Whence, where, and why the English major? Adam Gopnik asks in the New Yorker, noting its impending demise like the Latin prerequisite before it ― “a dying choice
bound to a dead subject.” Despite his sympathies, Gopnik finds the apologias of
the discipline's defenders unpersuasive, mocking “The Economic Case for Saving the Humanities” proffered by Brown University’s Christina Paxson as “the kind of Letter to a Crazy Republican Congressman that
university presidents get to write.” Like most pragmatic parries, it
surrenders the tradition’s essence in the vain hope its accidents might carry
the day or, at least, prolong the inevitable. Hardly surprising, given the bottom line for Paxson’s fellow economists: “Is it worth
it?” ― not the best way to defend the intrinsic worth of the humanities, even
in an age that abhors such “useless knowledge.”
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Buzzwords Drone On
Monday, August 19, 2013
Dead to the World Around Them
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Monday, August 05, 2013
Building Blocks of English: Affixes
Affixes are building blocks of language. The four types are prefixes, suffixes, combining forms, and infixes. We are familiar with prefixes, which placed at the beginning of words qualify their meaning (inappropriate) and suffixes, which convert the stem into another part of speech (celebrate to celebration). Combining forms, which can be either prefixes or suffixes, add another layer of meaning to words (biochemistry; pesticide). The least common affixes are infixes, which are placed within a word (in this case, to form the plural cupsful).
Friday, August 02, 2013
A Literary Triple Play

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