I have a question and would to hear from the Clamor: have you had the mortifying experience of belatedly, perhaps very belatedly, discovering you’ve been pronouncing a word wrong? Bonus points if it appeared you were the only one not in on the secret. What were some of those words? I suspect this is something that happens a lot to people who were strong readers as children, particularly if they grew up before the emergence of the many media opportunities we have now to hear less common and confusing words spoken.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
—George Saunders
—from Congratulations, by the way
litotes /LIY-toh-teez/. noun. A figure of speech using understatement to express an affirmative by negating its opposite. The definition is necessarily more complicated than the use: litotes 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.
A few example of litotes in use:
“For that matter, I, too,
lost someone in the war at Troy—my brother,
and no mean soldier, whom you must have known…”
(Homer, translated by Robert Fitzgerald)“In her days of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure…” (James Joyce)
“Ferris does not have what we consider to be an exemplary attendance record.” (Principal Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)
“Sir, it is not unreasonable; for when people see a man absurd in what they understand, they may conclude the same of him in what they do not understand.” (Robert Boswell)
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 in every way that I wondered at first if it was a prank.
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.
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.
A fascinating short essay making a case for the importance of bridging the “neurotypical”/“neurodivergent” communication divide.
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.
Hapax (logomenon) was the WORD exactly two years ago. Now, Atlas Obscura provides more grist for the mill.
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.
“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.
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?
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.
Spend four minutes with ► Adelene Koh, a (maybe the only) hand bookbinder in Singapore. Beautiful work (and thoughts on) rebinding old books.
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!
Reader J. on the Isle of Dogs: “I don’t see the Kurosawa influence, but the trailer looks fabulous. Now if only I can survive till March 23rd (it was hard enough holding out for Blade Runner!)”
Reader B. on the reading lists hidden inside great books: “I love the syllabi novels. ¶ I always wanted to teach a course of the books referenced in Frankenstein.” — I remembered mentions of The Sorrows of Young Werther (a favorite of mine) and Paradise Lost…but searched and found a third, Plutarch’s Lives. Are there more?
Reader D.: “Fun word fact about Madame Bovary - T.S. Eliot turned said madame’s name into an ism. He wrote: ‘I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarism, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.’”
A different Reader J.: “I just spent an hour browsing the Degas notebook and it was not time wasted. I want more!”
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