More Interesting Words (And Terms)

Several people have contacted me and asked me to write a follow-up to the recent selection of words I shared from my "interesting words" notebook.

Actually, that's a bare-faced lie. Not a single person has contacted me. I can't think why not. But here is a follow-up list anyway. Suck it up!

Mulct: To punish someone by making them pay a fine.

Scutage: A payment made in lieu of military service. Literal meaning: shield money.

Passel: A large group of people or things. Apparently, this is a well-known slang term in America. I'd never heard it until recently, after which (as always seems to happen) I heard it again soon after.

Taffrail: The handrail on the stern of a ship. Has other related meanings, but that's one.

Fungo: A practice throw at a baseball batter, just so he can hit it. An American I know hadn't heard this term. (It can also be the batter throwing the ball himself and then hitting it.)

Malkin: A kitchen maid.

Colophon: The part of a book that tells you the publisher, printer, and other bibliographical information, and often includes the publisher's logo. I like this word very much, as I'm utterly fascinated by publisher's logos.

Vault light: Like a skylight, except it's in the pavement and looks down to a cellar. In Dublin (and elsewhere, I think) they have very picturesque glass panes, often discoloured by time.

Onomastic: Pertaining to names.

Allodial: The highest form of ownership of land, having no higher landlords or authority.

Gnomon: The rod or pin of a sundial.

Vigesimal: A counting system that's based on twenty, not ten. The Mayans had this. How did that come about?

Rake: The upward slope of the seats in a cinema or theatre.

Sprocket hole: The holes along the edge of a celluloid film reel.

Anamorphic desqueeze: The process of stretching horizontally compressed ("squeezed") video or photos back to their normal, wide widescreen aspect ratio. I don't really know what means, but I like the phrase very much.

Eisegesis: Reading your own bias or preoccupations into a text. The opposite of exegesis.

Fascicule: A separately printed instalment of a longer printed work. (Like Marshall Cavendish collections, which you might remember if you're as old as I am.)

A Thought About Memory

Here's a thought about memory which I've had for some time (years), but which I've never put into words.

In my experience, memory tends to be a sort of clip that lasts about one second, or half a second.

I'm going to take an example: the memory of "chip day" in my old school. The cafeteria served chips one day a week. I was too shy to use the cafeteria myself, but I saw the queues outside it, and the smell of chips being fried.

When I remember chip day in my old school, the memory is not simply a piece of information: Chip day was one day a week and there were queues to buy chips.

It's not just a visual memory. In fact, my visual memory is terrible and always blurry.

It's not even a visual memory plus an olfactory memory plus an auditory memory.

No; the best term I can come up with is "clip". It's like a clip plays in my mind for a very brief moment. It has visual, olfactory, and auditory elements.

But above all-- it's the atmosphere that comes back.

There's also an awareness that my consciousness is only part of a larger consciousness, or an aggregate of consciousness. This, to me, is the biggest part of memory. There's always an awareness of expectations, anxieties, hopes, and so forth which were swirling around me. This even marks solitary memories-- because that larger consciousness is notable by its distance (it's never absent).

I don't think my handle on what those other minds were thinking is always very accurate. In fact, I think it was often very inaccurate. But even someone as oblivious and frequently clueless as myself shares (I believe) the extraordinary human capacity to "tune in" to the atmosphere of a place or time.

So when I remember chip day in school-- I'm aware of all the teenage swagger, insecurity, exuberance, yearning, etc. etc. around me. I'm also aware of the consciousness of the teachers, their expectations for us, their disapproval or approval, their greater knowledge of life, and so forth. The whole project of the school is part of this atmosphere-- its push towards self-improvement and career prospects, its Christian ethos, its partaking of the Irish language revival as an Irish language school, and so forth.

All of these "streams" come together in a confluence, like the sounds of hundreds of voices in a shopping centre.

My awareness of this aggregated consciousness (the word seems more diffuse and impersonal than "mind") is like the climate of the memory.

And that's it. That's really all I have to say in this post. But it's worth saying because I rarely hear memory described in these terms, and I often wonder if other peoples' memory works in the same way.

The Death of the Workplace?

This is a depressing thought, from a blog post I found while internet browsing:

So much of The Office already looks antiquated to me, because all of my friends are either working in food service, freelancing, nannying, or communicating on Slack, as I do, with a network of coworkers they haven’t even met, let alone gotten to know well enough to develop nicknames for. It’s a lot more difficult for a 20-something to coast her way into a cushy full-time job like Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Hitchcock and Scully apparently did. In fact, I don’t know any mediocre workers my age, because they never last long in any particular position. That bastion of workplace sitcoms, the bumbling employee no one trusts not to f--- it all up, is a dying breed.

Remote working has transformed my own workplace since Covid. I don't like it. I've chosen never to work from home, except for when I had no choice during the lockdown. As soon as I could come back into the workplace full-time, I did so.

