Pope Francis has only been Pope for a couple of months, yet, he's already coined fabulous phrases that Matt Schmitz has inventoried together with their context.
"God spray"
"Satellite Christians"
"identity card Christianity"
"Teenagers for life"
"Mr. Whiner"
"Pickled peppers"
"Middle class of holiness"
"Babysitter Church"
"Rosewater faith"
"Apostle of Babel"
"Charitable NGO"
"Odor of sheep"
and yesterday, "gentrification of the heart".
The English writers Orwell and Huxley describe two types of enslavement, external and internal In U.S. we are more Brave New World than 1984 though we have elements of both.
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, as has often been pointed out, imagined two very different dystopias. In 1984, written just after the Second World War, Orwell depicts the forces that held people captive as fundamentally external: coercion, espionage, laws, constraints, threats, lies, the state. By contrast, Huxley’s Brave New World, published just after the Wall Street crash had turned the excess of the twenties into the Great Depression of the thirties, portrays a future in which people are enslaved to forces within themselves: desire, inanity, hedonism, egotism, fatuity. For all the similarities between the two books, it is this difference that is the most striking.
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The greatest threat to human flourishing is the lack of wisdom, phronesis, or virtue. Whereas moderns understand freedom in terms of unconstrained individual choices, many ancients regarded the forces underlying individual choices—passions and desires which might in turn be foolish, selfish, or carnal, much like those depicted in Brave New World—as something from which people needed to be freed.
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The essence of eleutheria, in the vision of writers from Aristotle to St. Paul, was being free to become what one was originally designed to be, rather than simply being free to make decisions (decisions which, of course, might stunt one’s progress towards ultimate fulfillment). Thus humans could be enslaved, not just to the other, but to the self. One needs redemption from the flesh as much as from the powers. Under such a vision of liberty, modern Westerners might not be as free as we would like to think.
Eleutheria is the Greek term for liberty. Eunoia, in addition to being the shortest English word containing all five vowels, comes from Greek meaning "well mind" or "beautiful thinking" and is a rarely used medical term referring to a state of normal mental health.
Phronesis is the Greek word is most often translated as "practical wisdom" or prudence. Sophia is the other Greek word for wisdom sometimes translated as "theoretical wisdom". Young people can acquire sophia in their respective fields, but, as Aristotle pointed out, maturation is required for phronesia or prudence. Young people do not as yet as have the life experience of sufficient particular experiences that's necessary for prudence. This was clearly evident to Cicero who said:
"Rashness belongs to youth; prudence to old age,"
"Prudence is the knowledge of things to be sought, and those to be shunned."
"Precaution is better than cure"
One of the seven virtues, prudence is often misunderstood by young people as Kathryn Britton points out In Praise of Prudence from Positive Psychology News.
Generally speaking, adolescents understood them quite well, but I remember they had a tendency to confuse Humility with humiliation and Prudence with prudes. According the authors, “It seems that for most students, caution/prudence is a stuffy trait associated with timidity and lack of adventurousness.”
No wonder that "“The least prevalent character strengths in human beings are prudence, modesty, and self-regulation.”
Britton continues:
Psychologist Vincent Jeffries defines prudence as, “the use of reason to correctly discern that which helps and that which hinders realizing the good.” Think about all that entails: being able to project today’s actions into the future, to imagine the possible outcomes, and to form judgments about alternatives. I expect a person with the character strength prudence must have a high tolerance for ambiguity, needing to deal with incomplete and often conflicting information in order to make judgments.
As the expert contributor to the Prudence chapter in Character Strengths and Virtues, Nick Haslam identifies the following qualities of prudence:
• A foresighted stance toward the future, holding long-term goals and aspirations
• Ability to resist self-defeating impulses and to persist in beneficial activities, even if they lack immediate appeal (Grit anyone?)
• Reflective, deliberate, and practical thinking about life choices
• Ability to harmonize multiple goals into a “stable, coherent, and un-conflicted form of life.
