litotes /LIY-toh-teez/. noun. A figure of speech using understatement to express an affirmative by negating its opposite. The description sounds more complicated than the simply reality in use: it is basically the opposite of hyperbole. “Warren Buffett isn’t too bad off,” is an example, as would be John Coltrane saying he “played the sax a little.” If you’ve ever used a phrase like, “he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed,” then you employed litotes. From Greek litotes (simplicity); from litos (small). See also: meiosis, which includes understatement of other kinds.
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Links: October 8, 2017
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Kazuo Ishiguro wins the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature. I only recently came around to the sense in awarding Bob Dylan the 2016 prize. I enjoy Ishiguro’s work, but it is so opposite Dylan’s in every way that I wondered at first if it was a prank.
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If you can spot the “glaring errors” in this ABA Journal editorial quiz, I applaud you. If you catch all the “venial errors,” I bow before you.
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The whole article is available free, but the bottom line: significant physical brain changes, not limited to the areas associated with “executive function,” were observed in three groups practicing, each practicing a different kind of meditation.
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A fascinating short essay making a case for the importance of bridging the “neurotypical”/”neurodivergent” communication divide.
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Flashbak has unearthed some compelling photographs of Belfast, Ireland circa 1955 || Pairs with these phenomenal photos, with equally great captions, taken of passengers by a cab driver in 1980s San Francisco.
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Hapax (logomenon) was the WORD exactly two years ago. Now, Atlas Obscura provides more grist for the mill.
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Some great long-forgotten expressions to knock your interlocutors for six. The one I plan to use first: a lazy sheep thinks its wool is heavy.
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“Hijacked minds” and a “smartphone dystopia” are the definition of click-bait phrases…but at the heart of articles like Paul Lewis’s recent Guardian article is what I believe to be not just a real concern, but an incipient tragedy.
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How is it that I’m not learning until just now that there’s a newly discovered Kurt Vonnegut story, “The Drone King,” in The Atlantic?
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Today in 1942, comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello launch their famous The Abbott and Costello Show on NBC Radio. The show (many episodes can be found in the Internet Archive) would run for nearly nine years. In 1952, the duo’s television show, also called The Abbott and Costello Show, would premier. The TV show lasted only two years, but appears in multiple “top 100” lists and was one of Jerry Seinfeld’s primary influences when creating his eponymous (and I guess some would say successful) series. Incidentally, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet radio program also on the Internet Archive debuted on the same day as Abbott and Costello’s radio show.
Adelene Koh, Bookbinder
Spend four minutes with ► Adelene Koh, a (maybe the only) hand bookbinder in Singapore. Beautiful work (and thoughts on) rebinding old books.
40 Creepiest Book Covers
Timely for the season, peruse all of LitHub’s “40 of the Creepiest Book Covers of All Time”. Can you think of more and better? Thanks, Reader B!
from “The Woman of My German Summer” (H. Palmer Hall)
I remember Petra perfectly after more than two decades, the sound of her voice whispering “ich liebe dich,” the way she looked when she dove naked into the water at Hippie Hollow, the arch of her back when she dried her hair after a swim, the way her bare feet felt next to mine, the sheer wonder of her pale hair as the dry wind blew it into my face while she napped, the slightly salty taste of her skin in the hot Texas summer sun. She will always remain as she was then and I would not know her now in her mid-fifties. As poorly versed as we were in that language that is not considered a language of love, but of war, German will always be for me an erotic language.
—H. Palmer Hall
—from “The Woman of My German Summer: A Sixties Idyll”
—found in Eclectica (Vol. 1, No. 1)
interoception
interoception /in-tair-oh-SEP-shən/. noun. The sense of conditions and stimuli within the body. Compare to exteroception (the sense of stimuli acting on the body) and proprioception (the sense of the position of the body, and parts of the body, to other bodies or parts of the body).
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Links: October 1, 2017
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“Frances Glessner Lee’s miniature murder scenes are dioramas to die for” → How a Chicago Heiress Trained Homicide Detectives With an Unusual Tool: Dollhouses
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An Edgar Degas notebook online, complete and in high-resolution.
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I continue to be fascinated by the Container project, creating “books that aren’t books.” They’ve announced their next two projects, available soon → E, UIO, A is “a series of 30 typewritten letters in envelopes with hand-inked elements and other embellishments” and Tem is a boxed set of “origami gemstones cradled in containers of plaster-fused gauze.”
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An interesting essay that makes fitting use of creative web design/presentation → Long live the group chat: a look at the beauty, ubiquity, and therapy of group chats for black and brown people.
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Got the morbs. Coffee sisters. Parrot and monkey time. Some great stuff in this Dictionary of Victorian Slang.
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Wow → Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2017 Underwater Photo Contest Winners.
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Adam Aleksic, aka theETYMOLOGYnerd (a fun site to browse) has created quite an array of etymology infographics on topics as diverse as Star Wars, the anatomy of the eye, and Harry Potter spells.
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Links to a variety of “games with a purpose,” where your playing contributes to language research and other projects. Cool. → GWAP.
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Today in 1856, Gustave Flaubert publishes the first installment of his new novel Madame Bovary. The serialization of what is now considered one of the most important and influential novels every written would continue until December 15. Shortly after, French public prosecutors charged Flaubert (and the owner and printer of La Revue de Paris) with obscenity. The prosecutor’s speech is a literary read in itself, a passionate argument full of flights such as this: “…from this first fault, this first fall, she glorified adultery, she sang the song of adultery, its poesy and its delights. This, gentlemen, to me is much more dangerous and immoral than the fall itself!” Flaubert and the others would be acquitted, driving the popularity of the novel even higher. English readers might be interested in Julian Barnes’ assessment of the problems of translating, generally, and Flaubert and Madame Bovary in particular.
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