📚 #Writers, #readers, #vocabulary nerds: opinions, please? Reading or using term "faux pas"--we all know basic definition: social blunder. But do you assume-and/or do you think others assume--the term implies that the blunder happened b/c someone knew better & "oops, forgot!" Or that the blunder happened b/c someone didn't know better in 1st place? No wrong answers here. I just have reasons for wondering how others view this. Any input appreciated! 😎
Not a very clear or helpful distinction in my opinion. A bit vague. 🤔
"A treatise is a formal written paper about a specific subject. It’s like an essay but longer. A treatise is usually about a serious subject, so you might read a treatise on democracy, but you probably won't read a treatise about chewing gum."
I've just come across the Old English compound word "hord-wynn" (hoard-joy), which refers to treasure that delights.
That's how I'm going to be thinking of my library from now on 🥰 📚 #Life#Books#Words#Etymology
https://rootlgame.net/ continues to be good fun. Just remembered it today after discovering it (on here, natch. forget who offhand, a mutual probably?) and added it to my first-thing morning tab set.
Also! You can play the entire historical run of the game, so I'm probably going to have /a/ Rootl tab open like, near permanently, until I finish the backlog 😂
My son gave me a book of (very) short stories by Nabokov for my birthday, and in the first tale, “The Wood-Sprite,” I came across a wonderful word that was new to me: tintinnabulation, meaning a ringing or tinkling sound.
It rather delighted me, so I thought I’d share it with you.
In the #scifi “Robots of Dawn” series, Lijah Bailey (from a Earth-is-one-giant-city) meets Gladia (from a tee-hee-it’s-not-the-antebellum-South-but-with-robots-not-slaves-or-is-it) planet. Smelling flowers, which are not on his world, he avers:
“These flowers smell like perfume!”
Much chuckles for the reader.
Or, today at W58/Lexington Ave across from the new DKNY ad:
“Wow that lady looks so much like Kaia Gerber!”
The lady in question is Cindy Crawford, supermodel, and mother of Kaia Gerber.
“This song is so pretty. It almost sounds like something the Beatles would have done.”
We see the word "Ruthless" used (mostly to mean merciless or cruel, like a tyrant) but we rarely see "Ruthful".
Also, it's interesting that thesauri mainly list Sympathetic and Compassionate as antonyms of Ruthless. Likewise, Ruthless is generally not listed as the main antonym of Ruthful.
Guess it's just one of those things where usage sense and frequency has drifted w time. Nothing to rue though. 😉