Table of Contents
Introduction
“I: I’m a very big Borges fan, and he often talks about one of the things he loves about English: the ability to choose from so many different backgrounds. He points out how different it feels to say the Holy Ghost, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, compared to the Holy Spirit.
Which is a Latin word, and the feeling that they evoke is so completely different. We have a lot of choices.
F: Yeah, we certainly do. And actually, if you think about it, to heal someone is to make them whole. You heal them, and you give them health—those are all connected words: heal and health.
We heal; he’s a healer. In Latin, he’s a curer, or in fact, a curer of souls—a cure in the church, I suppose. So you curate.
And if you want to say it in Greek, you’d say a therapist. They all mean the same, but now they can take on a different meaning.”
The underlying webs of connotations and associations that words share due to their common etymological root is a fantastic property of language. Words that share the same etymological root can drastically diverge in meaning through the addition of suffixes and prefixes: for instance, to con-sider and ‘to de-sire both derive from the Latin sideris, relating to stars, yet have evolved to express very different concepts.
Many words of very close lineage can even address wholly different aspects of reality, because of their historical application to a particular area of life. One example of this are the words ‘virtue’ and ‘virtual’. Both originate from the Latin vir meaning ‘man’, initially conveying what Romans saw as attributes for an ideal virility, such as strength, efficacy, excellence, decorum or gravitas. Yet, through centuries of philosophical developments and then the emergence of the world of computer technology in the 20th century, ‘virtual’ evolved to be applied to a domain entirely divorced from virtue and virility.
In this interview fragment, Stephen Fry zooms out to address Borges’ observation about how different words originating from distinct linguistic families can come to refer to the same thing within a single language that has absorbed them all. An example of one such language is English. When prompted by host Anya Leonard, Fry elaborates upon Borges’ appreciation for the English language by drawing attention to the distinctive etymological domains that each way of referring to the idea of ‘health’ summons.
‘To heal’ is to make whole again, to restore wholeness by eradicating foreign elements that disrupt that whole. ‘To cure’ stems from the act of taking care of something, treating and attending to it. ‘Therapy’, meanwhile, derives from the idea of assistance, of alleviating a pain. it is something similar to ‘cure’ but carrying the scientific authority that Greek roots bring – ‘curing’, in contrast, evolved differently. It developed within the context of Christianity: of the Latin Church and Christian notions of caring for the Soul and Salvation.
These nuances and avenues of thought revealed by etymological roots and linguistic origins are the cracks and interstices that linger between synonyms and paraphrases. Within these gaps lies a richness in expression and thought that transcends mere conceptual definitions.
Even if we are not conscious of it, word choice can summon these etymological webs to which they belong. These manifest as connotative nuances that words bring. But they are more than mere shades of meaning. When examined with deliberate attention and wonder, we find that they reveal different metaphors, and that if we trace the threads of their etymological webs (ie. words connected by common etymological roots), we will find many other words that are also founded upon roughly the same metaphors.
Consider the word ‘culture’: while it can branch out to to the usual synonyms or words in the same conceptual domain, such as abstract concepts like civilisation, customs or tradition, it also rests upon another underlying web of words rooted in the idea of cultivation. This is the imagery domain it inhabits. Here we are evoking processes of things growing organically. We are talking of fertilising soil, sowing seeds, reaping harvests, separating wheat from chaff, fruits growing and ripening, and the list goes on. The metaphor provides thus a mental model that operates under the laws of the domain of cultivation in order to make sense of a phenomenon: what is the fruit? Who is sowing seeds? What would ‘fertilising soil’ entail in the act of creating culture?
The imagery of education
The same variation in imagery domains occurs with the notion of education. For one, it ties to the idea of culture through the shared metaphor of cultivation. We speak of ‘cultivating’ minds, which could translate into planting the right seeds, the right knowledge, and nurturing their growth. It could also extend to maintaining the soil of the mind fertile, meaning that we foster curiosity and self-reliance in finding the right way to learn. We can continue treading down this path by exploring how far we can stretch these analogies to better understand what ‘education’ actually means.
