Cut for those with no time for drivel
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A Governess in the Age of Jane Austen, which is the diary and letters of Agnes Porter, a governess to the children of some of the Fox Strangway connections. She was extremely duty-oriented, but had a sense of humor. I marked a bunch of passages that illustrate life as it was then.
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In the recent final rewrite of a project, I was particularly dismayed to see that among my 456,948 bad writing habits I still haven't been able to get rid of, there was still far too much of what matociquala calls scaffolding, which I think the perfect image--the unsightly wickerwork of tubes or wooden supports put up when one is repainting or refinishing a ( Read more... )

So the next unit is the Westward movement for my fifth graders. I'm looking through collections of diaries and letters and memoirs of Pioneers and others involved in the Westward Movement.

Came across this bit from a letter from a wagon train driver going out to the Gold Rush.

Whenever a wagon unluckily gets stuck in the mud in crossing some ( Read more... )

Lat night superversive came up with the sort of speculation about the linguistic threads of the tapestry of language that made sense to me. Many wouldn't see it, so with permission, here it is up front.

From superversiveI agree with you, Sherwood, and after much noggin-scratching and segashuating, I can even say roughly why ( Read more... )

Some of the OWW people have been talking about cliches--what they call primary and secondary. I don't quite get the distinction, but it's worth noting groupings of words that have become so ingrained we almost don't notice them. These ones are garnered from "The Cliche Expert," by Frank Sullivan, though I've added my own comments here and there ( Read more... )

Does anyone else watch the evolution of agreed on invisible rules--custom--on the internet? Human behavior adapting to the rapid proliferation of tech, in this case, the increasing ability through powerful search engines to find, if one wants, just where people might be talking about you or something you do? (I guess I'll find out if this post ( Read more... )

"For those of easy tongues...Remember, some live all their lives without discovering this truth: that the noblest and most terrible power we possess is the power we have, each of us, over the chance-met, the stranger, the passer-by outside your life and your kin. Speak . . . as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there ( Read more... )

I was out watering my plants to get them through the heat of the day, thinking about literature and books. In the discussion the other day, several folks differentiated between literature and other kinds of books. I don’t want to fall into the pit of ‘what makes bad books’--that just seems to me a dead end, with the unpleasant potential of a lot ( Read more... )

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