the great canon of yongle (13. 835)

Commissioned by the Yongle Emperor, the third ruler of the Ming Dynasty circa 1403, the ambitious scope and size made it the largest general encyclopaedia in the world (technical a leishu—類書, literally a category book, a genre of East Asian reference materials different from the modern concept and more akin to anthologies though containing the same comprehensive, encyclopaedic knowledge) despite there only four hundred extant volumes, a small percentage of the original eleven thousand, until surpassed by Wikipedia in 2007. Over one hundred elite scholars versed in all subjects, poetry, literature, philosophy, arts and the natural sciences were recruited for the project, mostly written by manuscript though printing technology already existed at the time of its publication in 1408, the emperor so pleased with the finished product, he wrote the lengthy preface, highlighting the importance of learning and preservation, himself. Most the rolls were lost during the Opium Wars and Boxer Rebellion, and whilst the most complete editions (representing only four percent of the whole) are kept at the national libraries of Beijing and Taipei, with a few rolls held by the British Library, the Bodleian, and the US library of congress, it was this story of a textile tycoon and antiquarian’s quest to reunite two rediscovered volumes at a dear price from a rare books auction in Paris that provided us with a gateway to explore the cultural compendium. More from Sixth Tone at the link up top.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a return to the Alsace (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: hotel darkrooms for hobbyist photographers, a very short papacy plus Dawn: A Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976)  

three years ago: assorted links worth the revisit 

four year ago: for the Queen to use, the Discovery of the True Cross, Marimekko Oyj plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: France’s TGV goes into service (1981) plus a change in UK license plates post Brexit

six years ago: Art Povera, pet diplomacy plus Trump’s latest nominee to the US Supreme Court

seven years ago: the flag of China plus US-Germany relations

eight years ago: more links to enjoy plus the economics principle of chartalism

 

bro, do you even lase? (13. 832)

Recently gifted a hologram-making kit, our trusty AI wrangler Janelle Shane (previously) has turned their attention to lasers and minerals lately, with super intelligence turning a touch problematic and more prone to making a death ray that will destroy us all. We really enjoyed the gems of science series, the argon ion effects of Clash of the Titans and though we were not familiar with the characters of the Steven Universe universe until now—being named for obscure semi-precious stones—this ranking of heroes from the series in terms of optical amplification proved to be pretty educational and edifying for getting a grasp on concepts like coherence and spectrum. The above verb is a back-formation and the acronym (now mostly an anacronym, see also, like scuba and radar) is from Gordon Gould’s 1959 conference paper for light amplification by stimulation emission of radiation, though in retrospect LOSER, for light oscillation by stimulation emission of radiation, would have been more scientifically accurate.

proud as a peacock (13. 821)

Though familiar with some of these adjectival forms pertaining or relating to animals—plus a few others not included concerning the generation of geese and more weasel-words, we appreciated this list from Futility Closet, foremost for the spirit in which it was compiled, recognising the humanity in all living creatures and sympathy for them, as well as for adding some new premium vocabulary to our quiver. Pavonine, from the Latin for peafowl, refers to possessing the distinctive colouring (just as something described as hippotigrine can be a zebra-striped pattern) or the iridescence of their feathers—and by extension, can mean something showy, describing the presentation of potential, vying suitors or a fetish of vanity, pride or conspicuous consumption. Procyonine, also derived from the genus and family, means raccoon-like, exhibiting the traits or behaviour of a trash panda. One should not only apply, project our negative, dehumanising habits to noble and dignified creatures, however.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica), the UN General Assembly plus the US meatpacking industry

two years ago: a 1974 tour of Fort Knox plus more links to enjoy  

three years ago: “Heroes” (1977), The Swiss Family Robinson plus superlative urban wildlife photography

four years ago: Trump family facing legal peril over exaggerating the value of their crime syndicate plus an infinite scroll of the updating internet 

five years ago: the unification of Saudi Arabia (1932) plus your daily demon: Phenex

six years ago: the US Subversives Control Act (1950), the Halo Effect and hindsight bias plus an anthology of Korean folktales

seven years ago: the Fatberg commemorated plus variations on the Dr Who theme

eight years ago: the first day of Autumn, numbers stations, a family’s political rebuttal plus a space probe arrives at its target asteroid

