Charles Harrington Elster

CHARLIE'S NEW BOOK, JUST PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER 2018

"Give me my typewriter and my dictionary, and just let me suffer!"
— Robertson Davies

"Writing is at the mercy of the largest number of amateurs—almost the entire population."
— Jacques Barzun

"When a writer thinks of his readers, common sense will tell him that a few of them will certainly not be his intellectual equals, but that the majority will be so, and that there will be some who are greatly his superiors; he should comport himself like a gentleman toward all of them."

— Robertson Davies

"[I]f you ask me as an artist what I came into this world to do, I, an artist, would say, I came to live out loud."

— Actress Viola Davis, quoting Émile Zola

"You can't spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them."

— Christian Wiman

"Nearly every fiction writer in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope, and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."
— Roald Dahl

"I put everything I have into whatever I'm doing or thinking about at the moment. So it's not right when people say I'm self-absorbed. I think I'm just absorbed."

— Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation

Copyright © 2003-2021
by Charles Harrington Elster

Note: Every article on this blog page, and on this website, is protected by copyright. Reproduction of any kind without permission is prohibited.

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WORD QUIZ

Below are ten abbreviations of Latin terms. Do you know what they stand for in Latin and in English?

1. MS or ms.
2. PS or P.S.
3. i.e.
4. e.g.
5. N.B. or n.b.
6. c. or ca.
7. et al.
8. cf.
9. q.v.
10. ibid.

Answers are on the
Comments page, in the left sidebar.

To Err Is Inhuman

“I’m afraid that surprise, shock, and regret is the fate of authors when they finally see themselves on the page. . . . Seeing one’s inadequate English frozen into type is a humiliating experience.”

— Julia Child, My Life in France

“I think of it as it should have been, with its prolixities docked, its dullnesses enlivened, its fads eliminated, its truths multiplied.”
— From the dedication page of
H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage (1926)

The Accidents of Style is a crash course in careful usage.

The Accidents of Style is in USA Today.

Click here to read it.

Click here to order.

One Writer's Ravings:

A Logophile's Blog
for Language Lovers

Imagine a World Without Books

April 3, 2013

Tags: The Big Read, WriteOutLoud, Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, dystopia, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, John Huston

This is the second year I've been invited to deliver the opening remarks for The Big Read, the annual celebration of books and reading sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and engineered locally by the hardworking folks at WriteOutLoud, Veronica Murphy and Walter Ritter. Following is my kickoff speech for their series of events inspired by Ray Bradbury's classic science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. Read More

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The Gory, Glorious Words of Edgar Allan Poe

March 6, 2012

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe, WriteOutLoud, The Big Read, Kathleen Krull, Philip Van Doren Stern

I’ve always been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, that master of mystery and the macabre, so when WriteOutLoud asked me to participate in this year’s Big Read, how could I say “nevermore”? Read More

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Charles Harrington Elster

Archives

One Writer's Ravings:

A Logophile's Blog
for Language Lovers

Imagine a World Without Books

The Gory, Glorious Words of Edgar Allan Poe

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One Writer's Ravings: A Logophile's Blogfor Language Lovers

Imagine a World Without Books

The Gory, Glorious Words of Edgar Allan Poe

One Writer's Ravings:

A Logophile's Blog
for Language Lovers