In Plain Engel-ish

Mark your calendars! It turns out that in 2037, for the first time, the world’s population will reach nine billion people. Rumor has it that the earth’s nine billionth person will be born on June 26th at noon in Lizard Lick, North Carolina. Well, that last sentence might need a little fact-checking.  But it’s good news that this will also be the first time that the earth’s population growth is actually slowing. It took only twelve years to grow from seven to eight billion (from 2010 to 2022), but it will take fifteen years to grow from eight to nine...

I felt that I had a slight advantage when I went to my first wine tasting on my twenty-first birthday (my thinking: why wait one day more?). After all, I was that rare young adult who’d had family experiences with drinking wine since my childhood. Growing up Jewish, I’d been given a little bit of wine on Passover since elementary school. Tragically, though, the only wine that had ever whetted my palate was Manischewitz Blackberry. For those of you who have never indulged, let’s just say that Manischewitz has a bouquet of children’s cough syrup and tastes like good fruit...

Early next year (February 12 to be exact), I shall be writing my 100th essay for you. I began in March of 2020, due to the start of Covid, and I have faithfully placed a new essay in your inbox biweekly ever since. And, hey, what’s with my beloved English language when the adverb “biweekly” can mean either “once every other week” OR “twice a week”? I suppose it’s not a dangerous language flaw, until, that is, your doctor tells you that you must continue to take your black-widow-spider antidote “biweekly,” and you think he meant “once every other week”—...

I remember when I was about seven my Aunt Mollie said to my mom, “You just never see Elliot without a pencil, do you?” She seemed pleased. I did find out later that, being a doting aunt in a Jewish family, she had hopes that her favorite nephew would one day be using his pencil, as Dr. Engel, to write prescriptions for wealthy, sick patients throughout Indianapolis. I bless her for never hinting to me, when I received my Ph.D. twenty years later, that I had bumbled into becoming the wrong kind of “doctor.”  Aunt Mollie was certainly right about...

It was at UCLA in 1974 that I taught my first upperclassman course: a seminar devoted to the novels of Charles Dickens. It was mostly comprised of students who had taken my freshman composition course two years before and were gluttons for punishment. I was never an “Easy-A” teacher; I wasn’t even an “Easy-C” one. I was delighted watching my former students rediscover Dickens’ marvelous sense of humor and his ability to create more memorable characters than any other novelist. But there was one area of human experience portrayed by Dickens for which my seminar students decided that he deserved...