carillon

and three more really cool words

Nov 19, 2022

this week’s Thought (singular)

instant mood improvers include petting kitties, talking to friends, and eating a good meal

this is the second edition of Vocabulary Builder with me, jahnavi. find the first one here. thanks for tuning in!

carillon (noun) - a set of bells played using a keyboard or by an automatic mechanism similar to a piano roll
Source: Wikimedia Commons
ovoid (adjective) - (three-dimensional) more or less egg-shaped
‘Try as she might, the cat couldn’t tip over the ovoid toy.’
orrery (noun) - a clockwork model of the solar system
‘As an astronomer, some of the tools he keeps in his observatory are sextants, telescopes, and a large orrery.’
sophist (noun) - a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece; associated with moral skepticism and specious reasoning, is thought to have clever but false arguments
‘If you ever read any of my 10-marker answers, you would think that I was a sophist by the way I used 180-200 words desperately trying to justify what I knew was wrong.’

if you’re having any conversations that would deem the use of any of these words appropriate and relevant, i would dearly love to sit in on them. as always, good luck with recollection at crunch time.

brown tabby cat with mouth open — Photo by Marco Biondi on Unsplash

English Recitation Competition

Hollywood Elegies, Bertolt Brecht (translated from the German by Adam Kirsch)
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It’s Hell, it’s Heaven: the amount you earn
Determines if you play the harp or burn.
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Small Kindnesses, Damusha Laméris

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What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

Fall, Ed Ochester (in its entirety)
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Crows, crows, crows, crows
then the slow flapaway over the hill
and the dead oak is naked
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A Poll!

Middle School Book Review

your regularly scheduled book recommendation has been temporarily halted! watch this space over the coming weeks so you don’t miss the next one!

find all shared books here.

A Picture!

*i only recently found out that you could change the arrow icon on google maps, and have made full, delightful use of that discovery since. look at my snazzy green pickup truck*

The Good Side of the Internet

Fantasy Re-Armed (YouTube playlist)
What are the best and most practical REAL medieval weapons each of the classic fantasy races would use based on their physical characteristics?
129 Ways to Get a Husband (list)
Launched in 1873, McCall’s was a magazine read avidly by millions of women across the United States each month. In its January 1958 issue, sitting innocently alongside a piece by John F. Kennedy and an article on the danger of sex manuals, could be found the following list of advice—advice which, somewhat predictably, has aged badly but must be read from start to finish.
Failure to launch
Launch House promised young tech founders community. A Vox investigation found what happens when clout and cash are paramount, and protecting members falls by the wayside.
Etched Into The Sticky Pages of Playboy, We Find Our Sexual Politic
From 1968 to 1972, Playboy introduced wealthy young men to a new political ideology: libertarianism. Ideas once found in the pages of Adam Smith now find their way into our sex lives and beyond.
For many young people, particularly young women, finding your identity is not a wholly personal journey, but also a political one. We want to feel empowered, we want to feel liberated, we want to feel in charge of our lives and ourselves. But what does any of that actually mean? In Contending With The Buzzfeed Bildungsroman, I wrote about how popular language surrounding “sexual liberation” for young women now still priorities casual sex as the mode of rebelling against patriarchy—something that seems to help men an awful lot more than the supposed subjects of empowerment. But where did this “do whatever you want, it’s all about you, and sleeping around is what will make you a liberated woman” rhetoric come from?
The big backlash
In 2022, it can sometimes feel as though we’re enmeshed in a raging, unrelenting, unforgiving reversal of, well, everything progressive. So how do we push back the pushback?