Star-crossed lovers - Romeo + Juliet
Call me Ishmael - Moby Dick (incidentally, also the inspiration for Starbucks)
From the Scarlett Letter - putting an A on someone as a way to cruelly shame them.
All 10 commandments - the Bible - everyone should be familiar
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way- Anna Karenina
Love at First Sight - catch 22 (also, the term catch 22)

Anonymous wrote:rohrschach inkblot test
52 pickup
pet rock
Ockham's razor: (very useful with kids: among multiple explanations, the one requiring the fewest assumptions should be selected.)
Infinite Monkey Theory
"This is like deja vu all over again" (Yogi Berra)

It's Occam's razor, and it states that the simplest explanation is the most likely.

If you want this kind of thing, I'd include
Zeno's paradox
too.

PP- These books are great and very relevant. I am a teacher and am amazed at how many references to all kinds of things exist in text that kids know nothing about. Just the idioms alone are enough to confuse even native English speakers (I teach ESOL). My son was reading a book that references The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. His teacher emailed me about something else and wrote that he was the only child to know that story. He had read one of those abridged classic versions of it.

This book has a great list of important cultural references. His grade by grade parent guides also help break it down.


Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know Paperback

by E.D. Hirsch Jr.(Author)

http://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Literacy-Every-American-Needs/dp/0394758439

basic bible stories: noah, abraham, solomon, moses, david and goliath, parables and events form the new testament (jesus and the moneylenders.)
Particularly in a nonreligious family, we notice a huge amount of references in news and popular culture are to biblical stories, so we are reading them as literature.

many many many quotes from shakespeare.

when playing apples to apples it's easy to see where kids have gaps in popular culture knowledge...playing with one teenager he knew almost no history, so a slow game where I talked through some of the people or events was sort of fun. Many of the things listed on the cards he had never heard of.

Double double toil and trouble (which I always thought was Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble) also Macbeth

Eighty percent of success is showing up (Woody Allen)

There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Mark Twain I think?)

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan)
Here's lookin' at you kid (Casablanca)
Well here's another nice mess you've gotten me into (Laurel and Hardy)
I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers (A Streetcar Named Desire)
Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary (Dead Poets Society)

From literature:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. (Tale of Two Cities)
Et tu, Brute? (Julius Caesar)
And that has made all the difference (The Road Not Taken)
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here (Dante's Inferno)
Out damn'd spot! (Macbeth)

Dial tone.

II used to own that book "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy" in high school. It was a good reference.

"All's well that ends well" Shakespheare --an unlimited resource of phrases.

"We're not in Kansas anymore" quote from Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

"put your money where your mouth is"

a "Pollyanna" comes from a book of the same name: someone with an extremely optimistic view

from today's Post:
by dawn's early light
the capital of the free world
win the battle but lose the war
like lemmings with suicide vests
Schadenfreude
poison pills
sleeves-rolled-up mode
throwing red meat to the public
like a banana republic
and finally: "eyes taped open to watch a 24 hour webinar on the life of freshwater, brain-eating parasites."

How sad that these are predominately lines from TV and movies and the subject line is about literacy.