Today’s WORD suggested by Reader J. Thanks!
from “Teen-age Gangs Speak Strange Tongue; Here’s a Glossary of Common Expressions”
—found in The New York Times (March 24, 1958)
—full article
amanuensis /ə-MAN-yoo-EN-sis/ /əˌmænjʊˈɛnsɪs/. noun. A literary assistant or factotum. A typist or stenographer. From Latin āmanuensis; from the phrase servus ā manū (slave at hand, aka handwriting); from ā (from) + manū (hand).
“I became Olivia Manning’s flunkey, her amanuensis, her temp worker, in effect saying to her, for however long it took to thread her words on the page, Where you go, I follow.” (Nicholson Baker)
“Think of him as the amanuensis of all those whose tales we’ve yet to tell him, the histories of those woman who would otherwise go down nameless and forgotten…” (Angela Carter)
“How could Lord Morton have known that Sir Bradley, his faithful amanuensis and chief engineer, was a merman in disguise, an ally to the sea creatures bent on the destruction of all mankind?” (Ben H. Winters & Jane Austen)
“Softer foods from agricultural lifestyles may have changed the human bite, making it easier to form certain sounds.” → Did Dietary Changes Bring Us ‘F’ Words? Study Tackles Complexities of Language’s Origins
“Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression.”
Julie Phillips on The dangerous shifting cultural narratives around suicide
The “Mandela Effect” is a collective misremembering, named after the phenomenon of people around the world falsely remembering, in often vivid detail, Nelson Mandela’s death in the 1980s, though he was alive at the time. Other common examples of this kind of group false memory, both of which I’ve been victim of, include the name of the “Berenstein” Bears and Sinbad’s non-existent genie movie. Thanks to the web and social media, examples of the effect are easier and easier to discover. My latest: the “flesh” colored crayons of my childhood which, thanks to this exhaustive history of Crayola Crayon colors, I am highly unlikely to have experienced for myself since the name was changed many years before I was born. Indian Red? Not so much…those were around until 1999.
I’ve tried listening Joe Rogan’s show. I just don’t get it. But…can his weird influence be ignored? → “So how did Rogan—the Fear Factor guy!—become the Larry King of the Intellectual Dark Web?”
Not into college basketball’s March Madness? How about a bracket of 100 new(ish) English words duking it out for domination? That’s what Daniel Donoghue does in his “History and Structure of the English Language” course. ※ See the live bracket (I’m betting on snerfle or salty).
“The World Wide Fund for Nature funds vicious paramilitary forces to fight poaching.”
For yr eyeholes: Alia Bright’s paper sculpture typography pieces & Bian Xiaodong’s anti-gravity ceramics & Winners of the 2018 Skypixel Aerial Photo and Video Contest & Pippa Dyrlaga’s exquisite paper cuttings ※ Related: Munch’s iconic work “The Scream” might not be screaming.
Today in 1853, the first issue of The Provincial Freeman is published in Windsor, Ontario. Co-edited by Mary Ann Shadd Cary (the first black woman publisher in North America and one of the first black lawyers in the U.S.) and the Reverend Samuel Ringgold Ward, the fiery, anti-slavery paper (its masthead declared it to be “Devoted to anti-slavery, temperance and general literature”) documented the activities of African-Canadians, many of whom were recent arrivals fleeing slavery in the States. Its run would last nearly five years. ※ Read some notices from the paper.
On day 86 of a walking trek to the South Pole, a very hungry ► Aleksander Gamme digs up his final food cache and the result is…one of the clearest moments of joy you’ll ever see on video. You don’t need the subtitles to get this one. ※ Via the very appropriately titled ► “Bliss” episode of Radiolab, where you can learn more about Gamme and the video.
Inspired by the ► Origami Magic Ball, scientists investigating “soft robotics” have created ► a mechanical gripper that can grasp and lift irregularly shaped objects up to 100x its own weight. And it does so with (slightly-creepy) style.
Reader L.: “OK, I now know the meaning of kipple, but what is moop? (Cory Doctorow’s quote?)” – Great question! MOOP is an acronym popularized by—if not originating from—Burning Man participants and stands for “Matter Out of Place”! See this story…
Reader J.: “much to love here, as usual ¶ but especially ‘Magical Thinking’ and ‘birdpunk’”
Reader B.: "So many good things: ¶ 1) I love the ant castings. Can watch those for hours. ¶ 2) Kipple: knew the PKD origin, but not the fanzine, so thank you for that. ¶ 3) Bogost’s piece on creative AI is fascinating. Gratifying, personally, as I’ve been talking about this for 4 years. ¶ 4) The Pound/Auden story is fascinating, too. Thank you. That vexed author-work relationship! ¶ Last week two of my students confessed - that is the word - their admiration for Garrison Keillor. They were very apologetic. (The earliest deplatforming I’ve heard - using the name - was in British universities during the 1960s. I’d have to research that.)
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