“
Suppose all I have fallen in love with is that voice deliciously phrasing its English sentences? The man who died for the soothing sound of a highly calibrated relative clause.
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”
Philip Roth (The Counterlife)
“
The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause.
t ev'ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three;
The period four, as learned men agree.
”
”
Cecil B. Hartley (Gentlemen's Book of Etiquette: And Manual of Politeness. Being a Complete Guide for a Gentleman's Conduct in All His Relations Towards Society)
“
You have a famous relative. Family tradition has it we descend from St. Nicholas.”
“Santa Claus? I thought he was make-believe.”
“He is, but the person Santa Claus is based on is real. St. Nicholas of Myra was a fourth-century bishop—and a fine human being. He served in Turkey.
”
”
Michael Benzehabe (Zonked Out: The Teen Psychologist of San Marcos Who Killed Her Santa Claus and Found the Blue-Black Edge of the Love Universe)
“
There's nothing sexier than imaging myself as an Oxford comma getting unambiguously banged. Throw in a semicolon in between two closely related independent clauses, and a volcanic love of punctuation eruption is guaranteed.
”
”
Ella Dominguez
“
There is no such thing as a relationship without a contract. All relationships are governed by contracts, be they implied or explicit. Relationship contracts are not legal contracts, though sometimes societal expectations of relationships get worked into law (this can come into play in situations like divorce as well as the legal establishment and relinquishment of paternity).
The society in which you grew up provided you with a set of template contracts to which you implicitly agree whenever you enter a relationship, even a non-sexual one. For example, a common clause of many societal template contracts among friends involves agreeing to not sleep with a friend's recent ex. While you may never explicitly agree to not sleep with a friend's ex, your friend will absolutely feel violated if they discover that you shacked up with the person who dumped them just a week earlier.
Essentially, these social contracts tell an individual when they have “permission” to have specific emotional reactions. While this may not seem that impactful, these default standards can have a significant impact on one’s life. For example, in the above reaction, a friend who just got angry out of the blue at a member of their social group would be ostracized by others within the group while a friend who became angry while citing the “they slept with my ex” contract violation may receive social support from the friend group and internally feel more justified in their retaliatory action. To ferret out the contractual aspects of relationships in which you currently participate, think through something a member of that relationship might do that would have you feeling justifiably violated, even though they never explicitly agreed to never take such action.
This societal system of template contracts may have worked in a culturally and technologically homogenous world without frequent travel, but within the modern world, assumed template contracts cause copious problems.
”
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Simone Collins (The Pragmatist's Guide to Relationships)
“
Some gifted people have all five and some less. Every gifted person tends to lead with one. As I read this list for the first time I was struck by the similarities between Dabrowski’s overexcitabilities and the traits of Sensitive Intuitives. Read the list for yourself and see what you identify with: Psychomotor This manifests as a strong pull toward movement. People with this overexcitability tend to talk rapidly and/or move nervously when they become interested or passionate about something. They have a lot of physical energy and may run their hands through their hair, snap their fingers, pace back and forth, or display other signs of physical agitation when concentrating or thinking something out. They come across as physically intense and can move in an impatient, jerky manner when excited. Other people might find them overwhelming and they’re routinely diagnosed as ADHD. Sensual This overexcitability comes in the form of an extreme sensitivity to sounds, smells, bright lights, textures and temperature. Perfume and scented soaps and lotions are bothersome to people with this overexcitability, and they might also have aversive reactions to strong food smells and cleaning products. For me personally, if I’m watching a movie in which a strobe light effect is used, I’m done. I have to shut my eyes or I’ll come down with a headache after only a few seconds. Loud, jarring or intrusive sounds also short circuit my wiring. Intellectual This is an incessant thirst for knowledge. People with this overexcitability can’t ever learn enough. They zoom in on a few topics of interest and drink up every bit of information on those topics they can find. Their only real goal is learning for learning’s sake. They’re not trying to learn something to make money or get any other external reward. They just happened to have discovered the history of the Ming Dynasty or Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and now it’s all they can think about. People with this overexcitability have intellectual interests that are passionate and wide-ranging and they study many areas simultaneously. Imaginative INFJ and INFP writers, this is you. This is ALL you. Making up stories, creating imaginary friends, believing in Santa Claus way past the ordinary age, becoming attached to fairies, elves, monsters and unicorns, these are the trademarks of the gifted child with imaginative overexcitability. These individuals appear dreamy, scattered, lost in their own worlds, and constantly have their heads in the clouds. They also routinely blend fiction with reality. They are practically the definition of the Sensitive Intuitive writer at work. Emotional Gifted individuals with emotional overexcitability are highly empathetic (and empathic, I might add), compassionate, and can become deeply attached to people, animals, and even inanimate objects, in a short period of time. They also have intense emotional reactions to things and might not be able to stomach horror movies or violence on the evening news. They have most likely been told throughout their life that they’re “too sensitive” or that they’re “overreacting” when in truth, they are expressing exactly how they feel to the most accurate degree.
