In Plain Engel-ish

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...

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,...