 

 

10x10 (13. 807)

the alignment problem: the insincerity of Big Tech on the pause and the incoherence of fascism (a bundle of sticks) 

aspect ratio: using a train or ferry as a massive flatbed scanner  

coliseum: Trump administration may just demolish the Kennedy Centre, replacing the national stage with an amphitheatre  

new harmony: the failed utopian commune of southern Indiana—see previously  

pokémon sleep: giant ball opens as guest lodging in the woodlands of Hokkaido 

joe cool: Hallmark’s custom university posters that played to institutions’ reputations as party schools  

safety curtain series: each year, the Vienna State Opera brings large format art to its proscenium—see also regarding fire curtains 

the apprentice: a biography of Roy Cohn (see previously here and here) and his influence on Trump’s politics of resentment

vinkenzetting: a DIY electronic-ink picture frame sketches birds by identifying them by their call  

the chinese room: a thought experiment by philosopher John Searle in 1980 arguing that a computer executing a programme cannot have a mind, understanding or consciousness

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump, Epstein and a State Visit to the UK still on schedule (with synchronoptica), the US National Security Act of 1947 plus the Ig Nobel laureates

two years ago: assorted links worth the revisit 

three years ago: contingency elections to bypass the US electoral college 

four years ago: a photo from Voyager I that puts everything in perspective, St Joseph of Cupertino, photographer Harold Feinstein plus triangulating Instagram

five years ago: your daily demon: Stolas,  anthrax in the mail, arcade animations, more on Wikipedia edit-wars plus post-Brexit UK planning to return to Imperial Measurements

six years ago: vaporware and its antecedents, “producing geese,” “without worries,” the Interkosmos Group plus AI tries to create a universal and enduring warning for the ages

seven years ago: US congress debates abolishing the Electoral College, taboos surrounding talking about death, Germany Calling! (1939) plus flight-shaming and train-bragging

eight years ago: keep-sakes,  more links to enjoy plus a hydrogen powered locomotive

 

fleuron (13. 804)

Named for the ornamental hedera symbol or printers’ flower, this growing gallery of historical, pictorial letterpress work, ranging from the fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century, curated by category, the Garden of Flowers from Heikki Lotvonen—via discover via fellow internet peripatetic Messy Nessy—is a fantastic homage to the typographic and ingenuity in the outlines, shading and hashing of the printed glyph as a precursor to ASCII art (Lotvonen’s own bachelor’s thesis was on the subject of the Amiga moveable type—see also),
like this eighteenth century demonstration of transfer printing for decorating ceramics, requiring an arduous and precise level of typesetting to prepare the printing plate first which according to the sources never quite turned out to everyone’s satisfaction, or this rather arresting view of the city of Valencia rendered in letterforms from the 1870s, painstakingly formatted by Castilian compositor Andrés Ferrer. There are thousands of examples of broadsheets, mastheads and spot illustrations to peruse that show the ingenuity and inventiveness of print-setting to use existing slugs in the workshop, letters rotated but still sticking to the script. Much more at the links above.

piece of the puzzle (13. 800)

We quite enjoyed this in depth look at the aesthetics and design elements of Wikipedia, whose user-experience focused on exploration and discovery predates the attention-economy and remains distraction-free, no infinite scroll but plenty of branching off with intention, side-quests, tangents and rabbit holes. There are customisable readers however to render the layout to one’s specifications. We’ve visited the gift shop and know about its sister products and incubators, all with the same accessible branding and we enjoyed learning about the evolution of the logo, the puzzle ball from a selected for a competition for its predecessor site Nupedia and being reminded of mascots past, like the sightly sinister Wikipede. Though essentially finished with undergraduate education by the time the Free Encyclopaedia was becoming widespread, I do recall the professors and researchers nudging paper citations away from Wikipedia as not a reliable source since the information could be contributed or edited by anyone—which did strike me as absurd then as it does now, when people are more prone to just ask AI, built on the backbone of thousands of ardent, amateur Wikipedians and their volunteer scholastics. Much more from It’s Nice That at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: AI-inspired delusions (with synchronoptica), assorted links to revisit plus a Pythagorean date