Similarly, the very word ‘educate’ is rooted upon the idea of conducts and guidance – e.g. abduction, deduction, ducts, introductions-. They are all children of the Latin ducere, which means to lead, guide or drive. The Italian word Duce, notorious in the contemporary age through fascism, quite literally means ‘Leader’. Thus, to ex-ducate means to lead out, to drive out (it is a compound word simplified into educate, the prefix ex denoting movement away from something. An educator is a kind of conduct with a gravitational pull that draws forth the best of a student. This force enrols and directs these positive inner forces latent within the student toward the external world, toward mastery and self-knowledge.
This is my own interpretation of the metaphor of course, improvised by blending a general notion of ‘education’ and ‘learning’ with the imagery that this metaphor evokes. And this is precisely the beauty of it: we are opening our minds to a rich exploration of an idea, beyond the abstract narrowness of a dictionary or academically sanctioned theoretical definition1. We can turn it around, twist it like a kaleidoscope, or a curious artefact, in our minds. We can visualise cultivated fields, seasons, conducts, magnetic forces, and in doing so, renovate the meaning of each concept.
Ancient peoples such as Latin speakers, who moulded the bases of all Romance languages -and a large part of the vocabulary of other Latinate languages such as English-, had less abstract terms and concepts in their common intellectual repertoire to explain ideas such as education, so they would resort to analogies and metaphors closer to their more direct, embodied, physical relation with the world around them to convey the idea. This was especially true for the first stock of words that later would serve as a cultural substrate: the building blocks to construct more complex and precise concepts.
There are other words related to this conceptual domain: instruction and teaching. ‘Teaching’ is the Anglo-Saxon counterpart, related to the notion of showing. We show the learner how something is done. It is a word full of trust in the student’s self-discipline and agency. To me, it evokes the tough love of more practical, physical cultures in merciless climates like that of the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Unlike Mediterranean peoples, there was not time to sit among grapevines to meditate and debate on the nature of beauty and the intricacies of the metaphysical. In harsh climates, where shelter and sustenance had to be secured with responsibility and far-sightedness, effective participation and action was a crucial demand in order to survive. Thus, the ‘teacher’ showed the way, and then allowed the student walk it by direct application, advancing step by step through trial and error.
Lastly there is ‘instruct’. This word’s close relatives are quite evident: construction, destruction, obstruction, structure, infrastructure, even industriousness. The Latin root here is struere, which means ‘to pile up’, ‘to arrange’, ‘to build’. Hence, to instruct someone is to build solid structures within the student’s mind. We build tidy, ordered networks of knowledge, and we carve these paths (we could perhaps also call them knowledge templates?). We stack, arrange and reinforce edifices of knowledge within their minds, and we may forge connections while tending to and strengthening their mutual coherence.
Curiously, industry is, etymologically speaking, almost the same word as instruction: in-struere. They share the exact same etymological root. So, to be industrious can also imply the building of ordered structures. Yet, rather than building them into someone’s mind, they would be translated outside of the mind and into the world. These words carry connotations of dependability, durability, precision, and consistency that ‘education’ and ‘teaching’ do not necessarily possess.
A Borgesian experiment of a lexico-utopia.
Now, to come full circle, we return to writer Jorge Luis Borges: these almost conjurative powers of words can be further explored through a characteristically Borgesian thought experiment. That is, an experiment of the mind that blends dreams with rationality and extends ideas to their hypothetical limits. This approach to thinking is encapsulated in his declaration: “Me veo obligado a razonar, pero yo prefiero soñar”, which translates, with fair accuracy, to “I find myself compelled to reason, but I prefer to dream“. Thus, in a Borgesian experiment we follow the threads of rational thought, of coherence in cause and effect, and of a certain bond with our reality, but we do so while venturing into strange lands where the whimsical, thoroughly evocative, life-giving intentions of dreams and fantasy assume an unusual level of dignity.
This Borgesian world is a kind of lexico-utopia. A lexico-utopia could be defined as a conceptual or imagined place where language attains an ideal, harmonious, and perhaps perfected state.2
In this lexico-utopia, the essential ideas that drive the finest aspects of human society -of comunal life, relationships, individuality, flourishing and such- are all enriched by vast metaphorical domains baked into the language itself. Speakers are well aware and deeply understand the metaphorical notions, imagery, and laws that inhabit all words related to these ideas. And people are all educated, instructed, taught to employ them with mastery, either in communication or in their thinking. The result is that when thinking, conversing, or talking to each other, speakers operate with a level of nuance, clarity, and richness of imagery that thoroughly enhance communication. This results in generally heightened clarity, precision. evocativeness and poetic potential in thought and communication.
