By the way I also would say “I got a book.” But your teacher and I are not “English teachers” in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English...

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish...

The history of prescriptions about English … is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also...

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art–Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,The moving waters at their priestlike taskOf pure ablution round earth’s...

English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.

I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.

What happened when the Verb asked the noun to conjugate? She said “no-no!”, forgot the “o” and decided to become a nun!

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression ‘killing time.’ It’s a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment,...