Earlier this week, the media delightedly reported that Jacob Rees-Moggs had referred to floccinaucinihilipilification in a parliamentary speech. It comes from Latin: floccus, a wisp of wool, naucum, a trifle, nihil, nothing, and pilus, a hair, words that belittle whatever they are referring to. The word is not new. The Oxford English Dictionary finds it […]
… NHS England has recognised that it should not fund homoeopathic remedies. First, consider the highly versatile IndoEuropean root, SM, meaning one or as one. In Latin, semel meant once only or once and for all, and simul had various meanings related to togetherness, in one company. A semelparous plant or animal reproduces only once […]
As I discussed last week, the physicist Alan Sokal has pointed out that “ . . . well tested theories in the mature sciences are supported in general by a powerful web of interlocking evidence coming from a variety of sources; . . . the progress of science tends to link these theories into a […]
The IndoEuropean root WED, with its o-grade form WOD, meant to speak. Hence the Greek word for a song or lyric poem, an ode, ᾠδή, and derivatives such as odeon, epode, hymnody, melody and melodeon, monody, palinode, prosody, psalmody, rhapsody, threnody, comedy, and tragedy. A parody is “a literary composition modelled on and imitating another […]
“Resistentialism is a philosophy of tragic grandeur. It … derives its name from its central thesis that Things (res) resist (résister) men. Philosophers have become excited at various times, says [its originator Pierre-Marie] Ventre, about Psycho-Physical Parallelism, about Idealism, about the I-Thou Relation, about Pragmatism. All these were, so to speak, pre-atomic philosophies. They were […]
To recap. After C P Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, the Cambridge literary critic, F R Leavis, in his 1962 Richmond Lecture, “The Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow” venomously slandered Snow’s abilities as a novelist and intellectual. Snow then wrote another essay, “The Two Cultures: A […]
Last week I showed how the noun “culture” developed from the IndoEuropean root KWEL, which implied turning in different ways. “Culture” entered English in the 15th century with meanings related to tilling the soil, both on its own and as a suffix in “agriculture”; “horticulture” followed in the late 17th century, but it was not […]
The IndoEuropean root KWEL, which implied turning in different ways, has turned into many different linguistic manifestations. Through the Greek κύκλος, a circle, we get cycle, cyclone, and encyclopaedia. A consonantal shift gives τέλος, that which turns out, the completion of a cycle, anything final, whence teleology, teleoanalysis, and entelechy, the Aristotelian realisation of potentiality. The […]
The term “monoclonal” is over 100 years old, having been first recorded, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in a 1914 paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, by W E Agar, in which “polyclonal” was also first recorded. “Clone” and “clonal” are even older, dating from 1904. “Monoclonal” is derived from two […]
Last week I suggested that passive diffusion and active dissemination of the outcomes of research could together be called “promulgation”. To promulgate is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “to make known by public declaration; to publish; esp. to disseminate (some creed or belief), or to proclaim (some law, decree, or tidings).” I rhetorically […]