another useful word

callipygian

adjective: Having well-shaped buttocks
pronounced as: (kal-uh-PIJ-ee-uhn)
from the Greek calli- (beautiful) + pyge (buttocks).

USAGE example:

"And it hasn't been lost on modern film directors that a nice set of tights can showcase the callipygian assets of a well-formed leading man."

Heroes in Hosiery; South China Morning Post (Hong Kong); Jul 20, 2006.

Thank you Anu Garg at A.Word.A.Day!


I think I will have the opportunity to use this word. . . .

old words

Word-a-day has featured archaic words this week. For example:

sweven (SWEV-uhn) noun
Dream; vision.

[From Old English swefn (sleep, dream, vision).]

-Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)

"[The queen] went in to the Sultan and assured him that their daughter had suffered during all her wedding-night from swevens and nightmare."

The Arabian Nights (translated by Richard Francis Burton); 1885.

Sweven. What a great word!

Others were scrannel, point-device, and garboil. "Thin, or unmelodious" - "completely/perfectly" - and "confusion/turmoil", respectively.

I like words. Scrannel. Now that's a word you can sink your teeth into.

I'm going to shake you by your scrannel little neck!

Although that's rather violent as a first thought. . . . Sorry. Let me try again.

The worst thing about running a fever was having to endure the scrannel broth my grandmother was convinced was called for as its cure.

Better? Maybe not.

The first tones of the young mockingbird are apt to be a bit scrannel, but they improve rapidly.

Thank God.

OK - so maybe it's a tough-ish word to start the day with. 'Sweven' is much better!

Away with your swevens of grandeur! They are naught but garboil. The dulcet tones of the mockingbird high over the forest meadow are heaven, point-device.

I'm sure an ancient would be just as puzzled by my use of his words as I was, just seeing them for the first time. But perhaps I'll improve my use of them, with practice.

Our vocabulary has become ever more scrannel. And yet? Our thoughts ever more a garboil. . . . Point-device plain.

editing

A friend of mine once said that, in music, the silence between notes is just as important as the note.

I have learned the same to be true with words.

Not that you have to have a set amount of silence in between each note or word, but that the absence of a certain word or note can be just as important as the ones that are there.

You gotta pick and choose.

I tend to work [in words, anyway] in the 'more is merrier' mentality. Part of it is undoubtedly that I like to think out loud. The journey is the important part to me - not the conclusion, once I've gotten there. Otherwise, it's like wrapping up the whole of Cinderella with . . . .and they lived happily ever after. "Happily ever after" isn't really relevant - or even interesting - until you've gone through all the twists and turns first.

But that takes time, and words.

In the last week, however, I've come across a couple different challenges to try and summarize a bit more. One, a one-sentence journal, in which you write every day. One sentence. Whoa! That's tough. Which segment of the day do I highlight? The particularly yummy spring rolls from House of Hunan last night, my concern that the king's driving is getting more aggressive (and should I say something?), or the delight at seeing the brick details out at the house we're building, on a 70 degree day, in which I spotted a Woody Woodpecker look-alike off the back porch.

Then, there was a 'meme' (and what is that, please?): My Life in Six Words.

Six? Why not seven? Yeah. . . . six is the 'number of man', and most people seem to sum up their lives - in six words - by what they "do"; their "job"; their "title"; their "function".

Would "PhD" be more descriptive of me than the fact that I think heaven smells like alyssum? Is "lawyer" more apt than "romantic" or "ruthless"? Is "childless" as important as "mother" - or does the absence of 'mother' in an exercise like this state 'childless' as the only logical alternative? What space is there for including things like being a good friend, crying over sad books, and skipping through meadows, talking to squirrels?

My Life in Six Words.

I refuse to do that. There.

That's six words. [I would have preferred to say "So there." Oh well. You live and edit.]

verbal arsenal

I've posted about A.Word.a.Day before. Here, here, and here.

