Anthony Esolen

You’d never believe how much time I spend with my college freshmen, unteaching them what they’ve been taught in high school. For instance, they tell me that you should never use the pronoun  you  in an indefinite sense, meaning  someone  or one. If you do, you’re . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s a new Bible translation that drives me nuts: “And he sent his servants to them, to gather the  produce  of the land.” How did that boring business-word get in there? The Greek was  karpous, fruits,  literally  things you pluck off a tree. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Sometimes my college freshmen tell me that they use a thesaurus to find synonyms, so that they don’t have to use the same word all the time. Using the same word, they’ve been told, is repetitive, and repetition is bad. Well, that’s complete nonsense. I’ll turn to repetition in . . . . Continue Reading »

“Dust you are, and unto dust you shall return,” said the Lord God to Adam after the first sin. It’s a fine translation of the Hebrew, that  dust ; it suggests transience and insubstantiality. By the nineteenth century, in Britain at least, the word came to denote . . . . Continue Reading »

We in English have an odd and useful tool: a possessive that can be appended to an entire phrase, rather than to just one word.  Look at the following: Il figlio del re d’Inghilterra  (Italian) Le fils du roi d’Angleterre  (French) Der Sohn des Koeniges von . . . . Continue Reading »

It may please some of my readers to learn that the word  whore  and the name  Cher  are etymologically related. But how? The first thing we need to clear out of the way is that  w  at the beginning of  whore.  It doesn’t belong there. It’s . . . . Continue Reading »

The Passive Voice is abused when the agent of the verb  is not general  and is indeed  of consequence,  but the writer wishes to obfuscate. Bureaucrats and politicians abuse the passive all the time,  to hide responsibility. Consider the following sentences: The . . . . Continue Reading »

Lent  is a most unusual word. Germans call the forty day period between Ash Wednesday and Palm Sunday by the perfectly reasonable name  Fastenzeit:  the time for fasting. The French, mishearing the Latin  quadrigesima, fortieth,  call it  Careme; whether they . . . . Continue Reading »

The Passive Voice is used badly when the writer tucks the real item of interest into a prepositional phrase, obscuring the agent of the verb and deflecting the emphasis. Consider these sentences: The slider was hammered by Colavito into the left field bleachers. Colavito hammered the slider . . . . Continue Reading »

It’s a good old Anglo Saxon word, but it did not mean to grow angry, scowling, waiting the chance to strike. It meant, simply,  to boil.  Why didn’t the Anglo Saxons say  boil if they meant  boil? Or  bo’ll,  if they were from Southwark? Or  . . . . Continue Reading »