English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

I am open to the accusation that I see compost as an end it itself. But we do grow some real red damn tomatoes such as you can't get in the stores. And potatoes, beans, lettuce, collards, onions, squash, cauliflower, eggplant, carrots, peppers. Dirt in you own backyard, producing things you eat. Makes you wonder.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

Studying literature at Harvard is like learning about women at the Mayo Clinic.

The local groceries are all out of broccoli, loccoli.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

People don't necessarily want or need to be done unto as you would have them do unto you. They want to be done unto as they want to be done unto.