• Ability to seek personal good without being collectively destructive.
In positive psychology, flourishing is “to live within an optimal range of human functioning, one that connotes goodness, generativity, growth, and resilience.”
Flourishing is the opposite of both pathology and languishing, which are described as living a life that feels both hollow and empty.
Flourishing is a positive psychology concept which is a measure of overall life well-being and is viewed as important to the idea of happiness
A pioneer in positive psychology, Corey Keyes describes flourishing thusly:
flourishing is the epitome of mentally healthy adults having high levels of emotional well-being; they are happy and satisfied; they tend to see their lives as having a purpose; they feel some degree of mastery and accept all parts of themselves; they have a sense of personal growth in the sense that they are always growing, evolving, and changing; finally, they have a sense of autonomy and an internal locus of control, they chose their fate in life instead of being victims of fate.
Keyes reports that only 18.1% of Americans are actually flourishing. The majority of Americans can be classified as mentally unhealthy (depressed) or not mentally unhealthy or flourishing (moderately mentally healthy/languishing).
He is quoted as saying,
"We are living longer — on average 30 years longer than at the start of the 20th century — yet we are not living healthier. The question is: Are we just living dependent and sick, or are we living healthy and able to contribute?"
"I think we set up an impossible task, because our hedonistic version of happiness is impossible to sustain. But it is quite possible to feel fulfilled and content and that the world is meaningful by aligning yourself with some ideals, something that is bigger and better than you, and trying to live up to it."
For a flourishing life, one that is well-lived, we do well to cultivate the virtue of prudence.
27 Everyday Things you Never Knew Had Names
1. Glabella
2. Vagitus - the cry of a newborn baby
3. Chanking - the food that you spit out
5. Niggly-Wiggly
6. Darkle
9. Nattiform
13. Punt
16. Brannock Divide
20. Collywobbles - butterflies in your stomach
26. Rasceta
You just have to go to the link to see the rest of the definitions and the photos that help explain
The Oxford English Dictionary chooses two words of the year; one for the British and one for the Americans.
American word of the year: gif
'gif,' short for graphics interchange format, a common format for moving images on the Internet. The editors said 'gif' was being recognized for making the crucial transition from noun to verb, 'to gif': to create a gif file of an image or video sequence, especially relating to an event. And, inevitably, to share it online.
British word of the year: omnishambles
It is defined as "a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations".
With institutions like the BBC in meltdown, the EU struggling to deliver a budget, and PR gaffes from the Government including Andrew Mitchell's row with policemen, many in Britain might not argue with the choice of phrase, the Daily Mail reported.
A wonderful word and very useful on this side of the pond as well.
These words have to do with the human body: lunule, philtrum, purlicue, phosphenes, paresthesia and wamble,
If you don't know what they mean, check here 25 Everyday Things You Never Knew Had Names
My favorites from the 25 handy words that don't exist in English
Age-tori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut
Gigil (pronounced Gheegle; Filipino): The urge to pinch of squeeze something that is unbearably cute
Meraki (pronounced may-ray-kee; Greek) Doing something with soul. creativity or love. It's when you put something of yourself into what you're doing.
10 Words Originating from Greek Mythology
Atlas
Chronological and Chronic
Echo
Erotic
Hypnosis
Morphine
Narcissism
Nemesis
Tantalizing
Enjoy the explanations and images at the link like this painting by the genius Caravaggio representing Narcissus
25 Everyday Things You Never Knew Had Names via First Thing's Joe Carter
How many of these do you know? One clue, I've got two tittles in my name.
Tittle, lunule, crepuscular rays, ferrule, gynecomastia, muntin, morton's toe, arms akimbo, desire path, semantic satiation, skeuomorph, brannock device, paresthesia, phosphens, armscye, wamble, feat, peen, rectal tenesmus, dysania, mondegreen, petrichor, philtrum, purlicue, aglet.
From Mental Floss, 15 wonderful words that have no English equivalent. My favorites.
