Anthony Esolen

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” says Queen Gertrude in Hamlet , watching a play wherein a woman professes, in the most fulsome terms, utter devotion to her husband the king, two minutes before the king’s brother will poison him by pouring poison into his ear, and four . . . . Continue Reading »

Deponent verbs are the bane of the young Latin student’s existence. They take the form of the passive voice, but they have  active meaning.  And they are darned common: loquor, I speak; confiteor, I confess; morior, I die.  Many of them are transitive verbs, and so they can . . . . Continue Reading »

In the Beetle Bailey comic strip, the old addled General Halftrack has a dumb blonde secretary with really dangerous curves. Her name, of course, is Miss Buxley. Mort Walker was punning on the word buxom, which is now used only to describe a woman—and not every woman, either! It . . . . Continue Reading »

I like the word brethren. Its specialized use is to denote members of a solemn or sacred brotherhood, sometimes including women too. Nobody would now say, “I have three sisters and two brethren,” unless he was telling a joke; he’s a member of an order of priests, and there are three . . . . 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 garbage of . . . . Continue Reading »

Two workers at the Ministry of Truth, Smith and Syme, sit at a table in an underground canteen. They wolf down spoonfuls of a pink and gray stew, with spongy chunks vaguely reminiscent of meat. Then Syme, filled with zeal, describes for his comrade what a joy it is to eliminate words from the . . . . Continue Reading »

In the Middle Ages,” said a candidate for a position in medieval literature at my college, “beauty was considered sinful.” Someone should have told Dante, who wrote that beauty is the prime attraction of the human soul, not to mention that he wrote a beautiful poem. Someone should have told . . . . Continue Reading »

I await with great delight the first translation of the Novus Ordo Mass into English. The bland, Scripture-muffling, colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase American Catholics have had for forty years often was not a translation at all, nor even a paraphrase into English. It was a paraphrase into . . . . Continue Reading »

Which, I wonder, is the greater despair of the comedian? Is it the academic, or the journalist? There’s much to be said for the academic. It takes real comic genius to write as badly as a Jacques Derrida or a Julia Kristeva, with the turgidity of a decadent schoolman and none of the precision. It takes even more to listen to it with a straight face. But my money is on the journalist… . Continue Reading »

In the year 1215, at a place called Runnymede, the barons of England, having paused from their usual pastime of bickering with one another, allied themselves with another brotherhood, the bishops of the Church, to checkmate their own king. They compelled him to sign a document called Magna Carta. . . . . Continue Reading »