Tag archives: Brilliant Thoughts
Our society is obsessed with popularity contests of various kinds. There are competitions for being the most beautiful, making the most money, and having a best-selling product. But the most prevalent type of such contention is called an “election,” which, in effect, means being chosen by the most people, usually for an office or position […]
Getting lost is nowadays becoming increasingly harder to do – even if you want to – because we now have electronic devices of all kinds to guide and direct us, and make it easier for other people to find us. Not surprisingly, the people who were most likely to get lost in times past were […]
A counsellor I once had habitually used the concept of enfolding in your arms metaphorically, to mean “accept” and “deal with.” If I told her “I’m having trouble,” she might say “Embrace trouble!” But she never said, “Hug trouble!” You’ll have a hard job finding the word “hug” either in the Bible or in Shakespeare – […]
“Sir, you are a liar, a thief, and a coward!” “What! You called him ‘Sir’?” “Why not? Courtesy costs nothing.” That old joke can probably be blamed for my first encounter with the concept of courtesy – a word which has many shades of meaning, involving politeness, respect, consideration, propriety, and making people feel relaxed […]
No doubt you have often received invitations which say at the bottom “R.S.V.P.” – and you probably know that this means that you are being asked to respond. I’m not a great linguist, but I know enough French to be able to tell you that these letters stand for “Répondez S’il Vous Plaît.” The first […]
Just about the last regular job I ever had, before my current career as a self-employed creator of illustrated epigrams, was way back in the 1960s, in connection with a “floating university” – an actual institution of learning on board a converted cruise ship (a program still functioning, on various vessels, under the name of […]
There’s a saying in the Real Estate business that, in considering the value of a property, only three things really matter: Location, Location, and Location. But, if that means where a place actually is, many factors enter into play – such as what it’s near, and not near. We are often reminded that “it’s a […]
Some people (it is often said) have all the luck – implying that not much is left over for the rest of us. The British, with their love of ironical humor, have an expression wishing someone “the best of British luck,” suggesting that the recipient of the wish has not much chance. But, in the […]
I have been asked to write something about Jealousy. For me, this was a difficult but challenging assignment, because I have rarely felt jealous of anybody else, and, as far as I know, I myself have not generated that emotion in other people – although I suppose it isn’t the kind of feeling you readily […]
“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,Who never to himself hath said,This is my own, my native land!” My mother would often quote those lines – although, ironically, I am not sure now just which “native land” she could have been referring to. The lines are part of a much longer poem by Sir […]
Despite my own attempts, through the jungles of information on Google, I’ve been unable to track down the originator of the term “hunter-gatherer,” as used to describe a lifestyle. But it appears to have been an invention of that branch of modern science which studies human origins and may fall under the rubric of Paleo-Anthropology. […]
In Shakespeare’s classic monologue about “The Seven Ages of Man” (from As You Like It) he ascribes the fourth Age to a Soldier, who is “Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,Seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon’s mouth.” That metaphorical bubble is a fitting image for the attractive but ephemeral concept of […]
Contrary to what someone might think, a cardiologist does not collect cards – not even such collectibles as those my little Company produces. The word comes from the Greek kardia, meaning “heart,” which has given us such spin-offs as “cordial,” and the French and Spanish “Coeur,” and “Corazón.” Where I live, there is a local […]
“Ah, but a man’s reach must exceed his grasp – or what’s a Heaven for?” This quotation, from Robert Browning’s long poem, “Andrea del Sarto,” may be all anybody remembers of that work (if any of it is remembered at all). But the idea itself is certainly worth thinking about. Whether or not you truly […]
Loving one another is OK – but let’s not overdo it. Can there be too much love? We’ve all heard of “smother love” – a kind of emotional swaddling that comes near to stifling the object of affection – particularly associated with over-protective parents. Some people are surprised to hear that my own parents, when […]
“Fool me once, – shame on you –Fool me twice,Shame on me.” It may surprise you to realize in how many ways our lives, literature, and entire culture are based on misleading each other and our fellow creatures. To start with, there’s the matter of clothing, and all kinds of other things we put on […]
One line I remember from the many years I spent listening to radio comedy was this: “You know I think the world of you . . . And you know what everybody thinks of the world these days.” Be that as it may, we can probably agree that, if anything is certain about what we […]
There was once a common expression, “This is where we came in.” The meaning was originally quite literal. In the early days of movies – and at least into my childhood in the 1940s – when movies, especially new releases, were still something most people went out to, rather than seeing them at home – […]
Because of the way our bodies bend, the most comfortable position, when not prone, tends to be with the buttocks emplaced some distance above the ground (depending on the length of our legs) and our backs resting, if possible, against a vertical surface. This is known as “sitting,” and, for all the improvements, in housing, […]
There used to be a comedian named Rodney Dangerfield (a name which is somehow funny in itself) who built his whole career on a five-word catchphrase: “I don’t get no respect.” This too had its own built-in funny-ness, because we tend to have less respect for people who use grammar incorrectly. But Dangerfield specialized in […]
