119 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
    1. Ironmonger,3rd October1908.Mr.Kaiserisapastmaster__inallthatappertainsto carding,filing,andindexing systems.

      I love the verb "carding" here.

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  2. Mar 2024
    1. The term 'knowledge work' appeared in The Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) by Peter Drucker.[12] Drucker later coined the term 'knowledge worker' in The Effective Executive[13] in 1966. Later, in 1999, he suggested that "the most valuable asset of a 21st-century institution, whether business or non-business, will be its knowledge workers and their productivity."
    1. We need a better catch-all term for the ills perpetrated on humanity and society by technology companies' extractive practices and general blindness to their own effects while they become rich. It should have a terrifically pejorative tone.

      Something which subsumes the crazy bound up in some of the following: - social media machine guns - toxic technology - mass produced toxicity - attention economy - bad technology - surveillance capitalism - technology and the military - weapons of math destruction

      It should be the polar opposite of: - techno-utopianism

  3. Feb 2024
    1. another word which he invented but whichwas never picked up by anyone else: crinanthropy, judgement or criticism ofother people.
    2. And, of course, he was a vegetarian, a cause he embraced in middleage. Or we might say he thought he was a vegetarian; the college chef was soworried that Mayor was abstemious and getting too thin that he added meatstock to the soups that Mayor preferred to eat. Mayor was also a teetotaller.Although he didn’t foist his diet or abstention onto others, he did spread theword in his books: Modicus Cibi Medicus Sibi, or, Nature her Own Physicianin 1880, What is Vegetarianism? in 1886, and Plain Living and High Thinkingin 1897. He contributed articles to Dietetic Reformer and VegetarianMessenger, publications of the Vegetarian Society. He became President ofthe Society in 1884, a position he held until his death in 1910 when he waseighty-five – and he attributed his healthiness in later life to his diet andascetic mode of living. Over this period, Mayor had witnessed new words fortypes of vegetarians: veg (1884), fruitarian (1893), and nutarian (1909). (Theword vegan would not appear until later, in 1944.)
    3. the word vegetarian did not existbefore 1842 (until then, those who abstained from meat were called‘Pythagoreans’ or ‘Grahamites’)
    4. A Professor of English at Mason College (later BirminghamUniversity), Edward Arber, kept Murray informed of new American bookswhich might provide Americanisms. He wrote to Murray on Christmas Eve1884, ‘Another book, quite a new one which I would also bring to yourattention is Bourke’s The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona. It is full ofthe latest Americanisms, such as the verb “to noon” for taking the noontiderest, while a male lover is said to “whittle”, what that is, I have no idea. Is itan Americanism for connoodle? It is a most interesting book in itself andwould refresh you, if you read it yourself.’
    5. That is the general sort ofanswer one gets which means ‘we write for amusement, & not tobe studied as texts; if you make school-texts of us, yours be theresponsibility!’ I believe Browning once answered a request forexplanation of a passage, with ‘I really do not know; ask theBrowning Society.’

      quote from John Murray about meanings of words made up by poets

      Browning's response is hilarious.

    6. had a general suspicion of words used by poets, as expressed in a letterwritten in 1901 discussing the use of voidee-cup, a cup of wine with spicestaken before retiring to rest or at the departure of guests, in a poem by DanteGabriel Rossetti. Murray did not know the meaning of the word:

      correctly and the notes could easily be spotted as counterfeit, but that only went so far.

    7. Ashbee was also quite possibly the anonymous author of an infamouspublication, My Secret Life, a narrative (likely fictitious, albeit based on theauthor’s experiences) of the 1,500 sexual exploits of a man called ‘Walter’who frequented the bars and brothels of London in the 1880s. The memoirwas in excess of a million words, coming in at 4,000 pages, over elevenvolumes. Only six copies exist today of the original print run of 475, self-published for private subscribers, but it was reprinted in the 1960s and hassince grown in reputation and fame. Its author is still unidentified, but Ashbeeis the frontrunner. Given the words sent in to the Dictionary by Ashbee, itwould not be surprising if he authored a book with chapter headings such as‘My Cock’, ‘A Frisky Governess’, and ‘My Cousin’s Cunts’ (the plural ismind-boggling!). It was only very recently, in the twenty-first century, thatMy Secret Life was read for the OED and the editors discovered that itcontained the first written evidence for the words cocksucking, cunty, fist-fuck(originally meaning masturbation), frig, fuckee, and randiness.

