In a 2013 lecture, the social psychologist and soi-­disant centrist Jonathan Haidt railed against the tendency of “both sides” to deny “inconvenient truths.”

Reasoning along similar lines, the historian Carl N. Degler asserted in 1991 that the struggle against Nazism had at last left social Darwinism “definitely killed, not merely scotched.”

The word “Saroyanesque” became an adjective for any story that captured the enthusiasm and optimism of the human spirit.

eirenic

(The poet Willie Perdomo, by the way, is the John Coltrane of acknowledgments. “Acknowledgement” as mycelial love note.)

Caesar finding it after his loose-belted youth (effeminatus erat)

For Sacks, wrestling with the meaning of experience — his own, his patients’ — continued until the very end. One folder, with the jaunty title “Some Deaths I’ve Liked,” contains the wry and humorous last words of scientists and others, starting with his brother Michael, whose lifelong struggle with schizophrenia greatly affected Sacks. In his telling, Michael sat up abruptly in his hospital gurney and announced, “I’m going outside to smoke a cigarette,” before immediately falling dead.

144. See Chris Aldrich’s writings for a comprehensive history of zettelkasten use over the yearsand around the world. https://boosocko.com/

He himself assesses the cost of his transgressions when he realizes, with a shock, that amid the “musical vibration” that lifts from a valley below him, her voice is plangently missing from the melody of children at play.

Headlines wrote her off as a “naughty” girl or “an experienced hoyden.”

The best way to judge a community is to actually judge them.

The book is excel-lently arranged and printed ; it is provided with a full index, and is-bound in a limp cover, which renders it easily handled by a busyman.

“white male homogeneity”

Circularising

surrounded by leafy rubbertrees and frangipanis

another word which he invented but whichwas never picked up by anyone else: crinanthropy, judgement or criticism ofother people.

Several of the books he wrotewere read for the Dictionary resulting in him being quoted eighteen times forlinguistic prosody terms such as acatalectic, not short of a syllable in the lastfoot; disyllabize, to make disyllabic; hypercatalectic, having an extra syllableafter the last complete dipody; and pyrrhic, a metrical foot consisting of twoshort syllables.

wrote a scholarly article on the derivation of the word akimbo

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.)

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.’

to scrinch, tosqueeze one’s body into a crouched or huddled position.

gloryhole, a drawer in whichthings are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness;

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’.

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.

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

Take Alter's treatment of the cycle of stories in which the first two matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, conspire against elder sons for the benefit of younger ones. Sarah insists that Abraham drive Ishmael, his firstborn, and Ishmael's mother, Hagar, into the desert to die, to protect the inheritance of Sarah's son, Isaac. Rebekah tells her son Jacob to trick his father, the now elderly Isaac, into giving him a blessing rightfully owed to Esau, Jacob's ever-so-slightly older twin brother. The matriarchs' behavior is indefensible, yet God defends it. He instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says, and after Jacob takes flight from an enraged Esau God comes to Jacob in a dream, blesses him, and tells him that he, too, like Abraham and Isaac before him, will father a great nation.Alter doesn't try to explain away the paradox of a moral God sanctioning immoral acts. Instead he lets the Bible convey the seriousness of the problem. When Abraham balks at abandoning Ishmael and Hagar, God commands, "Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice." Rebekah, while instructing Jacob on how to dress like Esau so as to steal his blessing, echoes God's phrase -- listen to my voice" -- not once but twice in an effort to reassure him. As we read on in Alter's translation, we realize that the word "voice" ("kol" in Hebrew) is one of his "key words," that if we could only manage to keep track of all the ways it is used it would unlock new worlds of meaning. In the story of Hagar and Ishmael, God's messenger will tell Hagar that God will save them because he has heard the voice of the crying boy. And the all but blind Isaac will recognize the sound of Jacob's voice, so that although his younger son stands before him with his arms covered in goatskin (to make them as hairy as Esau's), and has even put on his brother's clothes (to smell more like a hunter), Isaac nearly grasps the deceit being perpetrated against him.

Alter's translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of "key words," a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. Key words, as Alter has explained elsewhere, clue the reader in to what's at stake in a particular story, serving either as "the chief means of thematic exposition" within episodes or as connective tissue between them.

Propaedeutic: serving as a preliminary instruction or as an introduction to further study.

concupiscence

hortatory

Any difference in political philosophy between George Washington the co lonial planter and Washington the President was exiguous.

In 1807, he started writing a dictionary, which he called, boldly, An American Dictionary of the English Language. He wanted it to be comprehensive, authoritative. Think of that: a man sits down, aiming to capture his language whole.

