Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the pani...
One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: I don’t know why I am telling you all of this. It’s none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the j...
In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.
One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers, he replied, archly. I find, however, that you have been looking for them.
I am a nobody. ... Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.
Or of oats ( a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people),
It was an idea consonant with Trench’s underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the no...
No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be a...
2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.
In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, sp...
They were a formidable group—the college dean, Henry Liddell (whose daughter Alice had so captivated the Christ Church mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson that he wrote an adventure book for her, s...
They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today's middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries... a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that wa...
Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.
The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands’ lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves.
Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their numb...
Without haste, without fear, we conquer the world.
Is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind working without a single work of lexicographical reference beside him, other than Mr. Cooper’s crib (which Mrs. Cooper once threw into the fire, prom...
Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to ‘fix our language forever’—no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capaci...
The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven c...
Americans
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