In Plain Engel-ish

In Case you’re wondering about my topic for this Christmas-Chanukah week, I’d like to make the Case for writing about something not necessarily related to the holidays. Having carefully Cased out a number of potential subjects, I decided to go with a unique one, just in Case you wanted something a little different. Yes, astute readers, you probably already know that my topic is about A Case. No, not A Depressing Homicide Case nor even A Refreshing Case of Beer. And this English professor would never let himself be accused of writing about the grammatical nominative or accusative cases during...

I was in elementary school, junior and senior high school, and even college during the 1960’s. And so my exams back then contained a mixture of four types of questions: True or False, Fill In The Blank, Multiple Choice, and Essay. Most students preferred True or False — heck, why not, with the cushy 50% odds of guessing right?  Not me. I could too easily outwit myself by over-thinking the stupid statement, seeing tricks where there were none, dissecting the ambiguous sentence until I was sure it was probably True but then again just possibly False. I knew I was...

Many of us are about to sit down for our most traditional meal of the year: turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie. Substitutes are frowned upon on Thanksgiving. And so, this morning I would like to write about that other traditional American meal in which substitutes are “verboten”: The Blue Plate Special. I was introduced to this American institution at about the age of nine. I was “helping” my father at his Midwestern Hosiery Company one Saturday morning. Well, in actuality Mom had deposited me there so she could attend a lengthy ladies’ luncheon. When lunchtime finally came,...

Teaching poetic techniques is such a challenge. By college, most students know about “alliteration” and “assonance” and have filed that knowledge away in the “Never Ever Going To Use This” part of their brains. But they do perk up slightly when I remind them about Onomatopoeia, that Greek gulp of six syllables that simply means “a word that sounds like what it is naming.” I’ve always taken pleasure in “pitter-patter”, “boing”, “moo”, and “zap.” And who wouldn’t agree that “Listen to that steak SIZZLE on the grill” is perfect to our ear in a way that “Listen to that steak...

The best writing lets the reader know the point of the piece as early as possible. It frustrates me when I’m reading something without the vaguest idea why the author even bothered to put it down on paper. I remember once being in Toledo trying to find a particular bookstore in order to buy an obscure anthology. No, I’m sorry, it wasn’t Toledo — I was in Fort Lauderdale. But I just wrote “Toledo” because the anthology was about bullfighting in Toledo, Spain. Actually, my cousin lived in Toledo, Ohio, and I wish I had the graphic vocabulary to describe...