This week, Anu (the guy who writes it) put together a lovely selection of people-descriptives:

pavid
piker
pusillanimous
tremulous
ebullient

This, in an effort to reduce the high incidental use of such placeholders as "good" or "nice." (although these words don't mean 'good' or 'nice'. . . .)

Pavid and piker were new - although when I read the definition of piker - "A stingy person, a cautious gambler, or one who does things in a small way." - I recalled having heard it used in that context by British-speaking English users.

Pavid, now, is an entirely new one for me. "Timid and fearful." Pavid.

I like it!

I also like the heavy weaponry of being able to call someone a pusillanimous piker.

Then I can imagine the road to hell - or perhaps war - paved with pavid intentions. . . .

jobbernowl

To add to your verbal arsenal:


jobbernowl (JOB-uh-nowl) noun

A blockhead.

[From French jobard (stupid, gullible), from Old French jobe (stupid) + noll (top or crown of the head).]

from Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org) who will send you a word-a-day if you sign up.

"That he pays not the least regard to the requirements of convention marks him out as either a superior soul or a right down jobbernowl."

Soseki Natsume; I Am a Cat; Tuttle Publishing; 2002.

It's so close to Lewis Carrol's "jabberwocky" that I can't help but think of Alice in Wonderland when I see it, though. And I run the distinct risk of calling someone a jabberwock instead of a jobbernowl.

No worries. I'm sure they'll get the general idea.

protection. . . .

I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.

-Banksy, street artist (b. 1974)

The quote reference is from Word-A-Day, which I've written about before. Ok, referred to - anyway - before. . . .

I don't know who vets their quotes - all I can tell you is that they say that this is something Banksy said. . . . Then again, having done a bit of research on this guy (I'd never heard of him - sorry!) it appears that he keeps his identity a closely guarded secret so how could one put quotes around anything he has supposedly said?

Said as "Banksy", anyway.

As usual, I digress.

I was interested in "protection" from the political perspective, as we enter the ramped-up campaign heading to the elections this fall. Just what is the government reasonably expected to do to protect individuals, and from whom and from what.

Your assignment today: think about that.

Do I need, want, or expect "protection" from my family? My neighbor? My elected official? The nearby-living different-than-me group? Here's another "Banksy" streetscape (the one above, by the way, is called "Ratapult". . . . The one below, if you can't read the text, says: "How do we solve the crisis of youth crime? How do we get these kids to kill the right people?"

Here's another interesting observation: check out just how many products and companies advertise that they protect us - or that we need their protection. The one that particularly galls me is the life insurance company that says their insurance will "protect" me.

Protect me?!

I don't think so.

Not unless that word means a whole new thing these days.

But hey - I've met a pretty cool thinker and image maker today already through this flight of fancy. I figure it's a good day, even if that's all that happens today. . . . But it's not even 10 yet. I've got some time, Lord willing. Maybe I should go eat some "protective" cereal and put on my "protection" face cream. Then I'll go read up on how the politicos now leaving New Hampshire are planning to "protect" me if I will vote for them in November.

This is serious business. I think it calls for one more Banksy. Somebody get me outta here!

my new word

It's: excursive.

It's splendid! Here's the definition, courtesy of Wordsmith's A.Word.A.Day:

excursive (ik-SKUR-siv) adjective:
Tending to wander off; rambling.

My thoughts are excursive. Elsewhere, other definitional sources emphasized the excursional aspects of "excursive" - the going on a trip, making an excursion. And that's what I find intriguing not only in thoughts, but also in writing.

Other people - I am told - can find it merely annoying; not to the point. (Those are the same people who manage to draw up an outline before the fact, and then write to fill out the outline. I'm always surprised at where I end up. I do outlines at the end, to figure out how I got there. . . . )

By the way, you can subscribe to get a new word every day by email - NY Times called Word.A.Day "The most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace." I've been getting it for years. It's also a major source of the quotations I collect. . . .<

And the painting above, by another way, is by William Bradford, an American painter, 1823-92, who was related to the wife of a rather wealthy man I know, who apparently has several original Bradfords in his home. . . . This is not one of them, but it's one of my favorites of the ones I could find online. Their Bradford - the one I saw, anyway - was more cloud-ey; very somber and ominous. Right up my alley, in other words. I liked it well enough that I managed to remember the name long enough to do some internet research.

