Nothing improves an unappealing fish quite so much as a ruffle of parsley around the platter’s edge. By the same token, no device will help a dull paper more than an apt quotation, smoothly inserted.These hoary truths are prompted by publication of a second edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase, Saying and Quotation. It […]

Don’t be too quick to accept Iraqi civilian casualty numbers. Even if civilian casualties in Iraq are light, expect a great deal of attention to the subject in the days ahead. In a numbers-obsessed society, focusing relentlessly on the deaths of innocents – and inflating the numbers, if necessary – is a conventional way of […]

I can’t believe we subject ourselves to such torture year after year. Every year, we return to Orlando, Fla. Instinct makes us do this. We are like the salmon who must swim upstream to spawn, and die. They are lucky. We must go to theme parks.A theme park is an amusement park where you pay […]

AUSTIN, Texas – See if this doesn’t make you wince. The Washington Post reported last Saturday on how the Bush administration’s attempts to bully Turkey had backfired. Courtesy of John Marshall’s website, TalkingPointsMemo.com, I found this paragraph: “But one senior U.S. official acknowledged that U.S. pressure in recent months has backfired, saying that at one […]

So the French have been running around Africa urging tiny nations on the U.N. Security Council to help humiliate America and frustrate the war in Iraq. One French company has multibillion-dollar oil contracts pending with Baghdad, and a good reporter – Bill Gertz of The Washington Times – says another French firm is now supplying […]

AUSTIN, Texas – Don’t you hate when war starts in springtime? We are now united in desperately hoping that the war will be both easy and short.The most depressing thing about this war is that we are going into it with the support of the majority of public opinion in exactly two countries, the United […]

A couple of years ago, The Associated Press provided an item from the Census Bureau about a significant increase in the number of births. The increase reflected growth in the number of women entering childbearing years. Said the AP:“These daughters of early baby boomers are having their own kids, but getting married first is not […]

It was in March of 1963. I was 15. That was an innocent era. Recently, my little brother Phil (he’s only 50) gave me a box that wound up with him some years ago, when our mom died and a bunch of family flotsam drifted down one generation.The box contains slides. For you young, digital […]

Q When I was a kid way back when I had an uncle who’d say “land o’ Goshen!” I haven’t heard the expression since then. What’s the story behind it? – E.E., Wabash, Ind. A: “Land o’ Goshen” is an old-fashioned expression that is rarely heard these days, although it has not dropped entirely out […]

Peace and prosperity are nice, but they go hand-in-hand with vigilence and duty. War would be so much easier to think about if life weren’t complicated by our rueful pasts and our divided hearts.But our plaintive memories mire us in regret, in qualifications, in hesitancy even when we would prefer to charge ahead with what […]