      Ashbee could be an interesting movie idea...

    8. Jane Austen was the first person to write the word outsider.
    9. Over thetwenty-three years that Minor had sent in slips to the Scriptorium, he mainlyread travellers’ tales and medical texts from the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. It was the travellers’ tales that interested me because they broughtthousands of words from indigenous languages around the world into theEnglish language.
    10. The man who solved the problem was an American chemist, who alsocontributed to the Dictionary, Thomas Sterry Hunt. In 1857, he had beenteaching at Laval University in Quebec and responded to an appeal by thePresident of the Montreal City Bank who was battling counterfeit notes. Huntcreated a special green ink, using chromium sesquioxide, that was pretty wellindestructible. Numerous experiments showed that you couldn’t remove itfrom the banknote without destroying the paper itself – until one chemistsucceeded in doing so, and the Canadians dropped Hunt’s invention. But theAmericans took it up, especially on the back of their banknotes, hence thecolloquial term ‘greenbacks’ for US dollar bills, which was given its own entryin the OED in 1900 and defined as ‘the popular name for one of the legal-tender notes of the U.S., first issued in 1862 and so called from the devicesprinted in green ink on the back’, alongside something rather topical at thetime but now archaic, Greenback Party, defined as ‘a party in U.S. politics,which advocated that “greenbacks” should be made the sole currency of thecountry’, and its various derivatives Greenbacker and Greenbackism.
    11. Developed out of real (or royal) tennis, not only were nationaltournaments established – Wimbledon in 1877 and the US Open in 1881 –but every provincial town now wanted its own lawn tennis club. Old wordstook on new meanings connected with the game – love (1880), chalk (1886),volley (1875), smash (1882), lob (1890) – and new words emerged as thegame evolved and grew in popularity – grass court (1875), first serve (1878),second serve (1878), centre court (1883), hard court (1885), doubles (1894),ground stroke (1895). Murray included reference to the game in the very firstvolume, in 1884, defining the word ace as ‘a point at rackets, lawn tennis, etc’
    1. Community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech 'gift economy' in which information is freely exchanged between participants.

      I know the idea "gift economy" was around in the late 2000's and even more prevalent in the teens, but not sure where it originated. This is one of the earliest settings I've seen (within tech).

  4. Jan 2024
    1. All I had to do was just do a light edit, shuffle a few blocks of content around, and wala, a blog post is created.

      😆

      the misspelling of voilà as wala seems to be becoming more prevalent in English. This is the third or fourth time I've seen it in a month.

  5. Nov 2023
    1. How many times have you lost track of an online conversation, even accidentally ghosting someone because you couldn’t remember where it was happening? Between iMessage, WhatsApp, Instagram, Signal, Discord, and others, you’ve probably found yourself swiping between apps on a regular basis just to find your various chat threads. Frankly, with “appnesia” on the rise, we’re amazed we have any friends left.
  6. Oct 2023
    1. t is in Tyndale’s Bible that we first find the name “Passover” for the holiday Jews call Pesach; it was he who coined the word “scapegoat”; and many biblical verses that are now idiomatic in English are his own translation – notably, “my brother’s keeper,” “the powers that be,” “the salt of the earth,” among many others.
    1. The first person to use the word ‘outsider’, according to the OED, was Jane Austen, in a gossipy letter to her sister Cassandra detailing the presence one evening of ‘a whist & a casino table, & six outsiders’
  7. Sep 2023
    1. Speed and efficiency are, in my opinion, arbitrary gauges of success. The shear number of productivity czars prophesying about a "future without friction" are innumerable to be almost comical. In contrast to these efficiency futurists, when it comes to zettelkasten, I am pro-friction. But, not just any friction. Eufriction. Eufriction is good friction. Just as weight training, writing a book, and giving birth can all be considered a form of eustress[6], so too is folgezettel a form of eufriction.

      https://bobdoto.computer/folgezettel-mechanics

  8. Jul 2023
    1. For instance, they will not use an English word that the Oxford English Dictionary says came into use after the publication of the novel they are translating.
  9. May 2023
    1. Apophenia (/æpoʊˈfiːniə/) is the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.[1] The term (German: Apophänie from the Greek verb ἀποφαίνειν (apophaínein)) was coined by psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia.[2] He defined it as "unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness".[3][4] He described the early stages of delusional thought as self-referential over-interpretations of actual sensory perceptions, as opposed to hallucinations.[1][5]

      link to: - https://boffosocko.com/2022/05/14/55804938/ - Aby Warburg's coinage of Verknüpfungszwang

    1. Get some of the lowest ad prices while protecting your brand with a system backed by Verity and Grapeshot. Rest easy that your ads will only show up where you’d like them to.

