“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.”
—Federico Fellini
[via Signal vs. Noise]
According to this, the word “irony” comes from the Greek word eir?neia, which referred to the Socratic argument technique of feigning ignorance to get your opponent to say something you can poke holes in.
American Heritage gives the etymology as
French ironie, from Old French, from Latin ?r?n?a, from Greek eir?neia, feigned ignorance, from eir?n, dissembler, probably from eirein, to say.
I like the idea of simulated ignorance, and I think it’s kind of amazing that it is linked with both the ideas of dissembling and speech.
While I’m attracted to these things, I am also not a fundamentally ironic person. I think if you try to live on feigned igorance alone, you sort of starve. Eventually, you have to try to know something.
So, we finally went to Massachusetts’ first Ikea Saturday, a couple of months after it opened, braving it even though we figured it would be a madhouse on a Saturday afternoon. I guess the light snow scared enough people off, because it really wasn’t as crowded as I expected.
We bought a bunch of Billy bookcases for the dining room, some lights for under the kitchen cabinets, some new curtains and pillows for the bedroom, and some other odds and ends. And with some creative rope work, it all fit in the Civic (to the surprise of both me and the Ikea workers out on a smoke break in the loading area). I did note for future reference, though, that if we do need to take something big home from there someday, they do have Zipcars of the large variety parked there, as well as a shuttle from the Quincy T stop.
I tried to put my finger on what I like about the place, given that I’m pretty good at curbing my enthusiasm for most stores even if I tend to like their stuff (because they are stores, and it is stuff, and it’s just not my thing). It’s really that I tend to come out with more good ideas than actual stuff, I actually think about how I can organize my space better, and I already have enough bags of unburned tea lights to know not to get tempted to buy a lot of stuff there just because it’s cheap.
Our pal Matt Shaw, man about town, hipster, quantum physicist, and all around renaissance man, was in town this weekend. While we were catching up last night, Colin pointed out that a talk Matt Shaw gave earlier this year had been mentioned on BoingBoing. If you actually want to hear his talk on quantum computing, you can follow the link and get an mp3. Fantastic Physics fun!
In my post on the word quiddity, I linked to the excellent Recycled Knowledge blog. John Cowan is either reading my blog or reading my mind, because he posted this interesting little bit of hairsplitting a few days ago.
Of the many words I love, “quiddity” as been very close to the top of the list since I discovered it. I forget the context, but I feel like it was a summer or two ago, it came up (I have no idea how or why) when I was visiting the parents. My mom was looking it up, but I tried to guess what it meant from my smidgie of Latin: I guessed “what-ness” or “thingitude”. I was close:
quid di ty (kwi(d’i(-te-) pronunciation
n., pl. -ties.
- The real nature of a thing; the essence.
- A hairsplitting distinction; a quibble.
Or even better, from WordNet,
The noun quiddity has 2 meanings:
- Meaning #1: an evasion of the point of an argument by raising irrelevant distinctions or objections
Synonym: quibble- Meaning #2: the essence that makes something the kind of thing it is and makes it different from any other
On the Latin theme, I may start writing error messages in Latin after reading this.
Find non-Starbucks cafes near you at Delocator.net [via GMSV]
It is so cool that there is a word for “thinking of a witty remark too late”!!! Well, it’s actually 2 and a half words.
Speaking of growing blog empires, Gawker media’s growing empire includes several new blogs, none of which are of much interest to me, except for the excellent Lifehacker. I find the header graphic creepy (what’s up with the weird hat? Is she supposed to be my life flight attendant or something?), and the ads irksome. But every day since I subscribed has tips that are total gems. Like a fast Wikipedia lookup tool, how to change your legal name, how to run your first 5k, how to get your preschooler to bed, etc.
My cousin Margaret read my kvetching about Netflix’s selection, and pointed me toward Green Cine, which seems worth checking out.
Duh, sort of. Thanks to the comments in this post on Accordion Guy’s blog, I’ve realized the word I was looking for last week is synchronicity. Which I knew.
But I still think what I’m getting at is a little different. Synchronicity is broader: it can be any coincidence. What I’m talking about is the sudden recurring mention or appearance of the same person, place, thing, or idea. Synchronicity, if you buy the whole Jungian schtick, is also meaningful and more or less implies some kind of intentionality in the universe. What I’m talking about can be uncanny, but not necessary meaningful. It’s a specific kind of coincidence.
Also, my idea has nothing to do with Sting.
I don’t know if other people experience this. I don’t know that there’s not already a word for this that I just don’t know about (like my discovery of “The Narcisim of Minor Differences“, which I observed, but didn’t realize was a relatively well-known concept).
But there often seem to be these uncanny things that will pop up all at once in the course of a single day. (I can hear Helmecki already start to blather about a plate of shrimp, a la Repo Man…).
Take yesterday. I got a haircut first thing in the morning before work. AM news radio was on in the barber shop (story for another time: I deeply believe in only going to old man barbershops: none of this unisex crap for me). This station carried Paul Harvey, which is about par for the course for an old man barbershop. He was talking in his ridiculous Paul Harvey voice about the most ridiculous Paul Harvey stuff, the most jaw-dropping of which was a story about a bunch of old men playing golf in Florida stepping over their friend who had a heart attack and died on the 17th hole and playing through.
Then, after a long, busy day, as I was on my way out the door, a co-worker and I were talking about fat free snacks that use olestra, which inevitably made me bring up John’s Olestra prank (how I miss the early days of the web!). Which also got me talking about Computer Stew, his daily ZDNet webcast which was funded by overt sponsor plugs, a la the early days of TV. Which made my co-worker mention how Paul Harvey’s on-air ads must do more damage than good to their sponsor.
So after not thinking of Paul Harvey, probably since the Simpsons episode which contains a fictional book-on-tape by Paul Harvey called “Mr. and Mrs. Erotic American”, I am confronted with Paul Harvey twice in one day.
Plate, shrimp, plate of shrimp.
I just stumbled on a useful idea of Freud’s called “the narcissism of minor differences”. File under “I never knew there was a word for that”. It seems like such a prevalent part of human experience & behavior that it seems obvious that there should be. Here’s a succinct definition which I lifted from here:
Why are Republicans so hateful toward Bill Clinton when he is more like them than virtually any other Democrat? He has pushed through many of their favorite policies, such as cutting welfare, promoting the North American Free Trade Agreement and proposing that portions of Social Security reserves be privatized. You would think Republicans would regard him among their favorite Democratic presidents. Instead, the opposite is true. They seem determined to kill him politically through character assassination fueled by a hatred that is hard to understand.
Sigmund Freud had a brilliant explanation for this type of animosity: the narcissism of minor differences. The psychoanalyst contended that human beings express their most virulent hatred toward those who are just slightly different from themselves. This is because slight differences pose a greater psychological threat to ones core sense of self (ergo: narcissism) than those who are extremely different from ourselves. Freud used this concept as an explanation for the most heinous forms of aggression.
I originally saw it in this Globe article about transatlantic relations.
From CNN:CDs, DVDs not so immortal