For the sake of brevity, I will only stop by a narrow set of entries from this lexico-utopian language: an idea close to both education and inspiration rooted in an intersectional domain where those of light, illumination and fire overlap. That is, it represents another family of education-related, underpinned by etymological roots connected to these elements of light and fire.
Light and fire
The interplay of light and fire provides an almost alchemical contraposition. Since the beginning of the so-called Age of Reason, light has been historically linked to rationality -and even before that, all the way to the god Apollo ruling over light, rationality and harmony-. The Enlightenment itself was conceived as the shedding of the light of reason to dispel the superstition that they maintained pervaded the so-called Dark Ages. Fire, conversely, is generally linked to emotion: we ignite our passions, burn with desire, boil with rage, possess fiery hearts and ardent zeal.
To speak of knowledge in terms of light and fire is to transcend the conventionally established polarity between reason and emotion. It is not about blending, synthesing, or combining them. It is rather to speak of this phenomenon as if there was a world where this polarity never became so deeply rooted in the culture.
Lexicon
Illuminating others (by shining upon them):
You reveal to others truth about themselves, so they can see their own nature in detail, in full blown colour. They see their hands manipulating things, they see what they are doing, they become conscious of it. You also make their shadow visible to them, what the shadow is obscuring, its silhouette, its size against other light sources. But it is you who does it, you are the source. Your own self dazzles them, you are the illuminator. They depend on you pointing reflectors at them until they learn to build their own light sources. Before becoming self-reliantly wise, they need to discover their own methods for illuminating the meaning of their unique qualities, their individuality, what is particularly theirs and which can be cultivated to the greatest reward.
Making others glow:
It is an unassuming, subtle kind of power: igniting in others knowledge of their intention, purpose, and undiscovered beliefs in others. You are the prime mover of this glow, but you emit no light yourself. This glow is not yet self-sustaining, like embers halfway to catching fire. But because you retreat into invisibility, this absence motivates them to seek to learn how to sustain their own glow.
The ideal is for them to witness the beauty of their radiance and that their capacity to glow. They become enamoured with their glow, intrinsically motivated to nurture this glow so that it perhaps grows brighter, or -more modestly- consistently for years to come.
A distinct quality of making others glow is that their glow will draw others in; the glowing individual illuminates others through their own inner light. Thus, it becomes essential that the one who kindles this glow transmits the ability to make that acquired wisdom patently visible to others, even if it is a glow as discreet as a wandering New Year’s lantern.
A related term is to blow embers: you know how to ignite what lies dormant. You know how to tell charcoal from embers: that which appears lifeless and spent but only requires a few puffs to reignite. And so, you yourself are rewarded by the warmth radiating from the bearer of embers: the glowing apprentice. It is the warmth of their rekindled vitality in the pursuit of knowledge, self-driven meaning, and forging paths to genuine human fulfilment.
Being like a sun:
You illuminate others with the radiance and steadfastness of the sun. Those to whom you influence their relationship with knowledge become somehow dependent upon your light. You reveal basic principles, rules of thumb to follow, so they can return to you when their journey through life becomes infertile, numb, barren of new meaning.
And your steadfast lessons are also radiant: they give warmth to knowledge and meaning. You make it come alive. And this living knowledge yearns to move, to get in contact with other knowledge, other beings that are truly alive. It seeks to reproduce itself, to nourish itself. You prompt, inspire and dispense sparks of clarity that, in fertile, receptive psyches will grow into something greater.
But your illumination follows the earlier pattern. You are not aiding them in becoming self-glowing. You only deal with individual idiosyncrasies, with the particular vicissitudes of life stories and how they were assimilated, only to the extent that your warmth inspires people to move forward into the world.
You seek to leave nothing to hide, to illuminate everything. You aim to make bright and clear the universal principles that rule the world; working out the details is someone else’s responsibility.
However, like certain things made to flaunt their attributes only in darkness, there are many entities that will invariably turn out dull and meaningless under sunlight. These are things with particular glows, only shining in the dark, like fireflies, gaslit street lamps, gems, metals and other glimmering materials. Early 20th century Japanese author Jun’ichirō Tanizaki captured this property of materials like lacquerware, gold and silver in his celebrated essay on Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows (1933):
Sometimes a superb piece of black lacquerware, decorated perhaps with flecks of silver and gold-a box or a desk or a set of shelves-will seem to me unsettlingly garish and altogether vulgar. But render pitch black the void in which they stand, and light them not with the rays of the sun or electricity but rather a single lantern or candle: suddenly those garish objects turn somber, refined, dignified.
