If I’ve said it once about the oh-so-wrong idea of “untranslateables,” I’ve said it—not as many times as Mark Liberman has in Language Log in the ‘No Word for X’ Archive.
Links: July 17, 2016
- My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard ← The clichéd description “searing expose” is fitting. Man’s inhumanity to man.
- Step Inside the World’s Most Dangerous Garden (If You Dare) ← “…within Alnwick’s boundaries, kept behind black iron gates, is a place where visitors are explicitly told not to stop and smell the flowers: the Poison Garden, home to 100 infamous killers.”
- I have found a new way to watch TV, and it changes everything ← Way, way more interesting than I expected. [Via Reader C.]
- I Tried a Medieval Diet, And I Didn’t Even Get That Drunk ← “I drank diluted wine at dinner, and sometimes at lunch; I ate bread at almost every meal; I sought out richly stewed meat whenever I could. The regimen was not just about what to eat, though, and I also followed its prescriptions for daily life.”
- Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age
- Analyzing the language of Heavy Metal with Natural Language Processing ← The least metal word? “Particularly.”
- New Evidence on Van Gogh’s Ear… ← Now with contemporary medical sketches…
- Candle Flames Contain Millions of Tiny Diamonds
- This Barista May Be the Best Coffee Artist in the World
- Today is the third International #Firgunday, in which participants share compliments and pride for others, mostly on social media. If you’re having trouble figuring out what to say, there’s a Firgunator that will help. According to the founders, “Firgun (pronounced FEER-GOON, פרגון), is a Hebrew word that means an act of kindness performed solely to make another person feel good.” Wikipedia says the word “describes genuine, unselfish delight or pride in the accomplishment of the other,” or “a generosity of spirit, an unselfish, empathetic joy.” I want every day to be #Firgunday.
Idem Paris
Exit Mundi: A Collection of End-of-World Scenarios
tittle
tittle /TI-təl/. noun and verb. A point or mark used as a diacritical. For example the dot atop the lowercase ‘i’. In early horn-books, a series of dots (⋰) indicating an omission. More generally, the smallest part. Also to whisper or gossip (see tittle-tattle). From Latin titulus (title, or in the medieval sense a stroke or accent).
from Essays and Aphorisms (Arthur Schopenhauer)
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
—Arthur Schopenhauer
—from Essays and Aphorisms (translated by R. J. Hollingdale)
from Samuel Butler’s Note-Books
That our ideas are baseless, or rotten at the roots, is what few who study them will deny; but they are rotten in the same way as property is robbery, and property is robbery in the same way as our ideas are rotten at the roots, that is to say it is a robbery and it is not. No title to property, no idea and no living form (which is the embodiment of idea) is indefeasible if search be made far enough. Granted that our thoughts are baseless, yet they are so in the same way as the earth itself is both baseless and most firmly based, or again most stable and yet most in motion…
—Samuel Butler
—from Note-Books
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