17,792 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. Arber also suggests to Murray in this letter that he should use atypewriter. ‘I am quite certain’, he wrote, ‘that the only way to keep down thecost of corrections is to type-write the copy’, suggesting a model called theIdeal Caligraph, no. 2 price £18. Murray did read The Snake Dance of theMoquis of Arizona but he did not buy a typewriter.
    2. 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.’
    3. The Dictionary’s coverage of the leading transcendentalist, HenryDavid Thoreau, is largely due to the monumental efforts of a single woman,Miss Alice Byington of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, who sent in 5,000 slipsfrom books that included several by Thoreau:

      over how long a period?

    4. Surprisingly, the American author who is quoted most in the OED isnot Mark Twain or Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, but rather EdwardH. Knight, a patent lawyer and expert in mechanics who wrote the AmericanMechanical Dictionary and The Practical Dictionary of Mechanics. Knight isthe seventy-fourth-most cited author in the Dictionary, quoted morefrequently than Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot or Ralph Waldo Emerson(who comes in at 116, the next-most quoted American).
    5. The American who sent in the most slips was a clergyman in Ionia,Michigan, Job Pierson. A Presbyterian minister, book collector, and librarian,Pierson had the largest private library in Michigan (which included a bookpublished in the earliest days of printing, from Vienna in 1476). Over elevenyears, from 1879 to 1890, Pierson, who had studied at Williams College andattended Auburn Theological Seminary, sent in 43,055 slips from poetry,drama, and religion. His correspondence with Murray shows the breadth ofhis reading, from Chaucer (10,000 slips) to books on anatomy (5,000 slips),and lumbering (1,000 slips).

      Job Pierson 43,055 slips over 11 years<br /> 10.7 notes per day

    6. Byington shared her uncle’s interest in and support for indigenousculture and language, serving as President of the Stockbridge branch of theIndian Rights Association, and on the Education Committee for the Women’sNational Indian Associatio

      Support for

    7. But it was her uncle, the RevdCyrus Byington, who had the greatest influence on her life and interests. Hehad been a missionary with the Brewer sisters’ father to the Choctaw NativeAmerican Communities at the old mission station in Stockbridge; he hadtranslated the Bible into Choctaw, and wrote a grammar and dictionary of thelanguage.
    8. The New England Telephone Company had planned to put a pole intheir front yard and workers from the company began digging the hole. Butthe Brewer sisters and Byington came out and sat in the hole, blocking theirefforts by sleeping there in a tent overnight. The telephone company installedthe pole across the road instead, making this a successful result fornineteenth-century Nimby activism.
    9. to scrinch, tosqueeze one’s body into a crouched or huddled position.
    10. gloryhole, a drawer in whichthings are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness;

      compare with scrap heaps or even the method of Eminem's zettelkasten (Eminem's gloryhole ???). rofl...

    11. There was a high number of librarians among the Americans, such asCharles Ammi Cutter of Harvard and the Boston Athenæum (who producedAmerica’s first public library card catalogue).
    12. Tribes of the Extreme Northwest by the American naturalist WilliamDall was another important book on the indigenous peoples and languages ofAlaska, western Washington, and north-western Oregon
    13. Francis March also helped with the etymologies inWilliam Dwight Whitney’s Century Dictionary (1889–91) and IsaacFunk’s Standard Dictionary of the English Language (first volume publishedin 1893).
    14. Francis March was a Professor of English Language and ComparativePhilology at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. The study of Englishin higher education was a development of the nineteenth century, and it tooka long time for English studies to gain recognition. March’s appointment as aProfessor of English in 1857 had been the first in the world that had theprestige of a full professorship – Rutgers appointed its first English professorin 1860, Harvard in 1876, and Oxford in 1885.
    15. He was an early ecologicalactivist, warning against human-induced climate change before anyone else,and publishing in 1864 Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modifiedby Human Action.

      Cross reference The Parrot and the Igloo.

    16. In this context, Marsh invited members of the American public to helpcreate a radical new dictionary of all English which applied the scientificmethod, was collaborative in its making, and was based on written evidence.They were asked to collect current words and especially to read books fromthe eighteenth century – because literature from earlier centuries was harderto get in America at the time. Marsh ended his appeal with the warning thatAmericans would be paid nothing for their help.
    17. in 1864, Webster’s Unabridged was published and it marked animportant moment in modern lexicography: no longer the idiosyncratic workof one man, this dictionary was the product of a collaborative team withNoah Porter as Chief Editor and the German scholar Carl A. F. Mahn asetymologist
    18. When Marsh sent out his appeal for American Readers, what wasknown as the ‘Dictionary War’ had been waging for some time between twoleading lexicographers, Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester. Worcester hadbeen Webster’s assistant on his American Dictionary of the English Language(1828) but, a superior philologist to Webster,
    19. In 1858, the year after the idea of the Dictionary had been mooted by theLondon Philological Society, the New York Times informed American readersof a ‘fresh appeal to scholars, and lovers of learning and philological inquiry,for additions to their vocabulary’.
    20. American contributors were underlined in red in Murray’saddress books.
    21. Some Americans did write directly to Murray, and these – 196 ofthem – are the ones underlined in the address books. They represent 10 percent of all the Dictionary People with addresses and produced a total of238,080 slips that crossed the ocean before coming to rest on Murray’s deskin the Scriptorium.
    22. outfangthief, a tricky entry that took Murray three people andsix letters before he nailed its definition as ‘the right of a lord of a privatejurisdiction to claim for trial a thief captured outside the jurisdiction, and tokeep any forfeited chattels on conviction’.
    23. Maitland co-wrote History of English Law with Frederick Pollock.
    24. The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland helped Murray on current legalterms such as bail, defend, culprit, and deliverance, and also many obsoleteones such as couthutlaughe, a person knowingly harbouring or concealing anoutlaw; abishering, a misreading of mishersing, freedom from amercementsimposed by any court; compurgator, a character witness who swore along withthe person accused, in order to the acquittal of the latter; pennyland, landhaving the rental value of one penny; and contenement, holding, freehold.
    25. The Cambridge jurist and legal historian (and advocatefor women’s education) Frederic Maitland
    26. the novelist George Meredith who lived in Box Hill, Surrey, and wouldrelish the opportunity of serving cups of refreshing Russian tea to the‘Learned Tramps’ or ‘Cranium Tramps’, as he often called them.

