In Plain Engel-ish

Yesterday I was eating my favorite breakfast of scrambled eggs, exactly the way my father had taught me to make them when I was just a kid: not overcooked nor dry but very moist and flavorful. I remember going to a restaurant shortly after that, and when I ordered scrambled eggs, the waitress said, “How would you like them, young man?” I thought a second and exclaimed, “Wet!” My dad smiled at me, and after she’d left, he said, “I think the best word for how you like them, Elliot, is ‘soft’.” Yep, leave it to my dad to have...

I remember reading the classic novel Tom Jones as an undergraduate and scratching my head over this passage: “Tom asked Widow Miller if he might come in to offer his condolences to the sobbing matron. ‘Yes, Sir,’ the grieving woman answered. ‘I am presently quite comfortable.’” What? I think it defies reason to equate grieving with being “quite comfortable,” especially now that I myself have been widowered. Yes, I know there’s no such term as “widowered,” but if you whisper it a few times, it sounds just like Tweety Bird trying to say ‘little word.’ Please spare me the groans...

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...