mention of Emily Dickinson gives me an excuse to return to
the subject of English usage.

There's a book I haven't read, by Bill Arnold, called "Emily
Dickinson's Secret Love". One of the reviews at Amazon will
explain to you why no one else should read the book:

'Although the author of this book refers to himself as a
Dickinson scholar and presents the book as a work of Dickinson
scholarship, the presence of a number of spelling, grammatical,
and usage errors, along with numerous stylistic infelicities,
make one wonder what kind of scholar this might be. One would
have expected that someone who engages in literary scholarship
should have a better feel for the language than we see here!
Speaking of Dickinson's mode of dress, Arnold says "...in 1870,
Miss Emily was not a 'purest' about her supposed white attire..."
(P. 38; author's quotation marks). He suggests that certain words
"...are clearly unique symbols adopted between she and
'Master'..." (P. 70). The author writes that Emily Dickinson's
white dress "was emblematic of the bridegroom of Christ..." (p.
36). Decode this sentence: "Or maybe remembrances of things past,
erstwhile Poe's tale about the golden bug and the wise
code-breaker did it" (p. 201). The author, who calls himself a
"professor of English," says of his thesis, "...the proof is in
the pudding, the poems themselves" (p. 41). (The old saw actually
goes, "The proof of the pudding is in the eating.") Throughout
the book, we find the frequent, puzzling, and distracting use of
quotation marks around words, apparently intended as a means of
emphasis, the sort of thing one has come to expect on menus
posted in front of restaurants. Of course, in spite of his
stylistic shortcomings, it is still possible that Arnold could be
correct in his claims, but such poor writing, in a work by one
who calls himself a journalist and professor of English, casts a
shadow of doubt over the whole enterprise.'

James

Also "Gilligan's Island" or "I'd like to Teach the World to Sing".

Brian