      Cranium Tramps

    27. Stephen was ‘Captain of Tramps’, choosing the route, striding aheadwith his characteristic impatient snort and alpenstock in hand, and setting thetopics for conversation.

      alpenstock

    28. The motto of the Sunday Tramps was Solvitur Ambulando, ‘It is solvedby walking.’
    29. informal hub was the Sunday Tramps, a group of intellectualmen brought together by Leslie Stephen every fortnight, regardless of theweather, to hike together in the countryside on the outskirts of London. Theword tramp was a popular colloquial term at the time for ‘a walkingexcursion’.
    30. Stephen kept sending slips toMurray for twelve years, until 1891

      What was his slip total to give a notes per day calculation?

      (obviously not taking into account his other work...)

    31. during theyears that Leslie Stephen contributed to the OED, he started his owncrowdsourced project, the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Just asMurray’s Dictionary traced the lives of thousands of words, Stephen’sdictionary traced the lives of thousands of people who made a notable impacton British history. Stephen invited 653 people to write 29,120 articles. Sixty-three volumes comprising 29,108 pages were published, the first volume in1885 and the last in 1900. The DNB is still going today, under the aegis ofOxford University Press, and it now covers the lives of 55,000 people.

      Presumably this dictionary also used a card index for collection? (check...)

    32. Virginia Woolf described her childhood at 22 Hyde Park Gate: ‘Ourduties were very plain and our pleasures absolutely appropriate.’ Life wasdivided into two spaces – indoors, in a nursery and a book-lined drawingroom, and outdoors, in Kensington Gardens. ‘There were smells and flowersand dead leaves and chestnuts, by which you distinguished the seasons, andeach had innumerable associations, and power to flood the brain in a second.’
    33. 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.

    34. Katharine also read her friend John Ruskin’s book The Eagle’s Nest(1872), lectures on the relationship between natural science and art, for theDictionary, writing out 1,000 slips.
    35. 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.

    36. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, two Readers who wereaunt and niece and also lesbian lovers.
    37. Robert Browning was a great favourite and also a greatfriend. Katharine sent in 500 slips from his Dramatic Idyls of 1879, and Amyproduced 300 slips from the same book.
    38. 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...

    39. Jane Austen was the first person to write the word outsider.
    40. Dr Minor would read a text not for its meaning but for its words. It wasa novel approach to the task – the equivalent of cutting up a book word byword, and then placing each in an alphabetical list which helped the editorsquickly find quotations. Just as Google today ‘reads’ text as a series of wordsor symbols that are searchable and discoverable, so with Dr Minor. A manualundertaking of this kind was laborious – he was basically working as acomputer would work – but it probably resulted in a higher percentage of hisquotations making it to the Dictionary page than those of other contributors.
    41. 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.
    42. Very early one chilly morning in October 1895, Fielding Blandfordstepped into a horse-drawn carriage with Edith Lanchester’s father and twobrothers. The four men arrived at Edith’s rented lodgings in Battersea. Theywoke the whole house with heavy banging on the front door, and FieldingBlandford forced his way in to ‘examine’ Edith. He ordered that she be takento an asylum because she was committing ‘social suicide’ by insisting on livingwith her working-class lover without marrying him. He justified this byarguing that under the Lunacy Act 1890 he would have certified her had sheattempted (normal) suicide.

      Fascinating story of a kidnapping and committal of a woman in October 1895 for shacking up with a man she wasn't married to.

      Ultimately gained international attention.

    43. There were two approaches to the treatment of patients in psychiatrichospitals at the time: a humane consideration for their well-being and possiblerecovery, or the opposite – an inhumane disregard for their personhood andpossible recovery. These different approaches were championed by twoDictionary volunteers who sat on either side of the debate: Thomas NadauldBrushfield and George Fielding Blandford.
    44. Ranking below Thomas Austin, who sent in 165,061 slips, and WilliamDouglas, who sent in 151,982, there is a big drop to the third-highestcontributor Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield, who sent in 70,277 slips.

      repetition here from before to introduce mental health...

    45. 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.
    46. As long as money hasexisted, the problem of counterfeit currency has too, but it became aparticular problem once printed notes went into general circulation. Ineighteenth-century North America, Benjamin Franklin – who owned a firmthat printed money for several of the colonies – hit on the idea of misspellingPennsylvania on official currency, on the grounds that forgers would spell it

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

    47. 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’
    48. The Indian languages Specialist, Edward Brandreth, had D, D4, and D5beside his name in the address books and spent tireless hours in the BritishMuseum searching for fillers. Murray sent this retired member of the IndianCivil Service a total of 35 lists of desiderata, and Brandreth sent himthousands of quotations in return.

      thousands of slips...

    49. Alexander Beazeley, an engineer who specialized in lighthouses andsent in a total of 38,233 slips, many of which were desiderata and did notrelate to lighthouses.
    50. theRevd William Lees, a vicar outside Reigate who sent in a total of 18,500slips;
    51. Volunteers like Taylor who could fill gaps in quotations and search outdesiderata were invaluable to Murray. They were marked in the addressbooks by numbered D’s when desiderata lists had been sent to them, and by asmall Star of David sign when a third list had been sent.
    52. Murray responded a week later, giving instructions on how to read.This was towards the very end of his life and his instructions to Miss Taylorgive rare insight into Murray’s reading tips, especially instructions for readingfor desiderata, in this case words beginning with S, T, and U–Z: ‘I shouldsuggest looking it through and marking with a pencil dot such words as arementioned in the enclosed note, and any others that strike you as noteworthy,and then go through it copying out from the marked ones those immediatelywanted for the letters at which we are working the better parts of S & T, andsending these as soon as ready; then proceed to those in U to Z, and finallythe earlier words for our Supplement. I hope you will not find it too tedious;and I should be sorry if it were allowed to interfere with other calls.’

