For his most recent Sunday Book Review, Mark shows his readers his Aurelian side.No, not the sad, Berlin-bound Aurelian as depicted in Nabokov’s short story of that name; the joyous Aurelian, as in the great tradition of butterfly enthusiasts.
For his most recent Sunday Book Review, Mark shows his readers his Aurelian side.No, not the sad, Berlin-bound Aurelian as depicted in Nabokov’s short story of that name; the joyous Aurelian, as in the great tradition of butterfly enthusiasts.
It was Aristotle, in the first book of his “Nichomachean Ethics,” who wrote, “For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy” to conclude his point that the cultivation of virtue takes prolonged effort and a great amount of time.
Yaffle. The very first time I heard this widely used British colloquial name for the Green Woodpecker I was instantly taken by it. Thought to have been derived in the Eighteenth Century from the call made by the species, yaffle so well expresses the Zeitgeist of this ground-loving member of the woodpecker family that once learned it’s difficult to call it by its official common name.
When something is decreasing in quality, the common expression is that it has “gone to the dogs.” (As a dog enthusiast, I’ve never been particularly fond of this expression, but there it is…) However as the cover of the new second edition of the the Princeton Field Guide series’ Carnivores of the World has “gone from the dogs” of its first edition “to the cats,” can we interpret this as a sign that it has increased in quality?