New to Me

Another word from Democracy in America.

Found in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. I was surprised to find such a short word I was unacquanted with, and at first I thought I might have discovered a typo in my edition. However, it didn't make sense in the context of the sentence, so I turned to the dictionary and learned a new four-letter word.

Found in William Gibson's Spook Country.

«…sense of some peripheral and prelapsarian beauty.»

It's actually quite a nice turn of phrase. There's something quite poetic about the idea that there is a kind of beauty—perhaps the very idea of beauty—that existed prior to the complexity and turmoil of modern adult life regardless of any myth of humankind's origin. 

In the chapter Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States, and its Consequences in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote «In America the authority exercised by the legislatures is supreme; nothing prevents them from accomplishing their wishes with celerity and with irresistible power, and they are supplied with new representatives every year.»

Tocqueville clearly misapprehended the nature of American government. This whole chapter ignores the systems of checks against the power of the majority and Tocqueville reveals here his prejudice. He did write with some admiration about the strengths of American government and accurately describe many of its weaknesses, but accusing American government of falling prey to the passions of mob rule is just plain off the mark, as it was in the 1830s.…Go ahead, keep reading

I wrote this down a couple days ago with a note to myself to add it to the list. I can't recall where I encountered the word though. It was probably another word from Revelation Space, but skipping back through the last dozen pages or so I haven't found it.

Prosody, or more properly Prosody IM is the name of an open source Jabber/XMPP server which was recommended to me as a replacement for the Jabber server I use. My current server isn't connecting properly to my StatusNet installation at status.smscotten.com. When I searched for information about it, I found a number of search results that were clearly not related to instant messaging software. 

Yet another word gleaned from Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space.

Rebecca mentioned it being her new favorite word in her comment about my last vocabulary entry. Darned if I knew what it meant, so I looked it up. And that's my criterion for adding words to this list: if I have to look it up, I add it. 

I guess I'd always assumed that would be heaved. I came across this in Alastair Reynolds's Revelation Space.

Yeah, «bright and shining» for a pretentious nincompoop in love with his thesaurus. In this case, Alan Dean Foster, who wrote the novelization of the movie Star Trek, where I found this word. Even worse than his use of this word where «radiant» would have worked was the context in which it was used. «Refulgent hopes». Are you kidding me? I used to like Alan Dean Foster, but now I wonder whether I liked his books because when I read them I was too young to know any better.