      James Murray's instructions to Miss E. Hilda Taylor in 1914 for how to read for excerpting of useful words for the Oxford English Dictionary.

      Compare this with his original instructions from circa 1879.

      Also: https://hypothes.is/a/3S08ysbDEe6Ca5tVAqEABQ

    53. The random selection of words by volunteers often resulted in themchoosing the same words with similar dates, and produced gaps in thequotation paragraphs, which Murray and his assistants had to fill by their ownmanual searching. This must have been like trying to find a needle in ahaystack. It was remarkable how successful Murray’s small team was at fillingthose gaps and finding earliest or latest quotations. Murray told thePhilological Society that this manual trawling for words had to be done forthe majority of words: ‘For more than five-sixths of the words we have tosearch out and find additional quotations in order to complete their historyand illustrate the senses; for every word we have to make a general search todiscover whether any earlier or later quotations, or quotations in other senses,exist.’
    54. Readers were asked to choose words they considered ‘rare’ and the choice ofthese words was random – they were not guided by Murray on what wasneeded. This resulted in a dearth of quotations for common words whichultimately had to be found by Murray and his assistants. In the first part of theDictionary alone, ‘nearly the whole quotations for about, after, all, also, and,in Part I, and for any, as, in Part II, have had to be found by myself and myassistants’, he explained to the Philological Society. If he had his time again,he said that he would have directed his Readers differently, with theinstructions, ‘Take out quotations for all words that do not strike you as rare,peculiar, or peculiarly used.’
    55. two small flaws in the Dictionary’s compilation process

      It is incredibly difficult to plan in advance what to collect for any zettelkasten, even when its scope is tightly defined, like it would have been for the Oxford English Dictionary.

    56. And yet he desperately needed the help of Subeditors because the task wastoo massive to do alone. Two years into the job, Murray had estimated thathe had sent out 817,625 blank slips to Readers. If they returned them withquotations, and if he spent a minimum of 30 seconds reading each one andallocating it to the correct sense of an entry, it would take him three workingyears to get through a third of the materials gathered.

      By the second year into his editing work on the OED, John Murray estimated that he had sent out 817,625 slips to readers.

      At the average price of $0.025 for bulk index cards in 2023, this would have cost $20,440, so one must wonder at the cost of having done it. How much would this have been in March 1879 when Murray tool over editorship?

      How many went out in total? Who cut them all? Surely mass manufacture didn't exist at the time for them?

      Sending them out would have helped to ensure a reasonable facsimile of having cards of equal size coming back.

    57. Murray received a poignant letter in 1906 fromthe wife of William Sykes of South Devon who had been a one-timeassistant, and faithful Reader and Specialist for twenty-two years, sending in atotal of 16,048 slips: ‘My dear husband died last Friday, the day he receivedyour letter, he was able to read it, and wrote your name in one of the books Iam going to send you eight hours before he died. It took him an hour to writeit, but he made up his mind to do it, and did. The last words he ever wrotewere to you.’ A poignant last line from the impoverished widow reads, ‘I shallsend the books when the probate duty has been paid.’

      William Sykes 16,048 slips over 22 years<br /> (approximately 2 notes per day)

    58. Miss Clowes of Ipswich and Miss Wheaton of Bloomsbury Square‘threw up’ (gave up)
    59. One might have expected that the architectresponsible for the Liverpool Public Library, and after whom its main readingroom is named, Sir James Allanson Picton, would have been an ideal Readerfor the OED but Murray wrote ‘no good’ and put a red squiggle through hisentry.

      ha!

    60. Across the entry for T. W. Tonkin of Barnes, who had sent in nothingfor a sixteenth-century polemical work against female monarchs, The FirstBlast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women by theScottish Protestant Reformer John Knox, he wrote in blue pencil, ‘Impostor –Stole the Book’
    61. From the moment in March 1879 whenMurray signed the contract with Oxford University Press to be the next Editorof the Dictionary, and he took possession of 2 tons of slips at his house, hisfamily was immediately part of the project (whether they liked it or not)sorting out the slips. Their house was a workplace and the family aworkforce.

      Perhaps one of the first sources of counting slips in weight rather than number!

    62. Helwich was the fifth-highest contributor
    63. The most prolific Reader in Europe – we might call him a ‘super-contributor’ – was Hartwig Helwich, a professor at the University of Viennawho wrote out the entire Cursor Mundi onto 46,599 slips. His efforts madethe medieval poem the second-most-frequently cited work in the Dictionaryafter the Bible (though in the current OED, it has dropped to eleventh in thetop sources).

      This practice of writing out everything onto slips sounds like that used later (double check the timing) by the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in creating their slip corpus for later work.