And there you have it! Excursive thought and writing. Voilà.

another word of advice. . .

My mother was on a cruise not too long ago while I was in the throes of final dissertation madness. [No, I didn't resent it. . . . not much. Ok, maybe a little. . . .]

Anyway, on that cruise, she happened to meet an Oxford don - as she insisted on calling him - a lovely, dapper man from Oxford, who sent me this advice about finishing my dissertation:

It's not as hard as you think.

I can't tell you the comfort I derived from those words.

I don't know this man, but I salute him. And I give fair warning: If I ever meet you, I will kiss you!

serendipity

. . . . or is it 'synchronicity'?

Ah - I haven't thought of that song in ages. Nor have I posted any music in a while!

OK - let's go see what I can find on YouTube.

Here 'tis! Police's Synchronicity (looking pretty dated these days. . . .)



But no. . . . actually the word I was looking for IS 'serendipity': the occurrence and development of events by chance, in a happy and beneficial way,

whereas 'synchronicity' is: the simultaneous occurrence of events that appear significantly related, but have no discernible causal connection.

Well now. . . . but there are elements of synchronicity as well: significantly related, but no clear causal connection. . . .

What am I talking about? How just the right things - people, thoughts, information, opportunities - seem to come out of nowhere at just the right time.

Or maybe it's just my corvid-tendency to pick up bright shiny things and take them home, where they all then live together in a way that makes a (to me) surprisingly coherent pattern. And maybe it's just the superficial shininess that has dazzled my eyes and deceived me into thinking there's a greater unity underlying the whole?

Today, one Grim posted an article about military post-traumatic stress, here, at a site called Black-Five.

It opened my eyes to a whole new field of connection that is not only "happy and beneficial", but also significantly related, albeit with no clear causal connection.

A story about a supposed "non-practicing" pedophile in California some months ago led me to an article about the impotence of law, which introduced me to a whole new world of incredibly thoughtful, intelligent, encouraging and plain old fun people associated (often by marriage) with the military. I won't bore you with the complicated connections, but I'll tell you that they're quite astonishing. I've been so enriched by their thoughts!

Just today, I learned that Adorable Device is reading a book about Alice Williams - sister to William James - for her dissertation in English lit.

William James had a sister?! William James' thought appears in my dissertation, on law, ethics, and theology - for the proposition of religious experience as the connector between an individual and values/convictions. I'm ordering the book on the sister.

And it's indirectly through Lemon Stand that I found my way (by way of a path I no longer recall. . . .) to Grim's posting on post-traumatic stress. I think this might be really important with respect to the connection between the soldier and an ethics that makes sense - namely one that is more than just a series of rules written by know-nots in the no-danger-zone.

Grim has also posted on a surfer dude's amazing physics theory of just about everything which, like the last theories to catch my attention: John Nash's equilibrium in game theory and "fuzzy logic" - by whoever is responsible for that - strikes me as "related" to how we view the world, our role in it, and what we can, should, or will do.

Here's a picture of E8 - which forms the basis for surfer dude's theory - "the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan."

Wierd, huh?

It reminds me of the yoke of a fair isle knitted sweater. . . .

Who'da thunk it! The Meaning of Life preserved in a traditional knit pattern. . . . I'm not at all surprised.

Meanwhile, Non-essential Equipment reports that some parents are boycotting Shrek 3 because it is supposedly pro-life - if you can imagine. Mustn't have that around the children!

Not to worry, though. Nee reports that she's seen the movie often enough* to repeat the "dialogue" verbatim, together with the various sounds of scatological bodily functions, and she has seen no hint of an overt "pro-life" agenda hidden therein. So there you have it: There is no cause for alarm!