      Is there a word or phrase in the advertising space which covers the filtering out of websites and networks which have objectionable material one doesn't want their content running against?

      Contextual intelligence seems to be one...

      Apparently the platforms Verity and Grapeshot (from Oracle) protect against this.

    1. But in recent months, she’s been labeled a “Pretendian,” a high-profile figure in academia, publishing or entertainment who is accused of using a false Native American identity for money, fame or professional opportunities.
  10. Apr 2023
    1. a walk one day in the Thuringian hills, and meaning ‘children’s garden’ or‘garden of children’, the word ‘kindergarten’ is now used the world over todescribe preschool or nursery education.

      The word 'kindergarten' meaning a 'children's garden' was coined by educator Friedrich Froebel, a student of Johann Pestalozzi, while walking in the Thuringian hills.

  11. Mar 2023
    1. Hayes, William C. Review of Historical Records of Rameses III, by William F. Edgerton and John A. Wilson. American Journal of Archaeology 40, no. 4 (1936): 558–59. https://doi.org/10.2307/498809.

      https://www.jstor.org/stable/498809

      ...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

      This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

      I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.

      Update: even better, this has introduced me to a massive new ZK: Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache!


      Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

    1. Review: [Untitled] Historical Records of Rameses III by William F. Edgerton, John A. Wilson Review by: William C. Hayes American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 40, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1936), pp. 558-559

      ...have been diligently consulted and compared with the present versions and the authors have also availed themselves of the invaluable material contained in the Zettelkasten of the Berlin Wirterbuch der...

      This is the oldest appearance of the word "Zettelkasten" appearing in a journal article which I could find on JSTOR.

      I'm not surprised it's in a journal in the humanities and specifically on archaeology.


      Where is Indiana Jones' zettelkasten?!

    1. ‘‘So long as so-called A.I. systems are being built and deployed by the big tech companies without democratically governed regulation, they are going to primarily reflect the values of Silicon Valley,’’ Emily Bender argues, ‘‘and any attempt to ‘teach’ them otherwise can be nothing more than ethics washing.’’

      ethics washing!

    1. When I looked it up in the OED (the Oxford English Dictionary), I discovered to my surprise that it wasn't even in the main volumes but had been added in the Supplement, because the first known written reference in English ("non-fictional wares") occurred in a library journal in 1903. That is to say, "nonfiction" was evidently a term coined by a librarian trying to decide how to label all the works of narrative prose in her collection that weren't fiction, and rather than call them, say, "fact," had thoughtlessly exiled them into the Slough of Non.

      According to the Oxford English dictionary, 'non-fiction' was coined in 1903 in a library journal by a librarian attempting to define the opposite of fiction.

  12. Feb 2023
    1. In Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Whewell was the first to use the term "consilience" to discuss the unification of knowledge between the different branches of learning.
    2. He corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with neologisms for their discoveries. Whewell coined, among other terms, scientist,[2] physicist, linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism;[3] he suggested to Michael Faraday the terms electrode, ion, dielectric, anode, and cathode.[4][5]
  13. Jan 2023
    1. In particular Erwin Schrödinger is said (Wigner (1981)) to have spoken of the Gruppenpest (German for “plague of group theory”) which ought to be abandoned. In his autobiography John Slater, an MIT physicist, claimed: It was at this point that Wigner, Hund, Heitler, and Weyl entered the picture with their “Gruppenpest”: the pest of the group theory… The authors of the “Gruppenpest” wrote papers which were incomprehensible to those like me who had not studied group theory, in which they applied these theoretical results to the study of the many electron problem. The practical consequences appeared to be negligible, but everyone felt that to be in the mainstream one had to learn about it. Yet there were no good texts from which one could learn group theory. It was a frustrating experience, worthy of the name of a pest. I had what I can only describe as a feeling of outrage at the turn which the subject had taken… As soon as this [Slaters] paper became known, it was obvious that a great many other physicists were as disgusted as I had been with the group-theoretical approach to the problem. As I heard later, there were remarks made such as “Slater has slain the ‘Gruppenpest’”. I believe that no other piece of work I have done was so universally popular.