    64. It was left to a handful of keen British scholars, by no means part of themainstream, to encourage others to take up Continental philology. Murrayand his colleagues at the London Philological Society, especially its foundersEdwin Guest, Henry Malden, and Thomas Hewitt Key, were main players inenlivening the British linguistic scene and adopting the methods ofContinental philology. Now known as ‘the oldest learned society in GreatBritain dedicated to the study of language’, the Philological Society wasfounded in 1842 as a forum for discussion, debate, and work on developmentsin philology. But all this innovation came comparatively late, and theGrimms, who were made honorary members of the London PhilologicalSociety in 1843, were at the heart of the European innovations. Theyinfluenced Continental philology; they practised the application of historicalprinciples; they pioneered the descriptive method of defining and tracing aword’s meaning across time; and they forged the crowdsourcing techniquesand lexicographic policies and practices adopted by the OED editors.
    65. The study ofwords and language, otherwise known as ‘philology’, was all the rage inEurope at the turn of the nineteenth century. European scholars haddeveloped their own methodologies to compare languages and to trace thesource of a word, which became known as ‘Continental philology’. It was halfa century until Britain took up these methods, which are still practised todayand form the basis of comparative linguistics
    66. We think of the OED as a radical dictionary because of its size, itsscholarship, and its methods, and it was radical for English. But if youcompare it with other languages, there was nothing about its creation in themid-nineteenth century that had not been done before in Europe. English wasrelatively late to the table. The English editors were able to pick and choosethe best methods from different European dictionaries. The OEDimplemented European lexicographic practices, and advanced upon them, tocreate something truly revolutionary, something that would in fact end upbeing the envy of Europe.
    67. A section of a wall of slips in the Grimmwelt Museum showinghow the Brothers Grimm pioneered the methods used by theOED twenty years later.
    68. By the time the OED project commenced, Europe already had majordictionaries under way or completed in German, French, Italian, Russian, andDutch, all of which were taking advantage of the new methodologies ofContinental philology. In Germany, the Brothers Grimm had begun theDeutsches Wörterbuch in 1838. In France, Émile Littré had begun theDictionnaire de la langue française in 1841 (a dictionary of post-1600French). In the Netherlands, Matthias de Vries had begun Woordenboek derNederlandsche Taal in 1852 (a dictionary of post-medieval Dutch).

      Oxford English Dictionary (1857 - )

    69. showing the hundreds of volunteers who corresponded with the brothers; theeditors’ lists of words and statistical counts of entries; the tracing ofetymology using the new scientific philological methods of the day; thegathering of citations from historical, published sources. I had worked in theOED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum lookedidentical.

      They looked exactly like the slips sent into the OED by the Dictionary People. There was a world map

      Lexicographer Sarah Ogilvie, a previous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, said she "had worked in the OED archives for years and the contents of the Grimmwelt Museum looked identical" to them. She indicated that the similarity of the dictionary projects extended to the hundreds of volunteers, lists of words, counts of entries, etymology work, citations from published sources, and general philological methods used by the editors of the era.

    70. There was a dramatic wall of vastnumbers of slips, or ‘zettel’, hanging from long nails.

      The Grimmwelt Museum in Kassel, Germany is the home of some of the work of Grimm Brothers work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch which features a large wall of zettel or slips hanging from long nails.

      The slips hanging on nails sounds similar to Thomas Harrison's 1740's wooden cabinet of hanging slips used for excerpts and isn't far off from the organizational structure used by the subsequent Oxford English Dictionary's pigeonhole system of organization for their slip collection.

      see: https://hypothes.is/a/kVW3glq0EeyihQ834uN_Ig

    71. Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm were also lexicographerswho created and edited the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German equivalent ofthe OED. Or rather I should say, the OED is the English equivalent of theDeutsches Wörterbuch, because the German dictionary was started first (evenif it ended up being finished later because the Brothers Grimm died beforethe letter G, and it took another hundred years to complete).

      The Deutsches Wörterbuch (DWB) was begun in 1838 by brothers Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm who worked on it through the letter F prior to their deaths. The dictionary project was ended in 1961 after 123 years of work which resulted in 16 volumes. A further 17th source volume was released in 1971.

    72. absolutely drew the line with a word which he considered so obscene it had tobe sent to Murray in a small envelope marked PRIVATE, sealed within alarger envelope. Inside the intriguing packaging was a message advising himnot to include the word condom. ‘I am writing on a very obscene subject.There is an article called Cundum ... a contrivance used by fornicators, tosave themselves from a well-deserved clap; also by others who wish to enjoycopulation without the possibility of impregnation’, he wrote to Murray.‘Everything obscene comes from France, and I had supposed this affair wasnamed after the city of Condom, which gives title to a Bishop.’ But he hadfound a quotation from 1705 referring to a ‘Quondam’ which made himrethink his assumption that it was named after the town in France. ‘I supposeCundom or Quondam will be too utterly obscene for the Dictionary’, heconcluded. Murray left it out.

      Each of Murray’s advisers had different notions of what was offensively salacious. His adviser on medical terms, James Dixon, who was a retired surgeon living in Dorking, Surrey, had been all right with including cunt, but

    73. By the time that section of the letter C was published for the OxfordEnglish Dictionary the only cunt that was listed by Murray was cunt-, a cross-reference to the prefixes cont-, count- with no mention whatsoever of thefemale body part. Fuck was also left out. Although these old words had beenin use since the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, they wouldhave to wait until the 1970s to be included in the OED. Murray did, however,include pudendum, a word derived from Latin for ‘that of which one ought tobe ashamed’, which he defined as ‘the privy parts, the external genital organs’with no reference to a woman or – God forbid – her vulva.

      1970s!

      the shame attached to pudendum has lasted culturally for a terrifically long time in the West.

    74. a fellowlexicographer and one of the Dictionary People, John Stephen Farmer, hadhis own legal drama. Farmer was writing a slang dictionary with WilliamHenley, and was struggling to publish the second volume (containing theletters C and F) of his work on grounds of obscenity. Farmer took hispublisher to court for breach of contract in 1891, and tried to convince a jurythat writing about obscene words in a dictionary did not make him personallyguilty of obscenity, but he lost the case and was ordered to pay costs.Eventually, he found fresh printers and avoided the Obscene Publications Actby arguing that his dictionary was published privately for subscribers only, notthe public, and the remarkable Slang and Its Analogues by Farmer and Henleywas published in seven volumes (from 1890 to 1904), with cunt and fuck andmany other words regarded as lewd on its pages. Farmer’s legal case and thepublic outcry that ensued was a clear deterrent for Murray.
    75. He had helped Murray with the very firstentry in the Dictionary – A: not only the sound A, ‘the low-back-wide vowelformed with the widest opening of the jaws, pharynx, and lips’, but also themusical sense of A, ‘the 6th note of the diatonic scale of C major’, and finallythe algebraic sense of A, ‘as in a, b, c, early letters of the alphabet used toexpress known quantities, as x, y, z are to express the unknown’. Ellis washappy to see these and other results of his work on the printed page, includingthe words air, alert, algebra.