*I believe the actual number of viewing times was, at the time of publication, 3654. Give or take a few. . . .

adverb - shmabverb!

I love Mark Twin:

When you catch an adjective, kill it.

(hmmm. . . . and just what is the difference between an adverb and adjective again? Here's a university primer on the matter, lest you thought it was easy.)

fourteen recap

OK. Found a photo.

Update: books returned. check. Plus the nice libarary lady let me check out the one on Judge Posner again, even though I had reached my renewal limit.

Gown shopping: check. Found gown. Purchased, along with 2 other dresses on sale for $39 each - if you can imagine!? I couldn't. . . . The king likes it. I'm trying to figure out what kind of undergear is appropriate insofar as the back is kind of bare and I don't want panty lines but. . . man! I'm not sure how to handle this. This dress doesn't seem to be compatible with underwear-wear.

College library run to get page numbers on Ricoeur article: check. Plus found two more articles & copied them.

"One more fun thing" - nada. Didn't stop for Wintergreen Altoids. My teeth won't take much more. But now I'm yawnin' and I thought I was going to finish the 'hope and meaning' section tonight. Right. Maybe if I'd gotten Wintergreens, which perk me up - but no. . . . Tonight I got treated to a treatment of how Kant differs from Hegel and how - in order properly to appreciate the "philosophy of hope" one must proceed in order from Kant's first critique (of pure reason), to his second critique (practical reason), before coming to his "Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone", because otherwise "we shold have been tempted to oppose to the Hegelian concept of absolute knowledge an empty concpet of belief or of hope." ["Hope & the Structure of Philosophical Systems" 215].

Yep. He really talks like that.

The scarey thing? I actually think I understand him now. Ricoeur likes Kant because Kant acknowledges that there are limits. Limits to what we can know about where we've come from (creation) and limits about where we're heading (eschatology - now there's a word for you! Means 'study of final things' - best as I can make it out.) Hegel has a concept that we can actually know everything - which he puts in a category he calls "absolute knowledge".

Anyway - I won't bore you with how we know what we know - but it was kind of cool to read Ricoeur talking about what he thought about Hegel and Kant. And the broad brush stroke is that Ricoeur buys Kant's 'philosophy of limits' - that we can't know everything - and so he doesn't want to get pulled into the Hegelian game that says we can, by trying to set up an empty hope chest to try and carry the weight.

And I like what he says about hope:

Hope is not a theme that comes after other themes, an idea that closes the system, but an impulse that opens the system, that breaks the closure of the system; it is a way of reopening what was unduly closed.

This comes in after we have reached our limit, and breaks a way free to see new possibilities. In religious symbolism, this is where resurrection comes in; and salvation.

Oh yeah! I can just see me advancing that as a legal argument in our local circuit court. . . .

sigh

OK. It's midnight. A coupla hours sleep and write up all this I've ingested today. . . . please God to have made sense of it for me while I sleep! (why does this have to be so complicated?!

[ok. . . . and I SAW that typo. . . . but now I can't find it. And my eyes are closing. And if you have any sympathy for me at all, you'll tell me where it is. Ah - sure - I'll find it tomorrow.] [subsequent note: nope. . . . I'm letting ALL the typos stand, just to remember how out of it I was!]

day 3 - minus 21

Ok. So I'm freaking.

This morning, I wonder whether I should have started with the higher number and counted down, rather than the lower one and counting up. Which conveys more stress, do you think?

The worst bit of it is that I don't actually have 31 days. I only have 27 days, (now 25 - oops, 24) minus however long it will take me to get the thing copied and "soft-bound", whatever that means.

OK. so - 22 days? 21? I think we'll have to do the backwards count, cause I'll never get the full picture otherwise.

One good thing: I was cleaning up some text I wrote a year or so ago, and really found it pretty easy to cut all the over-the-top bits and advocacy for a certain point of view. I've been a lawyer so long, I am just always usually picking a side and arguing for it. I'm supposed to be "objective" on this, though. . . . Anyway, it wasn't so hard to cut out all the arguments I'd peppered the text with a year ago.