      Gruppenpest, a word of German origin, which has also entered into English to mean "the plague of group theory" and group theorists (mathematicians) who were applying abstract algebra to physics and quantum mechanics in the mid-twentieth century.

      via https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Gruppenpest

    1. If nothing else, Woit’s book allows its readers a sense of vicarious sympathy for physicists of the early twentieth century forced to face the facts and learn some group theory. The term gruppenpest has entered the literature, the spontaneous outburst, one gathers, of John Slater, the chair of MIT’s Department of Physics.
    1. Complaints about information overload and ‘infobesity’ are age-old phenomena, as book historian Rindert Jagersma observes. Until the invention of printing, monks and officials used to copy texts by hand, which was a slow and expensive process. But with the advent of printing presses, books and other texts became cheaper to produce and consume.
  14. Dec 2022
    1. In the liner notes of “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” (1978), Eno wrote, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
    2. In 1978, he started to use the term “ambient music”: the concept stretched back to describe “Discreet Music” and the work of earlier composers, like Satie, who coined the term “furniture music,” for compositions that would be more functional than expressive.
    1. el bocho

      New Spanish to me, but ostensibly, the brain, cerebrum, or perhaps the slang I saw of "brainbox".

      Perhaps "brainbox" could be an interesting alternate English translation of zettelkasten?

    1. The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. In essence, it is prioritizing quantity of one's arguments at the expense of quality of said arguments. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to another debating method called spreading, in which one person speaks extremely fast in an attempt to cause their opponent to fail to respond to all the arguments that have been raised.

      I'd always known this was a thing, but didn't have a word for it.

    1. “Goblin mode” has been chosen by the public as the 2022 Oxford word of the year. The term, which refers to “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations”, has become the first word of the year to have been decided by public vote.
  15. Nov 2022
    1. The TTRG (time to reply guy) was getting so fast, that I can’t actually remember the last time I tweeted something helpful like a design or development tip. I just couldn’t be arsed, knowing some dickhead would be around to waste my time with whataboutisms and “will it scale”?
    1. And that, perhaps, is what we might get to via prebunking. Not so much attempts to counter or fact-check misinfo on the internet, but defanging the tropes that underpin the most recurringly manipulative claims so that the public sees, recognizes, & thinks:

      And that, perhaps, is what we might get to via prebunking. Not so much attempts to counter or fact-check misinfo on the internet, but defanging the tropes that underpin the most recurringly manipulative claims so that the public sees, recognizes, & thinks:😬

      — Renee DiResta (@noUpside) June 19, 2021
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
  16. learn-ap-southeast-2-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-ap-southeast-2-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
    1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who’scredited with the first use of the term marginalia, in 1819, coined the term as literarycriticism and to spark public dialogue.6

      6 Coleridge, S. T. (1819). Character of Sir Thomas Brown as a writer.Blackwood’s Magazine 6(32), 197.

    1. A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the oldart-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out ofnowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. Ibecame (and still am) more and more convinced that the importantchanges in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. Icall this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius. This word isnow starting to gain some currency - the philosopher James Ogilvy uses itin his most recent book.

      Book Source: Eno, Brian. A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary. 1st edition. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Section: A Letter to Dave Stewart, p 354

      Cross reference quote and further usage/refinement of the word from popular blog post by Kevin Kelly Scenius, or Communal Genius: https://hypothes.is/a/SgYqomnBEe2_Yaf4i1JnCg

    1. Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes”  can occasionally generate. His actual definition is:  “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
    1. The final thing I will say is, we have the 2016 model in our mind that, if there's a normie Republican, they get crushed by Donald Trump. Why should a Mike DeWine, not that he's going to run, but why — normie Republicans did way better than the performative Republicans.

      https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-the-midterm-results-and-what-it-means-trumps-role-in-the-gop#transcript

      video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Km_Vyhvww

      David Brooks here (coins?) uses the phrase "normie Republican" to describe Republicans who tend to center rather than to the far right, Christian right, or who are Trump Republicans. Some of those people might describe these normie Republicans as Rhinos (Republicans in name only.)

      Typically I've only seen "normie" used by those who identify as ADHD, Aspergers, or otherwise on the (neurodiverse) spectrum to describe average people who don't display those behaviors.


