In Plain Engel-ish

Even now, after living in central North Carolina for almost fifty years, I still don’t take for granted that I have the Atlantic Ocean as an easy drive to the east and the Blue Ridge Mountains an easy drive west. But growing up in central Indiana, I knew early on that seeing oceans or mountains meant a very long haul south. And yet in just a two and a half hour drive, our family could be at the Indiana Dunes State Park on Lake Michigan. And who could tell the difference between this gigantic Great Lake and an ocean, especially...

Now that it’s been six weeks since my adored partner passed away, I find poignant reminders of him in unlikely places throughout our home. Yesterday I opened a drawer and found a small note in his handwriting — which is as precious to me now as if I’d discovered a note in Charles Dickens’ own hand — that simply read “Wound, 2/18/97.” I don’t know how long I spent trying to figure out how he had been wounded twenty-five years ago. And then last night I glanced up from the couch and saw the antique clock we’d purchased during the...

We English professors are besotted with books, of course, but our recent interests have also included how we read them to ourselves. A fairly new subject of study, dubbed “Subvocalization,” has emerged, and theoretical critics have flocked to it, bringing with them what they do best: inventing $50 words for what is basically about $5 worth of content. If we were to define “subvocalization” in a way that professors wouldn’t recognize because of its lack of pretension, it is simply the silent speech that we all make when we read. It provides the sound of the word as we read...

My parents bought me my first fine suit when I was a senior in college. It was for me to wear to my regional interview for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for graduate school. I think when I viewed the suit in the dressing room mirror as I first tried it on, it was the one and only time in my life that I actually ogled myself. Clothes can indeed make the man or, in my case, the nervous twenty-one year old fellowship candidate. I wore that handsome suit only once before the interview to “break it in” at a restaurant...

We all know the spirit of Thanksgiving is one of gratitude; the spirit of Christmas is one of joy; the spirit of New Year’s is one of times past and future. And here we are on the morning after New Year’s Day, and the spirit is: Bummed. From Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, almost all Americans luxuriate in three happy holidays within a mere five weeks. But now we are faced with the coldest eight weeks of the year with only one secular holiday — Valentine’s Day. And although that holiday seems to celebrate the heart (its symbol), it actually...