Sublime
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agnostic : unknowable.
agoraphobia : fear of unfamiliar situations in public.
agrarian : agre = acre, of the land.
Amalthea’s horn : a myth about abundance / having everything you desire. Zeus’s nurse fed goat milk to an infant, snapped off it’s horn, and promised that Zeus will have a pampered life.
amaranth : a fadeless flower.
Amaurote : Thomas Moore
Dictionary dump (unformatted): a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s. aardvark : South African “earth pig” aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up mi
... See moreAllusionist 172. A Brief History of Brazilian Portuguese — The Allusionist
The Allusionisttheallusionist.org
Both Are True
botharetrue.substack.com
Two other dictionary projects: The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) by Ambrose Pierce and The Devil’s Financial Dictionary (2016) by Jason Zweig. I’m more interested in the original; all the definitions are satirical and he wrote it over decades. It has around 1,600 words in the unabridged version.
exaptation : when a trait arises through evolution, but then is later co-opted for a different use. For example, the tongue evolved for eating, but later become fundamental for speech. The word is about surveying what exists and questions what new combinations are possible.
nickelodeon : the name of a theatre in 1888, and by 1909 it meant “motion p
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