Essays

Articles in this section

• The Great Baseball Scandal - how the Mob won the 1919 World Series, by Nelson Algren

  29 April 2020 by Nelson Algren

  Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the (...)

• A comparative study of the vocabulary of the greatest Western authors - and the winner is . . .

  13 March 2019 by Ray

  With the help of modern technology and a clever engineering student, we have analysed in depth the vocabulary in 25 of the most famous one-volume works in the history of Western literature - celebrated texts by Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, (...)

• Why we think that German has a bigger vocabulary than English (or any other Indo-European language)

  18 November 2016 by Ray

  Click here.

• "The Awful German Language", by Mark Twain

  1 May 2016 by Mark Twain

  Mark Twain concluded this very entertaining overview of the German language with the statement: « . . . a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. .(!!)
  His reflections on the particularities of (...)

• "I Love Awfully Bad Writing", by James Clarke

  30 November 2005 by James Clark

  I Love Awfully Bad Writing
  I love awfully bad writing. Indeed I can say (with all due modesty) that I am quite good at it myself. This might explain why I am fascinated by the annual Bulwyer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst opening to a novel.
  Every year since 1984 San Jose State (...)