Author Archives: Sterling Eisiminger

“Claire has never forgotten the panic he felt when, at age eleven, stretched out on an operating table, the surgeon who was about to excise his inflamed tonsils, asked everyone in the OR to kneel with him in prayer. For days, everyone had told Claire that the procedure was simple and ended with a bowl […]

“The history of blue begins with its absence. In any aboriginal language, blue will be the sixth color term to join its primary and secondary kin. I’ve often wondered what took so long for aboriginal poets to add ‘blue’ to their word palettes. My guess is that they already had it in the form of […]

“The engine ran for one day, and it broke down. We tried to fix it, but it was helpless. After that, we just let the boat drifted to wherever it wanted to. We floated out at sea for 26 days without any food or water. A lot of people died of starvation during those 26 […]

“The engine ran for one day, and it broke down. We tried to fix it, but it was helpless. After that, we just let the boat drifted to wherever it wanted to. We floated out at sea for 26 days without any food or water. A lot of people died of starvation during those 26 […]

“Finally, irony is fun . . . as when Jack Nicholson says his mother never appreciated the irony of calling him ‘a son of a bitch.’ In one fell swoop, Nicholson winks at his mother without extending his middle finger or his tongue. (The fun becomes even more complicated when you learn that the woman […]

“I admit that I’m among the first to collect bad news to share with my wife and classes, but I do not feel that the Sermon on the Mount is on the rocks, either. I also collect the good news, as when the journalist-lawyer Steven Brill, pretending to be a wealthy but lost foreign tourist, […]

“Though horses started disappearing from America’s roads and fields about a century ago, Pegasus and Winnie are still kicking up their heels in English prose, poetry, and speech. Indeed, after studying the impact of horses on the language today, one might think they’d never gone to pasture. In a sense, they never did because most […]

“Influence is subtle yet pervasive. Dine alongside Alberto Giacometti’s emaciated statuary, and most diners will eat less. That has been proven according to a study reported in the January 2017 issue of Appetite. Now, dine alongside the Standing Woman, a voluptuous bronze by Gaston Lachaise, and, though I cannot prove it, you’ll eat more.”—Dr. Skip […]

“Then there is Houston basketball coach Greg Wise whose high-school team at one point in the season was ranked first in the nation. Leading 100 to 12 at the half in one game with no ‘mercy rule,’ Wise ordered his team to press to the final buzzer because a win was not enough. He wanted […]

“Once during an in-class writing assignment, a bright freshman asked me if ‘anal retentive’ was hyphenated or two words. I suspected she was joking, but I answered seriously, ‘The way I stuff my files, I’m tempted to say it’s one word. Of course, it’s two unless it’s being used as a compound adjective, but if […]