Orwell ends his introduction to Animal Farm with: In our country … it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that fact that I…
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Transparent: “Paradise has many gates”
Surely we fear from our Lord a stern, distressful day. Therefore Allah win guard them from the evil of that day and cause them to meet with ease and happiness; And reward them, because they were patient, with garden and…
Acker, Acre, Aker, Akyr… A land, a river, a swamp…
The OED lists two meanings for Acker: Acker, n. 1 Etymology: Origin uncertain; perhaps a variant of eagre n. (although this is first attested later; compare the form agar at that entry). In later use English regional (Yorkshire). †1. A strong or turbulent current in the sea; a flood…
Orwell’s Animal Farm: “a statement about human society everywhere and at all times”?
Orwell’s Animal Farm is commonly read as a critique of Stalinism. However, does Orwell critique Stalinism or totalitarianism in general? And, what is more significant, does he tell a cautionary tale of how quickly and easily a power structure might…
John Clare: Love, Old, Day, See, Green, Summer, Flowers, Heart
Find John Clare’s POEMS CHIEFLY FROM MANUSCRIPT in our library. Edmund Blunden, who edited the volume, writes: For the present volume over two thousand poems by Clare have been considered and compared; of which over two-thirds have not been published.…
100s of Words for Ice – a “precious knowledge”
“…focus attention on selected aspects of the world as it is taken to be by other cognitive systems, and provide intricate and highly specialised perspectives from which to view them, crucially involving human interests and concerns even in the simplest…
Almuce, Otototoi, Plutomania, Foolosophy, Cockamamie, Septemfluous
Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin almussa.Etymology: < post-classical Latin almussa, almucia, almucium, amusium, etc. amice n.2 Compare earlier amice n.2 1, aumusse n. A hood, cape, or similar garment made of or lined with grey fur and worn by a member of a religious order (esp. a canon). Cf. amice n.2 1. The exact garment has varied at…
“You make them up? I will never look up a word in the dictionary again!” – In case you thought the dictionary came from God, it was not God, it was an unemployed first year linguist …And how the word F*ck got into Merriam-Webster…
From an interview with Lila Gleitman (an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania; an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children’s learning of their first language): … 19:18: Lila Gleitman: “And you won’t work with me. You will work with –”…