Anecdotal Evidence

Dr. Johnson writes in his diary on January 1, 1774: “This year has past with so little improvement, that I doubt whether I have not [rather]...

“It might be too much to say that no one who cannot write prose should be allowed to write verse, but certainly no one should be admitted to...

Dr. Johnson’s definition for pissabed is genteel and a little vague, though nicely trochaic: “a yellow flower growing in the grass.” At fi...

“The world is so various and rich that there are universes of knowledge that I will never touch (bird watching, mountain climbing, knitting ...

“There are persons in society with whom we put up and others for whom we pull up a chair by the fire; there are volumes of poetry that we po...

People used to get sick and die of exotically named diseases we have never heard of. We have cancer and congestive heart failure. They had q...

“Well, so that is that.”   W.H. Auden captures the hangover, alcoholic or otherwise, of the day after Christmas. As I’ve gotten older the ...