      Judy Woodruff: So, I just want to be clear. We're using the word normie, as in — this is a David Brooks word, right? (LAUGHTER)

      David Brooks: No, this — I did not invent this. I think two generations below me invented that word. (LAUGHTER)

      Brooks admits he learned the word from others, but he's also using it with a different meaning and context than the original "normie" unadorned.

    1. To create accurate animations, we generate the speech, run it through our in-house speech recognition and pronunciation models, and get the timing for each word and phoneme (speech sound). Each sound is mapped onto a visual representation, or viseme, in a set we designed based on linguistic features.

      viseme, an atomic speech visualization of a particular phoneme

  17. Sep 2022
    1. Nick Milo: REDACTED

      An ideaverse is the entire universe of idea that exists between you and every place you think.

      In Nick's conceptualization it's linked digital notes...

      Translation: songlines...

    1. Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Nick Milo: How can we do Combinational Creativity?

      Interesting to see people talking about these ideas in these spaces. It's too often a missed piece of the puzzle, and is really one of the most valuable parts.

      What was the origin of the phrase "combinatorial creativity"? Was if Farnam Street in 2014 https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity/

      Some of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's discussion of this in the past: - Building a Creativity Inbox: Anne-Laure Le Cunff & David Perell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTSAuSUxuj0 (taped: June 23, 2020; released: Jun 25, 2020) where the phrase is uased as well as "idea sex" - Combinational creativity: the myth of originality https://nesslabs.com/combinational-creativity (see https://twitter.com/anthilemoon/status/1275820127058120705)

    1. https://fs.blog/networked-knowledge-and-combinatorial-creativity

      Originally published: 2014-07-21T11:45:00+00:00

      Is this where I saw the phrase "combinatorial creativity" first?

  18. Aug 2022
    1. The term "stigmergy" was introduced by French biologist Pierre-Paul Grassé in 1959 to refer to termite behavior. He defined it as: "Stimulation of workers by the performance they have achieved." It is derived from the Greek words στίγμα stigma "mark, sign" and ἔργον ergon "work, action", and captures the notion that an agent’s actions leave signs in the environment, signs that it and other agents sense and that determine and incite their subsequent actions.[4][5]

      Theraulaz, Guy (1999). "A Brief History of Stigmergy". Artificial Life. 5 (2): 97–116. doi:10.1162/106454699568700. PMID 10633572. S2CID 27679536.

    1. The ideas expressed in Creative Experience continueto have an impact. Follett’s process of integration, for example, forms the basisof what is now commonly referred to as a ‘‘win-win’’ approach to conflictresolution; and her distinction between ‘‘power-with’’ and ‘‘power-over’’ hasbeen used by so many distinguished thinkers that it has become a part of ourpopular vocabulary. ≤

      While she may not have coined the phrase "win-win", Mary Parker Follett's process of integration described in her book Creative Experience (Longmans, Green & Co., 1924) forms the basis of what we now refer to as the idea of "win-win" conflict resolution.

      Follett's ideas about power over and power with also stem from Creative Experience as well.

      1. Those using the power-over, power-with distinction include Dorothy Emmett, the first woman president of the British Aristotelian Society, and Hannah Arendt; Mans- bridge, ‘‘Mary Parker Follet: Feminist and Negotiator,’’ xviii–xxii.

      Syndication link: - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Win%E2%80%93win_game&type=revision&diff=1102353117&oldid=1076197356

    1. In Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient, the word “thinkering” was coined, linking the way we create and understand concepts in our mind with “tinkering”.

      https://happiful.com/what-is-thinkering/

      thinkering<br /> a portmanteau of thinking and tinkering<br /> It describes the sort of mindful thinking and exploration one does when interacting with objects using one's hands.

      quoted here as first appearing in Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient

      link to: Barbara Oakley and ideas of diffuse thinking

  19. Jul 2022
    1. Martha Beatrice Webb, Baroness Passfield, FBA (née Potter; 22 January 1858 – 30 April 1943) was an English sociologist, economist, socialist, labour historian and social reformer. It was Webb who coined the term collective bargaining. She was among the founders of the London School of Economics and played a crucial role in forming the Fabian Society.
    1. Peter Drucker, the distinguished commentator onorganisation and management, has popularised theterm “knowledge worker” to describe the role of agrowing percentage of employees in businessorganisations: “The manual worker is yesterday..,..The basic capital resource, the fundamentalinvestment, but also the cost centre for a developedeconomy is the knowledge worker who puts to work

      what he has learned in systematic education, that is, concepts, ideas and theories, rather than the man who puts to work manual skill or muscle, ” [5]. 5. Drucker, P. F. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices, Harper & Row; New York, 1973.

