In Plain Engel-ish

I appreciate that so many of you have written to say that you especially enjoy those essays where I delve into my childhood and the nostalgia it evokes for your own early years.  I firmly believe that our pasts beat within us like a second heart.  But I am hesitant to write about one particular childhood memory because it is so common to all of us that it seems more of a cliche than a vivid reminiscence. But why not, since who of us does not enjoy that shared memory of the ultimate childhood comfort lunch: tomato soup and a...

Humankind has been celebrating New Year’s Day for at least 4,000 years, the first one being recorded in today’s Iraq. As you’d expect, most ancient civilizations connected it to the first day of spring. It was the perfect symbol of a fresh beginning. The ancient Romans originally followed this plan and even had recognition of wintertime banished, assigning it to a period outside their calendar. But when later Romans decided to add that nearly three-month period of winter back into the calendar year, that made the year eleven weeks longer. New Year’s Day had to be pushed back those eleven...

Since Charles Dickens is my favorite author, I select one novel of his to reread each year, and always begin this delightful task on Christmas Day. We Jews don’t usually receive gifts on Christmas, so I love knowing that I shall be treated to a bulging bag of Santa’s goodies the moment I open any Dickens novel on December 25th. There are more treats for me in any first chapter of Dickens than there are in entire novels by other authors.  This year my Christmas novel will be Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Because Dickens wrote fifteen novels, I have not...

A baby boy was born into a family that desperately wanted a girl, so they simply decided not to name him. Six months later, when parents and baby were staying at a resort, the other vacationers were quite uneasy when cooing over a nameless child, so they convinced the parents to put names they liked into a hat and then ask one of the guests to pull out the winner. They obliged. The name “Win” won—and when the parents didn’t want to go to the trouble of thinking of a middle name, they asked the man who drew the Win-winner...

Before the 1700’s, if you were tried by an English court for a crime you did not commit, and if your lawyer could prove that you were nowhere near the crime scene when the crime was committed, there was a problem. Oh, the problem wasn’t that you couldn’t be acquitted. The problem was with the verbal rigamarole that the judge had to go through before he could decide whether to release you. According to early court transcripts, the judge would ask: “Do you have a valid explanation, that the court would recognize, which proves that it would have been impossible...