Anthony Esolen

Reynard the Fox: A New Translationtranslated by james simpsonliveright, 256 pages, $24.95 A few weeks ago I found in my mailbox a brand-new, plastic-sealed, hardcover copy of Shakespeare’s complete works, sporting on its cover a close-up hellfire picture of a jester’s cap and bells, which looked . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve waited to discuss the most important of our modal auxiliaries, the word that is the past tense of  will,  and also therefore the marker for our  conditional  tenses:  would. We call ’em conditional because they hold true only if certain conditions are . . . . Continue Reading »

“Never begin a sentence with  and, ” my college freshmen have been told. This is another one of those rules that somebody must have dreamed up in a rage of vengeance: a schoolmaster named Ichabod, disappointed in love, glowering down on his young charges, and thinking, “Yes, I . . . . Continue Reading »

I like how hillbillies pronounce this relative pronoun:  hwut. It’s truest to the spelling and the history of the word. Wally Cleaver pronounced it that way, too. He said  hwen  and  hwere  and  hwy? A well-brought-up lad he was. The monks who introduced the Roman . . . . Continue Reading »

“Never begin a sentence with  but. ” So my college freshmen tell me. They also tell me that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat (everybody knew it was round), that women in the Middle Ages were no better than cattle (they had more freedom than they would enjoy until . . . . Continue Reading »

The verb  wax,  meaning  to grow,  has only a few surviving uses in English. The moon  waxes  and wanes. And people  wax  . . . some adjective, usually describing their gestures or their speech. Note: adjective, not adverb. It’s often misused. If John is . . . . Continue Reading »

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 »