Writing Inspiration | 24 | 03.05.18
Excerpts
The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes.
from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
They gripped their mother’s hands. No one had ever said she was beautiful, but she was young and that was a kind of beauty. People driving north sometimes thought momentarily, fondly, of their own mother, of her scent and the dry-handed grip that once secured them to her. Others would think, Black girls have kids way too young…
from Twins by C. E. Morgan in The New Yorker
…history does not tolerate a vacuum.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Phrases
ignoratio elenchi
an irrelevant conclusion; colloquially, “missing the point”
tabula rasa
an absence of preconceived ideas or predetermined goals; a clean slate; the human mind, especially at birth, viewed as having no innate ideas
ad hominem
attacking personal traits to invalidate an argument; Latin for “to the man”
Words
syncretism
- the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought
- the merging of different inflectional varieties of a word during the development of a language
“The remedy for artificial intelligence, according to Marcus, is syncretism: combining deep learning with unsupervised learning techniques that don’t depend so much on labeled training data, as well as the old-fashioned description of the world with logical rules that dominated AI before the rise of deep learning.” — from Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning by Jason Pontin in Wired
bacchanal
- an occasion of wild and drunken revelry
“On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend.” — from “Oh my god, this is so f — ed up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s secretive, orgiastic dark side by Emily Chang in Vanity Fair
bucolic
- relating to the pleasant aspects of the countryside and country life
“Hidden in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, along a scrubby arroyo north of Los Angeles, it’s an oddly bucolic setting for an endeavor so cerebral.”— from The Martian Chroniclers by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker
laconic
- using very few words
“The long months of solitude and open sky have given him a lean, wind-bitten look and a laconic style rare among NASA’s high-strung engineers.” — from The Martian Chroniclers by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker
