Weekend Words: Anchor
This week, two TV news anchors are going away.
This week, two TV news anchors are going away.
NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.
—Leonard Maltin
Oaths and anchors equally will drag: naught else abides on fickle earth but unkept promises of joy.
—Herman Melville, The Enchanted Isles or the Encantadas
Family… the home of all social evil, a charitable institution for comfortable women, an anchorage for house-fathers, and a hell for children.
—J. August Strindberg
The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.
—Hart Crane, “Voyages VI”
The primary function of myth is to validate an existing social order. Myth enshrines conservative social values, raising tradition on a pedestal. It expresses and confirms, rather than explains or questions, the sources of cultural attitudes and values. Because myth anchors the present in the past it is a sociological charter for a future society which is an exact replica of the present one.
—Ann Oakley (British sociologist and author)
It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Cleopatra: Think on me,
That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black,
And wrinkled deep in time? Broad-fronted Caesar,
When thou wast here above the ground, I was
A morsel for a monarch: and great Pompey
Would stand and make his eyes grow in my brow;
There would he anchor his aspect and die
With looking on his life.
—Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
A good heavy book holds you down. It’s an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.
—Roy Blount, Jr.
The world reacts very strangely to people they see on TV, and I can begin to understand how anchor monsters are made. If you’re not careful, you can become used to being treated as though you’re special and begin to expect it. For a reporter, that’s the kiss of death.
—Anderson Cooper
