The Saddest Literary Deaths We’re Still Crying About
A look into the deaths of our favorite fictional characters in literature and why some affected us much more than others.
Literature
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Can You Identify Literature’s Famous Opening Lines?
The opening line of any book should say—in the words of Stephen King—“Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.” Right? So intriguing! But, alas, that is not how books begin. So, how well do you know the actual opening lines from some of literature’s greatest novels? Correctly match these memorable openers with their works of fiction and consider yourself an excellent listener! …
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Literature’s Most Lovable Grumps
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade! That cheer-boosting adage works for some people, but others are perfectly happy sucking sour lemons. Literature is full of chipper lemonade-makers, but there’s something about those lemon-sucking grumps that draws readers in. Is it their angsty sarcasm? Their jaded world-weariness? Their stubborn dedication to doom-and-gloom even when everything else is giggles and rainbows? Are Negative Nancys somehow more …
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Harry Potter Redefines Identity
As a 13-year-old girl in the world of books, Harry Potter has influenced Winter a lot. Hufflepuff and the words of Harry Potter make Winter feel like she can be who she is. -
Last Month In Pop Language: “I Like It” And Other July #1s
by Molly Rosen Marriner It’s another installment of Last Month in Pop Language, a column where the most popular (statistically) song, book, and film of the month will have their words analyzed in hopes of drawing a conclusion about language’s current usage—and future. At the end of each monthly column, we’ll draw a conclusion: Was last month’s pop language masterly, malevolent, or merely meh? Film: Ant-Man and the Wasp …
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How to Speak Queer Eye
It didn’t take very long for the Netflix reboot of Queer Eye to sneak into America’s chests and start fiddling with those heartstrings. But, it wasn’t until season two (now out on the streaming service) that the Fab 5 worked the lexical magic that made the team at Dictionary.com stand up and take notice. We can believe. Spoiler alert … some Queer Eye plot points …
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Literary Bullies Who Are Meaner Than We Remembered
Bullies are discussed a lot these days, but they aren’t something new. Tormenters have been around for a long time … especially in literature. Let’s take an inside look at the characters who are bullies and learn about their consequences. Marion Hawthorne In the 1964 children’s novel, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, Marion Hawthorne is a smart-mouthed, entitled classroom bully. It’s never determined why she is so mean, but …
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Ode To The Schwa
How do I love thee? Let me count the schwas. Not exactly what Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Sonnet 43 . . . but we like it all the same. Why? Because it finally pays tribute to the most frequent vowel sound in English: the schwa. What is the schwa and how does it sound? Simply put, the schwa is a reduced vowel sound written as …
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