Who wrote “Candy is dandy But liquor is quicker”?

Published in several versions from 1728 to 1743, the mock-epic poem The Dunciad satirized bad writing and attacked critics of Pope’s poetry. In the final version, the king of the Dunces is Colley Cibber, England’s Poet Laureate from 1730 to 1757. Other targets of Pope’s venom were dramatists Nahum Tate and Lewis Theobald. Published in…

In Stendhal’s 1830 novel The Red and the Black, the red refers to Napoleon’s colors or the military life, the black to the clergy or religious life.

The subtitle of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is A Tale of the Seaboard.

Taken from the Greek word semeion, or “sign,” the term “semiotics” had its origins early in the twentieth century, when French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and American philosopher C. S. Peirce called for a new science of signs. Saussure called the discipline “semiology”; Peirce called it “semiotic.” Since then, semiotics as the study of cultural…

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Water, Water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink” in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The lines are often misquoted as “and not a drop to drink.”

English was not spoken in England until 449, when three Germanic tribes from Denmark, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, invaded Britain. The Angles, who settled along the east coast of north and central England, developed literate culture and gave their name to the country (Angle-land, England). The language of these tribes, Anglo-Saxon or Old English,…