Wordy Blog Archive 2014-03
What Desires Are Politically Important? (by Bertrand Russell)
As a free man, Andy had been a rockhound, so he asks Red to get him a rock hammer, a tool he uses to shape the rocks he finds in the exercise yard into small sculptures.
Rockhounding = Amateur geology. See Rockhounding
vocabulary: Whopping, looms large
Super Computer. Whopping 16 Mega bytes of RAM.
For these reasons the PDP-10 looms large in early hacker lore.
rectification of english: whose vs who's
What does whose mean? Whose = who's = who has = who is. Depending on context. This is called, function follows form, and is part of the theology of formal language.
a word i learned from watching Hunger Games Catching Fire Buy at amazon.
spile (1) a peg or plug of wood, esp. one used as a spigot (2) a spout for conducting sap from the sugar maple.
for the ♥ ♥ ♥ occasion the Story of Cupid and Psyche
Those studying SAT, GRE, vocabularies: note that many such prep books add words from dictionary without much discretion. For example, words found in Shakespear will almost never show up in journalism. So, if you want to increase vocabulary, don't take the brute force approach of trying to memorize every word in dict, as i've done some 3 decades ago.
学习英文 SAT， GRE 的同学，注意，很多词汇书乱加字典里的字。好像莎士比亚的字，一辈子都不会在报章杂志上用到。背字一定要由浅入深。这有很多。是我学英文记下的。供参考。英语：词汇汇编与用法示例。
“Fie, fie, how franticly I square my talk”. What does that mean? See: FLATLAND: A Romance of Many Dimensions