Essays

Articles in this section

• "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" by Étienne de la Boétie (1548)

  6 October by Étienne de la Boétie

  Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563) was a shooting star in the firmament of 16th-century France, a poet, jurist, essayist and philologist who graduated from the University of Orleans at the age of 22, was appointed court magistrate also at the age of 22 and became a member of Parliament the (...)

• English is a wordy language!

  1 December 2021 by Ray

  We have compared the word-counts of the considerable number of translations into English from other languages on our site – 423 at latest count – with the following results: - ALL OF THE TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH OF RUSSIAN AND GERMAN TEXTS HAVE WITHOUT EXCEPTION SIGNIFICANTLY MORE WORDS THAN (...)

• The Great Baseball Scandal - how the Mob won the 1919 World Series, by Nelson Algren

  29 April 2020 by Nelson Algren

  Born and bred in Chicago, a life-long fan of baseball in general and of his home team, the Chicago White Sox in particular, Nelson Algren (1909-1981), one of the finest American authors of his time, was particularly qualified to analyse the inner workings of the most sensational scandal in the (...)

• A comparative study of the vocabulary of the greatest Western authors – and the winner is: THOMAS MANN

  13 March 2019 by Ray

  With the help of modern technology and a clever engineering student, we have analysed in depth the vocabulary in 25 of the most famous one-volume works in the history of Western literature - celebrated texts by Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, (...)

• "The Awful German Language", by Mark Twain

  1 May 2013 by Mark Twain

  Mark Twain concluded this very entertaining overview of the German language with the statement: ". . . a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years."
  His reflections on the particularities of the (...)