      Influential management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker helped to popularize the concept of the "knowledge worker" by way of his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities and Practices (Harper & Row, 1973).


      Who/where is the origin of the neologism/idea of "knowledge worker"?

  20. Jun 2022
    1. Many are multipotentialities (that all-encompassing, modern term for renaissance souls)

      I've not seen/heard the idea of "multipotentialities" as a modern term for the much older (and gendered) Renaissance man before.

  21. May 2022
    1. [Bruno Giussani, co-curator of TED] gave the example of Steven Pinker‘s popular TED talk on the decline of violence over the course of history, based on his book The Better Angels of Our Nature. Pinker is a respected professor of psychology at Harvard, and few would accuse him of pulling his punches or yielding to thought leadership’s temptations. Yet his talk became a cult favorite among hedge funders, Silicon Valley types, and other winners. It did so not only because it was interesting and fresh and well argued, but also because it contained a justification for keeping the social order largely as is. Pinker’s actual point was narrow, focused, and valid: Interpersonal violence as a mode of human problem-solving was in a long free fall. But for many who heard the talk, it offered a socially acceptable way to tell people seething over the inequities of the age to drop their complaining. ‘It has become an ideology of: The world today may be complex and complicated and confusing in many ways, but the reality is that if you take the long-term perspective you will realize how good we have it,’ Giussani said. The ideology, he said, told people, ‘You’re being unrealistic, and you’re not looking at things in the right way. And if you think that you have problems, then, you know, your problems don’t really matter compared to the past’s, and your problems are really not problems, because things are getting better.’Giussani had heard rich men do this kind of thing so often that he had invented a verb for the act: They were ‘Pinkering’ — using the long-run direction of human history to minimize, to delegitimize the concerns of those without power. There was also economic Pinkering, which ‘is to tell people the global economy has been great because five hundred million Chinese have gone from poverty to the middle class. And, of course, that’s true,’ Giussani said. ‘But if you tell that to the guy who has been fired from a factory in Manchester because his job was taken to China, he may have a different reaction. But we don’t care about the guy in Manchester. So there are many facets to this kind of ideology that have been used to justify the current situation.’ —Winners Take All, pp. 126-127

      An early example of the verbification of Steven Pinker's name. Here it indicates the view of predominantly privileged men to argue that because the direction of history has been so positive, that those without power shouldn't complain.

      I've also heard it used to generally mean a preponderance of evidence on a topic, as seen in Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature, but still not necessarily convincingly prove one's thesis.

    1. Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term in 1819, but Edgar Allan Poe popularized it some 25 years later with some of his published material: Marginalia. Since then, authors have had varying degrees of success creating their own collections of published marginalia. Among them is Walter Benjamin, who struggled after 13 years of research, leaving behind The Arcades Project: "the theater," he called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas"

      Blackwood Magazine most likely introduced the term marginalia in 1819. Edgar Allen Poe popularized the term with some of his published material entitled Marginalia.


      What other (popular) published examples of marginalia exist?

      Source for the Blackwood Magazine assertion?

    1. The European Commission has prepared to legislate to require interoperability, and it calls being able to use your data wherever and whenever you like “multi-homing”. (Not many other people like this term, but it describes something important – the ability for people to move easily between platforms

      an interesting neologism to describe something that many want

    1. notes that when you don't tend to your digital garden, people come along, think your work is weeds, and pull it from existence.

      Oldest reference to digital garden on Twitter

      notes that when you don't tend to your digital garden, people come along, think your work is weeds, and pull it from existence.

      — Matthew Oliphant (@matto) February 19, 2007
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. The term “scientist” is aneologism, coined jocularly by William Whewell in 1834.

      "Scientist" is a neologism coined in 1834, by William Whewell and was originally meant tongue-in-cheek.


      Who coined the word "scientist" in 1834? :: William Whewell

  22. Apr 2022
    1. The fierce public opposition forced the directors to beat a shambolic rearguard defense.

      For an article on the 1970s, it's nice to see the use of the time period-appropriate portmanteau 'shambolic' (shambles and symbolic).

