Tag Archives: language

Angels, barbarians, Trump, and boring Klansmen

Posted on June 12, 2023 by smellincoffee

Short rounds time! Angels, Barbarians, and Nincompoops is a wonderful romp through a few score words in the English language. Esolen has always impressed me as a man deep in word & song, saturated by the beauty of language — … Continue reading →

Posted in history, Politics and Civic Interest, quotations, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Podcast of the Week: Butterfly Spanish

Posted on May 17, 2017 by smellincoffee

My podcast time in recent weeks has been largely devoted to listening to lessons on YouTube;  I’ve been trying to restore my high school Spanish for several months now, using an app called DuoLingo on a daily basis and studying … Continue reading →

Posted in General | Tagged , | 5 Comments

The Adventure of English

Posted on May 17, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language© 2011 Melvyn Bragg336 pages In The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg delivers a mythic history of the language that treats our lingua franca as a living personality — battered and now … Continue reading →

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Who Killed Homer?

Posted on May 29, 2014 by smellincoffee

Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom© 1998 Victor Davis Hanson290 pages For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the … Continue reading →

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

The Mother Tongue

Posted on November 5, 2010 by smellincoffee

The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way© 1990 Bill Bryson270 pages “More than 350 million people around the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seem, try to.” While I’m reading this as part of a … Continue reading →

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments