They don't even teach english at my university.

(LCC Library, 2005)

Nabokov had a way with lepidoptery. He named and saved the Karner Blue. There must be a fair few enthusiasts in Elephant and Castle; Lolita's all about butterflies. They flutter in and out, all over his words.

Nabokov had a way with words, even after abandoning "my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English."

(Lolita was his only English novel that his muse/editor/everything wife Vera translated into Russian. She had a Pullitzer prize-winning biography written about her.)

Another small gift from Nabokov to Western culture; the untranslatable term poshlust. Poshlust neatly encompasses most of my hates.

Interesting fact:
In the 1980's, a contingent of state lawmakers tried to make the Karner Blue the official insect of New York state, but it lost out in favour of the ladybug, a beneficient creature without the ignominy of extinction hanging over its head.