Alfred Delp SJ: 70 years after his arrest, trial and death in Nazi Germany On this day, September 15, in 1944, Alfred Delp turned 37. He was a Jesuit priest who had been arrested six weeks earlier on suspicion of treason against Germany’s Third Reich. He...
A CBC commentator referred to today's 50th anniversary of the "infamous" march on Washington. Surely that march is famous, not infamous. "Infamous" refers to an event or an action that is considered evil or monstrous. Thus freedom marches become famous, and the segregation laws of the...
When the English novelist Evelyn Waugh visited the United States in the late 1940s, a young journalist asked him what impressed him most in America. His answer: the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Finding that his interviewer, whom he identified only as “the wretched...
In one of the most recent episodes of the popular British series, "Foyle's War", Foyle asks, "May I speak to whomever is in charge here?" "Whomever" should be "whoever" in this sentence. The reason for this is that "whoever is in charge here" is a subordinate...
In late October, 1866, a young student and poet named Gerard Manley Hopkins boarded a train in Oxford and took the 60-mile journey north to the industrial city of Birmingham. There, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry Newman. By that time,...
In the chapel of St. Stephen’s Monastery, set high among the giant outcroppings of rock that stand before the Pindos Mountains in central Greece, the nuns’ chanting of Vespers goes on and on as evening turns into night. Their voices, singing in a minor key...
An article in a recent New Yorker contains the following sentence: "A range of other provisions were also suggested." In the above sentence, range is the subject. Because range is a singular noun, the verb should be was. So the sentence should read as follows: "A range of other provisions...
If you aren’t interested in something–say, science fiction movies…. Are you disinterested in science fiction movies or uninterested in science fiction movies? If you aren’t interested in science fiction movies, you are uninterested in them. If you are disinterested, this means that you are neutral on a particular...
Here is a clear guide to the writing of titles. When are italics used, and when are quotation marks used? http://homeworktips.about.com/od/mlastyle/a/titles.htm ...
A clever New Yorker cartoon (May 28, 2012) shows a man tapping on his keyboard with his computer screen in front of him, and behind him a woman looking over his shoulder at the screen. She says, "It's 'She's driving me crazy and I'm not...