In Plain Engel-ish

It was at UCLA in 1974 that I taught my first upperclassman course: a seminar devoted to the novels of Charles Dickens. It was mostly comprised of students who had taken my freshman composition course two years before and were gluttons for punishment. I was never an “Easy-A” teacher; I wasn’t even an “Easy-C” one. I was delighted watching my former students rediscover Dickens’ marvelous sense of humor and his ability to create more memorable characters than any other novelist. But there was one area of human experience portrayed by Dickens for which my seminar students decided that he deserved...

As a word enthusiast, I enjoy telling you that the Greek word that is pronounced “phehm” is translated in English as “to speak of” and is the root of our word “Fame.” This makes perfect sense because the one thing that famous people have in common is that they are all often Spoken Of. The Greeks have also given us a very useful prefix: eu-. It means “good“ or “well.” We use it in the word euthanize, along with thanos, the Greek word for “death.” Put the two together, and you see why that word in English means “A Good...

Now that I number myself among the elderly, I’ve been thinking about the time in our life when we have our first really close experience with old people. I’m happy to say that in my case (and probably in many of yours), it was in very early childhood with my grandparents. As children, we consider our parents old, but grandparents seem somehow a different kind of old. Our parents love us, but our grandparents dote on us, are often besotted with us, and so, early on, if we are very lucky, we think of old people as perfect in the...

I’ve been watching reruns of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his marvelous television show of suspenseful half-hour dramas that were on the air around 1960, the same year he released his masterpiece, Psycho, in movie theaters. I remember his press conference when the movie was scaring viewers nationwide. A female reporter asked, “Mr. Hitchcock, that shower scene was so horrific that I’ve not been able to take a shower ever since I viewed it. Do you have a suggestion for me?” The droll British wit of Hitchcock was on full display when he thought for a moment and then answered drily :...

Being comfortable with multi-syllable English words comes with the territory for me. My birth “territory” being Indianapolis, I was born in a city that has at least as many syllables as any other American city. I was tempted to write “more syllables than any other,” but I suspect there might be a smarty-pants Floridian reading this who would prove me wrong before I could say “Apalachicola.” In any case, I have always been partial to long, difficult-to-pronounce words, so I was especially alert in my seventh-grade English class when Mr. Weeks, my all-time favorite English teacher, announced that he wanted...