Poor Magda. She's had to deal with this for years now!

After knitting 5 or 6 inches day before yesterday, yesterday I knit one row. The king was giving me a bit of a hard time about focusing on anything other than my dissertation. . . . He's probably right. But I don't have to like it!

For today, I'll try and remember to take it with me. I have a doctor's appointment. There I was, last week, trying to cancel a diagnostic test I had unwisely scheduled for later this month, and here I am this week, going not for the test, but for a doctor's visit before the test, because they're "concerned".

I'm concerned that they'll just tell me it's stress and I'll have disrupted my afternoon for them to reach this major diagnostic insight. sigh.

Coupla things: Google translate is not bad! Granted, you probably need to speak the other language somewhat in order to make complete sense of the translation (from the German, anyway, perhaps other languages are different, but we all know how amazingly ridiculous the German sentence structure is! If you want proof, all you need do is read Mark Twain's That Awful German Language which I find laugh-out-loud funny! But then I mostly speak German, too. Scroll up to the top, by the way, if you get dumped into the middle of Twain's article, which a link test kept doing to me. Sorry!)

I got to cook yesterday - for some reason the king was not insistent that I not have to take the time away from work. I like to cook, so this was a good thing. We have very little food in the house (as the king is in charge of food shopping, which he hates) so this was a challenging thing. The potatoes weren't too fuzzy, though, and there was half an onion, plenty of garlic, a bounty of herbs outside and an almost-full carton of eggs: Tortilla de pappas was in order. Spanish frittata-type thing a friend of mine who now lives in Spain turned me on to. You serve it with a garlic mayonnaise and, ideally, a green salad.

No salad. Frozen broccoli, though! That'll do. Defrost, saute in olive oil with onion. Just a bit of caramelizing and you're all done! And, of course, half a baguette from the freezer (that's the one food chore the king does like: Saturday stop at the artisanal shop for fresh french bread - best I've had outside of Paris - and cheese. And maybe a run into the wine store).

Well, the day is getting away from me already, and I can't afford it today! I have a pre-deadline deadline, insofar as if I don't get Magda the last chapter - and the intro - by Friday, she won't have time to do any revisions before I have to turn in. New term is starting and she's swamped. So these next few days are crucial.

And the housekeepers arrive today. OK. Eat your heart out: I don't have to clean house. The king had a housekeeper before he married me and I advised him - even when we left his former big house - that I really would prefer to keep the housekeeper as housekeeping is not exactly my forte. . . . and, bless him, he did. Now I clean before the housekeepers get here. The things I don't want them to clean, anyway. Like certain wine glasses, my wooden kitchen stuff and anything silver or other polishable metal. . . . So I have to do that before they get here and then hopefully get out before they get here or I'll be talking for an hour. I'm glad they like me. But when we talk for an hour, the kitchen floor is sticky after they leave. I think they figure the hour's talking is the equivalent of an hour's work. And, granted, I'm sure they don't like me that much! But they do seem to like talking to me. Best just not to be here when they get here.

One day I'm sure I will be glad I recorded this minutia. Off I go, then!

second word and more

OK - help! I've started writing and can't shut up. . . . .

Here's the first bit:

There is a tension between an ethical teleological aim - a striving towards the ‘good life' or good purpose - and its deontological aim, namely the restriction imposed by the obligation to conform one’s action to what is ‘right’: the moral sense of what one ought to do in any given circumstance. This is not a new tension; it is very old. Aristotle dealt with it. Kant dealt with it. Hegel dealt with it. Then, coming more quickly now, Marx, Kiekegaard, Nietzsche, and William James all dealt with it. More recently, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor and Paul Ricoeur have dealt - and are dealing - with it.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. Socrates and Plato, for example, are not agnostic of the issue. Neither are any number of more recent moral philosophers and theologians who address issues bounded by questions of the ‘good’ and - or - the ‘right’.