”
”
Lauren Sapala (The Infj Writer: Cracking the Creative Genius of the World's Rarest Type)
“
The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.’” To put it perhaps a little more clearly: any attack or other operation is CHENG, on which the enemy has had his attention fixed; whereas that is CH’I,” which takes him by surprise or comes from an unexpected quarter. If the enemy perceives a movement which is meant to be CH’I,” it immediately becomes CHENG.”] 4. That the impact of your army may be like a grindstone dashed against an egg— this is effected by the science of weak points and strong. 5. In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory. [Chang Yu says: “Steadily develop indirect tactics, either by pounding the enemy’s flanks or falling on his rear.” A brilliant example of “indirect tactics” which decided the fortunes of a campaign was Lord Roberts’ night march round the Peiwar Kotal in the second Afghan war.76 6. Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhausible as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams; like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew; like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more. [Tu Yu and Chang Yu understand this of the permutations of CH’I and CHENG.” But at present Sun Tzu is not speaking of CHENG at all, unless, indeed, we suppose with Cheng Yu-hsien that a clause relating to it has fallen out of the text. Of course, as has already been pointed out, the two are so inextricably interwoven in all military operations, that they cannot really be considered apart. Here we simply have an expression, in figurative language, of the almost infinite resource of a great leader.] 7. There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. 8. There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. 9. There are
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Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
“
Every ought simply has no sense and meaning except in relation to threatened punishment or promised reward … .
Thus every ought is necessarily conditioned through punishment or reward, hence, to put it in Kant’s terms, essentially and inevitably hypothetical [with if-clause] and never, as he maintains categorical [without if-clause] … Therefore an absolute ought is simply a contradictio in adjecto.
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Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation)
“
It’s true that when it’s time to go, someone will be waiting for you. It might be a relative or a loved one, but not always. It could be a dog, hanging out with a tennis ball and ready to play again. Sometimes, when children die, they don’t know any of their relatives who are on the other side, so they’ll have an angel or even maybe a cartoon character or Santa Claus waiting to pull them across that bridge. It’s just a manifestation of energy saying, “Come on, baby, it’s okay.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (Where There's Smoke)
“
The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.'
Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns.
The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap.
Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable.
It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.
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B.H. Liddell Hart (Strategy)
“
Stephens resumed speaking as the crowd quieted. He referred to one final “improvement” the Confederate Constitution had introduced, a brief but crucial clause that banned forever any “bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” “The new Constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” This question, Stephens baldly admitted, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”20 Stephens then referenced
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Don H. Doyle (The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War)
“
I've thought about death often in recent weeks, but not really about God. My mother took me to church occasionally--but I don't recall ever connecting that up with the thought of God. She mentioned Him quite often, and I had to pray to Him at night, but I never thought much about it. I remember Him as a distant uncle with a long beard on a throne (like Santa Claus in the department store on his big chair, who picks you up on his knee and asks you if you've been good, and what would you like him to give you?). She was afraid of Him, but asked favors anyway. My father never mentioned Him--it was as if God was one of Rose's relatives he'd rather not get involved with.
