Grammatical number

a perfect Royal Flush on the same day. Now let’s consider the odds of me writing this essay and you reading this. The odds of one of us even being born was roughly 1 and 10^2,685,000 according to some statisticians more knowledgeable than I. This number is unfathomable to us as humans, but I will do my best to quantify the miracle of this paper in a story:…

Last summer I partnered with another educator from my school to craft a multisession mini course for Math for America. The course met over a three month period and focussed on teaching educators from the Metro New York area about the symmetries of a sphere using an ancient japanese art form called Temari. I used our organization’s shared digital message board called the small world network to post and share an overview of our course in the spring course catalog and invited 15-20 teachers to sign…

that such a method is utilized in mathematics and science without second thought. Considering the sentence, “Seven of them remained and seven is an odd number,” the 'is ' seems to be timeless, but when Quine evaluates the sentence, “George married Mary and Mary is a widow,” the 'is ' cannot be. From the first sentence we may infer that an odd number of them remained, but a similar inference in the second requires a fallacy, according to Quine. Thus, the…

It is fitting to begin a study on how modern English speakers describe aspect in Ancient Greek by exploring how the ancient Greeks described this concept themselves. In the Platonic dialogue The Sophist, the verb is defined as “the word indicating action,” or simply the action word. Aristotle defines the verb as “a sound compounded with meaning and indicative of time”. A verb, according to the Greeks, describes action, from which we can deduce further that it has a subject, and it indicates…

A 2011 article by Nancy Bombaci addresses the possibility the famous author, Gertrude Stein, having autism. Bombaci states that Stein is often referred to as a “loose cannon,” and claims that many of her writings occur in a style which matches the speech pattern of those with autism. Whether or not Stein actually has autism, however, it not stated. Autism typically causes extremely specific character traits, being hyper-attention and intelligence. Though autism has different effects on…

What would literature be, had every author used the same perspective for every single story? Literature would not be as well received as it currently is received. Take three American short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for example. These stories, by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman respectively, each utilize a different point of view. The perspective of a story heavily influences the emotional impact of the…

INTRODUCTION Language samples of children are helpful to see what stage they are at in their language development. By looking at different aspects of their normal speech you can get a pretty clear picture of where the child is at. The language sample that I am going to be talking about is on a little girl names Olivia. She is four years old and is talking to her Aunt. They are playing with some of her toys in a good environment. I feel that this is a good language sample because it is in an…

Magical realism is “… characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusions of fantastic or mythical elements into apparently realistic fiction” (Edison). Characteristics of this genre include plentitude, hybridity, metafiction, and an unreliable narrator. A story that shows magical realism is “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is recognized as one of the best authors who combines reality with fantasy: “… García Márquez, combining radically different realities, what…

When considering a story such as The Immortals, one must take into account not only the contents, characters and setting of the story, but the manner in which it is told, and the perspective by which it is narrated. All of these components are certainly full of importance, but all of them must be valued equally or the balance would tip and fall crashing down from the point all the best stories, like The Immortals, strive to reach. Unfortunately, there is a surprising amount of rather irritable…

When I was younger, my mom would rent out our basement room to single people she would work with in the military. I personally loved it because it meant that there were more people around I could harass into playing with me. However, I was always confused when I would hear my grandparents berate my mother on letting “those people” into our home. I remained confused, until I asked my mother what they meant, and why they were so angry. My mother described to me how “old fashioned” my grandparents…