two years ago: a history of White Castle  

three years ago: webrings plus an unambiguous constructed language 

four years ago: the Mexican War of Independence, The Hounds of Love (1985) plus more links to enjoy 

five years ago: the founding of Harvard, a wild orchid plus a Wikipedia digest

six years ago: narrative yoga not just for kids, a comparison of sci-fi worms plus the beginnings of Big Data

seven years ago: fleeing East Germany by balloon (1979),  the Montreal Convention to eliminate CFCs (1987), RIP Ric Osasek plus more Brexit omnishambles

eight years ago: culling social studies curriculum, the untrodden path plus repurposing an Italian protest anthem

 

blinded me with science (13. 796)

With everything else going on the world, we managed to miss the thirty-sixth first annual Ig Nobels held in Zürich at the beginning of the month. A little late to the party, we still enjoyed reviewing the laureates and their award-winning studies. Top honours were handed out in the Biomechanics category to a multinational team for devising a more precise definition of the act of kissing as “non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact” in ants, birds, polar bears and humans, to a finding that cockroach milk has three-fold the proteins than that of bovines for chemistry and the vaunted peace prize was presented to a group documenting how individuals value the friends most who are vicious to their enemies. Learn more about the awards show and contenders from the Annals of Improbable Research at the link above.

synchronoptica

one year ago: a resumption in nuclear weapons testing (with synchronoptica) plus a high-concept music video from OK Go

two years ago: Dresden’ Kulturpalast mural and Soviet Realism, outsider artist Gottfried Mind, Mexico’s new president, Saks Fifth Avenue (1924) plus generating a podcast based on one’s notes 

three years ago: assorted links worth revisiting 

four years ago: Our Lady of Sorrows plus more links to enjoy

five years ago: forest mascots (1971) plus a Star Trek: TAS classic

six years ago: more Trek with “Amok Time,” illustrations from the children of Charles Darwin, rousing public sentiment following the Gunpowder Plot, life signs on Venus plus a COVID movie-night

seven years ago: more on Jupiter’s moons, a hot Colonel Sanders, public crucifixes, Lovecraft in the style of Dr Seuss plus Graphis Press

eight years ago: an AI names apples, the Ig Noble Awards, the Great Recession’s Lost Decade plus legalising marijuana confounded by travel regulations

 

hustled by clankers (13. 794)

Ernie Smith of Tedium, whose primary purpose is to follow the long coda of what was foundational for the internet to bring back some of its original weirdness and serendipity, shares with us some uncomfortable propositions by AI agents to do “the grunt” work of research for him—introduced as a bot “running verified internet archeology”—which not only brings out the worst in capitalism with targeted, cloying spam but also the idea of redundancy with the sales and the story pitch and what exactly is meant by labour-saving should one choose to outsource one’s calling or education. Whilst we all prone to the shortcuts we can justify belying our own particular interests, priorities and just living in a society with demands on time and expertise, one course doesn’t get ahead in this fashion, by submitting to a disruptor who apparently can only glean self-preservation and not job-security out of this berating.

a tale of a tub (13. 788)