I'm convinced remote working is a bad thing, although I'd probably struggle to make this argument when faced with its enthusiasts (which seems to be most people). For as long as I've remembered, I've feared an increasing privatization of society. I like the formality of work.

The comments on mediocrity touch upon another of my longstanding anxieties. I really and truly believe mediocrity is important, that a society has to find room for mediocrity. Excellence is the peak that rests atop a mountain of mediocrity. The historian Paul Johnson made the observation, which I think an excellent observation, that anyone who really loves a particular genre or art-form necessarily loves the second-rate and third-rate examples of it. I love the horror genre. The idea of only having classic horror movies like The Exorcist or The Wicker Man is a dreary one.

For the heart must pause to breathe

And love itself have rest.

Dare I mention poetry again? The idea that we can have only the tiny sliver of attention paid to poetry that we have today, and that poetry can flourish in those conditions, seems ludicrous to me. Lots of people still write poetry-- it's the readership of poetry that has disappeared. When poetry was seriously read, there was a huge class of indifferent or forgettable poets who achieved a certain amount of success, celebrity, or simply publication. But so what? How else could it be? Do you expect the local multiplex to have a constant stream of five-star films? Do you expect every soccer player to be a George Best?

But these are the sort of things I usually don't say because I fear people will assume I'm just being contrarian.

Is Hype Good?

This question is occurring to me more frequently in recent years.

"Hype" is usually used negatively, to denote commercial advertising and marketing and publicity drives: the sort of thing that most people hate (or profess to hate).

But ultimately what is the difference between "hype" and a sense of wonder?

You might say hype is fake and contrived, while a sense of wonder is authentic and spontaneous.

But how clear is this distinction? I can find very little in life that is spontaneously wonder-provoking. Nearly everything that inspires us with wonder is much-heralded.

Think about it. First love. Parenthood. Travel. The Aurora Borealis. The giant redwoods. Looking at cells through a microscope. Most things that we associate with wonder have been very heavily promoted to us before we experience them (if we ever do).

And is this such a bad thing? I think it's a good thing. I think one of the roles of culture is to prime us for the experiences of life and also to magnify those experiences.

But this "hype" is also something that (I think) accompanies us throughout the day. I know in my own case, I make a conscious effort to "hype" my ordinary experiences. The deadening force of habit is so strong that I feel myself pushing against it constantly.

Much conversation (perhaps most conversation) also feels like hype to me-- trying to make the most of an experience, an anecdote, a funny observation, and so on. And it's hard to imagine what else it could be.

I'd planned a longer post, but it's past midnight and I'm tired. Maybe I've made the point anyway, and perhaps started an interesting train of thought in your own mind.

Time and Eternity

If our lives in time somehow determine or influence our lives in eternity...does it follow that this very moment, when you are reading this line-- and, indeed, every moment of our lives-- will be as consequential (and much more consequential) than any moment in human history in its relation to all of human history...more consequential than the death of Socrates, the sack of Rome, the sinking of the Titanic, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and so forth?

What will any of that mean in eternity, compared to the fate of a single soul?

I don't know if this is the case. But I wonder.

The Church and the Bible

I've just left this comment on a previous post, arising out of an interesting discussion with someone who left a comment (and I'm always very grateful for comments): The doctrine of the Trinity is one of those things where I believe because the Church has told me. It seems to me that the Arians had a spectacular proof-text in John 14:28 "The Father is greater than I". The fact that the Arians were rejected as heretics convinces me that proof-texts aren't the way of interpreting the Bible. My own belief in the Church is prior to my belief in the Bible and based on other evidences. I'm aware that all sounds very pompous and nasal, put like that; I was just trying to be concise.

St. Augustine famously said: "I would not believe the Gospel if the authority of the Catholic Church did not move me." I'm quite willing to admit that I come to faith in Christ through my trust in the Catholic Church. This trust is based on viewing the history and life of the Church as a whole, over centuries and continents-- volumes could be written finding fault with this or that aspect of its history or influence or practice, but this fact doesn't dent my faith. The Church really does behave, as Chesterton said in The Everlasting Man, like the bearer of a message, and not its inventor.

This doesn't mean that I think everything a Pope says is right, or everything a saint says is right, or even that the Church has always been wise or enlightened in all its actions. Pope Leo X condemned Martin Luther for opposing the burning of heretics! Saint Ambrose of Milan refused the Eucharist to an Emperor who had demanded the rebuilding of a synagogue burned down by a Christian mob. It's quite easy to find such scandals, reaching into our own time.

But if you take an overview, the consistency, sublimity, wisdom, and goodness of the Catholic Church-- compared to all other institutions-- is startling, and to me bespeaks a supernatural origin.

First Things First

"When and how the Universe originated is one of the greatest mysteries of science."

The first line of Multyfarnham Parish History by Peter Wallace, published in 1897. (Multyfarnham is a small rural parish in Westmeath.)