      He here is A. J. Ellis

    76. a favourite quotation from Auguste Comte, the founder of altruism,‘Man’s only right is to do his duty. The intellect should always be the servantof the heart, and should never be its slave.’

      original source?

    77. the outright winner was a mysterious character called Thomas Austin Jnr whosent Dr Murray an incredible total of 165,061 over the span of a decade.Second place goes to William Douglas of Primrose Hill who sent in 151,982slips over twenty-two years; third place to Dr Thomas Nadauld Brushfield ofDevon, with 70,277 over twenty-eight years; with Dr William Chester Minorof Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum coming in fourth place with 62,720slips.

      Top slip contributors to OED: 1. Thomas Austin Jnr. 165,061 slips over 10 years (45.22 notes per day) 2. William Douglas 151,982 over 22 years (18.92 notes per day) 3. Thomas Nadauld Brushfield 70,277 over 28 years (1.98 notes per day) 4. William Chester Minor 62,720 slips over 23 years (to 1906) (7.5 notes per day)

    78. Over the seven years that archaeologist-to-be Margaret Murray sent in wordsto the Dictionary, she managed to contribute 5,000 slips.
    79. tensof thousands of books

      Tens of thousands of books were used to draw the quotations used in the OED.

    80. The box in the archives held two further address books belonging toMurray, and the following summer, in a box in the Bodleian Library, I foundanother three address books belonging to the Editor who had preceded him,Frederick Furnivall. As I worked my way through them, it became clear thatthere were thousands of contributors. Some three thousand, to be exact.

      Sarah Ogilvie found a total of three address books from Dr. Murray as well as three address books from Frederick Furnivall which contained details about the three thousand or so contributors to the OED.

    81. He had written the names and addresses of not just hundreds butthousands of people who had volunteered to contribute to the Dictionary.Finding Dr Murray’s address book

      James Murray kept an address book with the names, addresses, and notations about the thousands of people who had volunteered contributions for the Oxford English Dictionary. Also included were the lists of material they read, the level of their contributions in number of slips and dates sent, as well as various personal details including relationships, marriages, and deaths.

    82. It was a treasure trove.

      Curious that she doesn't use "thesaurus" here!!

    83. He devised a systemof storage for all the slips in shelves of pigeonholes that lined the walls of theScriptorium.

      The scriptorium for the OED relied on shelves of pigeonholes into which the slips could be sorted and stored.

      There are photos of Murray with these pigeonholes stuffed behind him. Dig one of these up.

      This pigeonhole practice is in marked difference to other projects like the TLL which relied on boxes on shelves.

    84. urray’s house at 78 Banbury Road to receive post (it is still there today).This is now one of the most gentrified areas of Oxford, full of large three-storey, redbrick, Victorian houses, but the houses were brand new whenMurray lived there and considered quite far out of town.

      Considered outside of Oxford at the time, Dr. Murray fashioned the Scriptorium at his house at 78 Banbury Road. Murray received so much mail that the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box just to handle the volume.

    85. Readers received a list of twelve instructions on how to select a word,which included, ‘Give the date of your book (if you can), author, title (short).Give an exact reference, such as seems to you to be the best to enable anyoneto verify your quotations. Make a quotation for every word that strikes you asrare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way.’
    86. A 4 x 6-inch ‘slip’ sent in by one of the most prolific femalecontributors, Edith Thompson of Bath, who sent in 13,259slips. The underlinings and markings were made by Dr Murray.
    87. In addition tobeing Readers, volunteers could help as Subeditors who received bundles ofslips for pre-sorting (chronologically and into senses of meaning

      The slips for the OED were sorted alphabetically and then grouped chronologically and by sense of meanings of the words.

    88. The volunteer ‘Readers’ were instructed to write out the words andsentences on small 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper, known as ‘slips’.

      Volunteer 'Readers' for the Oxford English Dictionary were encouraged to write down interesting headwords along with their appearances in-situ along with the associated bibliographical information. The recommended paper size was 4 x 6-inch pieces of paper which were commonly called 'slips'.

      (Double check this against the historical requests from James Murray.)

    89. Monday had been a walk around the deer park within the walls ofMagdalen College. C. S. Lewis had said that the circular path was the perfectlength for any problem. It was true.
    90. Ogilvie, Sarah. The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary. 1st ed. New York: Knopf, 2023. https://amzn.to/3Un0sv9.

      Read from 2023-12-04 to 2024-02-01

      Annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:c95483c701c7fc677e89f2c44f98a30b

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    Annotators

    1. https://www.ebay.com/itm/186286893621

      2024-02-06 Remington Rand 60 drawer modular card catalog offered for sale at $2,500 with local pick up only in Laurel, DE.

      7 pieces: table/base; writing drawer with 2 pull outs, top, and 4 sections of 5x3 drawers.

      Condition: Generally pretty good. Missing manufacturer plackard, Missing 15 rods. Some finish/paint peeling on the top.

      Cost per drawer: $41.66

    1. https://www.ebay.com/itm/116060316468

      2024-02-06 Gaylord Bros. modular 3 piece card catalog with 15 drawers (5x3), table, and top offered for bidding at $500 with a buy it now of $2,000. Local pick up only from Franklin Square, NY.

      In pretty dreadful condition, mismatched drawers, wood and metal with plastic trays in drawers instead of wood. Heavy water damage to stain/finish on the top.

      Cost per drawer: - minimum auction price of $500: $33.33 - buy it now price of $2,000: $133.33

      I suspect this won't sell for quite a while at this price and in this condition.