Now - is one agnostic 'of'? or 'on' on issue?

achhhhh. . . . how boring can I get?!

CONSTRUCTIVE comments welcomed. (isn't this exciting?! OK - don't answer that.)

lavender green - reprise

ok - ok - I know! I'm supposed to be writing. . . .

I have the first word, though! It's: "The". Whaddaya think? Good, huh?

In the meantime, having found so much fun stuff lately on YouTube, I went to look for a lavender blue/lavender green rendition. I found this really cool band, above. Never heard of 'em before. Maybe I can check them out after I've written my second word. . . .

Tuesday

. . . . and it's another new day, thank God.

I was pretty dejected all day yesterday, and accomplished nothing. I didn't even post wierd pictures or engage in diversionary ramblings! Actually, I pretty much shut down.

The king read the comments and told me there were 14 - or was it 16? - "goods". There's the very distinct possibility that I'm over-reacting. (do ya think?!) Anyway, today's a new day and I'm about to hit it, and finish the last chapter and send it on.

Meanwhile, this week is shaping up to be a tough one. I should be getting marked-up chapters by email each day. My tutor is of the German persuasion, so small talk and encouragement is not something she keeps on her usual palette of relationship tools. The other thing I realized yesterday is that her tense of choice appears to be something resembling the 'unreal conditional,' which I finally recognized tends to communicate "futility" to me. (which might be why I feel so bad so often right after I've talked to her. . . .) I must assume that it communicates something different to her, however, as she is continuing to work on this project and seems to expect that I will, as well.

It must be different in the German.

Anyway - still trying to figure out how to do things like put in YouTube clips - let's try this one more time. It being a Tuesday and all, how about a little Moody Blues, Tuesday Afternoon?



just the thing. . . .

fall, food & fairies - NOT Dickinson

I liked this poem I found online, presaging the upcoming fall:

When I sound the fairy call,
gather here in silent meeting,
chin to knee on the orchard wall,
cooled with dew and cherries eating.
Merry, merry, take a cherry,
mine are sounder, mine are rounder,
mine are sweeter for the eater,
when the dews fall, and you'll be fairies all.

It was attributed to Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) - the so-called 'New England Mystic.' Wrong.

When I looked to find the full citation - title - whatnot - I found it's not Emily Dickinson at all. It's Robert Graves. Yes, the same who wrote I, Claudius. He also wrote a book of poetry called Fairies and Fusiliers (1918) about his experiences in the war. WWI. The above is the last stanza to a poem entitled CHERRY-TIME.

It's amazing the difference it makes. Emily Dickinson's fairies, perched on a wall: sweet, innocent, whimsical. . . .

Or Robert Graves' phantoms of trench-fare: dark, threatening, silent. Tragic. . . . Scarey-sad.

I love Mark Twain

"The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug."

Samuel Clemens.
(attributed to Clemens, anyway: date & place of publication unknown)

too many notes

I've always loved the line in Amadeus when Emperor Joseph II of Austria says to Mozart that his opera has "too many notes."

"Too many notes?"

"Your work is ingenious. It's quality work. And there are simply
too many notes, that's all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect."

"Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?"

I am like that with words. Often. But having put them on paper, I can't bear to part with them. In one way, I guess that's better than not having put anything on paper to begin with!

On the other hand, a rambling mess of random words strung together is as sure a defense against readers as a castle moat is to intruders.

Chapter one cut yesterday - down to 16,500 words. Not 'perfect', perhaps, but not bad. Chapter two is on the block today. I am guarding against discouragement and what's-the-use mantras. I felt SO good yesterday, having finally completed chapter 1! And it's so easy to slip from elation to despair. Why is that, do you suppose?

PS - if you click on the 'question mark' link above - currently messing up the layout - you'll hear the line! I have NO idea how to make that come up as link on the words themselves - as so many others manage. . . . a little help here? [never mind - figured it out! yay!!!]