Weekend Words: Rot
Composting, anyone? If Mayor Bloomberg has his way, the next must-have kitchen appliance will be a pot where onion skins can rot.
Composting, anyone? If Mayor Bloomberg has his way, the next must-have kitchen appliance will be a pot where onion skins can rot.
“Do not judge this movement kindly. It is not just another amusing stunt. It is defiant—the desperate act of men too profoundly convinced of the rottenness of our civilization to want to save a shred of its respectability.”
—Sir Herbert Read, International Surrealist Catalogue, New Burlington Galleries, London, 1936
“Fix’d like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot.”
—Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man”
“Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.”
—Ezra Pound
“Hamlet: How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?
First Clown: I’ faith, if he be not rotten before he die—as we have many pocky corses now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in—he will last you some eight year or nine year: a tanner will last you nine year.”
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene I
“And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.”
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII
“Hot things, sharp things, sweet things, cold things All rot the teeth, and make them look like old things”
—Benjamin Franklin
