- HOME
- INTRO TO THE FORUM
- USE AND MISUSE
- BADLY WRITTEN, BADLY SPOKEN
- GETTING
TO KNOW ENGLISH - PREPARING FOR ENGLISH PROFICIENCY TESTS
- GOING DEEPER INTO ENGLISH
- YOU ASKED ME THIS QUESTION
- EDUCATION AND TEACHING FORUM
- ADVICE AND DISSENT
- MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH
- STUDENTS' SOUNDING BOARD
- LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
- THE LOUNGE
- NOTABLE WORKS BY OUR VERY OWN
- ESSAYS BY JOSE CARILLO
- Some Guideposts For Positioning Adjectives In English Sentences
- The ‘Off Of’ Bad-Grammar Pandemic
- Long Noun Forms Make Sentences Exasperatingly Difficult To Grasp
- Good Conversationalists Phrase Their Tag Questions With Finesse
- The Pronoun “None” Can Mean Either “Not One” Or “Not Any”
- A Rather Curious State Of Affairs In The Grammar Of “Do”-Questions
- ABOUT JOSE CARILLO
- READINGS ABOUT LANGUAGE
- TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR
- NEWS AND COMMENTARY
- BOOKSHOP
- ARCHIVES
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.
A book that’s “a delightful ode to everyday elegance”
From the look and feel of it, Jessica Kerwin Jenkins’s Encyclopedia of the Exquisite: An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights (Doubleday, 336 pages) is both a joyful holiday read and a delightful treasure trove by itself. As described by Glamour magazine in its review of the book, it’s a “stylish little index of the facts you never knew you absolutely needed to know about one hundred of the most wonderful things in life—from frilly lingerie and champagne to dining al fresco to trapezes.”
Take a peek at just a few of the many beguiling subjects that Encyclopedia of the Exquisite sensually explores: hot-air ballooning; picnicking and dining alfresco; collecting cupids, cherubs, and baby angels; wearing an all-black wardrobe to express elegant restraint; drinking champagne as an art; wearing frilly lingerie; accenting a dress with sequins; making origami; playing badminton; and whistling. It is, in the words of Hollywood film star Sarah Jessica Parker, “a delightful ode to everyday elegance.”
“Jenkins’s wittily curated selection emphasizes the rare and not often considered, with a dash of Julie Andrews’s ‘favorite things’ sensibility,” says Lily Koppel in her review of the ingeniously illustrated book in the December 3, 2010 issue of The New York Times. “Along the way, tales are told about muses of the marvelous, from Madame de Staël to Yoko Ono... There are enough of these fancies in Encyclopedia of the Exquisite to fill a castle of your own. It is a worthy trove.”
Read an excerpt from Jessica Kerwin Jenkins’s Encyclopedia of the Exquisite now!
Read Lily Koppel’s review of Encyclopedia of the Exquisite in The New York Times now!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jessica Kerwin Jenkins was formerly the European editor of W and a senior editor at Women’s Wear Daily. She currently writes for Vogue.
ANOTHER HOLIDAY READING:
In the new book Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël Coward (Harper, 228 pages), British historian Paul Johnson presents a highly engaging collection of biographical portraits of the Western world’s greatest wits and humorists, among them Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Toulouse-Lautrec, G.K. Chesterton, Damon Runyan, W.C. Fields, James Thurber, and the Marx Brothers. The world is cruel, Johnson says, and these comics “who can dry our tears, and force reluctant smiles to trembling lips, are more precious to us, if the truth be told, than all the statesmen and the generals and brainy people, even the great artists.”
Read an excerpt from Paul Johnson’s Humorists: From Hogarth to Noël Coward now!