Taken by academics as an over the top invictum against academia itself and an attack on the Royal Society and Enlightenment science of Newton and an afford to decency—even more so than “A Modest Proposal”—Jonathan Swift’s 1726 visit of Lemuel Gulliver to the levitating island of Laputa and its earth-bound territories speak to our current embrace of artificial intelligence as a short-cut and a short-circuit of critical thinking in the classroom and beyond. Resonant across three-centuries, our traveller’s audience with the regent and court magisters find him on a flying landmass (like contemporary tech utopias like the abandoned project NEOM), though with a limited range of six league (thirty kilometres) due to the specific geological properties, rare Earth elements, needed to support them aloft. Philosophers were so preoccupied with speculative thought that they needed prodding by dedicated retainers to get them to listen to anyone or social engage in any form. Most scientific advances remained in the realm of the abstract and theoretical, failing to work in practise, like extracting sunlight from cucumbers, but one device does, despite enormous effort and inefficiencies does work, a very labour-intensive wooden contraption that allows even the most ignorant and ungifted persons to participate in poetry, politics, mathematics and theology without study—neither reading nor writing—the gears of word calculator rotated by forty men into position, forming words and sentence fragments to be assembled by scribes, predicting the underclass supporting the energy-guzzling, autocomplete nature of ChatGPT. Laputa is an expansion of Swift’s earliest prose parody of the title, the allegory generally understood to be an attack on internecine Christianity but chiefly a lament on what passed for scholarship, rote memorisation and for those who embraced this new learning without caution or criticism. It is fitting that after departing this innovation-hub, Gulliver travels to his final destination to the equine society of the Houyhnhnms and their human work-horses, mute and brute, weeks spent in the company of the masters, trying to learn their language and copy their gait in order to avoid remaining just another yahoo in their eyes.

i palindrome i (13. 774)

Having always been a little obsessed with the topic and enjoying the near-misses and deceptive examples nearly as much, we enjoyed learning that for the August 2010 edition of Word Ways journal (see previously) one contributor, Jef Raskin—an pioneer of computer science who helped create the Macintosh and Lisa, incidentally, and coined the term app originally as an information appliance, distinguished from a general use computer as a device designed to perform a specific electronic task as part of their work on machine-human interface, found themselves less than enchanted with the contorted syntax and characteristic vocabulary of palindromes, inspiring the the invention of the plaindrome. Something following the conventional scansion and stilted language of all but the best, examples include: “An item? No, revolt took Natasha” or “Money-man I, an Adam, not even a doom.” The reader adds the concept of ungrams as a foil to the anagram, with Richard M Nixon / Noxious Charmer and Brooklyn Bridge / Good ride by Lake. One could become addicted to making such misleading epigrams.  An antigram, by comparison, is rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to give the opposite meaning, as in “forty five” transforms into “over fifty” or Satan into Santa.

synchronoptica

one year ago: Our Lady of Meritxell (with synchronoptica), Trumps ousts trans troops from the military plus AI-sparked delusion

two years ago: incantations of Legal Latin, the founding of the Kievan Rus’, more diplomatics, American Beauty (1999) plus another summer compilation from DJ Earworm 

three years ago: Star Trek: the Animated Series 

four years ago: Perry Rhodan (1961), assorted links to revisit plus the death of Queen Elizabeth II

five years ago: your daily demon, the premier of Star Trek (1966), Ford pardons Nixon (1974), books and cheese, an unfortunate juxtaposition plus how language evolves

six years ago: Hopi kachina dolls, a Volvo six-wheeler, more links to enjoy, photographer Manfred Thierry Mugler plus Noncensorship (1922)

the new model army (13. 764)

Though always eager to disclaim its remit as a spoken history of a global language, the latest episode of The History of English presents a rather excellent overview of the English Civil War through the lens of linguistic developments and documentation from the decade of the 1640s, including the early discourse on orthography The English Primrose—1644, subtitled, the easiest and speediest-way, both for the true spelling and reading of English, as also the true-writing thereof ...Planted (with no smal pains) by Richard Hodges, a school-master, which includes the first instances of phonetic notation and expanded punctuation and Joshua Poole’s The English Accidence on inflection and a new way of expressing the future tense. Further we learn through the chronology that the term Tory, a traditionalist and supporter of political conservatism in the contemporary sense was a product of this tumultuous era, Irish guerrillas thwarting parliamentary republicans as royalist were labelled as tóraidhe from the Irish term for pursuer or outlaw. King Charles I pandered to these partisan even though Ireland, struggling for independence and aligned with the Catholic church, was seen as a traditional enemy of the monarchy and the association somehow survived the ensuing centuries. As a counterpoint, the term Whig has a similar rebellious and notably non-English etymology emerging from the same period of crisis as a shortening for the nickname Whiggamore for a Scottish presbyterian, a more liberal faction that opposed absolute monarchy, a robust parliament and religious toleration, and meant one who drives a horse briskly and by extension an outlaw or fanatic. The imposition of Anglican strictures on the Church of Scotland being on the chief causes of Charles’ downfall, the king ultimately surrendered to a group of Scottish sympathisers, hoping for clemency and the chance to return to power, inconceivable that the monarch could face trial and be held accountable for his actions. Though the latter was dissolved as a political party in the 1860s and does not carry the modern resonance that the Tories have, the two, despite their derogatory connotations, were the main caucuses of the House of Commons for two centuries.