Speaking of the virtues of darkness, this lexico-utopia includes an adjacent expression: one who illuminates like a candle.
Being like a candle, or the wisdom found in darkness:
In a world of shifting, breathing darkness, there exists an ineffable unity between things, as captured in this passage:
“The sheen of the lacquer, set out in the night, reflects the wavering candlelight, announcing the drafts that find their way from time to time into the quiet room, luring one into a state of reverie. If the lacquer is taken away, much of the spell disappears from the dream world built by that strange light of candle and lamp, that wavering light beating the pulse of the night.“
Tanizaki emphasises how candlelight allies the night wind with the dance of light and shadow. The candle’s flame itself -and thus the light around- sways and flickers to the delicate tide of the occasional draft, of people’s breaths, of air moved by every slight movement in the room. The first quality of being like candlelight is then the ability to perceive of the thrill of these subtle connections that exist between things, to be engrossed by it, and to share this awareness to others.
Another evocative description of the effects of candlelight on our perception of the world is in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953):
“Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. It was not the hysterical light of electricity but-what? But the strangely comfortable and rare and gently flattering light of the candle. One time, when he was a child, in a power-failure, his mother had found and lit a last candle and there had been a brief hour of rediscovery, of such illumination that space lost its vast dimensions and drew comfortably around them, and they, mother and son, alone, transformed, hoping that the power might not come on again too soon“
Candlelight gives darkness a breathing presence. It creates space by allowing our surroundings to recede into dusk and darkness. These darkened distances enable clearer contemplation of what surrounds us. It lencourages us to leave thoughts wisely incomplete, like a question mark patiently waiting for its answer, all the while warmed by this central light that follows us. And the central candlelight draws people’s attention to it itself. It becomes that subtle but essential force which ties the things it illuminates momentarily together. They gather in shared space, all huddled together, in their common condition of being encircled by darkness.
It allows us to observe how the flame of our meaning-making endeavours is fickle and subtle, never leaving definitions as static, contrary to what we’d like to convince ourselves of. We may believe that we understand something, but our doubts about it surprise us from time to time. Sometimes they expand and sometimes they contract, like shadows in candlelight.
And similarly highlighting the moving quality of shadows, and the communal closeness that this light produces, we find these observations from a character from the novel Hopscotch (1963) by Julio Cortázar:
“Babs is a shepherdess of shadows,” Gregorovius said, “she works in clay, concrete shadows . . . Here everything breathes, a lost contact is established again; music helps, vodka, friendship . . . Those shadows in the cornice; the room has lungs, it palpitates. ”
As said above, being like a candlelight means making things breath. We animate what was previously only known in stasis, in a vacuum. We create a comforting scene out of it, fostering the communal warmth latent in our common bond with the candlelight. Maybe, like a dramaturg, or by playing shadow-puppets, we give light and shadows a face and a story. That is, we assimilate ideas by giving them movement, dancing in the haze between light and darkness: the advancing and retreating gaps of uncertainty, and the dim but restless light of provisional certainties.
“Yes, electricity is eleatic, it has turned our shadows to stone. Now they are part of the furniture and the faces. But here, on the other hand . . . Look at that molding, how its shadow is breathing, that volute that rises and falls. In those days man lived in a soft and porous night, in a continuous dialogue. The terrors, what a luxury for the imagination . . .” 3
The night becomes porous, where our imagination, like what we project onto darkness, interweaves with what candlelight reveals to draw forth new meanings from things. The dim light seeps into the unknown, gradually dissolving into it, becoming one with it. While developing his system of philosophy, Hegel came to a similar observation about the fertile nature of potential knowledge dwelling in darkness alongside the unknown.
“His studies, he later explained, had led him along labyrinthine paths to the deep recesses of his mind, to ‘dark domains where nothing is stable and definite and certain’.“4
The early Romantics, most notably Novalis, celebrated night as a realm of heightened perception and receptivity of the sublime.
