Humor Quotes scare me 23 Sep 2009 I used to be a typesetter, proofreader and publisher. I take punctuation relatively seriously. One conclusion I came to is that “scare quotes” (like that) are almost never needed. This website – UnnecessaryQuotes – shows the reasons why. If you find some signs, snap ’em and send the pix to… Read More
Evolution The Essentialism Story 22 Aug 2007 Historian Mary P. Winsor published recently (2006b, in the December 2006 edition, but it just came out) a paper discussing how the Essentialism Story was constructed by Arthur Cain, Ernst Mayr, and David Hull. The Essentialism Story is the claim that before Darwin systematists and biologists in general treated natural… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity On speciation 26 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 The Atavism has some thoughts on speciation in response to a high school teacher’s query. He uses the following nice diagram to indicate what some of the core species definitions mean: It’s neat, and therefore… wrong. By which I mean that given the rule that biological organisms do what they… Read More
That joke was old when done there. The best ones are really old. I think that goes back to “1066 and all that”.
I’m reminded of a panel in the comic “The wizard of Id” where the king, on being informed that the peasants are revolting retorts “You can say that again”
It’s that old, is it? I first encountered it in Robert Manson Myers’s From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf (1951), in which we learn “…when Wycliff [of Dover] translated the Old Testament into the New, he was condemned as hereditary and burned as a steak. Following his death several “University Wits” instigated the so-called Pedant’s Revolt, upon which occasion Henry VI Part III made his astute observation: “The pedants are revolting.” An excellent book if you like that sort of thing. Still in print the last time I looked. Oh, BTW: “Chief among medevil dramatists was Mahatma Dante, whose Divine Comedy has become the favorite farce of all time. … He stood with one foot in the Muddle Ages, while with the other he hailed the dawn of a new day.”
Where were all these excellent texts when I was an undergraduate? Or are they the texts that undergraduate essayists write?