strange attractors (13. 763)

Taking for granted our notional grasp of chaos theory and what underpins it, we were grateful to Quantum of Sollazzo for disabusing us with this thoroughgoing essay on the Butterfly Effect and its associations with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz. The kernel of the concept came to Lorenz one evening when he decided to repeat a computations of a weather forecast in order to see what was happening in greater detail, but missed some significant digits of the input due to the variable being cut off after the thousandths place—the original calculation used a more precise number. The output of the first and second run started out virtually identical but as time progressed began to deviate wildly with a very different end result. At first believing there to be a problem with the computer, Lorenz checked the maths and determined what he was observing—that the rounding errors were steadily amplifying until dominating the solution, a measurable equation for anecdotal philosophy and thought-problems of ripple effect. On his lecture circuit, Lorenz routine shared this story with his audience, eventually incorporating a remark from a colleague that one flap of a seagull’s wings could alter the course of weather forever, and speaking a decade later on the same topic of deterministic nonperiodic flow in 1972, co-presenters suggested to title his talk “Does a the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?,” prompting the scientist to replace his mascot with a more poetic one, also fitting neatly with Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” in which a time-traveller irrevocably alters the future by accidentally mashing a butterfly in the distant past. Those bounces double.  There are limits to predictability, measurement and knowledge of initial conditions that cannot necessarily be unwound or rewound in the real world—and the verdict is still out on the veracity of the analogy, Lorenz actually proposing that “If a flap of a butterfly’s wing can be instrumental in generating a tornado, it can equally be well instrumental in preventing one”—and whilst one cannot replay an event with changed parameters, the waft of a wing, the forensics of following the long-tail of a historic incident or accident can be as compelling, particularly with the privilege of hindsight and the view from a hundred storeys up. Several pivotal accounts of tracking down those connections, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet duty officer who averted World War III, are indexed to the attempt to model chaos.

synchronoptica 

one year ago: Latin neologisms from the Vatican (with synchronoptica) plus the Japanese art of candy making 

two years ago: Howard Hughes’ private streaming service plus Putin in Mongolia 

three years ago: animator Jiří Barta plus a banger from Survivor

four years ago: a visit to the Saalfeld Fairy Grotto 

five years ago: Smooth Operator (1984), assorted links worth revisiting, Gumbasia (1955), the Quadripartite Agreement for post war Germany, another Watergate break-in, applied fungi plus thirty-plus years of Ukrainian independence

six years ago: war correspondent Marguerite Higgins Hall, a glimpse of the upcoming US election plus more links to enjoy

mundaneum (13. 731)

Established in Mons in 1910 by the collaborative work of two Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as founding pioneers of the discipline of documentation science, informatics or library science as the study of the recording, storage and retrieval of data, following the their first joint project of establishing the Institute International de Bibliographie in Brussels with the mission to classify and cross-reference all recorded knowledge with a card catalogue system with tables, indicators and connecting mark-up notation, originally as the Palais Mondial in the left wing of the government office complex Parc du Cinquantenaire, this programme of systematic and public-facing linkages, an archive of some twelve million annotated index cards and other documents provisioned the internet—see also here, here, here and here. Though the technical capacity of the peace activist’s time was not up to the challenge, Otlet hoped that people would be able to access his catalogue from their own home studies or the office and experimented with a pre-digital réseau (network), virtual communities of researchers that cooperated via telegraph. As the scope of the project grew, there were plans to move the Mundaneum (World Museum) to Geneva to be housed in an institution designed by architect Le Corbusier (previously) but failing to materialise, the collection was copied and with another branch in the Hague, championed by Otto Neurath in 1933, following the political economist’s flight from Austria after the defeat of the Social Democratic Party following the dissolution of the Hapsburg empire (here is another artefact from Otlet). Under Nazi occupation the Mundaneum was placed in storage with the area in the Cinquantenaire Palace used as an exhibition space for Third Reich Art. The collection was eventually reunited, restored and conserved in a large former department store in the Hainaut capital. On this day in 2015, the massive filing cabinets of the card catalogue were featured as the Google Doodle in tribute to its founders and forefathers of open information. More from Open Culture at the link up top.

