cupidity /kyoo-PID-ə-tee/. noun. Despite the sensual connotation of its Latin roots, cupidity now refers to non-erotic greed, covetousness, lust, or inordinate appetite for material things. From Latin cupidus (ardent desire); from cupere(desire); maybe from Proto-Indo-European root kup-(e)i- (to tremble; to desire). File under: words that might not mean what you think they mean. See also: avarice, rapaciousness and venality.
[Read more…]
Links: July 22, 2018
- The New York Times asks: Why Are Some Crows Committing Acts of Necrophilia?. A fascinating article in itself…and includes one of the best corrections ever (at the end of the article). Pairs well with podcast listening: ► HBM038: Do Crows Mourn Their Dead? and ► The Genius of Birds: Live From the Aspen Ideas Festival. Closer to (my) home and involving the greatest of corvids: Hundreds of birds seem to mourn deaths of fellow ravens.
-
BAP! BARM! COB! BLAA! → Why the UK has so many words for bread. Thanks, Reader B.!
-
The Digital Newberry collections feature more than a million “manuscripts, maps, books, photographs, artworks, & other rare & unique materials” from the famed Chicago research library. Such as my first cool find: a 1931 map of Chicago’s gangland from authentic sources.
-
Myrtis Dightman not only broke the color barrier, but became one of the best bull riders who ever lived…and then he just kept going. → The Jackie Robinson of Rodeo
-
Science says: You Should Actually Send That Thank You Note You’ve Been Meaning to Write
-
The OEDILF—pronounced /oh-DILF/—aims to create “at least one limerick for each meaning of each and every word in the English language.” Currently at about 100,000 entries but most are marvelous! → OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form || Via the highly-recommended A Way With Words podcast
-
Terrifying, sad and emblematic. → Alt-Right Troll To Father Killer: The Unraveling Of Lane Davis
-
Sichuan, spice and spies. → How the chili pepper got to China
-
This week in bots: Botnik’s Twilight Zone but creates eerily apt ideas for revivals of the iconic show. On Twitter, @venmodrugs culls public profiles on Venmo to highlight … umm … strange transactions … and @ThinkPieceBot creates hot take, think piece headlines that often sound much more interesting than the real thing.
-
Today in 1849, poet, translator and teacher Emma Lazarus is born in New York City. Lazarus would publish her first volume of poems and translations, to no small acclaim, at just 18, but her most enduring work was the sonnet “The New Colossus,” which is (for the time being?) inscribed on a plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, ending with the famous lines:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The Danish Poet
The Last Male Kauai ‘O’o
Recorded in 1987, this is ► the song of the last male Kauai ‘O’o singing for a mate. The Kauai ‘O’o was declared extinct in 1989. Listen also: an orchestral piece inspired by the song.
from The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch)
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
—Irish Murdoch
—from The Sea, The Sea
iatrogenic
iatrogenic /iy-A-tro-jen-ik/. adjective. In medicine: an illness or symptom caused by a physician’s treatment or medications. In more general use, a problem caused by the means of treating that problem but ascribed to being a natural part of it. From Greek iatro-(pertaining to medicine or physicians) + -genic (producing, caused by).
[Read more…]
Links: July 15, 2018
-
The always awesome 99% Invisible podcast put out a particularly tasty episode last week on the interrobang (‽‽‽) and the octothorpe (###) || See also, two new (to me), conversational word nerd/language podcasts I’ve been enjoying lately: Lexitecture and Words for Dinner. Speaking of podcasts, how has it taken this long for something like Wilson—a podcast magazine (sadly iOS only right now)—to become a thing?
-
“The Race Card Project encourages people to condense their observations and experiences about race into one sentence with just Six Words.” Some of them are extremely powerful.
-
Play the Font Memory Game for the 30% discount on a quality book…or just because it is addictive.
-
This week in Twitter: @WYR_Bot is a neural network that asks deliciously weird, sometimes surreal “would you rather” questions every three hours on Twitter. A few from recent days: “Would you rather eat your own hair or have a cat with a giant cake?” “Would you rather be able to run anywhere or have no pain?” “Would you rather be santa or climb uncontrollably??”
-
This Week in Wikipedia: the bizarre story of Jára Cimrman, “universal genius, and one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, composers, teachers, travellers, philosophers, inventors, detectives, mathematicians, and sportsmen of the 19th and early 20th century.” And entirely fictional.
-
This week in heists: ATMs spewing cash, jet-setting money mules, and more than a billion dollars still missing and the Con Queen of Hollywood ( Thanks, Reader B.! )
-
“Such ambiguous words not only allow the speaker to avoid being pinned down but also allow the receiver to interpret the message in a way that is consistent with their preconceived notions. Obviously, the result is poor communication.” → How to communicate likelihood and probability more effectively.
-
“There’s an ambient grandiosity to it all, like fridge poetry for Roman Emperors.” → I don’t get the appeal of Jordan Peterson. This has to be the best (and most brutal; same thing) assessment of Peterson and his “thinking” I’ve been lucky enough to read.
-
Today in 1919, novelist and philosopher (Dame Jean) Irish Murdoch is born in Dublin, Ireland. Winner of the Booker and James Tait Black Memorial prizes, the Whitbread Award, and routinely listed as a top 10, 50, 100 etc novelist, Murdoch’s fiction nevertheless remains under-read, though not as criminally under-appreciated as her philosophy. Murdoch led a rather unconventional lifestyle, marrying novelist and critic John Bayley (who declared that sex was “inescapably ridiculous”) in 1956 and remaining with him, while engaging in numerous destructive affairs with men and women, until her death from Alzheimer’s—a cruel end for such a bright mind—in 1999. To learn more about Murdoch, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum’s insightful 2001 assessment of Murdoch, the “anomalous” novelist and philosopher. Good places to start with her deeply various fictions are the Booker-prize winning The Sea, The Sea, her first novel Under the Net and the unrepentant and racy A Severed Head.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 52
- 53
- 54
- 55
- 56
- …
- 132
- Next Page »