Category: Wednesday Wordplay
Wednesday Wordplay: Lucille Ball’s 100th Birthday!
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If Lucille Ball were still alive, she’d turn 100 this week. In honor of this, here’s a few of her most memorable quotes:
How was “I Love Lucy“ born? We decided that instead of divorce lawyers profiting from our mistakes, we’d profit from them.
I regret the passing of the studio system. I was very appreciative of it because I had no talent.
I’m sometimes scared of everything that has happened to us. We didn’t think Desilu Productions would grow so big. We merely wanted to be together and have two children.
Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.
I’m not funny. What I am is brave.
The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
Use a make-up table with everything close at hand and don’t rush; otherwise you’ll look like a patchwork quilt.
Wednesday Wordplay: Worst book titles of all time
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Games You Can Play with your Pussy Read the entire list of literary gems (click on books for more info) |
Wednesday Wordplay: Bette Davis and her enemies
I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn’t dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
— Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, 1962
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously…. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1811
Hysteria is only possible with an audience.
— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters, 1999
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
— Will Rogers
Do what you love, love what you do, leave the world a better place and don’t pick your nose.
— Jeff Mallett, Frazz, 08-03-04
Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying, 1973
Sooner or later we all quote our mothers.
— Bern Williams
Wednesday Wordplay: The secret of being boring…
The secret of being boring is to say everything.
— Voltaire
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
— Charles Dickens
Flattery is like cologne water, to be smelt of, not swallowed.
— Josh Billings
Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
— Rose Kennedy
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
— Freya Madeline Stark
The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
— Whitney Young
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
— Albert Camus, Happy Death
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
— James Thurber
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
— John Cleese
I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
— Edgar Allan Poe
Sometimes the lies you tell are less frightening than the loneliness you might feel if you stopped telling them.
— Brock Clarke, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, 2007
Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.
— Minna Thomas Antrim
Wednesday Wordplay: Leona Helmsley and Gertrude Stein
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I don’t hire people who have to be told to be nice. I hire nice people. — Leona Helmsley |
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| He that can’t endure the bad, will not live to see the good. — Jewish Proverb |
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| We are always the same age inside. — Gertrude Stein |
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| But seduction isn’t making someone do what they don’t want to do. Seduction is enticing someone into doing what they secretly want to do already. — Waiter Rant, Waiter Rant weblog, 11-29-05 |
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Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. |
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| Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. — Alexander Solzhenitsyn |
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| Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery. — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1849 |
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Wordplay Videos
Looks like the “Homeless Man with the Golden Voice” got a job!
Wednesday Wordplay: from Ashe to Updike
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Assumptions are the termites of relationships. — Henry Winkler |
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| The arts must be considered an essential element of education… They are tools for living life reflectively, joyfully and with the ability to shape the future. — Shirley Trusty Corey |
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| Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome. — Arthur Ashe |
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| I simply cannot understand the passion that some people have for making themselves thoroughly uncomfortable and then boasting about it afterwards. — Patricia Moyes |
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I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught. — Georgia O’Keeffe |
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| Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. — Thomas A. Edison |
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| Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose. — Bill Gates |
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| Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. — Theodore Roosevelt, September 1913 |
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Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. — John Updike |
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| If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances. — Julia Sorel |
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| If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down. — Mary Pickford |
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| I like coincidences. They make me wonder about destiny, and whether free will is an illusion or just a matter of perspective. They let me speculate on the idea of some master plan that, from time to time, we’re allowed to see out of the corner of our eye. — Chuck Sigars, September 8, 2003 |
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Only two things you ignore: things that aren’t important and things you wish weren’t important, and wishing never works. — David Shore, House M.D., Not Cancer, 2008 |
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Urban Dictionary
Audience Typing
When a person’s typing abilities degrade when they must type in front of others, leading to misspelled words, improper capitalisation and most likely resulting in blushing. Worse if that other person is an older relative or someone you respect.
Father asks, "Put Manchester United into Google there for me"
Son, "Sure"
Results in – "Manchetser UNited" being typed into Google.
Wednesday Wordplay: meaning of the word ‘pretty’ – very powerful!
Katie Makkai – ‘Pretty’
Katie Makkai, a veteran poetry slammer – defining the word “pretty”.
Wednesday Wordplay: Stephen Fry vents about word usage
Don’t like nouns becoming verbs?
Get over it bitches!!
Stephen Fry vents regarding his distaste for audiophiles who point out every little grammatical error instead of enjoying the energy and seduction of language. And check out the great typographical animation!!
Wednesday Wordplay: mangled words and John Wayne
words often mangled or misused
As a kid, did you ever dread being sent to the principle’s office? Or have you ever asked someone to be discrete with delicate information you’ve given them?
English is a Rubick’s cube of confusing possibilities. Here are a few of the most famous word mangles and mix-ups:
cache / cachet
Cache, “a hidden store,” is sometimes confused with cachet, “prestige, appeal.” Both words come from French, but cache is pronounced like “cash,” while cachetrhymes with “sashay.” The confusion may be encouraged because we often don’t write final accents for words borrowed from French like resume andprotege, so people may mistakenly think that cache is one of these words ending in an “ay” sound. Cachet is one of these “-ay” words, but one that ends in –et, like cabaret.
pore / pour
When you read something closely, you pore over it. You only pour over something if you are dumping a liquid on it. It may seem to some that they are pouring their attention or vision over something they are reading, and this metaphor encourages the confusion.
shined / shone
Shine is one of those “strong verbs” that had an irregular past tense and past participle (shone) but later acquired a regular form ending in -ed as well. Some people use the forms interchangeably, but there is a pattern that most people follow to keep them distinct. Shined takes a personal subject and an object: I shined the flashlight at the bear. Shone is used of light sources and does not take an object: The moon shone over the harbor.
enervate / energize
Many people believe that enervate is a synonym of energize, but in fact the words are antonyms. Enervate means “to deprive of energy or vitality.” This is because enervate comes ultimately from Latin nervus, “sinew,” and means literally “to cause to be without sinews,” that is, “to weaken.” Ancient and medieval anatomists could not distinguish the white fibers of sinews or tendons from those of nerves, and the word nerve was once used for both things.
Motivational Quotes
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
— Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Strength to Love,’ 1963
A mother only does her children harm if she makes them the only concern of her life.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge, 1943
The best way to realize the pleasure of feeling rich is to live in a smaller house than your means would entitle you to have.
— Edward Clarke
Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.
— Arnold Palmer
Do not accustom yourself to use big words for little matters..
– Samuel Johnson
Storms make oaks take deeper root..
— George Herbert
If you really want to do something, you do it. You don’t save it for a sound bite.
— Liz Friedman, House M.D., Hunting, 2005
Courage is being scared to death – but saddling up anyway.
— John Wayne
