The Story of Information

Ben Zimmer, the executive producer of VisualThesaurus.com and Vocabulary.com., gives us a great introduction in today’s Boston Globe to the recently published The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs. He concludes by telling us that “Recognizing that the search for early information on proverbs is unending, the editors are launching a website (www.yalebooks.com/modernproverbs) where readers can contribute their own historical research and suggest additional proverbs that this edition might have missed. It’s a fitting acknowledgment that a single compendium of proverbial language will never provide a final, definitive statement. Proverbs represent a kind of dynamic folklore, resonating with the past but constantly reinvigorated in the present. As Mark Twain didn’t say, though we wish he did, ‘History never repeats itself, but it rhymes.’” Continue reading →

Illustration by H. M. Brock

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

–Charles Dickens, Great Expectations