”
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Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)
“
Teach all nations” (the last words of the glorified Jesus – Matthew xxviii. 19) “baptizing them into these relationships of the divine, into the connection of[24] the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” From the very context of the words, it is clear that by “baptizing into” we are not to understand a dipping in water, a so-called “Christening” in which there has to be an utterance of certain words like a magic formula. The word μρθητεύειυ [teach] is likewise deprived of the notion of teaching proper by the clause which follows it. God cannot be taught or learned, since he is life and can be apprehended only with life. “Fill them with the spiritual relation” (ὂυομα [name]; cf. Matthew x. 41: “whoso receiveth a prophet εις ὂυομα προϕήτου [in the name of a prophet], i.e., in so far as he is a prophet)[25] “which connects the One, the modification (separation), and the developed reunification of life and spirit (i.e., not in conceptual thinking alone).
”
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“
In her eyes, he could see the fear, but also the love. The need. Time to show her, that to him, she meant everything.
“Before you shower me with kisses for saving you –”
“I think it could be argued that I played a part.”
“Not when I retell the story you won’t. But we can argue about that later, naked. As I was saying, I have something for you.” Remy pulled the sheet of paper out of his back pocket and unfolded it.
Initially he’d worried about it being too short. But as Lucifer assured him when he made the contract and binding, the less clauses he put in, the more his promise would stick out. Handing it to her, he waited.
Fidgeted when she didn’t say a word. Almost tore it from her grasp. Then stumbled back as she threw herself at him.
I, Remy, the most awesome demon in Hell, do declare to love the witch Ysabel, fiery temper and all, for an eternity. I will never stray. Never betray her trust. Never do anything to cause her pain upon penalty of permanent death.
This I do swear in blood,
Remy
A simple contract, which in its very lack of clauses and sub items, awed her. “You love me that much?”
He peered at her with incredulity on his face. “Of course I love you that much. Would I have done all the things I did if I didn’t?”
“Well, you are related to a mad woman.”
“Yes, and maybe it’s madness for me to love you, but I do. Do you think just any woman would inspire me enough to take on a bloody painful curse. Or put up with the fact you have a giant, demon eating cat. I know you have trust issues, and that I might not have led the kind of life that inspires confidence, but I will show you that you can believe in me. I want you to love me.”
“I know you do. And I do love you. Only for you would I come to the rescue wearing nothing to cover my bottom.”
His eyebrows shot up. “You came to battle in a skirt without any underwear?”
A slow nod was her answer.
He grinned, then scowled. “You will not do that again. Do you know how many demons live in the sewer and could have looked up your skirt? I won’t have them looking at what’s mine. On second thought. Throw out all your underwear. I’ll lead the purge on the sewers myself so you can stroll around with your girl parts unencumbered for my enjoyment.”
“You’re insane,” she laughed.
“Crazy in love with you,” he agreed. “But I do warn you, we’ll have to have dinner with my crazy mother at least once a month.”
“Or more often. I quite like your mom. She’s got a refreshing way of viewing the world.”
“Oh fuck. Don’t tell me she’s already rubbing off,” he groaned, as he pulled her into his arms.
She snuggled against him. This was where she belonged. But she did have a question. “As my new… what should I call you anyway? Boyfriend? Demon I sleep with?”
“The following terms are acceptable to me. Yours. Mate. Husband. Divine taster of your –”
She slapped a hand over his mouth. “I’ll stick to mate.”
“And I’m going with my super, sexy, touch her and die, fabulous cougar, ass kicking witch.”
“I dare you shout that five times in a row without stumbling.”
He did to her eye popping disbelief. “I told you, I have a very agile tongue.”
“I remember.
”
”
Eve Langlais (A Demon and His Witch (Welcome to Hell, #1))
“
To reason about something is to proceed from one premise or proposition or concept to another, in order ideally to arrive at some conclusion, and in a coherent sequence whose connections are determined by the semantic content of each of the steps taken—each individual logical syntagma of the argument, each clause or sentence or symbol. In a simple syllogism, for example, two premises in conjunction inevitably produce a conclusion determined by their logical content. “Every rose in my garden is red; the rose I am looking at now is in my garden; therefore, the rose I am looking at now is red.” But then the series of steps by which the mind arrives at the conclusion of a series of propositions simply cannot be identical with a series of brute events in the biochemistry of the brain. If the mechanical picture of nature is correct, after all, any sequence of physical causes and effects is determined entirely by the impersonal laws governing the material world. One neuronal event can cause another as a result of physical necessity, but certainly not as a result of logical necessity. And yet the necessary connection that exists between the addition of two numbers and the sum thereby yielded is one produced entirely by the conceptual content of the various terms of the equation, and not by any set of biochemical contingencies. Conversely, if the tenets of mechanistic materialism are sound, the mere semantic content of a thought should not be able to affect the course of physical events in the cerebrum. Even if the long process of human evolution has produced a brain capable of reason, the brain cannot produce the actual contents of reasoning; the connections among the brain’s neurons cannot generate the symbolic and conceptual connections that compose an act of consecutive logic, because the brain’s neurons are related to one another organically and therefore interact physically, not conceptually. Clearly, then, there are mental events that cannot be reduced to mechanical electrochemical processes.
