I was speaking the other day with an older friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and he asked me what I was reading lately. I mentioned this and that, and then asked him the same question. He said he was getting interested in philosophy—not the kind of thing professors in the universities talk about, …
Author Archives: rultimo
My Florida Home
If an acquaintance happened to mention to you casually one day that my house in Florida needs a new roof, you would be right to wonder just how many homes he in fact has. You would be right, that is, to infer that he had at least one other home, but what about the sentence …
Logically or Poetically?
It is possible to think about the way we write and speak as the way we see the world. After all, we write and speak about something, and whether it’s ultimately true that there is an independent and real and lasting world outside our own minds (our commonsense notion which, surprisingly, not everyone has always …
More Than One Is Sometimes One
An early obstacle one comes up against on the road of grammar and style is the towering habit English has of using a string of words as one part of speech. The science of grammar, as opposed to its art, is meant to give us the rationale by which to revise skillfully what we have …
Beach Balls
Students of the Chinese martial art tai chi learn a pose in which they extend both hands, cupping them into the shape of a sphere while each hand (each half of the sphere) remains separated from the other. They are then told to imagine that both their hands are pushing on a rubber beach ball …