    1. Die Zettelkastenmethode. Kontrolliere dein Wissen

      by Andrey Sukhovskii (transliteration) aka Sukhovskii https://qnnnp.substack.com/p/024#%C2%A7%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%87%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8-%D0%BD%D0%B0-%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D1%85-%D1%8F%D0%B7%D1%8B%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%85

      A fairly solid overview of lots of note taking texts, including some historical. Nothing new to me. Almost looks like he's collected everything I've mentioned in the past several years online. Originally written in Russian.

    1. sample catalog card included in a Gaylord Brothers supply catalog.

      Gaylord Bros. sold several types of card catalog cards including:

      • No. 301 medium weight
      • No. 306 with red rules (classical three lines)
      • No. 307 with blue rules
      • No. 311 pain card

      all were predrilled with holes

      via https://www.libraryhistorybuff.org/catalog-cards.htm

    1. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/899978637990824/

      Steelcase 8 drawer (x 2 rows per drawer) card index offered for $450 in downtown Los Angeles area in late December 2023. Looks to be in good condition with some nice art deco detailing.

      Antique two tone card file with 8 drawers. Extremely rare in excellent condition. Detailed handles and opener latch with beautiful metal work. These typically sell for $1400 or more so it is priced to sell. Possible delivey depnding on your location. 52" height x 15" across x 28" deep

      Most likely for 4x6" index cards, but messaged owner to check

      Cost per drawer: $28.12

      Likely capacity: 57,000 cards

    1. Sarah is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, and Director of the Dictionary Lab at Oxford. She specializes in lexicography, endangered languages, language revitalization, the history of dictionaries, and the interface of technology with the Social Sciences and Humanities (digital humanities). Her research includes work on Australian Aboriginal and American Indian languages, especially relating to language documentation and revitalization. She is the Director of the new MSc in Digital Scholarship.

      What a fascinating set of areas she's working in... I want to do this...

    1. A variation of this quote also appears in the movie Sweet Home Alabama (Touchstone Pictures, 2002) in the lightning sequence at the waterfront at the end of the picture:

      What is it about you Southern Girls? You can't make the right decision until you tried all the wrong ones.<br /> —Jake Perry, portrayed by Josh Lucas

      Link to: https://hypothes.is/a/EoLQ5MLkEe6lqTcB_otgdw a quote often misattributed to Winston Churchill.

    2. Abba Eban who was an Israeli politician and diplomat. In March 1967 Eban visited Japan, and the New York Times reported on a remark that he made:[1] 1967 March 19, New York Times, “Japan Welcomes Eban Warmly; Her Industry Impresses Israeli” by Robert Trumbull, Page 14, New York. (ProQuest) Commenting that the passage of time offered the best hope of an end to the problems of Israel and her neighbors, he said: “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.”

      Potential origin of a phrase often misattributed to Winston Churchill in a slightly different form.

      Later in June 1967 Eban commented similarly:

      ...nations do behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

      See also: https://hypothes.is/a/ev6_bMLjEe6lotOP3r9I7w

    1. As King put it: "Winston Churchill once famously observed that Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else."

      Apparently this quote about America is misattributed to Winston Churchill

      Several, including Richard Langsworth, editor of the journal Finest Hour published by WinstonChurchill.org, have been unable to attribute this quote to him.

    2. Nigel Rees, the host of the long-running BBC quiz show Quote ... Unquote, found so many examples of this oratorical identity theft that he coined a phrase for it: Churchillian Drift.
    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).

    1. Joy, Bill. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” Wired, April 1, 2000. https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/.

      Annotation url: urn:x-pdf:753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0

      Annotations: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?user=chrisaldrich&url=urn%3Ax-pdf%3A753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0&max=100&exactTagSearch=true&expanded=true

    2. the prevention of knowledge-enabled massdestruction
    3. The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to takepersonal responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, andthe way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We can, as theydid, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat. We mustdo more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly surprised andshocked by the consequences of our inventions.

      Bill Joy's mention that insurmountable problems can "take on a life of [their] own" is a spectacular reason for having a solid definition of what "life" is, so that we might have better means of subverting it in specific and potentially catastrophic situations.

    4. Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowl-edge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves?
    5. But many other people who know about the dangers still seemstrangely silent. When pressed, they trot out the “this is nothing new”riposte—as if awareness of what could happen is response enough.They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists who studythis stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before,and by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments arealready old hat.

      For so many issues we face the "nothing new" argument seems to abound. It's not just the bioethics issues Joy points out, but even things like fascism and Nazism.

      How to better argue these points for society so we aren't always having to re-hoe the same row?

    6. I havefound the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the DalaiLama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, theDalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct ourlives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need todevelop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interde-pendency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individ-uals and societies that seems consonant with Attali’s Fraternity utopia.The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is thatmakes people happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neithermaterial progress nor the pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key—that there are limits to what science and the scientific pursuit alone can do.

      Dalai Lama throwing back to a large number of indigenous cultures and societies.... contemplate reading this book...

    7. Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks,who defined it as “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellencein a life affording them scope.”15

      quote from <br /> Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way. W. W. Norton & Co., 1942: 35.

      Coincidence that I just started this a few weeks back...

    8. At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as noth-ing more than a labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood adoor leading, via their death, to the company of gods and to Eter-nity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared freethemselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal Citywhere Liberty would flourish. Others, noting the evolution of themarket society, understood that the liberty of some would entailthe alienation of others, and they sought Equality.

      quote pulled from Jacques Attali's book Fraternités

    9. Thoreau also said that we will be “rich in proportion to the numberof things which we can afford to let alone.”
    10. Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineersadopt a strong code of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocraticoath, and that they have the courage to whistleblow as necessary, evenat high personal cost.

      another suggestion for professional ethics oaths for scientists and engineers...

    11. The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial andmilitary uses; given their potential in the market, it’s hard to imaginepursuing them only in national laboratories. With their widespreadcommercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will require a verificationregime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an unprecedentedscale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual pri-vacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verifica-tion to protect us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistanceto this loss of privacy and freedom of action.