3. Slampadato (Italian)
Addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons? This word describes you.
4. Luftmensch (Yiddish)
There are several Yiddish words to describe social misfits. This one is for an impractical dreamer with no business sense. Literally, air person.
12. Glas wen (Welsh)
A smile that is insincere or mocking. Literally, a blue smile.
14. Boketto (Japanese)
It’s nice to know that the Japanese think enough of the act of gazing vacantly into the distance without thinking to give it a name.
15. Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Literally, grief bacon.
Some useful new words petrichor, zarf, chanking, scroop,
10 Things You Didn't Know Had Names
1. You know how it smells after it rains? That clean, greenish smell? That’s petrichor, from the Greek petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of Greek gods and goddesses). The term was coined by two Australian researchers in 1964.
2. Originally, a zarf was a metal chalice keep the heat from your coffee from burning your fingers. The fancy cupholder has morphed into the modern-day cardboard sleeve that comes wrapped around your hot coffee.
3. Chanking: Chewed-up food that’s been spit out. (Try to avoid giving us reason to use this one, ok?)
4. Scroop is the rustling, swooshy sound ballgowns make. More specifically, it’s the sound produced by the movement of silk
David Brooks on The New Humanism or how to enlarge the too simplistic current definition of human capital as IQ and professional skills
Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view.
This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.
to include to include qualities you may not have heard of, but can recognize immediately as important for the full
flourishing of human life.
Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.
Report shows that Christians are the most persecuted religion in the world.
Out of every ten people, seven can not live their faith in full freedom. And the most persecuted religion is Christianity, with at least 200 million people suffering from discrimination.
“Political oppression and discrimination, come from countries like China, from Cuba, from North Korea, and from countries like Vietnam.”
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“Places like Saudi Arabia where it's impossible for any Christian or indeed any other group, non-Muslim group, to organize and to have open public prayer. We think of places like Somalia, or we think of Sudan.”
--The report also reveals that religious freedom has declined in the United States and Europe by the radicalization of secularism. Especially in countries like Spain, which prohibits the presence of religious symbols in public places. France was cited for the discrimination of Islamic communities and Germany for the hostility of some sectors against the Catholic Church because of its position on family issues and defense of life.
Here's an example of the radicalization of secularism: The Southern poverty Law Center has classified 18 pro-family groups as "hate" groups including the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage.
In response, FRC president Tony Perkins charged that the SPLC was engaging in “a deliberately timed smear campaign” against FRC’s nearly 30 years of action “with civility and passion.”
“We hold to the indisputable fact that the family- a Dad, a Mom, and children - is the best building block of a good society, which is why we oppose efforts to transform it based on personal sexual preference,” he said in a Nov. 24 statement.
He called on the law center to apologize for its “slanderous attack and attempted character assassination.”
Maggie Gallagher, chairman of the board for the National Organization for Marriage, spoke about the SPLC article and list in a Nov. 29 interview with CNA. She called it an “absurd distraction” and a “very sad” move for “a once-great civil rights organization.”
“What we’re seeing now is the next phase of the gay rights movement,” she warned. She noted homosexual rights activist Dan Savage’s claim in the Washington Post that the country should get to a point where same-sex marriage isn’t debatable.
“This is part of the unfolding process of attempting to redefine Christian teaching on sex and marriage as the moral, legal and cultural equivalent of racism.”
“I do believe this is the goal of the architects of the gay marriage movement,” Gallagher stated. “And they’re making it very clear.
In a Nov. 29 e-mail to CNA, Princeton University law professor and National Organization for Marriage chairman emeritus Robert P. George compared the action to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s smearing of opponents by accusing them of being communist sympathizers.
20 Obsolete English Words that Should Make a Comeback
I like "freck" which means to move swiftly or nimbly, "brabble" meaning to quarrel noisily about trifles and "quagswagging" which is the action of shaking to and fro.
And I especially like this wonderful short film of Words.Tony Judt on Words
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”
I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.
Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.