“As they followed the flickering warm lights through the dark sculpture exhibition, the contours of the cold plastercast bodies softened in the theatrical play of light and shade. Except for the torches’ moving light, the rooms were shrouded in total darkness. How different the space looked at night – empty, quiet and magical, like Novalis’s celebration of darkness but writ in three dimensions. If imagination was like a building with many different rooms, maybe this was as close as one could get to walking through one’s mind.” 5
It can be said that a dark room mirrors the theatre of imagination. It is close to how our imagination would look like if projected on a screen: a darkened background and a few objects on focused display. The darkness in which they are shrouded resembles the primordial, watery, amorphous nature of our imagination, from which meaning surfaces. Our imagination constantly shifts, momentarily taking a crystallised, definite shape, only to dissolve back into the darkness as only a question, or a mere subtle perception.
And perhaps there are moments where we can only be inspired, educated, prompted on with things that need darkness to show their glimmer.
“As I gazed at the trays and bowls standing in the shadows cast by that flickering point of flame, I discovered in the gloss of this lacquerware a depth and richness like that of a still, dark pond, a beauty I had not before seen.”6
Being like moonlight:
You guide others like the moon hanging above. You tint their vision to let them explore the other side of truths, truths only seen in the silver night, when it is silent and cold. Instead of textures and colours in full daylight bloom, you reveal outlines and dark looming masses. You draw attention to what remains concealed or overlooked in the tumult of truth by sunlight. You perceive and contemplate things with a sense of focused humility. The world appears as both simple and a majestic mystery.
It is a way of assimilating the world through this mood. In moonlight, trees are not just their textured bark and leaves, they are shapes merging to create something different. Our perceptions and ideas undergo this same transformation, becoming simplified in outline yet exhibiting a new beauty, blending to form new ideas. Under moonlight, shapes flow into one another. We perceive and interpret these darkened, smooth silhouettes through their similarities rather than by their differences. Things remain incomplete, inviting imagination to complete them, to play with their possibilities.
In describing Romanticism’s essence, Novalis, that great extoller of night, emphasises the deeper meaning that this melting of usually ignored affinities between things can generate:
“By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite”7
In this mingling of shapes, shadows, silver light and glimmer, we rediscover the mystery of things: their hidden relations, unseen details, textures, and beauties.
So, someone being like moonlight teaches others to see in these terms. You reveal the world in these terms, and you guide others to do the same, when the world seems too inscrutable and senseless, and the knowledge we thought we had in daylight betrays us. We teach them to bathe their the dark night of their perplexity in moonlight, and let them explore it with new eyes, learning to see the beauty that the dark brings forth.
Like candlelight, moonlight provides a reminder that in darkness some things can be made to shine in ways they would not otherwise, and that some glows, made obsolete under sunlight, can only be observed in the dark. We float and dissolve into the void of mystery, where our subjective impressions merge with what exists. It represents a stance of humility before the vastness of the universe and all that we cannot know. Yet it also embodies an urgency to create meaning in spite of this, meaning that is wholly resonant with who we are and that makes us intrigued to move on and make more out of life, in a playfully enchanted back and forth with this mystery.
Moonlight is the quiet darkness, the still darkness, a world stripped to monochromatism, where colour sleeps. It is digesting the world around us as if we were alone with it and it were alone with us, only sharing our presence with the silent, elusive, luminous beings of the night.
Being like electric light:
It is light that eradicates shadow from every corner. It is sharp and decisive, yet offering neither warmth nor life. It leaves truths recorded and clean so we can easily think them, observe them, and navigate them in a space of fixed and static certainties.
It is that comfort of letting yourself act upon a temporary belief that there are timeless certainties in life – a world where all corners are lit and perfectly visible, so that you can navigate it with less wariness and doubt. You play only with these limited objects, combine them, use them, and talk about them and their permanently cast cast shadows and colours. You are overlooking the rest that other lights reveal, but it is comforting and liveable, with solid, static components that can reliantly be assembled into acceptable meaning.
Blazing:
Heat is motion. A blaze is overwhelming motion. It is the fast acceleration of meaning to let it burn its mark in the culture. It is a group effort of bouncing the blazing concepts between us, as if we sentient beings were blaze-carrying torches. We need to pass them on to others before delving too deeply into them. They need to be seen by many with their own particular perspectives, and they need to be quickly measured against reality, against other things. All alone they will quickly burn out. They are not particularly self-sustaining.
