Happy New Year!
“An optimist stays up to see the New Year in. A pessimist waits to make sure the old one leaves.” — Bill Vaughn “Cheers to a new year and another chance to get it right.” — Oprah Winfrey http://www.quotationspage.com/
Author Archives: Bob Welbaum
How I Got in Trouble at High School … As a Teacher
When I substitute teach, I always have backup plans — books and topics we can talk about if we run out of material. One of my favorites used to be The Book of Totally Useless Information by Don Voorhees (MJF Books, 1993). It contains an entry on obscene gestures entitled “When did it first become
Team of Rivals
I recently finished reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A fascinating book, it was really a political history of four men. I always wondered how Lincoln was able to win the presidential nomonation with so little experience in Washington. (He positioned himself as everyone’s second choice.) Of
Do Dictionaries Contain Mistakes?
Having spent 15 years in the publishing business, I know there’s no such thing as a perfect book.(And if there ever were, the computer would eat the file.) So what about dictionaries? In the book The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, Bill Bryson explains one error. The 1934 Merriam-Webster International Dictionary