Positive
Adj.
Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
The Devil’s Dictionary
by Ambrose Bierce
Farther vs further
Farther denotes a literal distance.
Further denotes a distance in time or degree.
The school, where he furthered his education, was farther.
Definition of deuteragonist
1: the actor taking the part of second importance in a classical Greek drama
2: a person who serves as a foil to another
Examples of deuteragonist in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
In fact, nearly every single Resident Evil entry places a woman as either a protagonist, a deuteragonist, a crafty villain, or both in some instances.
— Brittany Vincent, Wired, 7 May 2021
The three-minute video features the new deuteragonist, Spartan Locke, who’s going to be filling in for the Master Chief as the resident gun-with-a-camera-attached for parts of the game, which releases October 27.
— Jake Muncy, WIRED, 1 Sep. 2015
Academy, n. A modern school where football is taught.
From the Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
Zeitgeist
Spirit of the time or age
Zeitgeist is an invisible agent or force dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.
Zeit--time
Geist--spirit
Schizofascist
A term used by Timothy Snyder referring to fascists who call other people fascists. For instance, Vladimir Putin who calls the Ukrainians fascists as a pretext for invading their country.
Mikhail Epstein, a Russian philosopher who teaches in the United States, calls modern Russian society “schizo-fascism,” calling it “fascism disguised as a war against fascism.”
Shog, from Shakespeare's Henry V.
"Will you shog off."
It means the same as other phrases ending in off, like buzz off or clear off or......
Puritanism:
The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
--H.L. Mencken,
Apparatchik
A very loyal member of an organization (such as a company or political party) who always obeys orders.
(party apparatchiks)
'Unravel' and 'ravel' both mean the same thing: "to cause to come apart by or as if by separating the threads of."
Merriam Webster
Serendipity
1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3. An instance of making such a discovery.
The serendipity of finding a rare flower.
@coluber2001,
That word was central to the Doctor Who story The Green Death.
One of the scientists finds the mushrooms he was been working with are a cure for the bites of the mutant maggots but he is bitten before he can tell anyone.
He is delirious and keeps saying serendipity over and over again.
It is Katy Manning's last appearance as Jo Grant, and her character elopes with the aforementioned scientist at the end.
Katy Manning then went on to present an arts and crafts show called Serendipity.
@izzythepush,
Ah, The genius of the Doctor Who series. They always have a strong theme, a point they're trying to make. It's one of my favorite programs.
@coluber2001,
I was about 10 or 11 at the time, and the word stuck, the craft show probably reinforced it, but it only lasted for ten episodes before being cancelled.
Woke
A lawyer representing Ron DeSantis is forced to Define woke by a judge:
"to me it means someone who believes that there are systemic injustices in the criminal justice system and on that basis they can decline to fully enforce and uphold the law...it would be the belief that there are systemic injustices in the American society and the need to address them."
Gaslighting
The term comes from a 1938 play "Gas Light" set in Victorian England about a man who tries to convince his wife that she is going crazy when the gas lights start dimming. It turns out that he is responsible for the gas lights dimming. He murdered the widow in the flat above for her money, which he never found, so he goes there every night looking for it and turns on the gas lights, which cause the lights in his flat to dim. So the term gaslighting means to convince others to accept a lie by constant and consistent repetition, and attack anybody who questions your lie. It is a trick used by authoritarian politicians under attack and is the technique used by Donald Trump to make people doubt their own perceptions and doubt the election outcome despite all evidence.
@coluber2001,
Lipogram, a type of work that deliberately avoids certain letters. An example of this would be the novel Gadsby 1939 by Ernest Vincent Wright which contains no words spelled with an e.
pareidolia
par·ei·do·lia ˌper-ˌī-ˈdō-lē-ə -ˈdōl-yə
"The tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.
The scientific explanation for some people is pareidolia, or the human ability to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness. Think of the Rorschach inkblot test."
Or an animal in a cloud formation or the face of Jesus in a piece of burnt toast
Carbon sink
A carbon sink is anything, natural or otherwise, that accumulates and stores some carbon-containing chemical compound for an indefinite period and thereby removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Globally, the two most important carbon sinks are vegetation and the ocean. Soil is an important carbon storage medium.
