Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
This is a revised version of a piece first published in 2014. Once upon a time I decided to learn Japanese. I had none of the usual practical reasons: no business interests that would take me to Japan nor even an academic project comparing Noh plays with Attic tragedy. I knew next to nothing of Japan, though as a child my imagination had been stirred by the Mikado, and later, when a college friend persuaded me to read the Tale of Genjii, my mind was haunted by images of beautiful men and women spending languorous evenings composing allusive verses to...
Another morality play has been played out. Catholic high school kids from Kentucky—obviously Southern bigots—harassed a Native American Marine, a Vietnam veteran, and one of the all-white adolescent louts deliberately got in his way and, with a smug grin on his face, humiliated the brave old man. They should be expelled, cried the watchdogs in the media, their school should be humiliated. One particularly repellant female demanded the release of their names and addresses so that outraged leftists could tar and feather them. Another depicted the students being put–MAGA hat first–through a chipper. The best line came from the bastion...
Tom, I, too, am stunned by the decline of literacy among the literate classes, which is far more disappointing to me than the general decline. Kids growing up today don’t have the people in the profession–whether the media, academe, or writers–we had to learn from. After a discussion about writing essays and grammar in one of my classes back in the 90s a couple of older students came up to me. They were both women who had come back to school to earn teaching credentials and master’s degrees after rearing families. They had grown up when English was properly taught...
I received this message from Prof. McGrath in response to my columns on learning foreign languages. Tom: For what it’s worth, I took French in high school and Latin in college. I think Latin teaches one a surprising amount about the English language or perhaps reminds one of all those things that we were supposed to learn in the 7th and 8th grade–when English teachers emphasized parts of speech, diagramming sentences, tense, mood, et al. During my years playing professor I noticed a slow but steady decline in the writing skills of the average student. By my final days of teaching...
Dear Autodidact: Question for you. T. S Eliot is one of my favorite poets. ( I have read and re-read many of his poems) Most friends of mine aren’t as enthusiastic about him. I’ve often heard people say that he “killed poetry” with his “Modernist” style. This is also the view of a number of conservative professors I know (none is a literary scholar, though) Do you think there’s any truth to this claim? I tend to read poetry for its meaning, not its style (so Eliot’s style doesn’t bother me much) A Catholic College Student Dear Catholic College Student,...
John Seiler has posted a sensible column on why the electoral college is not going to disappear in a puff of smoke. He points out that one of the great compromises that made the Constitution possible is an electoral system that protects the interests of smaller states without eliminating all the advantage enjoyed by larger states. There is, however, another aspect of the electoral college that is worth looking at: the principle of indirect election.
The freshman Democrats in Congress are behaving like the stars of a down-market reality TV show. Alexandria—like Cher and Madonna, she really doesn’t need a last name—has been dancing up a storm, though many of her supporters have been disappointed by her lumbering performance.
This is the long-awaited Part II of my Agrigento Trog There is hardly a better place in Europe—not even Athens—were the differences between the ancient and the modern world can be felt so acutely. 20th century Agrigento is, at its best, a tribute to the greed and and contempt for humanity that have characterized modern governments that are the distilled essence of democratic man. The local government is hopelessly inept at carrying out the most basic tasks—picking up trash, policing traffic, cracking down on organized crime. And yet, good democratic socialists that they are, they have imposed new rules on...
“I’ve grammar and spelling for two And blood and behavior for twenty. In studying any new language, the two most basic elements are the proper pronunciation, meaning—and of course spelling—of words, in other words ‘vocabulary,’ and grammar. In simple English, while the study of vocabulary focuses attention on individual words, grammar consists of the rules that determine the form (morphology) and function or structure (syntax) of words. The arbiters of Postmodern English have tried their best to eliminate prescriptive grammar—that is, the normative rules of language usage—from our speech, but few other European languages have been so thoroughly revolutionized. The...
