More specifically concerning: words
26.03.02 – Tuesday
26 March 2002, around 21.24.
Now there’s a word I don’t like: spiritual. Heard in these contexts: ‘I’m not religious or anything, but I am very spiritual…’ -or- ‘yeah, you know, he’s all spiritual and shit.’ Spritual people supposedly tap into the grand essence that is, the great non-materialistic who-knows-what, all without the aid of organized religion. In general, they […]
Elenchus
16 September 2002, around 13.35.
Socrates was married, you know, and his wife, Xanthippe, was a shrew. Perhaps that’s why he liked to sit in the cobbler’s shop and talk with young aristocrats about the meaning of words. ‘The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’ How many a man has said that, in the course of […]
prescriptive
30 November 2002, around 19.13.
For words have a weight beyond their meaning, the sound of the stithy drawing measure from the iron of Elizabethan poetry, skirting the Joycean quicksilver to forge a something other than consciousness—a feeling, then, a fear. The chthonic sibilance and uneven lisp hammering out associations and leaving nothing but the need to hear.
abecedarian
21 March 2003, around 18.10.
As it sounds.
The trouble with Shakespeare
18 May 2003, around 10.59.
The spirit of contrariety indulged in the boy, leads the man into serious quarrels, into brawls, fights, and duels. I have known a most tragic duel to arise from a dispute about a passage of Shakespeare. The parties were friends when they began. One quoted the passage, the other asserted he had misquoted it. Instead […]
apropos of nothing
10 June 2003, around 8.45.
Small rain.
phrases
27 June 2003, around 13.33.
general principles • moral turpitude • progressive non-action • radical self-sufficiency • righteous indignation • pompous twit
Flibbertigibbet
2 July 2003, around 11.39.
Don’t flip.
reference
2 August 2003, around 8.06.
On the origins of regret.
diction
4 August 2003, around 8.04.
Wherefore, I beckoned to Gioffredo to take the ankles: but I myself took the hollow armpits; and terribly the head waggled between. In this manner we flung the dead slave from the balcony: but, after we had heard the splash of his fall in Tiber, we returned, expecting new events. (chapter xii) ‘Terribly the head […]
poena sine fine
6 August 2003, around 8.05.
After reading Donna Wilson’s Ransom, Revenge, and Heroic Identity in the ‘Iliad’ (based on the dissertation she prepared for the University of Texas, Austin) the largest question I have for the author concerns her relationship with her father. Her discussion of the character of reparation in the Iliad emphasizes the role of the father in […]
I feel sick
11 November 2003, around 8.50.
Nauseous.
the very marrow
15 January 2004, around 15.52.
I’ve reached a point where the OED is of no use, for it cannot tell me why some people call them zucchini and other people call them courgettes, nor can it tell me on earth they were not more popular before the mid-twentieth century. The most it can say is that the young fruit of […]
miaros
25 February 2004, around 16.07.
fragment of a dialogue Is there a reason you haven’t bathed in almost a week? Is there a reason you consider my personal hygiene to be of general interest? Answer the question. Yes. There is a reason. Would you care to elaborate? When have I ever cared to elaborate? Let me rephrase: please share your […]
pseudaphoristica (8)
4 March 2004, around 15.05.
vartue.
Citation (18)
8 March 2004, around 8.12.
adventurous students always read classics.
exquisite
19 April 2004, around 22.33.
meme (ex machina):1 Intrigue me?2 The impression is that the lay-out of the whole area resembled that of the Seraglio in Constantinople, with palaces, barracks, and other royal buildings set in an area of parkland.3 A house of sin you may call it, but not a house of darkness, for the candles are never out; […]
ablative abecedarian
20 April 2004, around 13.49.
Also as it sounds.
scrapes
11 May 2004, around 14.31.
‘As is’ he she we they you you you I her so pronouns begin the dance called washing whose name derives from an alchemical fact that after a small stillness there is a small stir after great stillness a great stir —Anne Carson
postponed
4 June 2004, around 14.31.
After the fact.
parrying poetics
16 June 2004, around 12.32.
At the end of March there was a puff piece about Anne Carson in the NY Times, occasioned by a staged reading of her translation of, I think, Euripides’ Hekabe.1 One short passage attracted my attention: For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. ‘Homer’s a poet,’ she said. ‘I would say […]
an interval
21 June 2004, around 14.49.
In a backward bin.
a quiver
15 September 2004, around 9.51.
Curvet.
Citation (30)
30 March 2008, around 5.30.
Robert Musil gets twisted up.
ha eli
27 August 2008, around 0.01.
Little phrases.
to have done
24 January 2009, around 1.30.
Infixes and conjugations.
aydqan mard es
22 March 2011, around 21.10.
The more languages you know, the more of a (hu)man you are.
beautiful-good-true
11 April 2011, around 16.06.
Sow seeds for flowers right now, I thought this spring, and sowed many more than usual
new vocabulary
4 October 2011, around 9.12.
The other sign in the classroom says ‘Knowledge is essential to freedom’.
wellspring
9 November 2016, around 18.41.
Meaning and mediocrity.
Small pome
5 April 2020, around 4.23.
appetite alters everything restive beneath words containing all meaning —less you have been used to your beauty
æquanimities
19 November 2021, around 14.30.
τὸ δὲ σκότος ἐκλείποντος τοῦ φωτὸς γίνεται. For darkness follows when light fails. —ps-Aristotle, De Coloribus (791a; trans. W.S. Hett) The sense of withdrawing into oneself, running to ground. A step away from easy definitions, the lineæ abscissæ of demographic plots, towards abscission – even so it shall be cut off, as someone said, and […]
Lettuce now: tend to our garden
1 April 2022, around 4.47.
A partial and incomplete consideration of Latin words for crucifers.
words of note
31 December 2022, around 4.52.
One encounters so many interesting words while reading, some of which are unfamiliar, some of which – though tantalizing – send one to the dictionary immediately, and some of which linger in the mind even if already known. I used to gather such things elsewhere in bits and pieces, but it seems amusing to collect […]
4.i.2023
4 January 2023, around 13.26.
‘…words are vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels. The words point to an experience; they are not the experience’ —Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (Chapter V, Section 1: Being Active)
facta est lux
19 January 2023, around 4.26.
The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking, even in the thinking of the individual, in so far as in thinking he participates in something transcending himself. But habit dulls our sensibilities, and prevents us from perceiving it. […]
cut to the chase
23 September 2023, around 6.34.
‘A doctryne of doctoris’ or ‘a example of maisteris’ Normally when I get an idea, I charge ahead and scribble about it, tangling words together in the hopes that I will net my quarry – that is, some sort of sense (even if it is nonsense). Usually it works (more or less), but sometimes it doesn’t. […]
paronomasia
6 February 2024, around 9.04.
Sketch for a decorative panel, by Sir James Thornhill (ca. 1700) Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a part in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one. —Guy Debord (The Society of […]
the frond
22 May 2024, around 10.33.
Words are the living carriers of feeling – only pedants and scholars dilute them with analysis or kill them with devitalising formulae. A word is the stamp of life – the richer the better. —Isaiah Berlin (‘The Magus of the North’ in Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 396)