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TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.
The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.
I hope you’ll enjoy the new selections that will be presented here each week.Joe Carillo
A defense of evolutionary theory, a lowdown on snarky writers
For your time out from English grammar this week, I highly recommend two very interesting and provocative readings. The first is Richard Fortey’s review in The Guardian UK of Richard Dawkins’s latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which makes broadsides against the religious fundamentalists who continue to oppose Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The second, also in The Guardian UK, is David Denby’s article on snark, the attacks done under the guise of wit that he says are “invading all modern discourse from gossip sites to newspapers.”
In his review, “Richard Dawkins’s latest broadside just misses its target,” Fortey says that Dawkins, whom he describes as “Darwin’s pit bull,” once again demonstrates his consummate skill as an explainer of evolution in his new book. However, Fortey says he isn’t sure “whether Dawkins is rehearsing his arguments here to stiffen the backbones of those involved in the debate with ‘intelligent designers’, or whether he really thinks that the scales will fall from their religious eyes, cauterised by his searing arguments.”
Read Richard Fortey’s review of Dawkin’s The Greatest Show on Earth now!
In his article “It’s not big and it’s not clever,” Denby makes a lowdown on snark as a sly and downright nasty activity that “seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find—a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite up to date, a bit of flab, an exposed boob, a blotch, a blemish, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed mouth.” He describes snarky writers as people who “can’t bear being outclassed by anyone” and who use snark as “the vehicle of their resentment and contempt.”