  23. Mar 2022
    1. I might call such a tool memex 2.0, to suggest an upgrade of Bush's memex, but I prefer genex, to indicate an orientation towa rds generating excellence. (Footnote: The closeness of genex to genetics and to generation-X is coincidental.)
    2. In looking to the future, we might again transform society by building genexes -- generators of excellence. Such inspirati onal environments would empower personal and collaborative creativity by enabling users to: - collect information from an existing domain of knowledge, - create innovations using advanced tools, - consult with peers or mentors in the field, and then - disseminate the results widely.

      This is a dreadful definition of the neologism genex. Had it been used previously in other locations so as to be common even within a small community? Is this the first use?

      It obviously didn't catch on at the time.

  24. Feb 2022
    1. Every Scrivener document is made up of little cards of text — called “scrivenings” in the lingo — that are presented in an outline view on the left hand side of the window. Select a card, and you see the text associated with that card in the main view.

      zettels:zettelkasten::scrivenings:Scrivener::index card:index card file

      Example of a neologism ("scrivenings") used specifically for marketing a feature of a technology product.

  25. Jan 2022
    1. Most of us simply take it for granted that ‘Western’observers, even seventeenth-century ones, are simply an earlierversion of ourselves;

      It is likely a good broad generality that from a historical perspective, those looking at people from the past do so by considering them simply an earlier version of ourselves.

      This sort of isocultural cognitive bias is something to be very cognizant of particularly in cases without extensive context as it is likely to cause massive context collapse.

    1. in Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which has a chapter called “How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Interest Rightly Understood.” Despite our ambient certainty that it is natural, Tocqueville describes individualism as a newfangled phenomenon. The word “individualism” itself entered the English language largely through translations of his work. Somehow, our leaders are educated into the error of dangerously discounting this “enlightened self-interest” (also a term Tocqueville invented). 

      Alexis de Tocqueville coined the ideas/phrases "individualism" and enlightened self-interest.

  26. Dec 2021
  27. Nov 2021
    1. There Is No Antimimetics Division (qntm): This is the best new sci fi I've read in recent memory, I think because it feels fresh and modern, tackling some of the hardest social questions that the world is facing today. It's about antimemes, defined as "an idea with self-censoring properties...which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it."

      I like the idea of antimemes. The tougher question is how to actually implement it on the web?

      Is this just the idea of a digital secret?

      "The only way for two computers to keep a secret on the web is if all the computers are dead."—Chris Aldrich

    1. Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

      This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

      Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

      This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

      This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

    1. The word dolmen entered archaeology when Théophile Corret de la Tour d’Auvergne used it to describe megalithic tombs in his Origines gauloises (1796).

      The first use of dolmen in an archaeological context was in Théophile Corret de la Tour d’Auvergne's Origines gauloises (1796) to describe megalithic tombs.

  28. Sep 2021
    1. What any individual infers about their hopes and dreams for an e-reader derives from their understanding of reading in the first place. You can’t have books without bookiness.Bookiness. That’s the word Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer and longtime bookmaker, uses to describe the situation. “It’s the essence that makes someone feel like they’re using a book,” he told me. Like pornography or sandwiches, you know bookiness when you see it. Or feel it? Either way, most people can’t identify what it is in the abstract.

      definition: bookiness

      Does this only come out because there's something that's book-tangential or similar and it needs to exist to describe the idea of not-book, book-adjacent, or book-like on some sort of spectrum of bookishness.

    1. Proof-of-work methods (e.g. blockchains) are harmful for sustainability (s12y).

      First time I've seen s12y as abbreviation for sustainability.

      Also makes me wonder if I should make sesquipedaliantly into s15y? It would be more fun if it were s18y so that the 18 could refer to 12+6 inches which is a foot and a half matching up with sesquipedalian's root definition.

  29. Jul 2021
    1. Downsizing and shrinkflation mean the same thing Dworsky is a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general and longtime consumer advocate. He has spent decades tracking instances of companies shrinking products on his website Mouseprint. He refers to it by its original name, downsizing, but economist Pippa Malmgren rechristened it "shrinkflation" about a decade ago, and the term stuck. Downsizing and shrinkflation both refer to the same thing: companies reducing the size or quantity of their products while charging the same price or even more.

