In Plain Engel-ish

Because my father owned a women’s hosiery store, I found myself employed during junior and senior high summer vacations at his Midwestern Hosiery Company. Being able to call my boss 'Dad' had its advantages. My hours of work were basically from when I wanted to appear (10:00 a.m. seemed congenial) until Dad ran out of busy work and sent me home, much to the relief of both of us. By my high school years I had requested a more creative position than a mere stock-boy stocking stockings. (I've been a connoisseur of awful puns for over sixty years now.) When pantyhose...

Poor Charles Dickens. Here is an author who seriously remarked: “In a hundred years I hope to be remembered as the man who wrote Martin Chuzzlewit.” Martin who? Sorry, Charles, it’s now been way over a hundred years, but Mr. Chuzzlewit has become a literary casualty of the Missing-In-Inaction variety. Did Dickens happen to mention a second work that he hoped would bring him immortality? No, he did not — which is so odd given the fact that he made the prediction in 1843 when he was not only writing the now neglected CHUZZLEWIT but also had just finished one other...

I was reading an article last week about an on-the-job death where a man trying to deliver newspapers to subscribers during a tropical storm was killed by flying debris. The freak accident was bad enough, but the journalist saved the truly tragic coup de grâce for the last sentence: “He leaves behind a wife and three young children.”    I realize that the odds of my own tragic on-the-job demise are quite slim. I suppose I could be at a podium in an auditorium in which an enormous spotlight has been faultily installed above center stage where I stand lecturing on...

It was impossible not to be reminded this September of the twentieth anniversary of 9-11, such a dreadful but necessary commemoration. And yet little has been said about a much more obscure but inspiring anniversary this year — the thirtieth anniversary of the “Second Russian Revolution” when Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev triumphed over the old-line communists in August of 1991.  As the author of the most famous novel about the French Revolution, Charles Dickens would no doubt have been fascinated by this revolution too. And I'm convinced that had he seen the pictures of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin...

I do have a terrific memory for events of my early childhood, but even I can’t remember back to age two when I first started jabbering words and phrases (yes, yes, I know — I have yet to stop since then). How I would love to remember the glee I must have felt when I first mastered that early magical double-word with its own cool gesture: “Bye-bye!” — complete with the accompanying funny, energetic wave.   Those other early double syllables that we all utter — Ma-Ma, Da-Da — might make our parents swoon with pride, but "Bye-Bye" gives us wee ones our...