The title for this post comes from one of the great works of art of the twentieth century. I mean, of course, Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. “I take nouns and adjectives”, Calvin says to Hobbes, “and use them as verbs. Remember when ‘access’ was a thing? Now it’s something you do. It got verbed.” … Continue reading Verbing Weirds Language
Author: Matthew Clark
Matthew Clark is a classical philologist and literary critic. He received his BA and MA degrees from the University of Toronto and his PhD degree from Harvard University. He has published five books: Out of Line: Homeric Composition Beyond the Hexameter (Rowman and Littlefield, 1997); A Matter of Style: Writing and Technique (Oxford University Press, 2002); Narrative Structures and the Language of the Self (Ohio State University Press, 2010); Exploring Greek Myth (Blackwell, 2012); Debating Rhetorical Narratology: The Synthetic, Mimetic and Thematic Aspects of Narrative, with James Phelan (Ohio State University Press, 2020). His current project has the working title How to Reread a Novel: Essays in Narrative Analysis.
Video Meliora Proboque, Deteriora Sequor
Not long ago I was reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and I got to Book VII, which begins with a great monologue as Medea debates with herself whether or not she should desert her father and homeland and run off with Jason. As I was reading, I came across a very famous line, (Ov. Met.VII.20-21): “video meliora … Continue reading Video Meliora Proboque, Deteriora Sequor
More on Dialects
In my last post I talked about correctness and about dialects of English and in this post I will continue that discussion and end with some examples of dialect in English language literature. Dialects are not inferior forms of language. Every form of language is a dialect: the standard, if there is a standard, is … Continue reading More on Dialects
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
I ended my last post with some comments on correctness. I get asked questions about correctness all the time, but it’s not a topic that interests me very much. There’s a lot of “correct” writing which is really dull, and a lot of writing that is not “correct” that’s really interesting. I would rather be … Continue reading I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
This is not an essay
This is just a quick question for those who have posted replies to any of the essays. A friend was trying to post a reply and he couldn't do it unless he opened an account. Is that the way it works? You can't just go to the reply box and post? Or can you? Any … Continue reading This is not an essay
Synchronic and Diachronic
One way to study language is to take what amounts to a snapshot of a language at a particular moment and write down a description of the language at that moment. (One can argue that there is no such thing as “a language at a particular moment”, because there will always be different dialects and … Continue reading Synchronic and Diachronic
Etymology and Entomology
I was going to write a post or two about editing classical texts, and I’ll get back to that sometime soon, but I thought I’d take a break and just talk about some words. This post is part of a group I think of as etymological entertainments. I love etymology. Etymology was maybe the first … Continue reading Etymology and Entomology
When is a Mistake not a Mistake?
In my last couple of posts I’ve been exploring the editing of texts, one of the four aspects of my conception of philology. I imagined a philologist two thousand years in the future who is trying to deal with English-language texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; her situation was a sort of analogue to … Continue reading When is a Mistake not a Mistake?
Rocks On My Shoulders
In my previous post I imagined a philologist of the future struggling to read and understand ancient books, books from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In that post our philologist was dealing with the word “rtaffic”, which didn’t make any sense at all and didn’t even seem to be an English word. The problem was … Continue reading Rocks On My Shoulders
Philology in the Future
Imagine that it’s two thousand years in the future, around the year 4000 AD or so (assuming that dates in that year are still figured in AD or perhaps CE), and imagine someone at that future time who is a professor of Ancient English Language and Literature, with a specialization in the literature of the … Continue reading Philology in the Future
