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Archiloquy
Here’s a sentence you’d be unlikely to encounter nowadays. “It was noscible in the village that the oporopolist’s stall was often closed because of his fondness for riviation.” You’d be unlikely to encounter it because “noscible,” “oporopolist,” and “riviation” are all words that were once in general use in English, but haven’t been heard from… Continue reading
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Don’t buy TNT from ACME
Eponyms are words that come from someone’s name. “Flack” is an eponym because it came from Gene Flack. “Dickens,” as in the old fashioned “oh he’s just a little dickens,” is not an eponym based on Charles Dickens; “dickens” was a synonym for “devil” a couple of centuries ago. But “boycott,” refusing to engage in… Continue reading
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“Like a business,” they said
The idea that the US should be “run like a business” has been popular with the republic party for decades. Like many of the slogans they parrot, the actual thinkers in the party almost certainly don’t agree with it, but recognize it as a convenient talking point that will convince their base. Now they’ve got… Continue reading
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What is missing
Socrates said “Virtue does not come from money, but rather from virtue comes money, and all other things good to man.” John Siracusa opens his latest essay with that quotation. It was featured, he points out, on the website of Ambrosia Software, which released really good games for the Mac back in the days when… Continue reading
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Sentencing
The American slang phrase “throw the book at [someone]” means to apply the maximum legal punishment. The most common usage is something like this: “the judge really threw the book at Ralph; he won’t get out of prison for twenty years.” But really, which book is that — the one getting thrown? The legal tomes… Continue reading
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Not just the Principia Mathematica
From Bertrand Russel in 1940: “The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and… Continue reading
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Doing it over and over again
A lot of human experience, especially the experiences we seem to choose, involves doing the same thing over and over again. It’s a dream of many people to start their own business, and whether it involves cooking, painting, installing closets, fixing cars, moving furniture, or you-name-it, a small business is often (not always) mostly about… Continue reading
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Teslas are obsolete, overpriced junk
Tesla is not keeping up with the competition, not by a long shot. The real competition in electric vehicles seems to be led by companies in China and South Korea. Tesla, which has always been known for inferior build quality and doesn’t update its offerings very often. The Model X is a decade old. The… Continue reading
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The intoxication of exuberant verbosity
“A sophistiocal rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and glorify himself.” That’s what Benjamin Disraieli said about William Gladstone in 1878. Decades before Disraeli and Gladstone rose to prominence… Continue reading
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There are jobs, and then there are jobs
The regime of the orange baby, and the baby itself, seem to believe (or at least say, which isn’t the same thing for it) that making products — toys, for example — arbitrarily more expensive for US consumers is a good thing. Maybe, the baby spitballs, it will mean that “the jobs” move to the… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate. I shouldn’t be surprised, but she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Recent Posts
- A quart of prevention…
- Which amendment was that?
- Independence Declaration
- Lexical ketchup burst
- The NYT appears to be wrong again
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Bedlam Farm Journal
Krugman Wonks Out
Daring Fireball
[citation needed]
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