John McPhee — one the great American writers of nonfiction, almost peerless as a prose stylist — once wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called “Draft #4.” He explains that for him, draft #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that’s left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

The lib-eral artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, andthink.

"in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

"in his youth he was full of vim and vigor"

Retrenchment is a term that describes the situation when tenure-track or tenured faculty are let go because their positions have been eliminated.

Had Russell gone to Crimea with an avowed aversion to battle and aprofound sense that the whole fight was morally wrong and shouldbe brought to an immediate halt, one might fault him and declare himto be a Victorian example of modern advocacy journalism

He left in high dudgeon for Europe and a succession of what heconsidered more nobly fought continental battles, mainly involvingthe Prussians.

Dostoyevsky’s detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy, prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his “gothic rodomontade.”

One day, when Richard was reading “Karamazov” (in a translation by one of Garnett’s epigones, David Magarshak), Larissa, who had read the book many times in the original, began peeking over her husband’s shoulder to read along with him.

What were the lineaments offormality or informality?

a common technique in natural language processing is to operationalize certain semantic concepts (e.g., "synonym") in terms of syntactic structure (two words that tend to occur nearby in a sentence are more likely to be synonyms, etc). This is what word2vec does.

“Broadly speaking, the shortwords are the best, and the old wordswhen short are best of all,” attestedformer British Prime Minister WinstonChurchill,

“Usethe smallest word that does the job,”advised essayist and journalist E. B.White.20

“[T]here is always a short word for it,”Rogers said. “‘I love words but I don’tlike strange ones. You don’t under-stand them, and they don’t understandyou. Old words is like old friends– you know ‘em the minute you see‘em.”17

Justice Felix Frankfurter,a prolific writer as a Harvard lawprofessor before joining the SupremeCourt, was right that “[a]nything thatis written may present a problem ofmeaning” because words “seldomattain[] more than approximate preci-sion.”12

Guy de Maupassant, was no lawyer,but his advice can help guide lawyerswho seek precision in their writing.“Whatever you want to say,” he assert-ed, “there is only one word to expressit, only one verb to give it movement,only one adjective to qualify it. Youmust search for that word, that verb,that adjective, and never be contentwith an approximation, never resortto tricks, even clever ones, and neverhave recourse to verbal sleight-of-hand to avoid a difficulty.”11

Writing4ever_3

Dagger anatomy, for the quiz: the quillon is the guard that separates the hilt of a knife from its blade, and the choil is the notch where the blade meets the quillon.

Intermediate Packets

censitary

: low land that is covered wholly or partly with water unless artificially drained and that usually has peaty alkaline soil and characteristic flora (as of sedges and reeds)

gesture isimpressionistic and holistic, conveying an immediate sense of how things lookand feel and move.

Circle words you’re not familiar with, look them up, and write their definitions in the margins beside them. Consider creating on a blank page in the book’s front or back matter a running glossary complete with the page numbers where the new words can be found in context.

We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

A lagniappe (/ˈlænjæp/ LAN-yap, /lænˈjæp/ lan-YAP) is "a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase" (such as a 13th doughnut on purchase of a dozen), or more broadly, "something given or obtained gratuitously or by way of good measure."[2] It can be used more generally as meaning any extra or unexpected benefit.

Omake (御負け, usually written おまけ) means extra in Japanese.

20 years in, blogging is still a curious mix of both technical, literary and graphic bodgery, with each day's work demanding the kind of technical minutuae we were told would disappear with WYSIWYG desktop publishing.

The phrase “gardyloo” was shouted in medieval times to warn those below that toilet waste was about to be thrown out of the window. I learned the phrase at school, and have periodically told others of it since. I had always assumed it was used UK-wide, but apparently it was only used in Scotland. I wonder what they said in England. Or maybe they didn’t say anything on warn those below before throwing their toilet waste out of the window. (And yes, the English also threw toilet waste out I the window in medieval times.) While I’m here, I learned a few weeks back that “squint” in England only means to narrow one’s eyes, whereas in Scotland it can also mean wonky or askew, so all the times in England I’ve said something like “the picture’s a bit squint”, the English won’t have understood what I meant.

In ancient Greek, noēma means “thinking” or the “object of thought.” And that is our intention: to delve deeply into the critical issues transforming the world today, at length and with historical context, in order to illuminate new pathways of thought in a way not possible through the immediacy of daily media.

Geertz 2001. Academics are very prone to a phenomenoncalled ‘schismogenesis’, which we will be exploring at variouspoints in this book.

“Liberal” just means free and disinterested. It means that inquiry is pursued without fear or favor, regardless of the outcome and whatever the field of study.

Catachresis in rhetoric is a failed transfer, a juxtaposition of incon-gruous elements.

