Wordy Blog Archive 2015-10
“silly season”
“The event received coverage in the Western press during the 2007 silly season.”
from Wikipedia Honey badger,
In the United Kingdom and in some other places, the silly season is the period lasting for a few summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media. It is known in many languages as the cucumber time. The term was coined in an 1861 Saturday Review article,[1] and was listed in the second edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1894) and remains in use at the start of the 21st century. The fifteenth edition of Brewer's expands on the second, defining the silly season as “the part of the year when Parliament and the Law Courts are not sitting (about August and September)”.
In North America the period is referred to prosaically as the slow news season, or with the phrase dog days of summer. In Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, the silly season has come to refer to the Christmas/New Year festive period (which occurs during the summer season in the Southern Hemisphere) on account of the higher than usual number of social engagements where the consumption of alcohol is typical.
from Wikipedia Silly season,
Pride and Prejudice, Novel of Manners
Pride and Prejudice is a novel of manners by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character, Elizabeth Bennet, as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of the British Regency.
The novel of manners is a realistic story that concentrates the reader's attention upon the customs and conversation, and the ways of thinking and valuing of the people of a social class.[1] As such, the narrative structure of the novel of manners recreates a social world (civil, military, political, business) and shows the spheres of public and private life sufficiently to convey the dominance of social-code mores upon the personal and public lives of the people in the story. The detailed observation of the values and customs of a social-class society, thematically dominate the story. The characters are differentiated by measures of “success” and “failure”; by the degree to which he or she meets the standard of uniform social behaviour; and by the degree to which each character fails at uniformity in language, thought, and action.[2]
etymology of calculus
etymology of calculus
1660s, from Latin calculus “reckoning, account,” originally “pebble used as a reckoning counter,” diminutive of calx (genitive calcis) “limestone” (see chalk (n.)). Modern mathematical sense is a shortening of differential calculus.
Also used from 1732 to mean kidney stones, etc., then generally for “concretion occurring accidentally in the animal body,” such as dental plaque. Related: Calculous (adj.).
[etymology of calculus https://www.etymonline.com/word/calculus]
mesmeric, jingle, jangle
vocabulary: ebullience
Mathematicians are not famed for ebullience and many prefer research – deep, solitary labour – to the challenge of communicating complex abstractions to young adults.
hilarious. Little Red Riding Hood (Politically Correct version)
here's original, 1697. “Grandmother, what big teeth you have got!” Little Red Riding Hood (original), 1697, By Charles Perrault