WORK
“What you call passion is not a spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward and isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout or wave their arms. But, I assure you, they are nevertheless, burning with subdued fires.”
—Herman Hesse
—from The Glass Bead Game
WORD(S)
lapsonym /LAP-sə-nim/. noun. “A word whose meaning you forget no matter how many times you looks it up.” Here we have a fresh portmanteau with a precise origin—coined by Kathryn Schulz on March 20, 2015 at 9:34a PST—that I can’t believe waited this long to be born. From Latin lapsus (a slip or fall) + onoma (name).
“Lapsonym will be the rare word whose meaning I won’t have trouble remembering.” (David Caithness)
“I’d like to think of lapsonym as also applying to a word you forget no matter how many times you look it up. My favorite lapsonym is litotes . Again and again, I have to stop and wonder: what’s the name for the figure of speech…” (Michael Leddy)
WEB
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Between 2010 & 2013, Photographer Jimmy Nelson travelled the world to document some of the most fantastic indigenous cultures left on the planet today. → Before They Pass Away
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The Little-Known Story of the Night Witches, an All-Female Force in WWII
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No surprise that Tobias Frere-Jones’s series on typography and type design is both excellent and interesting to both casual and hardcore type nerds. → Typeface Mechanics: 002
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Today in 1937, at 8:43a, Amelia Earhart—on her second attempt to fly around-the world—transmitted “we are running on line north and south” and disappeared forever. Or maybe not. Modern analysis of radio signals supports a large body of evidence suggesting Earhart and/or her navigator Fred Noonan survived the crash and lived for some time as castaways on the atoll of Nikumaroro, once called Gardner Island.
WATCH/WITNESS
More cross-stitch tattoos by Eva Krbdk
REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES
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Reader B. tried out the rhyming keyboard: “I kept typing orange and nothing happened.” — That was, of course, the first thing I tried too…along with ‘silver’
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Reader S. thinks The Atlantic could have done better : “That reprint of Wallace’s essay is ok, but could they have not put the annotations to the side? There’s copious whitespace, and it would have made the flow of reading easier. But maybe that was intentional; skipping to side/footnotes does always cause an interruption I guess.”
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