This week I happened to reread Malcolm Lowrey’s Under the Volcano, which I last read probably forty years ago or more. It’s not one of my favourite books, but many people like it a lot, and I’m not writing this blog to give my opinions. Whether I like it or not, I grant that it’s … Continue reading Plangent, Ostiole, and Winze
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.
Pneumonia, Amnesia, and Knee
Etymological Entertainments #3 Today I want to talk a little more about phonotactics, that is, the rules of sound combination in various languages. In an earlier post (“Etymological Entertainments #2”) I noted that when we say the English word “pterodactyl” we don’t pronounce the initial “p”—we say “teradactyl”. The initial cluster “pt” is not allowed … Continue reading Pneumonia, Amnesia, and Knee
Lost in a Book
Some years back, when my mother was still alive, I called her one day to find out how she was doing. “I’m a little tired today,” she said, “because I didn’t get much sleep last night.” What kept you up? I asked. “Well,” she answered, “you know I always read a little bit before I … Continue reading Lost in a Book
Etymological Entertainments #2
By the end of this post I want to get to the word helicopter, but first I will consider a different group of words: telephone, telegraph, telegram, telescope, and so on. These are all compound words, and it’s easy to see the parts of the compounds: the first part is tele and the second part is, respectively, phone, graph, gram, and scope. … Continue reading Etymological Entertainments #2
Etymological Entertainments #1
Etymology, the history of words, is entertaining and informative. It’s entertaining to find out that the word idiosyncrasy is formed from three Greek roots: idio- (personal, private, one’s own), syn (together), and krasis (a mixture, a blend)—so an idiosyncrasy is the personal things you have mixed together. The word idiot comes from the Greek idiôtês, a private person, a person who keeps to himself, a … Continue reading Etymological Entertainments #1
Language and Meaning #2
In my previous post on meaning I talked about the meaning of the dative of interest and the meaning of what I called parenthetical “well”. In this post I will talk about he meaning of one of the rhetorical figures—tricolon, which is made of three items in more or less parallel structure. Abraham Lincoln used … Continue reading Language and Meaning #2
Language and Meaning #1
Meaning is at the center of what interests me about language and literature. Meaning, as I understand it, covers a lot of ground, and it includes kinds of meanings that many philosophers and even some linguists wouldn’t call meaning. Here’s an example. Some years ago I happened to be shopping in a small store in … Continue reading Language and Meaning #1
