In Plain Engel-ish

My elementary school in Indianapolis during the 1950’s was as homogenized as the milk served in our cafeteria: almost all white, almost all Christian, perhaps four or five Jewish children per class of thirty, but, as far as per grade, not more than two “colored children,” the only term I ever heard for Blacks until at least a decade later. So I was amazed when Aunt Anna, my mom’s oldest sister, told me about her school in the same town forty years earlier. She was born in 1911, less than three years after her parents — my Grandma and Grandpa...

Both Peter O’Toole and Glenn Close starred in many famous movies in the last fifty years. They each garnered an amazing eight nominations for an Academy Award, though that’s hardly a record-breaking feat. Meryl Streep has captured a jaw-dropping twenty-one nominations and so leads the pack. What is record-breaking is the fact that although O’Toole and Close have sixteen nominations between them, they do not have a single win. But please reserve your compassion for a more worthy recipient. Let me introduce you to Diane Warren, a 69-year-old super-talent, who has been nominated for an Oscar a whopping sixteen times...

The novels of Charles Dickens are so beloved around the world that there are clubs which meet regularly to discuss his works. Currently, there are a whopping thirty-eight Dickens clubs throughout England and the United States, with fourteen more in Europe, Canada, and Asia. They comprise the World Dickens Fellowship.  Because Dickens’ favorite flower was the geranium, it has become the symbol of all the branches and is prominently displayed by fellowship members as cheery lapel pins at annual Dickens conventions. And geraniums certainly bloom throughout Dickens’ novels: when brides walk down Dickens’ aisles, they carry geraniums; when bodies are...

GATHERED TOGETHER  In the ninth grade, we learned how to write a business letter. We were taught to always begin with “Dear Sir.” Dear? If I wanted to write to the Acme Squidget Company to complain that their most expensive Model A Squidget utterly failed when I tried to attach it to my Whatchamacallit, I was supposed to address the scoundrel who headed this dubious business as “Dear”?  It turns out that we owe this very strange usage of “dear” to the Middle Ages when the word meant “highly esteemed” rather than our modern meaning of “beloved.” It was the...

With last night being the first night of Hanukkah and with Christmas just ten days away, the delightful topic of gifting has come to my mind. And with my having minored in Classics as an undergraduate, my mind has wandered from the Judeo-Christmas gifting tradition to the mythological one.  Has there ever been a creature more literally gifted than the first woman of Greek mythology? And by “first woman”, I mean the “Eve” of the ancient Greeks. When the most powerful gods on Olympus got together to create her — by committee! — each of them gave her a special...