      While Joy looks at the Biological and Chemical Weapons Conventions as well as nuclear nonproliferation ideas, the entirety of what he's looking at is also embedded in the idea of gun control in the United States as well. We could choose better, but we actively choose against our better interests.

      What role does toxic capitalism have in pushing us towards these antithetical goals? The gun industry and gun lobby have had tremendous interest on that front. Surely ChatGPT and other LLM and AI tools will begin pushing on the profitmaking levers shortly.

    12. We have embodied our relinquish-ment of biological and chemical weapons in the 1972 BiologicalWeapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Con-vention (CWC).
    13. As Thoreau said, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”;and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed,Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?

      another variation of Thoreau on tools... source?

      It's Walden. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/b10mJsGoEe6rgteMdxbwKQ)

      Joy may have more profitably quoted the earlier Walden piece from p.41: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."

      There also seems to be the idea of our slow evolution into cybernetic or Borg-like beings hiding not only in Joy's argument, but in Thoreau's. If we integrate so closely with our tools, where do they stop and we end and vice versa?

      Compare this with the infamous problem of the ship of Theseus.

    14. I believe that we all wish our course could be determined by ourcollective values, ethics, and morals.

      the collective "we" here must broadly be the West, but even there our values, ethics, and morals aren't all the same. Things devolve further and more quickly beyond the cis-gendered white male perspective which Joy represents here.

    15. It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, notonly that God is dead but that “faith in science, which after all existsundeniably, cannot owe its origin to a calculus of utility; it must haveoriginated in spite of the fact that the disutility and dangerousness ofthe ‘will to truth,’ of ‘truth at any price’ is proved to it constantly.”

      Joy quoting Nietzsche

    16. In recent times, we have come to revere scientific knowledge.

      Some do, yes, but it's interesting to note that when Bill Joy was writing this a strong anti-science movement was afoot in the United States of America.

    17. We have, as a bedrock value in our society, long agreed on thevalue of open access to information, and recognize the problems thatarise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge.

      Many academics and modern people may think this way, but it is far from a "bedrock value".

      In many indigenous cultures knowledge was carefully sectioned and cordoned off.

      And as we know that knowledge itself is power (ipsa scientia potestas est - Francis Bacon) many people have frequently cordoned off access to information.

    18. Aristotle opened hisMetaphysics with the simple statement: “All men by nature desire toknow.”

      Bill Joy quoting Aristotle.

      see original: https://hypothes.is/a/2LPjSMGkEe6K-4Oi8iIRmg

    19. The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit de-velopment of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting ourpursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
    20. Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of theimagined future, driven—this time by great financial rewards andglobal competition—despite the clear dangers, hardly evaluating whatit may be like to try to live in a world that is the realistic outcome ofwhat we are creating and imagining.
    21. In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings,Oppenheimer stood firmly behind the scientific attitude, saying, “It isnot possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge ofthe world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of in-trinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spreadof knowledge and are willing to take the consequences.”
    22. But thesewarnings haven’t been widely publicized; the public discussions havebeen clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.
    23. Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has becomeknown as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncon-trolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo”emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less in-spiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superiorin an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

      quote in Bill Joy originally from the book Engines of Creation.

    24. Drexler startedthe Foresight Institute in the late 1980s “to help prepare society for an-ticipated advanced technologies”
    25. I remember feeling good about nanotechnology after reading Enginesof Creation.

      Here's an example of Bill Joy reading about nanotechnology and having positive feelings.

      Why are people so pro-technology? Have we evolved this way over 10,000 years? Are there too many technologies with bad effects?

    26. If, for ex-ample, we were to reengineer ourselves into several separate and unequalspecies using the power of genetic engineering, then we would threatenthe notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.

      I find it hard to believe that equality is "the very cornerstone of our democracy".

    1. https://pages.oup.com/ol/cus/1646173949115570121/submit-words-and-evidence-to-the-oed

      The modern day digital version of an OED contribution slip includes database fields for the following:

      • Submission type (new word or sense of a word; information about origin/etymology; other)
      • the word or phrase itself
      • the part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, other)
      • pronunciation (recording, IPA, rhyming words, etc.)
      • the definition or sense number as defined in the OED
      • quotation evidence with full text, and bibliographical references/links)
      • additional notes

      Only the first two fields are mandatory.

    1. Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

      Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

      If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

      No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

      (Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

    2. What you are reading is likely cleverer than you (of which reading as Mortimer J. Adler points out we should be doing), which constitutes "Like an intelligent and interesting conversation partner."

      While Adler may say that a text could be cleverer than you are (is this a direct quote? reference if so), there is an associative nature to our thinking by which one can read further into a text than anything which is actually present. Did the author really mean to "say" the additional associative material? Was it in their lived experience to make such tangential references which associate things in your mind as well?

      One ought to be careful that an author can only mean something so far, unless one has much more experience with their additional works and context. If it's not there, does it really exist? Did they mean it?

      These associative tricks are what can make texts much richer and deeper than they may have claim to be. Though this doesn't mean that they aren't good "conversation partners."

      compare this with doubletalk and https://boffosocko.com/2016/09/30/complexity-isnt-a-vice-10-word-answers-and-doubletalk-in-election-2016/

    1. https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1aglte6/eink_tablets/

      I've yet to run across anyone excited about zettelkasten on their e-ink device. The note taking experience for writing/capturing seems to be there, but a user interface for sorting, searching, and interlinking seems to be wholly missing.