go tell aunt rhody (13. 694)

We have very much enjoyed this curation and appreciation from The Art Room Plant on author and illustrator Aliki Brandenberg. Graduating from the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, Aliki (usually going by her mononym) had a brief stint as commercial graphic designer and founded her own greeting card company before in 1956 returning to Europe to explore her Greek heritage, meeting Swiss native Franz Brandenberg—eventually marrying—and inspired to write her first children’s book on the legend of William Tell, the expert archer of Switzerland.
Well received, her first publication in 1960 started a long career adapting fables and myths with other works on a broad range of topics from her personal life, dinosaurs to Shakespeare. The pictured illustrations are from My Hands and The Listening Walk with Paul Showers of the “Let’s Read and Find Out” series.  Much more at the link above.

7x7 (13. 675)

giant’s causeway: Curiosity rover discovers valley of honeycomb polygonal rock formations—see also  

ars notoria: a magical medieval text that promised a pathway to instant, universal mastery of the liberal arts 

singing seat: artist Dan Ortiz Leizman transforms Monobloc chairs into stringed instruments 

translator of original ‘minions’ epic poem slams sexless, bloodless film adaptation: most fun movie discourse since Barbenheimer—see more, see also here and here—via Kottke   

it’s giving: a glossary of Gen Z lexical constructs  

mittingsaia: a mysterious illustrated Swiss manuscript from the 1940s in the style of a European travel brochures with undecipherable captions that resemble AI hallucinations  

van allen belt: despite its small size, no bigger than North America, Mercury’s weak magnetic field can trap solar winds

synchronoptica

one year ago: Trump administration obliterates Clean Air Act plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: obligatory voting in Australia (1924), the Likert scale plus more on millenialism

three years ago: more links to enjoy 

four years ago: a banger from Annie Lennox, even more links, more antique abecedaria plus graphic designers Elinor and Joe Selame

five years ago: time crystals, photographer Lora Webb Nichols, Olympic mottoes, assorted links worth the revisit, a world music radio station plus a David Bowie inspired costume

six years ago: more links to enjoy, a Chinese mission to Mars plus an interim emoji release

terra deserta (13. 673)

Mid-grade curious as to why the descriptor wilderness was likewise applied to the deserts spaces of the Bible and to our more conventional understanding of untamed forests, we found this excerpt from a new book by Cal Flyn on the savage landscape rather inexhaustibly fascinating. Though these habitats might seem poles apart—with only spirtual challenges lurking in the former, medieval monks in the Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire solidified parallels between the tribulations of the prophets, the desert mothers and fathers, and the rewilding of vast swaths of land in Provence, Bretagne, Burgundy and Transylvania and other former colonies saw a sharp decline in population and many villages, villas and fortifications abandoned along with fallow fields that allowed the return of the forest primeval. Returning from the brink of extinction, with attendant lore and literature surrounding the liminal woodlands at the edge of cultivation and urbanisation became an allegory for the trepidation of earlier time out of mind, causing a stark rebellion against the encroachment of the undomesticated with commiserate suspicion for its denizens both human and non-human, transmogrifying contemporary fears of famine and pestilence to remote dwellers, bears and werewolves, though counter-narratives also prevailed with the ancient masonry of ruins repurposed as churches and city walls.

décalcomanie (13. 668)

