A machicolation (French: mâchicoulis) is a floor opening between the supporting corbels of a battlement, through which stones or other material, such as boiling water or boiling cooking oil, could be dropped on attackers at the base of a defensive wall. The word derives from the Old French word machecol, mentioned in Medieval Latin as […]

jamais vu (n)

jamais vu (noun), Fr. — “Often described as the opposite of déjà vu, jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer’s impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before. Jamais vu is sometimes associated with certain types of aphasia, […]

Maslow’s Hammer (n)

A phrase coined by Abraham Maslow in his 1966 book The Psychology of Science where he described the phenomenon: I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. or, more popularly “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a […]

pazienza (n)

noun. Italian. The capacity to endure with serenity. Which, of course, does not mean you are not internally screaming; however it is critical that you may not be outwardly screaming, or appear to be internally screaming. ety. Latin: patientia; ultimately, Greek: pathos “suffering.” Related: grazie. e.g. “I accepted the revisions from my adviser with great pazienza.”

footnote (n)

footnote (noun): 1. an ancillary piece of information printed at the bottom of a page; 2. the place where writers tell you what they really think; 3. a place writers hide easter eggs, and flaunt all the research they read that wasn’t, in the end, really necessary to the article. E.g:

kodawari (n)

kodawari (拘り) or (こだわり): obsession, fixation, hangup, determination, fastidiousness, pickiness about (trait, style, etc.) Think: Ahab, White Whales, monomania, dissertations. It’s also related to a passion for ramen (sidenote: this is where I get my ramen), which is not unrelated. Apparently ramen only became a major American culinary obsession in the mid-1990s, and took off when Momofuku opened in 2004. Before that time, […]

lucubrate (v)

From Latin lūcubrātus, perfect passive participle of lūcubrō (“work by candlelight”), from lūx (“light”). “To burn the midnight oil.” “To make a deadline.” lucubrate (third-person singular simple present lucubrates, present participle lucubrating, simple past and past participle lucubrated) (rare) To work diligently by artificial light; to study at night. 1991 December, K. Boo, “The organization woman”, in The Washington Monthly, volume 23, issue 12, page 44: Instead, as Oklahoma’s tenure committee lucubrated over Hill’s future, […] To work […]

parergon

1. A piece of work that is supplementary to or a byproduct of a larger work. 2. Something that is an accessory to a main work or subject; embellishment. 3. Work undertaken in addition to one’s principal work.” Read as: deadly distraction. Life-threatening. MENACE. Read also as: side-job, paramour, passion project, sidechick. (also might get […]

plenary (n)

related: colloquium, workshop, symposium. This is a placeholder post, I’ll return to this later.

ultracrepidarianism (n)

Ultracrepidarianism is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge. Cf. “bloviating”; Cf. “mansplaining”; Cf. “fundamentally“; Cf. “thought-try” Cf. “Marxist Glam” Cf. “prolix” Etymology (Wiki): The term ultracrepidarian was first publicly recorded in 1819 by the essayist William Hazlitt in an open letter to William Gifford, the editor of the […]

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Evander Price

a waystation of thought-tries

Dead White Men

Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan (Review)

Norman Mailer’s Lego Utopia

William Empson – 7 Types of Ambiguity

Richard Henry Dana – Two Years Before the Mast

Piet Hein’s Squircle

Methinks we are too much like oysters..

Leo Steinberg: Other Criteria

John Andrew Rice: Rector of Black Mountain College

Josef Albers as Teacher

John Erskine – "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent"

Manhatta

Lionel Trilling: Kindred Spirit