Pat’s Polemics

My wife gave me a delightful task: take a shirt back to the Student Book Center at ASU for a refund. Not many interesting books (Continue Reading)

A bit misleading, this category, b/c I’m really going to get into details of reading texts in other languages, but, OTOH, it IS what I’m (Continue Reading)

Thursday I went back to ASU library for the book Finnish Lessons. The first few words bring up TRUST as the necessary ingredient, something I (Continue Reading)

I’m taking a break from my scheduled reading to get through A Media Voz, by Ricardo Maldonado, a book on the Spanish clitic se. I (Continue Reading)

Since I have retired, I decided I should list out at least a good number of the books I want to read. I broke them (Continue Reading)

Just yesterday I got determined to locate books in Modern Greek and Norwegian and finally found bookstores that carry them. I want Harry Potter in (Continue Reading)

Let me give you an example of the kind of thing I like to see in a book on a foreign language. In English we (Continue Reading)

The Peter Mackridge book, The Modern Greek Language, has turned up a gem: the term prolapsis, referring to a pronoun which anticipates a noun object (Continue Reading)

My reading time got cut a little short this weekend because my brother-in-law is flying in for his 50th h.s. reunion and will stay with (Continue Reading)

I just found a book on my shelf that’s been there for many years. I thought it was a scholarly work beyond my abilities regarding (Continue Reading)

I blogged a little on Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885. I just looked and found I had not, so I will mention (Continue Reading)

My wife has taken to watching the Turner Classic Movies channel and so it was one day I turned on the television and found myself (Continue Reading)

On Saturday I went to the largest book sale in the country, the Visiting Nurse Service Auxiliary (I think it has dropped that now and (Continue Reading)

I’ll place this in both the politics and what I’m reading categories. Mann and Ornstein, a liberal and a conservative, have collaborated for decades on (Continue Reading)

As the summer closes and the craziness of school starts, I am in the middle of finishing some books I started, getting started on some (Continue Reading)

Anyone who would like to help with this, feel free to send me something. I am looking to read books in several languages, probably starting (Continue Reading)

Summer is over. Our monsoon was supposed to fade away by mid-September but yesterday I pulled into my garage and left the door up it (Continue Reading)

This category will probably leave me the most open to criticism of any category. The list of what I am reading and trying to get (Continue Reading)

Why imaginary and baseless rules don’t work. I just read the translation of a Russian title, Vremia i My, Time and We. How utterly dumb (Continue Reading)

What am I reading? Right now I just started yesterday Ira Berlin’s new book, The Making of African America, H. A. Gleason’s Linguistics and English (Continue Reading)