    1. We do not ride on the railroad; it rides uponus. Did you ever think what those sleepers are thatunderlie the railroad ? Each one is a man, an Irish¬man, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, andthey are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothlyover them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you.And every few years a new lot is laid down and runover; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on arail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.

      p100

      This fits into the same sort of framing as Thoreau's earlier quote "men have become the tools of their tools." (p41)

      see: https://hypothes.is/a/vooPrPkwEe2r_4MIb6tlFw

    2. But lo!men have become the tools of their tools. The manwho independently plucked the fruits when he was hun¬gry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a treefor shelter, a housekeeper.

      p41

      This quote is fascinating when one realizes that the Thoreau family business was manufacturing pencils at John Thoreau & Co., one of the first major pencil companies in the United States. Thoreau's father was the titular John and Henry David worked in the factory and improved upon the hardness of their graphite. https://hypothes.is/a/sm7LUpazEe2tTq_GhGiVIg

      One might also then say that the man who manufactured pencils naturally should become a writer!


      This quote also bears some interesting resemblance to quotes about tools which shape us by Winston Churchill and John M. Culkin see: https://hypothes.is/a/6Znx6MiMEeu3ljcVBsKNOw

    1. All men by nature desire to know.

      The famous, and oft-quoted first line of Aristotle's Metaphysics.

    2. METAPHYSICS

      Aristotle. Hutchins, Robert M., and Mortimer J. Adler, eds. “Metaphysics (Metaphysica).” In The Works of Aristotle, Volume I, 1st ed., 8:495–626. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

    3. Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle, Volume I. Edited by Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler. 1st ed. Vol. 8. 54 vols. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago, IL: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

      (Annotations in 1984, 27th Printing, though notes made on 1952 first edition)

    1. The bad reader is lost amonggood books. He lacks the highest pleasure available to man,according to Mrs. Woolf. If she is right, none but a fool would refuseto learn to read as well as he can.
    2. Reading is not a passive activity
    3. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelistis doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment withthe dangers and difficulties of words.

      This seems to be the duality of Millard Kaufman (and certainly other writers'?) advice that to be a good writer, one must first be well read.

      Of course, perhaps the two really are meant to be a hand in a glove and the reader should actively write as they read thereby doing both practices at once.

    1. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/1511212389452724/

      60 drawer wooden card catalog in a very long 12x5 configuration offered for sale at $800 on Facebook marketplace in September 2023. Sold in the fall for unknown price, though likely close to 800.

      Cost per drawer: $13.33

    1. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/7016702761714807/

      2023-09 36 drawer wooden card catalog (no manufacturer; looks custom) offered for $850 and sold sometime in the fall 2023. Rough, but rustic shape. Possibly a modular unit of two 6x3 sections with a custom top attached.

      Cost per drawer: $23.60

    1. https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/2356693964529700/

      2024-01 Offering three Cole Steel card filing cabinets for $165 each. Industrial beige 20 gauge steel in good condition with locks.

      Size: 52 h x 19 w x 29 d

      10 sections of 2 drawers for 20 actual drawers.

      Based on communication with the seller their internal space is 4" high by 7.5" so they were likely designed for punch cards (7 3/8 by 3 1/4").

      Cost per drawer: $8.25.

    1. To what extent in this process is the client reconfiguring and refocusing on their relationship with those around them? Does the past have absolute process (in the Zulu incarnation)? It obviously may not in the Western practice, but perhaps the client may more easily come to terms with those around them as a result, and this is more beneficial than a "truer" outcome?

    2. A healing resolution for the issue generally is supposedly achieved after repositioning the representatives and adding key members of the system who have been forgotten or written out of the family history. When every representative feels right in his or her place and the other representatives agree, the facilitator may suggest one or two sentences to be spoken aloud. If the representatives do not feel at peace with their new position or sentences, they can move again or try a different sentence. This is claimed, in an abstract way, to represent a possible resolution of the issues faced by the seeker. Sometimes the process concludes without a full resolution being achieved.

      The focus of family constellations seems to be placing people with respect to not only their surroundings, but their family, ancestors, and those who create the web of the world around them.

    3. The connection with ancestors is a central feature of the Constellation process.

      Relationship of stars to stories and people to each other (ancestors).

      As above, so below...

      Reflection of the skys to the earth and to its peoples

    4. The traditional Zulu people lived and acted in a religious world in which the central focal point was the ancestors.
    1. Hellinger told how one of the trainers asked the group, "What is more important to you, your ideals or people? Which would you sacrifice for the other?"

      direct attribution?<br /> likely in <br /> Hellinger, B., Weber, G., & Beaumont, H. (1998). Love's hidden symmetry: What makes love work in relationships. Phoenix, AZ: Zeig, Tucker & Theisen. p. 328

    1. Okay folks. I think I better name my antinet before he gets too big and people start getting suspicious. After some thinking and googling words I don't know in order to make an acronym I think I've decided on "J.A.K.O.B". Which stands for "just a knowledgeable omnilegent box". Omnilegent apparently means reading or having read everything. The name is of course inspired by J.A.R.V.I.S (just a very intelligent system) the artificial intelligence created by Tony Stark.

      u/tylermangelson named his zettelkasten J.A.K.O.B.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/1aecx27/naming_my_baby_antinet/

  2. Jan 2024
    1. With your Kokuyo Binder- do you know of a way to bind relatively large numbers of pages together? I want to use something like this as my commonplace book and archive as I go, but once I get enough archived on a given subject, I'd like to bind it as a sort of compendium. Does that seem possible with these or are they not good for larger numbers of pages?

      reply to u/modspyder at https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/18fbwqx/comment/ko8bksm/

      The small plastic binder I use comfortably holds 50 pages, but has room for maybe 25 more (though not 50). You could use several of them for binding together groups of pages like that. Searching around might reveal larger ring binders here if you want larger books.

      For larger quantities:

      You can use book rings (sold in various sizes) or even binder clips to hold these sheets together in batches, but with the ability to remove them or add sheets later.

      File folders might be a useful option too for holding things together in categories.

      With some inexpensive book binder's glue and cardboard you could bind together much larger numbers of sheets into custom books for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nivNPCoAHcM is a good basic primer, but you could also do more complicated bindings and covers or have pages bound at FedEx/Kinkos or other higher end professional binders depending on your need and ultimate budget. For this the sky may be the limit, though anything over 1000 pages may be getting awfully bulky.