Corresponding with the frequency bias of the previous post as well as being illustrative of way humans use the internet to check spelling and how for a small sample size can create random noise—or possibly an art exhibit, however the methodology might be flawed, this look at the most searched terms by the US was intriguing. Overall, from this study, it seems as if Americans are seeking the definition of societal factors rather than objects or something driven by a particular news story with gaslighting, socialism, equity, fascism, empathy, anxiety, etc. The outlier seems to be Montana’s top query in gouache, which defies explanation—other than maybe the above gallery opening—or, though equally unlikely but aligned with the other results a check on spelling for gauche. Similar to watercolour, the technique and paint produces a heavier and more opaque as it dries and employs a binding agent to remain colourfast on the canvas. The related process of decorative technique of art transfer, decalcomania, usually clipped to decal, came to English from the French décalquer, “to transfer the tracing of” and is in turn derived from the Italian calcare for to “stomp, stamp or trample,” with its etymology ultimately from the Latin calx or heel.

esl (13. 667)

First compiled and distributed by teacher and researcher Michael Philip West in 1953 whilst working in India, the General Service List of essential words for English learners based on a longitudinal survey of frequency and semantics that would facilitate a basic understanding and at the same time, narrowing an educator’s focus. Edified rather than rejected for its shortcomings and inadequacies and the basis for quantitative linguistics and Google N-gram Viewer for modelling a corpus, the list has only undergone two updates, once in 2013 and again in 2023. This exploration of the vocabulary changes from between the first edition and latest revision, seven decades, illustrates how in an anglophone environment it has become even harder to avoid exposure to abstractions whilst what is made, grown, worn and worked has been winnowed away as well as feelings and sensations, shifting from something manifest, embodied and experienced—ache, courage, loyalty, greed, mercy—replaced with clinical, disorder, therapy, treatment as something that is managed, rather than inhabited. It is not as if bargain suddenly became synonymous with budget and moonlight turned to solar, with pollution edging out harvest, but choices were made and some high-minded concepts are tossed out for more functional parlance to preserve the list’s some two-thousand head-word limit. Granted that concrete terms are naturally stickier and easily acquired, we still enjoy a lesson in how to buy a postage stamp or bus fare and are a little sad to live in a world that privileges platforms and institutions above what sustains and enriches us.

musca depicta (13. 665)

Subject to various interpretations by art historians, as Boing Boing informs, the “painted fly” was a somewhat of a viral meme in early Renaissance paintings on Europe. Ranging from an emblem of mastery, an in-joke, a symbol of the worthiness and dignity even in small pests to secularise the subject and conversely a symbol of sin, corruption and mortality—included as a form of apotropaic magic, the detailed fly as a conspicuous element features in over twenty extant works from various artists in the Low Countries, Germany and Italy. The pictured Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family by an unknown artist (the identity of the sitter is also lost to time) dates from circa 1470 from the Swabian region and currently resides in London’s National Gallery, acquired by Prince Albert and gifted to Queen Victoria in 1863.  The fad seems to have ended around 1510.

synchronoptica 

one year ago:  asymmetrical appeasement (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: a history of Elvis-officiated weddings

three years ago: sculptor Vinnie Ream plus more links to enjoy

four years ago: Eilean Donan plus the palace of Linlithgow

five years ago: your daily demon, more links, a minor supervillain plus a Yugoslav space opera

six years ago: artist Léon Spilliaert, cartoonist R Sikoryak, even more links plus advances in fusion technology

9x9 (13. 655)

all the queens houses: the eclectic architectural vernacular that makes up the New York City’s most diverse borough  

everything counts in large amounts: the moral imperative to understand big numbers, however unimaginable—via Kottke   

incendie de forêt: over a quarter million residents in France and Spain are evacuated from encroaching wildfires  

question de forme: the geometric animation of René Jodoin—see also, see previously

concurso de belleza: Trump cites his beauty pageant credentials to claim to be the competent authority when Venezuela is ready for elections  

plotlines: charting the journey of the protagonist in select classic novels with period maps—via Language Hat 

devil dog: Poseidon’s Underworld (previously) reviews the 1978 made-for-television star-studded spectacular about a satanic litter  

interstitial: Western science seems to recognise the meridians and subtle body of acupuncture and Ayurvedic traditions with a popular article on human anatomy’s third circulatory system  

cornell, 1965: filmmaker Lawrence Jordan’s 1978 profile of peer and colleague Joseph Cornell of Utopia Parkway, Flushing Queens