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David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss)
“
the bourgeoisie wanted to insert something more than just the negative law of “this is not yours” between the worker and the production apparatus he had in his hands. A supplementary code was needed that complements this law and gets it to work: the worker himself had to be moralized. When he is told: “You are only your labor-power and I have paid the market price for it,”‡ and when so much wealth is put in his hands, it is necessary to inject into the relationship between the worker and what he is working on a whole series of obligations and constraints that overlay the law of wages, which is apparently the simple law of the market.§ The wage contract must be accompanied by a coercion that is like its validity clause: the working class must be “regenerated,” “moralized.” Thus the transfer of the penitentiary takes place with one social class applying it to another: it is in this class relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that the condensed and remodeled penitentiary system begins to function; it will be a political instrument of the control and maintenance of relations of production. Fourth, something more is needed for this supplementary code to function effectively and for the delinquent actually to appear as a social enemy: the actual separation of delinquents from non-delinquents within those lower strata practicing illegalism. The great continuous mass of economico-political illegalism, going from common law crime to political revolt, must be broken up and the purely delinquent must be placed on one side, and those free of delinquency, who may be called non-delinquent, on the other. Thus, the bourgeoisie has no great wish to suppress delinquency.18 The main objective of the penal system is breaking this continuum of lower-class illegalism and the organization of a world of delinquency. There are two instruments for this. On the one hand, an ideological instrument: the theory of the delinquent as social enemy. This is no longer someone who struggles against the law, who wishes to evade power, but someone who is at war with every member of society. And the suddenly monstrous face the criminal assumes at the end of the eighteenth century, in literature and in penal theorists, corresponds to this need to break lower-class illegalism
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Michel Foucault (On the Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973)
“
In conclusion, the death of Christ was not about God the Father needing to vent His rage and fury upon a sacrificial victim in order to appease Himself. It was not about the Father needing to crush someone in the place of humanity so that, on the other side of the crushing He could be pleased with, and relational towards us. It was not about a sacrificial system which God originally instituted, but later decided was incapable of satisfying His needs. It was about the entire Trinity destroying and putting to death the alien entity of sin, the “devil’s work”(1 John 3: 18), in order to save us from its corrupting influence. It was done so that on the other side of the Cross, we would see and understand what man had lost sight of after partaking of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It was to reveal to us that our God is not a cosmic Santa Claus who is making a list, checking it twice, and who will ultimately repay both the naughty and the nice. Our God is Love, and has only ever been seeking to reveal that love to us. He was never out to “get us”, but to rescue us from the consequences of our own decisions. Sin did not change God, and the Cross was not the means by which He reset Himself back to His factory settings. Sin changed us, and it therefore needed to be destroyed so that we could behold the unchangeable nature of our God of love. The Cross was the ultimate, climactic demonstration of the Godhead’s love for the human race, not the crude display of a deified version of human justice. It was Eternal Love Himself, stepping into our problem, absorbing it into Himself and dying in order to put it to death. It was heroic, self-giving, sacrificial justice.
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Jeff Turner (Saints in the Arms of a Happy God)
“
Show Clear Relationships When you are trying to connect more than one clause, sentence, or paragraph, make sure to express the relationship between them clearly. This means using words such as “since,” “because,” “after,” “before,” “however,” or “nevertheless,” which show the reader why, when, where, or how the new idea relates to the prior one. By contrast, additive words such as “and,” “in addition,” and “besides” fail to show how the ideas are related.