A supremacy of dinosaurs
A dignity of dragons
A fondle of unicorns
A shroud of ghouls
A hustle of brownies
A lawn of gnomes
A clangor of robots
A harem of sexbots
A culture of viruses
If you love new words as much as I, you'll enjoy the Stoakes-Whibley Natural Index of Supernatural Collective Nouns over at the book of joe.
"Whatever' is voted the most irritating word in the English language.
Absolutely right.
It's not a new kind of cloud, just a rare one that just got its name: Asperatus. "Asperatus comes from the Latin verb aspero, meaning "to roughen up" or "agitate". The poet Vergil used it to describe the surface of a choppy sea."
The Royal Meteorological Society is now gathering detailed information for the days and locations where the asperatus clouds have been seen in an attempt to understand exactly what is causing them.
Officials will then apply to the UN's World Meteorological Organisation in Geneva to have the new cloud type considered for addition into the International Cloud Atlas, the system used by meteorologists across the globe.
A new mental illness that is so destructive that some psychiatrists are urging that bitterness be considered a mental illness - post traumatic embitterment disorder. I think we all know or have met people of this sort.
"They feel the world has treated them unfairly. It's one step more complex than anger. They're angry plus helpless," says Dr. Michael Linden, a German psychiatrist who named the behavior.
Embittered people are typically good people who have worked hard at something important, such as a job or a relationship or activity, Linden says. When something unexpectedly awful happens -- they don't get the promotion, the wife files for divorce or they fail to make the Olympic team -- a profound sense of injustice overtakes them. Instead of dealing with the loss with the help of family and friends, they cannot let go of the feeling of being victimized. Almost immediately after the traumatic event, they become angry, pessimistic, aggressive, hopeless haters.
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There are only a handful of studies on the behavior, but psychiatrists meeting Monday were in agreement that much more research is needed on identifying and helping these people. One estimate is that 1% to 2% of the population are embittered, says Linden, who has published several studies on the behavior.
"These people usually don't come to treatment because 'the world has to change, not me,' " Linden says. "They are almost treatment resistant.... Revenge is not a treatment."
Merriam-Webster has chosen "w00t" as the word of the year, blending as it does whimsey and new technology.
w00t, the hybrid of letters and numbers, if you don't know is an exclamation of happiness or triumph, first used by gamers.
Last year, the word of the year was truthiness.
Who hasn't used many of the words or phrases listed below?
forever and a day
all corners of the world
it's Greek to me
short shrift
household words
thin air
fixtures
tongue-tied.
seen better days,
good riddance,
charmed life,
for goodness sake,
didn't sleep a wink,
in a pickle
heart of gold.
laughable,
laughingstock,
zany,
gloomy,
excitement,
bedroom,
luggage
worthless.
All first came from the mind of William Shakespeare. A Way with Words.
Why career planning is a waste of time
Or why your best guess beats careful planning.
In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it.
We are very poor at what will make us happy in the future, We "miswant."
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information.
Maybe the Chaos Theory of Career Development makes more sense.
if you ask people about their career decisions, almost 70% report that they have been significantly influenced by chance events.
This seems to tie in with Purposive Drift: Making it Up as We Go Along by Richard Oliver at Change This
Your life is not a project plan. Nobody knows where they will be in five years time.
Life is more open, much messier, more ambiguous, more complex, more mysterious, more surprising and filled with more possibilities for good or for ill than we can possibly imagine.
He argues that we revert to "machine-like' thinking because it promises a world of predictability and certainty to mask the frightening thought of our own fragility.
He says we are all more ignorant than we know and smarter than we think and believes our real compass point is our sense of well-being.
Making it up as you go along, he calls Purposive Drift and that's a perfectly reasonable, responsible and realistic approach to life.
Seems to be the one I took.
My favorite battlefield slang from Iraq via Austin Bay
Battle rattle: Slang for combat gear. "Full battle rattle" means wearing and carrying everything (helmet, body armor, weapons).