On the other hand, paremiologists seldom specify "definitions"-much less ori- gins-of proverbial expressions that they collect, for the simple reason that so little can be known with certainty.

I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers.

Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate.

We refuse to overload it, to cumber the mind; we prefer liberty of soul to a wealth of unusable ideas.

The figures are relatively flattened, and in the case of the Virgin Mary and Gabriel, placed against a diapered ground (a traditional, flat patterned background).

One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of read­ing, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different-appropriate-speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed.

Doxography (Greek: δόξα – "an opinion", "a point of view" + γράφειν – "to write", "to describe") is a term used especially for the works of classical historians, describing the points of view of past philosophers and scientists. The term was coined by the German classical scholar Hermann Alexander Diels.

Perhaps a better way of understanding what Anaximander has to say is to study carefully the doxography, which goes back to people like Aristotle and Theophrastus, who probably have had Anaximander’s book before their eyes, and who tried to reformulate what they thought were its central claims.

Therefore, we offer a translation, in which some poetic features of the original, such as chiasmus and alliteration have been imitated:

The important thing is, however, that he did not just utter apodictic statements, but also tried to give arguments. This is what makes him the first philosopher.

Though my relationship to time fluctuates, the gravamen of my disclosures remains constant.

Hesse described each imagined Life as an “entelechy,” that is, the realization of a potential—but perhaps that assumes something like the pre-existence of souls, an Identity that somehow exists before it is embodied in, realized in, a particular culture, a particular gender, a particular ethnicity.

23-24) Latin epulis does not = “grand salons,” and Lucretius’ language is not recherché enough to warrant “gewgaws” and “garnitures.”

And even long-term, canonical sources such as books and scholarly journals are in fugacious configurations—usually to support digital subscription models that require scarcity—that preclude ready long-term linking, even as their physical counterparts evaporate.

Either you have a spare computer on hand or spin up a VPS and have the technical nous to run a Gemini server on it, or you find somebody running a site like Flounder, or a tilde, and ask them very nicely if they’ll give you some space to upload to.

Von der Bücherordnung zur Buchführung

The relationship between Phillips — one of whose most famous works is A Humument, an ongoing-for-decades collage/manipulation/adaptation of a Victorian book — and Eno is a fascinating one in the history of aleatory or, as I prefer, emergent art.

I basically destroyed my favorite books with the pure logorrheic force of my excitement, spraying them so densely with scribbled insight that the markings almost ceased to have meaning.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed.

You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their as-signment but seem to present an op-. A portunity.

Apophenia is the name for that tendency in humans to see patterns where none exist, to draw connections, to make links.

Like a plowjockey with a dybbuk in him, he can'tbe certain whether he's a genius or anut, a funny man or a fool.

Yet, a fewweeks later, safe at home on the JackPaar show. Winters was his old self:prancing out in a satyr wig, he turnedon the audience subliminally with aninsanely fruity tribute to "thrping";

Originally, one of these marks (or a plain line) was used in ancient manuscripts to mark passages that were suspected of being corrupted or spurious; the practice of adding such marginal notes became known as obelism. The dagger symbol †, also called an obelisk, is derived from the obelus, and continues to be used for this purpose.

recension

revanchist

There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.

A book where you can enter “sport” and end up with “a diversion of the field” — this is in fact the opposite of what I’d known a dictionary to be. This is a book that transmutes plain words into language that’s finer and more vivid and sometimes more rare. No wonder McPhee wrote with it by his side. No wonder he looked up words he knew, versus words he didn’t, in a ratio of “at least ninety-nine to one.”

le mot juste.

There is an additional civic value here, one that goes beyond simply preserving professional journalism. For about ten years now, a few of us have been waging a sometimes lonely battle against the premise that the internet leads to political echo chambers, where like-minded partisans reinforce their beliefs by filtering out dissenting views, an argument associated with the legal scholar and now Obama administration official Cass Sunstein. This is Sunstein’s description of the phenomenon:If Republicans are talking only with Republicans, if Democrats are talking primarily with Democrats, if members of the religious right speak mostly to each other, and if radical feminists talk largely to radical feminists, there is a potential for the development of different forms of extremism, and for profound mutual misunderstandings with individuals outside the group

In German, Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") is a common term for this phenomenon, and in Spanish, deformación (literally deformation).

Mojibake means "character transformation" in Japanese. The word is composed of 文字 (moji, IPA: [mod͡ʑi]), "character" and 化け (bake, IPA: [bäke̞], pronounced "bah-keh"), "transform".

fissiparous

lumpen

I decided I wanted something that was a cross between a wiki and a blog - which Ward Cunningham immediately dubbed a bliki.

hispidities

protreptic