What shall we call a “thing”
“‘What shall we call a “thing” anyhow?’ [William] James asks. ‘It seems quite arbitrary for we carve out everything just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.’ . . .
In counting the stars and finding a resemblance, we in one sense discover what was always there, but in another, by adding to it, create something entirely new.”
—Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.
Modernization
“Modernization forces upon us a world that is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities, including beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, sin and redemption. A person who restricts his or her attention to only what can be counted, measured and weighed lives, necessarily, in a very poor world.”
—Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.
the interval
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
—George Santayana, quoted by Dennis Ford in The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.
the interjection Io!
“While questions have clearly been around since time immemorial . . . the question mark has not. This handy graphic sign seems to have been formed from a Q with a little o under it as an abbreviation of the word quaestio (query, question). Similarly, the exclamation point—a.k.a., ‘screamer’ or ‘bang’—is derived either from an abbreviation of Latin interiectio (interjection) or else from the interjection Io! (‘Hey!’).”
—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.
The word punctuation
“The word punctuation comes from the latin verb pungere (to puncture, prick), of which the past participle is punctum, a mark of punctuation having originally been a spot pricked with a writing instrument.”
—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.
the period and the comma
“During [the early 1700’s] the period and the comma were also known as the jot (ultimately from the Greek iota) and the tittle (from Latin titulus). As for dot, the word seems originally to have meant head of a boil or pimple.”
—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.
a missing twenty-third letter
“Harold Blume writes of the mystic Kabbalah as ‘a collective, psychic defense of the most imaginative medieval Jews against exile and persecution pressing on them inwardly. So, some Kabbalists spoke of a missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, hidden in the white spaces between the letters. From these openings the larger Torah was still to emerge.’”
—Richard A. Firmage, The Alphabet Abecedarium, 1993.
The Ear
“I was killing time and pain at a nearby bar called The Ear, so named because the two ribs of the ‘B’ in the neon sign that read ‘Bar’ had burned out years ago. So had most of the patrons.”
—Kinky Friedman, Blast From the Past, 1998.
a dazzling sun
“‘The sun is the greatest, the most resplendent, and the most wonderful of heavenly luminaries, but you cannot contemplate and examine it simply with unprotected eyes. You have to use a piece of artificial glass that is many millions of times smaller and darker than the sun. But through this little piece of glass you can examine the magnificent monarch of stars, delight in it, and endure its fiery rays. Holy Scripture also is a dazzling sun, and this book, The Philokalia, is the piece of glass which we use to enable us to contemplate the sun in its imperial splendor.’”
—Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim, first published in 1884, translated by R.M. French, 1965. ‘The Love of Spiritual Beauty’, or The Philokalia, is a collection of mystical writings by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church.