In Plain Engel-ish

One of the joys in reading Dickens’ novels is discovering the wonderful names he creates for his characters. The most famous characters – Pip, Estella, David Copperfield, Sydney Carton, Scrooge — do not usually possess the most delightful names. It is often the minor characters whose names bring a moment of joy to Dickensian readers. Could anyone but Dickens have created the wretched school principal in Hard Times named Mr. McChoakumchild? Is it possible to come up with a name at once more ludicrous, pompous, and flabby-sounding than the ludicrous, pompous, flabby Uncle Pumblechook? And even bored high school students,...

My parents probably knew from my earliest age that I was going to be a professor when I grew up. Their clue would not have come from any particular academic proclivity nor from an unusual love of learning, but rather from the one quality I possessed that the general public has always associated with professors: absent-mindedness.As a child I never met a mitten, jacket, or gym shoe that I liked enough to remember to take with me when I boarded the school bus at the end of the day. If it could be left behind, it was; if it could...

Now that I have oodles of spare time, thanks to hiding away from COVID, I have done the math (something we English majors usually avoid) and discovered that I have lectured in forty-seven states (forty-eight if you count the State of Exhaustion) on so many writers but especially on Charles Dickens, my favorite author.Before the pandemic temporarily made my lecturing career as dead as the authors I lecture on, I had been delighted to address hundreds of groups and enjoyed visiting countless new cities. But the inconveniences, complexities, and complications of daily air travel, even pre-COVID, make my career a...

This essay first appeared in the "My Turn" column of Newsweek magazine on June 21, 1982. The editors wanted it to appear in mid-June because they felt it had an oblique connection to Father's Day. I had sent this same essay to Newsweek the year before, and it was rejected immediately.  When I came upon it a year later when cleaning out a desk drawer, I thought about revising it but, being rushed for time, I simply sent it in again with no changes. Amazingly, it was accepted. The editor explained that she had just been promoted to the position...

I’ve been an avid talker since age two, and I always suspected that I could make a career involving what a teacher once called my “virtuosity with sheer verbosity.” I remember a traveling salesman named Mr. Medlicott who frequently called at my father’s hosiery store and introduced me early to the joy of word play. He delighted me with riddles such as: “What is the only state name that contains a word and its opposite?” CONNECTiCUT, of course. And when I told him of my plans in college to become an English major, he asked: “Really, dear boy — in...