Beltway clerk: A derisive term for a Washington political operative or civilian politician.
Blackwater: Specifically, a private security firm operating in Iraq. Used as slang, can mean any private security firm. "Gone to Blackwater" indicates that a soldier quit the armed services and went to work for a private security firm.
Blue canoe: Slang for a portable toilet.
Bohica: Bend Over, Here It Comes Again. Pronounced "bo-HEE-ka." Means "we're about to get screwed, as usual." This term was in use in the Army in the 1960s.
Embrace the suck: Phrase heard in OIF1 (the original Operation Iraqi Freedom force). Translation: The situation is bad, but deal with it.
Flash-blasted: Being screamed at or chewed out by the unit's senior noncommissioned officer.
Groundhog Day: Every day of your tour in Iraq.
O dark 30: Pronounced "oh dark thirty." A word play on military time. Means a very early hour during the night. ("We had to get up at oh-dark-thirty.")
PUC: Person Under Custody. ("We got two PUCs on that last raid.")
Turkey peek: To glance around or over an object or surface, such as a corner or wall.
Waxed: To get hit hard or get killed.
What is it like to be autistic? Take a look at In My Language on YouTube.
When you watch it, it's like being in someone else's skin. Odd, compelling and strange.
33 names of things you never knew had names.
via Jonah Goldberg who I think spends more time sniffing out timewasters and utterly useless bits of information that anyone I know.
minimus, ophryon, rasceta and columella nasis all describe parts of the body.
Lovely words to impress your friends and family with anytime.
American researchers have coined a new term. Middlescents are those workers between 35 and 54 who have burned themselves out.
Work Stressful? You may be a middlescent
The middlescent is frustrated, confused and exasperated, finding themselves leaving work feeling "burned out, bottlenecked and bored".
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"It is a critical time for people and they have to rethink their whole life. Should they be less ambitious? Should they spend more time with their family?
"The critical time for that used to be well into your 50s, now it's getting younger.
It's what used to be called a mid-life crisis, but it seems to be happening earlier now. I think highly educated people who live in this world of abundance we enjoy today have more opportunities for identity crises throughout their lives. That's a good thing because it's usually a crisis that forces you to assess your life and find new meaning and passion.
I came across this quote today from Peter Drucker and it's such a good question that it's worth asking repeatedly over time.
"What can you and only you do, that if done well, can make a real difference."
It seems like we're in the middle of an epidemic of ADT or attention deficit trait according to Dr. Edward Hallowell and it's making us dumber.
Why can't you pay attention anymore?
the constant and relentless chatter coming from our computers, phones and other high-tech devices is diluting our mental powers....you've become so busy attending to so many inputs and outputs that you become increasingly distracted, irritable, impulsive, restless and, over the long term, underachieving.
Multitasking doesn't work either though the attempt to do so can get your adrenaline going. Hallowell says no one really multitasks. You just spend less time on any one thing.
It's the great seduction of the information age. You can create the illusion of doing work and of being productive and creative when you're not. You're just treading water.
Remember frazzing? That's the frantic, ineffective multitasking, typically with the delusion that you're getting a lot done.
The brain doesn't multitask, it toggles among tasks rather than processing all tasks simultaneously.
Says Hallowell
We need to preserve time to stop and think.
If you don't allow yourself to stop and think, you're not getting the best of your brain. What your brain is best equipped to do is to think, to analyze, to dissect and create. And if you're simply responding to bits of stimulation, you won't ever go deep.
When you hit your funny bone, you say "Ouch" or swear because it somehow relieves the pain.
When someone else sneezes, you say "Gesundheit" or 'God bless you'.
What do you say when someone else hits their funny bone on knee or elbow?
"Uffda" (OOF-dah) is a Swedish onomatopoetic word, a sympathetic exclamation when somebody else is in pain.
According to Howard Reingold in "They Have a Word for It , it combines "Ouch for you" and "Oh, I'm sorry you hurt yourself."
We are always interested in "new" emotions. