a crock of gold
“‘Just the place to bury a crock of gold,’ said Sebastian. ‘I should
like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy
and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and
dig it up and remember.’”
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.
Real G-g-green Chartreuse
“‘Real G-g-green Chartreuse, made before the expulsion of the monks.
There are five distinct tastes as it trickles over the tongue. It is
like swallowing a sp-spectrum.’”
—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945.
reality in a dream
“It might have been at a time of night when people say they see reality
in a dream. Almost catching my breath, I looked on this strange scene.
By the dim light of the andon, I could see the Emperor doll holding an ivory sceptre, the Empress doll—its tiara bedecked with jewels, the ukon wild orange, the sakon
cherry, the porter carrying a long-handled umbrella, the Court Lady
holding up a food tray a little below the level of her eyes, the small
gold-lacquered mirror and chest, a small folding screen decorated with
shell, the rice bowls, the decorated candle shades, the balls of colored
thread, and again, my father’s profile. . . .
As if I were seeing them in a dream, . . . ah, that is what I have already said.”
—Ryunosuke Akutagawa, The Dolls, from Exotic Japanese Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagaway, translated by Takashi Kojima and John McVittie, 1964.
Word of the Year
Lexicographically speaking, 2007 was all about w00t, which Merriam-Webster (the dictionary) has named Word of the Year. For more about l33t sp34k, click here or here. Ph342 /\/\j 133+ 5|<1||%!!!
An On-Line Color Thesaurus
There’s a new link to your left, a blog from HP Labs called, intriguingly, Mostly color perception.
It’s as intelligent and as technical as you might expect a blog from HP
Labs to be, but it’s not an advertisement and some interesting things
are happening there. Nathan Moroney, who holds both a Bachelors Degree
and a Masters Degree in Color Science, is, for instance, conducting an online Color Naming Experiment and a separate Color Name Comparison Experiment. Participation in the study is easy. With just a few clicks and keystrokes, by naming some color swatches at the first
experiment, and by comparing a few color terms at the second, anyone can contribute to it.
So far there have been over 20,000 responses, and
the resulting database has been used to create An On-Line Color Thesaurus
which contains, according to Nathan Moroney, over 800 different color
names. If you like color terms like I like color terms, you won’t want
to miss it.
the poetic title
“The kind of title you attach to your work says a lot about how you perceive the book’s intentions. The descriptive title announces a book to be used; the poetic title a book to be enjoyed.”
—William Germano, Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, 2001.
The word processor
“The word processor exerts a curious effect on writing; it makes everything you peck out look neat, and neat rapidly becomes convincing. The computer makes storage so easy that nothing is wasted; chapters can grow beyond their needs, frequently augmented by bits the author has reinserted with the cut-and-paste function. Are word-processed manuscripts longer than those from the Typewriter Era, or does it just seem that way? Fortunately, the same word processor that records each of your thoughts in 12 pt Times Roman also counts your words for you. Know how long your word-processed text is.”
—William Germano, Getting it Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books, 2001.
POW…
“Cover from Vogue, Vol. 145, No. 10, June 1965. . . . Montage
with photograph by Irvine Penn and serigraph construction by Gerald
Oster.”
—Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.
every picayune punctuation
“‘I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers. I know that every sentence, every word, every picayune punctuation that appears in the public press is perused and revised and deleted in the interests of advertisers and bond-holders. The fountain of national life is poisoned at the source.’”
—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.
spectral opposites
“The spectral opposites of black and white embody the most
extreme visual contrast and can summon myriad optical effects,
including spatial illusion, virtual motion, after-images, and phantom
color. Goethe made observations on such phenomena in his theories on
optics and color, but it was Gestalt psychologists who later explained
how the brain interprets perception to create these phenomena in the
mind. . . . Optical illusions, which accentuate the disjuncture between
knowledge and vision, became an early subject of interest to perceptual
artists.”
—John Houston, Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s, 2007.