Following in the footsteps of A. J. Jacobs’ The Know-It-All in which the author devoted himself to reading the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, Ammon Shea has spent the past year reading the Oxford English Dictionary and will publish his experiences in Reading the OED this July. This first preview mentions some of the ‘absurd entries’ that he came across.

Absurd Entries in the OED

One example is a tautological pair that reads like a lexicographical snigger -

The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

Others might be considered circumlocutive obfuscation, such as trondhjemite (”Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase“) and disghibelline (”To distinguish, as a Guelph from a Ghibelline“). Yet ironically, when I posed the latter to my friend SW as a joke, she immediately started describing the differences between those terms - for as it happens, they are two warring factions from 12th and 13th century Italy…and she is a doctoral student specializing in art of the Italian renaissance. So maybe KA’s geology class will have covered trondhjemite (aka plagiogranite). For my part, I fondly remember getting Yggdrasil as a selection in a game of Balderdash and casting it as some kind of Yiddish, while of course knowing it as the World Tree from Norse mythology where Odin hung for nine days (cf. Gaiman’s American Gods).

Ed Boyden of the MIT Media Lab provides a useful list of good cognitive habits, for optimizing “brain resources in an age of complexity.”

How To Think

#1 & #9 on the list are as good a codification of this blog as any, reinforcing Bloom’s Taxonomy - particularly the inverted Cognitive pyramid which builds to “Analyze / Evaluate / Synthesize.”

#5 I have been following while evaluating MBA programs, building course dependency maps in NovaMind.

#6 encapsulates the reason behind the new TSP project I’ve started with TNG.

#7 is my emergent approach to new tasks, although I’ve noticed it most prominently in programming, cooking, and taxes. Getting it wrong first is sometimes the quickest route to learning how to do it right.

Good ideas all!

I’ve started overhauling the site - using a new theme, switching to a sidebar orientation, converting previous categories to tags - in an effort to make it simpler to post shorter pieces. My momentum has been caught up in collecting material to write about with the actual composition seeming difficult with the long-form orientation I had adopted. So you should start to see a more typical linkblog structure interspersed with occasional essays and reviews.