Found in a quoted section of a New Jersey child abuse case in a recent post on The Volokh Conspiracy. The post uses the case to raise questions of balancing religious freedom and parental rights in legal cases.… Read the rest
Found in Chambers Thesaurus as related to glibness while looking for words to describe P J O’Rourke’s writing tone. Flibbertigibbet has led to a cascade of discoveries in the dictionary today.
Also persifleur, one who engages in persiflage.… Read the rest
Kudos to P J O’Rourke. I can’t recall the last time I had to look up a word I found in a newspaper because the word was new to me. I’ve looked up words from a newspaper because I wanted a better understanding of some aspect of usage or nuance of definition. More often I’ve headed to the dictionary because the journalist misused or misspelled a word.
But flibbertigibbet? A word so delightful-sounding and whimsical that I was skeptical … Read the rest
I wrote this down a while back but I’m pretty sure that I found it in de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
This takes the prize for most loaded phrase. Many phrases are used almost exclusvely in the ironic sense, but few have made it into the dictionary (Chambers’ and Oxford American were the ones I checked) with so specifically a negative connotation when the literal meaning is at worst neutral and at best virtuous. The Constitution has the full … Read the rest
Sleep-inducing.
My goal this year is to have a post to Monochromatic Outlook every day, which might sound good but you also might end up with a bunch of vocab items. I have a backlog of words that I’ve had to look up but which have not yet made it to the database. I’ll try not to rely too heavily on these as daily filler, but I’m making no guarantees.
About soporific, I’m embarrassed to say I wrote down … Read the rest
Found in deToqueville’s Democracy in America. The word obviously comes from the name of the Roman god of sexual love, but in usage it does not apply so much to healthy desires. Instead it is associated with a dissatisfaction with what one already has and a need for possession.… Read the rest
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.… Read the rest
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 beautyperhaps the very idea of beautythat 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 … Read the rest