      The idea of shrinkflation and the fact that it works indicates that the majority of consumers are not rational actors that classical economics would indicate or they would be much more aware of these changes in pricing.

      Another example of this sort are the domed bottoms of jars/bottles which remove product while keeping the same packaging, which further hides the bait-and-switch operation.

  30. Jun 2021
    1. The Chicago Manual of Style is a quixotic attempt at one-style-fits-all for every house in America-newspapers, magazines, book publishers, blogishers.

      curious to see blogishers, as a portmanteau of blogger and publisher

    Tags

    Annotators

  31. May 2021
    1. AS PAPER became ever more abundant from the fourteenth century onward, note-taking proliferated, expanding from erasable wax tablets (the method used by Cicero and medieval wool merchants) and erasable donkey skin to permanent slips of paper and notebooks. An early-modern term for notes was “scraps.” Piles of them were called scrap heaps, and tragically for historians, most notes ended up there. Yet notes made in the margins of great printed books survived, and they are like rare seashells in the sands of the libraries.

      Early versions of annotations. Sad to realize that most of them likely perished.

      Interesting to think of this problem of note taking actually coining the phrase "scrap heap".

    1. social telephones — primarily emails and Twitter mentions

      There's something lovely about the way he defines email and social media as "social telephones"

  32. Feb 2021
    1. Uber is a "bezzle" – JK Galbraith's name for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." Uber is a scam and it will never be profitable.

      bezzle

      related to embezzle?

    1. We have “limbic capitalism” which “preys on our addicted brains”, with vast amounts of money invested into making sites and apps more addictive so subjects view more adverts, with some people even claiming this has created a new generation with shorter attention spans and less focus and concentration than ever before.

      This is the first time I've seen a reference to limbic capitalism as a term. Not a bad word for the concept.

  33. Jan 2021
    1. The possibility of a prehistory of humankind, indeed the need for one, was established; the term itself came into general use after the publication of John Lubbock’s (1834–1913) book Prehistoric Times in 1865, which went on to become a bestseller.

      prehistory

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  34. Nov 2020
    1. In other countries, the effectiveness trap has other names. In his recent book on Putinism, Between Two Fires, Joshua Yaffa describes the Russian version of this syndrome. The Russian language, he notes, has a word—prisposoblenets—that means “a person skilled in the act of compromise and adaptation, who intuitively understands what is expected of him and adjusts his beliefs and conduct accordingly.”

      prisposoblenets

  35. Oct 2020
    1. I would have preferred if instead of “white privilege” she had used the term “white dominance,” because “privilege” suggested hierarchical dominance was desired by all.
    2. The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems conferring dominance on my group.”
    1. As Gamergate unfolded, Wetherell noticed its participants were using the retweet to “brigade,” or coordinate their attacks against their targets, disseminating misinformation and outrage at a pace that made it difficult to fight back. The retweet button propelled Gamergate, according to an analysis by the technologist and blogger Andy Baio. In his study of 316,669 Gamergate tweets sent over 72 hours, 217,384 were retweets, or about 69%.

      brigade

    1. Microcelebrity refers to the affective capital engendered and commodified by various social and new media platforms where identity and brand are merged and measured in likes, shares, follows, comments and so on.
    1. Robin brings a helpful name to this problem, by way of the philosopher Timothy Morton: hyperobject. A hyperobject is an entity whose scale is too big, too sprawling for any single person to fully appreciate their scale. Climate change, financial markets, socioeconomic classes, design systems—they’re systems we move through, but their scale dwarfs our own.

      hyperobject

  36. Sep 2020
    1. A longtime libertarian who dabbled in eccentric ideas like seasteading — artificial island communities in international waters far from governmental jurisdiction — and life extension, Thiel had made occasional forays into mainstream politics.

      First time I've seen seasteading as a word in context.

  37. Jun 2020
  38. Feb 2020
    1. UPFs

      Bee has just introduced the idea of "ultra processed foods" and is already using an acronym for it. The acronymization seems all too apropos as it gives the idea of UPFs an additional layer of verbal processing!

  39. Aug 2019
    1. owned

      from pwned a half generation earlier out of computer gaming and leet (l337) speak.

  40. Apr 2019
    1. crisis. Its “creators,”

      I see crisis and creators close to each other in the text here and can't help but think about the neologism "crisis creators" as the thing we should be talking about instead of "crisis actors", a word that seems to have been created by exactly those "crisis creators"!