Things I learned while looking up other things, 2021.2.11
Dear friends,
I am currently obsessed with Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History, by Stephen Chrisomalis. I mean, maybe you think you don't want books full of cool words like 'mnemotechnic' and 'bijective' and offhand references to Ḥeḥ, the Egyptian personification of infinity ('the god of millions of years'), but you do, you just don't know it yet. Reckonings is my favorite kind of nonfiction book, where beautiful facts are the chocolate chips in a cookie of cogent argument, but at the end (once you've eaten the cookie) you realize that you now have a completely different idea of what it even means to be a cookie! Anyway, highly recommended!
I've also embarked on a program of what I can only call Swedish Death Reading, where the constant reminders of everyone's mortality has pushed me to re-read books so that I can donate them. So far I've re-read the entire Aubrey/Maturin series (except for the unfinished last novel). I thought that re-reading the books would push me to look up more nautical things, but I'm afraid all the lines and shrouds and bentincks and whatnot just collapse into an undifferentiated mass of "blah blah blah ship bits". And even when I do look up things (like bentincks) I'm afraid I don't come away enlightened. Let's just say I'm never going to rate as able seaman, and leave it at that.
Did you know that there are blue garnets (and that they were only discovered twenty-five years ago)? The Blue Garnet sounds like the title of the kind of mystery novel characters inside other mystery novels are always reading.
"Her lifelong hobbies included painting, quilting, baking, gardening, hiking and arson." is the kind of sentence one should aspire to have in one's obituary.
Although every day feels like doomsday, in this squarest of months, we'll have to wait until February 28 for an actual doomsday: "one of the easy-to-remember dates, called the doomsdays ... for example, the last day of February, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 all occur on the same day of the week in any year."
I guarantee that once you learn this word, you will never again see the thing without thinking of the word that you now know.
Stay safe, and consider wearing as many masks as you can fit on your face (minimum two), and thank you for reading!
Your friend,
Erin
I am currently obsessed with Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition, and History, by Stephen Chrisomalis. I mean, maybe you think you don't want books full of cool words like 'mnemotechnic' and 'bijective' and offhand references to Ḥeḥ, the Egyptian personification of infinity ('the god of millions of years'), but you do, you just don't know it yet. Reckonings is my favorite kind of nonfiction book, where beautiful facts are the chocolate chips in a cookie of cogent argument, but at the end (once you've eaten the cookie) you realize that you now have a completely different idea of what it even means to be a cookie! Anyway, highly recommended!
I've also embarked on a program of what I can only call Swedish Death Reading, where the constant reminders of everyone's mortality has pushed me to re-read books so that I can donate them. So far I've re-read the entire Aubrey/Maturin series (except for the unfinished last novel). I thought that re-reading the books would push me to look up more nautical things, but I'm afraid all the lines and shrouds and bentincks and whatnot just collapse into an undifferentiated mass of "blah blah blah ship bits". And even when I do look up things (like bentincks) I'm afraid I don't come away enlightened. Let's just say I'm never going to rate as able seaman, and leave it at that.
Did you know that there are blue garnets (and that they were only discovered twenty-five years ago)? The Blue Garnet sounds like the title of the kind of mystery novel characters inside other mystery novels are always reading.
"Her lifelong hobbies included painting, quilting, baking, gardening, hiking and arson." is the kind of sentence one should aspire to have in one's obituary.
Although every day feels like doomsday, in this squarest of months, we'll have to wait until February 28 for an actual doomsday: "one of the easy-to-remember dates, called the doomsdays ... for example, the last day of February, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 all occur on the same day of the week in any year."
I guarantee that once you learn this word, you will never again see the thing without thinking of the word that you now know.
Stay safe, and consider wearing as many masks as you can fit on your face (minimum two), and thank you for reading!
Your friend,
Erin
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