Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

cathedra

etc. etc.n

Howitzer-grade

People really do judge one another according to their use of language. Constantly. Of course, people are constantly judging one another on the basis of all kinds of things—height, weight, scent, physiognomy, accent, occupation, make of vehicle 43 —and, again, doubtless it’s all terribly complicated and occupies whole battalions of sociolinguists. B

polemical.

But they are themselves good eating. Or so we think now. Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel

in this country that just about everybody who started junior high after c. 1970 has been taught to write Descriptively—via “freewriting,” “brainstorming,” “journaling”—a view of writing as self-exploratory and -expressive rather than as communicative, an abandonment of systematic grammar, usage, semantics, rhetoric, etymology. For another thing, th

Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.

To be a top athlete, performing, is to be that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel that we average unbeautiful watchers have such a hard time seeing in ourselves.

hale,