Tag archives: wordplay
People who have some kind of religious feelings often believe that they can communicate with their Deity – and some even believe that their prayers can in some way influence human events, or even non-human, such as the weather. As practiced in most cultures today, there seems to be little harm in such beliefs. But […]
My title comes from one of the best-known parts of the Old Testament: Number 23 in the Book of Psalms. I have been familiar with it since the two years of my childhood which were spent in my mother’s hometown of Toronto, Canada. At that time (1940), it was still quite permissible for religion and […]
Many people believe in many different things – yet (speaking personally), I find it hard to believe in anything at all. Of course, the primary “belief” hurdle is whatever people think of as “God.” And there is nothing new about this. There is a whole field of study concerning belief without proof, called “Theology.” But […]
The little glass balls we call “marbles” today were once probably made of real marble – but they were no doubt being played with by children thousands of years ago. Just when “having all one’s marbles” became a semi-humorous metaphor for being sane is probably much more recent in origin. And not having all of […]
There’s not much that has stuck with me from a course in Political Theory I once had to take (it was a requirement for getting my B.A. in History at the University of London). But one thing I remember was that it began with Plato and his book The Republic, which was all about an […]
In times past, it was more important for many things to be sharper than we now care about. This applied not only to weapons, such as swords, spears, and arrows – but also to culinary ware, when animal parts often went directly from the place of killing to the place of cooking. And, in pre-modern […]
In the early chapters of the Old Testament, we find the story of two brothers, Jacob and Esau, one of whom (Esau) sold his entire inheritance (his “birthright”) to his brother for a single simple meal (a “mess of pottage”). That might be regarded as a very bad bargain. The more civilized method of determining […]
There is something special about a man’s relationship with his barber. The very essence of a barbershop is masculine. Unfortunately, it is no longer a place for singing quartets – but at least it’s not what it used to be – a place for surgery. The very word Barber is related to the word “Barbarian.” […]
In the London school I attended during my teenage years, the most shameful act any student could commit was one that incurred personal punishment by the Headmaster. This befell me only once, when I was still fairly new to the British Education system, after spending my childhood on this side of the Atlantic. It was […]
No doubt you’ve heard the proverb, “It’s the early bird that catches the worm.” Those words of wisdom would have a different meaning to you, depending on whether you were a bird or a worm. Not being either, I can nevertheless vouch for the fact that it’s not always easy to get up early, especially […]
In case you’ve wondered, our word “royal” stems from “Roi,” the French word for “King.” I was born in 1933, and in my childhood, the British Royal Family consisted of a King and Queen and two little Princesses. But there were, and are, many other things and people called Royal, including the Royal Air Force, […]
You may know that one of the first characters to appear, in what is generally considered to be Shakespeare’s greatest play, is the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father. He has not been dead for long, and Hamlet is still fuming at the callousness of his mother for having remarried (and to his Father’s brother!) so soon […]
In the time between the invention of printing and the advent of the Internet, many types of periodicals have come and gone. In our own era, we have seen the birth and demise of magazines of news, humor, commentary, housekeeping, and many other more specialized subjects. A key element in the survival or failure of […]
In the evolution of our language, “good enough for government work,” is an expression which has come to mean almost exactly the opposite of what it once did. It began as a way of describing work of high quality, but somehow came to refer to what was just barely adequate. It was probably American in […]
If anybody asks you, “What Is the Southernmost point of Africa?” you would probably say “The Cape of Good Hope.” And you probably identify that location with the City of Cape Town, South Africa. But you would be a little off. Cape Town is located at a point which the earliest Portuguese explorers called the […]
How do things end? I made a whole career out of writing very short “Thoughts.” But where does a thought end? For years, I’d been jotting down various ideas. They could be a new form of literature. But every such form must have some structure, and a crucial dimension would be its length. Looking through […]
In our society, the word “Rest,” and most of its connotations, have a generally positive resonance. Even when it comes to the matter of being dead, it has a somewhat soothing aura. But watch your Latin grammar and spelling here. The expression “Requiescat in Pace” means “may he – or she – rest in peace.” […]
There are people (you may be one of them) who believe that there must always be a reason. By their standards, God has his own reasons for everything that happens, even if they are not obvious to us. It is comforting to believe in such a reasonable God. Alfred Lord Tennyson, who had been Poet […]
As you probably know, the words in our language have a tendency to change over time; in spelling, in pronunciation, or even in meaning. But there is at least one case in which the word has come to mean the exact opposite of what it once did. To make matters even more confusing, both meanings […]
Sometimes, when asked if I have any goal in life, I answer that I want to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. That may seem a less lofty aim, now that Bob Dylan has won it. But so far, the closest I myself have come – and in fact the only time I ever […]