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Robert C. Pozen (Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours)
“
There cannot be such a thing as true life without praise. Praising and no longer praising are related to each other as are living and no longer living.” —Claus Westermann, The Praise of God in the Psalms (1965)
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Belden C. Lane (Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality)
“
While the experience of the Second World War has to a large extent shaped the political makeup and destinies of all European societies in the second half of the twentieth century, Poland has been singularly affected. It was over the territory of the pre-1939 Polish state that Hitler and Stalin first joined in a common effort (their pact of nonaggression signed in August 1939 included a secret clause dividing the country in half) and then fought a bitter war until one of them was eventually destroyed. As a result, Poland suffered a demographic catastrophe without precedent; close to 20 percent of its population died of war-related causes. It lost its minorities - Jews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the war. Poland's elites in all walks of life were decimated. Over a third of its urban residents were missing at the conclusion of the war. Fifty-five percent of the country's lawyers were no more, along with 40 percent of its medical doctors and one-third of its university professors and Roman Catholic clergy. Poland was dubbed 'God's playground' by a sympathetic British historian, but during that time it must have felt more like a stomping ground of the devil.
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Jan Tomasz Gross (Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland)
“
During much of the Paleolithic, reindeer were a primary food source for Eurasians, but judging by the relative scarcity of their representations in cave paintings, they were not as highly respected as aurochs, horses, and bison. They don't seem to have been deemed sacred. By the time domestication commenced, that attitude had changed, as evidenced by the Bronze Age megaliths depicting flying reindeera motif that still figures prominently in the religion of contemporary Siberian tribes such as the Evenki and Eveny. Some believe that Santa's flying reindeer ultimately derive from these myths. I don't, but I have been called Scrooge more than once.
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Richard C. Francis (Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World)
“
ELECTIVE MUTISM
Social anxiety appears in many forms, some of which are only now coming to light. Socially anxious children, for example, are usually thought of as quiet and reserved and of course “shy.” But some children, though they function fairly well in their home environment, have great difficulty talking in social situations. Donny was one such child. At fourteen, he managed quite well at home, but never talked to his peers. His parents encouraged him to join in group activities, and even sent him off to an overnight camp. But he remained silent, even when he became lost in the woods. The child was alone for several hours; dusk was approaching, and he began to get cold, but he still could not bring himself to call out. The counselors were near enough for him to attract their attention and yet he remained mute.
Alarm bells went off for Melanie when she noticed that her daughter at age three had trouble talking with people outside their home. When the little girl went to see Santa Claus, and he asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she became hysterical and couldn’t respond verbally. And the problem continued: She would speak only with the immediate family, and never to peers or potential playmates. Elective mutism is a very specific symptom of social anxiety. Fear turns into panic which inhibits speech; the elective mute is capable—physically—of speaking to outsiders, but anxiety prevents him or her from speaking. Only recently has there been any media attention paid to this syndrome, and research in this area has just begun. After an article appeared in a New York-area newspaper, however, someone who had expressed interest in starting a self-help group for elective mutes was besieged with phone calls from desperate relatives, eager to get help for their silent family members. I have worked with people of all ages who suffer from varying degrees of elective mutism. From my perspective, elective mutism is treatable relatively easily in childhood or early adolescence. But treating the adult is very difficult because of the pervasive progression of the problem.
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Jonathan Berent (Beyond Shyness: How to Conquer Social Anxieties)
“
If they could not prove adultery or extreme cruelty, Nina's attorneys had an alternate strategy available. Rhode Island was unique in allowing divorce based upon other, more ambiguous grounds, as well...[as] an omnibus clause in the state's legal code authorized divorce based upon..."gross misbehavior and wickedness in either of the parties repugnant to and inconsistent with the marriage contract"...the relative vagueness of the terms "gross misbehavior and wickedness" left room for interpretation by Rhode Island judges. Therefore, it was crucial NIna's attorneys prove she had legitimate standing to file for divorce in Rhode Island.
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Jean Elson (Gross Misbehavior and Wickedness: A Notorious Divorce in Early Twentieth-Century America)
“
Advancing no particular theory of their own, some insist that explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and even pronunciation is necessary because students in immersion classrooms sometimes have trouble with these features of the second language. Direct instruction, they say, is the only remedy. Such claims rely heavily on short-term studies in which older students—rarely K–12 English learners—are taught a linguistic form, such as word order, verb conjugation, relative clauses, and so forth, then tested on their conscious knowledge of the form soon after.
