Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are ''prefabricated'' in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak. |
Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are ''prefabricated'' in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak. |
I never did like working out - it bears the same relationship to real sport as masturbation does to real sex |
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way round. |
Morris read through the letter. Was it a shade too fulsome? No, that was another law of academic life: it is impossible to be excessive in flattery of one's peers. |
She was a very funny writer but also a very thoughtful one. She made writers think and she made readers think. She was constantly playing on the difference between God and the writer. |
The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific. |
The damages are far reaching - from the shoreline, to the pipes of power plants and municipal waterworks, to the many other lakes and rivers that are under threat and indeed under harm as zebra mussels and many other species spread from the Great Lakes across the continent. |
The electric barrier is crude but it's the best thing we have now. The irony is the barrier was first proposed to keep round gobies (another fish invader in the Great Lakes) from colonizing the Mississippi River watershed, but by the time the barrier was built they had already passed it. Now the motivation is to keep the carp from coming from the other direction. |
These species are not inherently bad. They're just in the wrong place. |
Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. |
Walt Whitman who laid end to end words never seen in each other's company before outside of a dictionary. |
We might have been able to say 20 years ago that it was unanticipated consequence, but we know now that a shipload could bring in a bunch of invasive species into the Great Lakes. |