We revise our views through these blazing concepts, using them to delve into unknown but enticing areas of what we experience in the world. These are the “What ifs?” that in our gut we feel compelled to investigate. We let them guide us, ignite us, whether as a source of inspiration, free association or interpretation.
Some of what we explore we burn down so that the new can grow. It is meaning that is “unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing“, and as Friedrich Schlegel, another one of the early Romantics who rejected the divide between rationality and emotion declared: “it should forever be becoming, never perfected“, “inherently incomplete and unfinished“8. In this sense, meaning is something alive and in movement. It is a blaze that renews with each bounce, each new torch it alights upon.
A form of blazing meaning could relate to revitalising works of art: films, literature, theatre, image, and so on. I believe that we live to understand art and not the other way around. As we mature and grow more connected to the world around us and familiar with it, we become more attuned to the messages emerging from artworks, which in turn reveal themselves as increasingly profound, expansive and brimming with meaning as life itself. Consequently, we become better conducts for the meaning that artworks channel through us and then we diffract out into the world. We act as a prism of sorts, and the more moving our own diffracted version of the ideas within artworks are, the more they will touch other people and fire them up with a desire to pass it on again.
Eventually blazing meaning dies out. There is nothing else that is worth throwing at it, questioning it or forgetting about in order to fuel it. We stop thinking about it, but not before it left its mark in the culture with new meanings, senses and uncharted paths. It is the spark that set this process in motion, akin to the one described in the Bruce Springsteen song “Dancing in the Dark”:
“You can’t start a fire
You can’t start a fire without a spark“
Being like a reflective shine:
“He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more often – he searched for a simile, found one in his work – torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?”9
You refract people’s lights to them. You help them experience -discover- how their light affects others, how it appears, revealing aspects of their flame that they couldn’t or didn’t want to see, their “own innermost trembling thought”. You show them whata they really think and how it gains life and warmth through their own fire. It is an empathetic approach.
Conclusion: the perpetual renovation of the notions of meaning-making and knowledge-acquisition through different metaphorical domains.
These variations follow the same rhythms as Fry’s example of the distinct roots of ‘heal’, ‘cure’ and ‘therapeutic’, or the varied possible connotations among words that are near-synonyms such as ‘instruct’, ‘educate’ and ‘teach’,
We are adding another etymological root to the idea of ‘bringing, or inspiring, knowledge in other’, as well as ‘ways of producing meaning’. It is that power that we have to slip streaks of new colours into each other’s minds, to change the rhythm of our thoughts, and perhaps rescuing us from a despairing narrowness of thought that is not our fault. ‘Educate’, ‘teach’, and ‘instruct’, are some manifestations of this primordial human act. And we are including a new vision of this act, embedded in other metaphorical realms: for instance that of ideas as having heat and movement, or that of the ambiguous relationship of meaning with shadow and light, with what we think we see, how we perceive it, and how we engage with the inevitable unknown.
Coda: the plausibility of magical realism
There it is, a glimpse of some of the magic that Borgesian magical realism can engender. We explore something that could have been, a plausible alternative that could have happened had history taken a series of unlikely turns.
Yet, its dreamlike quality owes to the fact that the person imagining it is cutting it off from its origins. We do not concern ourselves with how exactly this status quo would have come to happen. We let it float in a clear mind sky of possibility, uprooted from the chains of causality that counterfactuals demand in order to explain how this utopia would have come to happen. And we allow ourselves to dream it, because we intuit that what could improbably have happened could still happen, and the world would become a bit more like a living dream.
✵
- I am not implying that this narrowness is intrinsically bad. It is actually invaluable for certain kinds of academic pursuits and the construction of academic consensus on truths, the building upon others findings’ and being precise about the process we developed to getting there. ↩︎
- The etymology is imperfect, as lexicon is Greek for book of language, while lexis is the proper word for language. Still, I choose to settle on this little inaccuracy for the sake of euphony. ↩︎
- Hopscotch, by Julio Cortazar. Published in 1963. ↩︎
- Found in Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf. Published in 2022. ↩︎
- Idem. ↩︎
- In Praise of Shadows, by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki. Published in 1933 ↩︎
- Magnificent Rebels. ↩︎
- Idem. ↩︎
- Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. ↩︎
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