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James Crawford (The Trouble with SIOP®: How a Behaviorist Framework, Flawed Research, and Clever Marketing Have Come to Define - and Diminish - Sheltered Instruction)
“
... I've never met a magical creature before. All I know is what I've heard in stories. Father Christmas, for instance, with the elves who make the toys." Tergil was impassive. "We relate a similar tale," he replied. "It is called Santa Clause and his slave workforce". "Oh," said Thorpe. "It is an ancient story," said the elf, "about the perils of trusting strangers. It does have a happy ending, though. The evil Clause is beaten to death with hunks of reindeer meat.
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Andy Redsmith (Breaking the Lore (Inspector Paris Mystery, #1))
“
Rules for the Use and Arrangement of Words The following rules for the use and arrangement of words will be found helpful in securing clearness and force. 1. Use words in their proper sense. 2. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing." 3. Avoid exaggerations. 4. Be careful in the use of not ... and, any, but, only, not ... or, that. 5. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e. g., certain. 6. Be careful in the use of he, it, they, these, etc. 7. Report a speech in the first person where necessary to avoid ambiguity. 8. Use the third person where the exact words of the speaker are not intended to be given. 9. When you use a participle implying when, while, though, or that, show clearly by the context what is implied. 10. When using the relative pronoun, use who or which, if the meaning is and he or and it, for he or for it. 11. Do not use and which for which. 12. Repeat the antecedent before the relative where the non-repetition causes any ambiguity. 13. Use particular for general terms. Avoid abstract nouns. 14. Avoid verbal nouns where verbs can be used. 15. Use particular persons instead of a class. 16. Do not confuse metaphor. 17. Do not mix metaphor with literal statement. 18. Do not use poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject. 19. Emphatic words must stand in emphatic positions; i. e., for the most part, at the beginning or the end of the sentence. 20. Unemphatic words must, as a rule, be kept from the end. 21. The Subject, if unusually emphatic, should often be transferred from the beginning of the sentence. 22. The object is sometimes placed before the verb for emphasis. 23. Where several words are emphatic make it clear which is the most emphatic. Emphasis can sometimes be given by adding an epithet, or an intensifying word. 24. Words should be as near as possible to the words with which they are grammatically connected. 25. Adverbs should be placed next to the words they are intended to qualify. 26. Only; the strict rule is that only should be placed before the word it affects. 27. When not only precedes but also see that each is followed by the same part of speech. 28. At least, always, and other adverbial adjuncts sometimes produce ambiguity. 29. Nouns should be placed near the nouns that they define. 30. Pronouns should follow the nouns to which they refer without the intervention of any other noun. 31. Clauses that are grammatically connected should be kept as close together as possible. Avoid parentheses. 32. In conditional sentences the antecedent or "if-clauses" must be kept distinct from the consequent clauses. 33. Dependent clauses preceded by that should be kept distinct from those that are independent. 34. Where there are several infinitives those that are dependent on the same word must be kept distinct from those that are not. 35. In a sentence with if, when, though, etc. put the "if-clause" first. 36. Repeat the subject where its omission would cause obscurity or ambiguity. 37. Repeat a preposition after an intervening conjunction especially if a verb and an object also intervene. 38. Repeat conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronominal adjectives. 39. Repeat verbs after the conjunctions than, as, etc. 40. Repeat the subject, or some other emphatic word, or a summary of what has been said, if the sentence is so long that it is difficult to keep the thread of meaning unbroken. 41. Clearness is increased when the beginning of the sentence prepares the way for the middle and the middle for the end, the whole forming a kind of ascent. This ascent is called "climax." 42. When the thought is expected to ascend but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." 43. A new construction should not be introduced unexpectedly.
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Frederick William Hamilton (Word Study and English Grammar A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses)
“
it is impossible to use that if the relative clause is non-restrictive – that is, if it does not serve to identify the thing under discussion, but only serves to provide more information about that thing. So, you must write the Suez Canal, which was opened in 1869, and you cannot write *the Suez Canal, that was opened in 1869.
