SubscribeWednesday’s Word LXIII
khaki
n. a dull, yellowish-brown colour, the colour of dust.
n. a strong cloth of wool or cotton, often used for military uniforms, used as a school uniform color.
Khaki is everywhere; if you don’t own a pair of pants in that universal dust color, then you at least own a pair of pants in a different [...]
Fire in the Grove
Standard social studies fare more most high school students is the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which horrifically and succinctly summarizes the excesses of the industrial age that eventually led to novels like The Jungle and the creation of institutions of governmental oversight. For those who don’t know or have forgotten the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, [...]
The Book of Psalms
Any time one deals with a book which has been translated, you’re opening up a whole new can of worms above and beyond the quality of the book itself. I noted this with some hesitancy when I reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s Snow—or, more accurately, a translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.
Biblical translation is even tougher: [...]
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Issue 31
Every issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern comes with a sort of prompt given to its writers. In some cases, the theme is more generic; in other cases, it’s a more limiting construct. In the case of Issue #31, writers were either given or allowed to select (I’m not sure which) an old [...]
A Voyage Long and Strange
I’m something of an iconoclast; I used to enjoy telling people (smugly, as only an over-informed grade-school boy can be) that George Washington was the 8th president. I took fewer cheap thrills from knowing that Columbus wasn’t necessarily the saint we so often make him out to be, though I stopped of damning [...]
Into the Wild
I’ve come to appreciate Jon Krakauer more and more as a writer since I was a young pup, when I refused to read Into Thin Air mostly because I was told to. Though in fact my English professor at the time introduced us to Krakauer by way of an article about (or an excerpt [...]
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