MW The consequence I shall draw from this may, at first sight, appear a mere sophism; but upon the least examination will be found solid and satisfactory. I say then, that since we may suppose, but never can conceive a…
Month: February 2021
Pantechnic
OED These having been sufficiently gazed at, and beginning to lose their attractiveness except for the flies, and, truly, the boys also (in whom I find it impossible to repress, even during school-hours, certain oral and telegraphic communications concerning the…
Old man see day; heart said come night
We ordered all the words in The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by their frequency of occurrence (the content word vector). The first eight words are: 0.207 old0.174 man0.171 see0.168 day0.165 heart0.164 said0.160 come0.157 night Find the text…
Turbid
MW It made him feel, in the turbid coil of his fears and passions, like a muddy tramp forcing his way into some pure sequestered shrine… He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her…
Stromboli
OED stromboli, n. Origin: Stromboli, the name of a 1950 Italian-American film < Stromboli , the name of a volcanic island in the Mediterranean, one of the Lipari Islands (see Strombolian adj.).The name seems to have been an attempt to…
Slipshod
MW …but there in its usual slipshod way memory failed. Author and Text I watched, too, with the fascination that things have for an observant boy, the play of his lips–they were a little oblique, and there was something “slipshod,”…
Definitions of Love, Corinthians 13
Passage N 91 in “How Many of the 100 Most Famous Passages in Literature Can You Identify?” (LITERARY HUB, February 24, 2021) is from the Bible. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast,…
Fathom
MW “When the late Captain Audley Coote was laying the cable from New Caledonia to Sandy Cape, at the north end of Fraser Island, on the South Queensland coast, he passed a submerged mountain 6000 feet in height, and found…
Habeas Corpus
MW The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli’s scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our…
Words of the Day: February 17 – February 22 2021, Sui-similar Indissoluble Toady Anodyne Cognoscente
The OED: February 17: Meta-analysis February 18: Ice master February 19: Oliver current February 20: Sari-sari store February 21: Phronesis February 22: Sui-similar When the Black Prince went to set the exiled king of Castile into his kingdom, there was…