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R.L. Trask (Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English)
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During the last eighty years or so, the justices have rewritten sections of the Constitution, including the Commerce Clause (redefining noncommerce as commerce) and the tax provisions (redefining penalties as taxes), to accommodate the vast expansion of the federal government’s micromanagement over private economic activity. Moreover, the justices have laced the Court’s jurisprudence with all manner of personal policy preferences relating to social, cultural, and religious issues, many of which could have been avoided or deferred. What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force.
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Mark R. Levin (The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic)
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I love to read. Rom-coms, sports romance, traumances. Romance of any kind really. I love forgetting that I’m reading, like I’m in the story, in the book, so intently in the moment that I forget who I really am. No other feeling relates to being completely lost in a book,
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Pru Schuyler (Stealing Mrs. Claus)
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Only a lunatic would mug his next-door neighbor. A band of marauding soldiers or nomadic horsemen falling on a peasant hamlet to rape and pillage also obviously have no intention of forming any ongoing relations with the survivors. But in a similar way, religious traditions often insist that the only true charity is anonymous—in other words, not meant to place the recipient in one’s debt. One extreme form of this, documented in various parts of the world, is the gift by stealth, in a kind of reverse burglary: to literally sneak into the recipient’s house at night and plant one’s present so no one can know for sure who has left it. The figure of Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas (who, it must be remembered, was not just the patron saint of children, but also the patron saint of thieves) would appear to be the mythological version of the same principle: a benevolent burglar with whom no social relations are possible and therefore to whom no one could possibly owe anything, in his case, above all, because he does not actually exist.
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David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years)
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You may believe you are above others, more intelligent, better, morally superior, more virtuous, more righteous, more genuine, but unless you have awareness, which is related to your pineal gland, Claustrum oil, and stimulated mainly by meditation and sunlight, these traits that only exist in your mind will soon disappear when you realize that you have been totally blind and oblivious to the real world you live in. That is why the pineal gland has been the target, from the beginning.
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Jack Freestone
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WOW!! YOUR BELLY JIGGLES JUST LIKE SANTA CLAUS! ARE YOU GUYS RELATED?” she blurted out.
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Rachel Renée Russell (Tales from a Not-So-Smart Miss Know-It-All (Dork Diaries, #5))
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The way you use the commas should give your sentence its correct meaning — viz: The men, who were handsome, found partners. There, the relative clause tells us that all the men were handsome and all found partners. The men who were handsome found partners. With this restrictive relative clause, without commas, we are discovering something quite different: here, only the men who were handsome found partners.
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Gyles Brandreth (Have You Eaten Grandma?)
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If the writer finds that he has written a series of sentences of the type described, he should recast enough of them to remove the monotony, replacing them by simple sentences, by sentences of two clauses joined by a semicolon, by periodic sentences of two clauses, by sentences, loose or periodic, of three clauses—whichever best represent the real relations of the thought.
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William Strunk Jr. (The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition)
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The CIA was created by the NSA/47 and placed under the direction of the NSC, a committee. This same act had established the NSC at the same time. Therefore, the CIA’s position relative to the NSC was without practice and precedent; but the law was specific in placing the agency under the direction of that committee, and in not placing the Agency in the Office of the President and directly under his control. In conclusion, this act provided that among the duties the CIA would perform, it would: . . . (5) perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the National Security as the NSC may from time to time direct. This was the inevitable loophole, and as time passed and as the CIA and the ST grew in power and know-how they tested this clause in the Act and began to practice their own interpretation of its meaning. They believed that it meant they could practice clandestine operations. Their perseverance paid off. During the summer of 1948 the NSC issued a directive, number 10/2, which authorized special operations, with two stipulations: (a) Such operations must be secret, and (b) such operations must be plausibly deniable. These were important prerequisites.
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L. Fletcher Prouty (The Secret Team: The CIA & its Allies in Control of the United States & the World)
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The new National Security Act contained a tantalizing clause worded to allow endlessly elastic interpretation. It authorized the CIA to perform not only duties spelled out by law, but also “such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” This gave it the legal right to take any action, anywhere in the world, as long as the president approved. “The fear generated by competition with a nation like the USSR, which had elevated control of every aspect of society to a science, encouraged the belief in the United States that it desperately needed military might and counterespionage by agencies that could outdo the Soviet spymasters,” the historian Robert Dallek has written.
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Stephen Kinzer (The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War)