L: Language

Check out the English Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). It is set of one billion words that is considered to be the best cross-section of usage in the English language. It has 8 domains—blogs, websites, movies, speeches, fiction, magazines, newspapers, academi research—that each cover ~125 million words. Bigger corpus’s do exist—the s

• agnostic : unknowable.

• agoraphobia : fear of unfamiliar situations in public.

• agrarian : agre = acre, of the land.

• Amalthea’s horn : a myth about abundance / having everything you desire. Zeus’s nurse fed goat milk to an infant, snapped off it’s horn, and promised that Zeus will have a pampered life.

• amaranth : a fadeless flower.

• Amaurote : Thomas Moore

Two other dictionary projects: The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) by Ambrose Pierce and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary (2016) by Jason Zweig. I’m more interested in the original; all the definitions are satirical and he wrote it over decades. It has around 1,600 words in the unabridged version.

Similar to how you start using the slang of your friends without realizing, you should be careful with who you read: you’ll start subconsciously adopting their mannerisms.

The thesaurus sucks. You can always tell when a writer is using a thesaurus and random words are substituted to sound smart. The problem is the thesaurus has a bad architecture. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!). Since we don't have a hierarchy of "core words" and "s

Literally doesn’t just mean “not figuratively,” but it means “of the text.” When you say literally, what you’re actually saying is: “regardless of what is spoken or done, we should refer to what is put down in writing at the source.”

A lexigraph of “uproar” (46 entries):

uproar (n.) : an event that disturbs a pre-existing order; ranging from trivial misunderstandings to devastating violence; accompanied by sound. 1520s, German/Dutch: “to stir up.” Middle English, roar: “…a loud, continued sound.” Typically negative, but sometimes turns to humor from de-escalations and clarifica

You’re supposed to use quotes around the title of an essay (and italics for a book of larger work), but if you’re hyperlinking to a piece, so you still need them? Is it redundant to have quotes AND an underline AND the color blue?

WIP words: ag, agglomerate, agglutinate, aghast, agog, agronomy, -aholic, ail, ailron, aria, adjar, akimbo, ambiguity, anagesis, androcentrism, animism, dissemination, egotistical sublime, empiricism, exegesis, explication, foregrounding, formulaic, impressionism, ambry, Osiris, amerindian, amoret, amphisbaena, amrita.

NOMINAL (thingness)

• noun : person, place, thing, idea (‘the dog”)

• pronoun: a signifier of an adjacent noun ( “The dog” > “it”)

• adjective : a modifier of a noun (“the happy dog”)

DYNAMIC (motion)

• verb : an action

• intransitive verb : an action that requires an object (“the dog ate the food”)

• transitive verb : a self-evident action (“the dog sleeps”)