I doubt if any modern poet can boast of as loud acclaim or as liberal reward as Longfellow received for Evangeline or Tennyson for the Idylls, but his fate today is somewhat kinder than that of Poe or Whitman, and much gentler than the stony dole dealt out to poets in the nineties and noughties.

It's a great test of the claims of open-source gurus, who say that a self-motivated community can outcode any team working for a single employer—like, um, Microsoft.

The verb “rain” is impersonal in sentences like “It’s raining.”

Don't ask me why, because there was no diminishment of my red-handedness when I threw the evidence to the floor.