Would this dictionary, with its display cases of literary specimens, demonstrate the natural history of English, constructing a "treasure-house of the language," as Ms. Brewer's title puts it?
The literary specimens under consideration at the demonstration, conducted by David Vander Meulen, were two presumably identical 1922 first editions of Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt," laid side-by-side and each opened to Page 121.
This will be of great interest to scholars, since it is the only known specimen of literary Aramaic from the period of four hundred years between the Aramaic of the Book of Daniel in the early third century B.C. and that of the Scroll of Fasting, a document of the second century A.D. The Metropolitan Samuel has been living in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Therapeutic amputations are never depicted or mentioned in the literary sources, while the specimens suggested to demonstrate such amputations are not convincing.
In breathless but perfectly controlled prose, she focuses Jack's fury and amps up the intensity of his search for the homicidal pedophile -- who turns out to be an especially revolting specimen of his literary type.
Aside from the troubadours' love poetry, medieval Provençal literature has some prominent specimens in other literary genres.
The relatively few specimens that achieve genuine literary merit do so by overcoming the easy therapeutic clichs that buzz like clouds of summer gnats around painful memories and difficult emotions.
Fortunately, the days of famine are not yet here, and from his latest raid into the literary jungle Vila-Matas has brought home a fine specimen of that most endangered of intellectual species, the literary publisher.
Champion attacks "largely white women" between the ages of 25 and 33 (with "some of the more pathetic specimens" being closer to 40), accusing them of confusing "the act of literary engagement with coquettish pom-pom flogging".
Joseph Mitchell published two Profiles in this magazine, in 1942 and in 1964, of a prime specimen, the unwashed Greenwich Village rapscallion Joe Gould, who claimed to be at work on a revolutionary literary opus, "An Oral History of Our Time".
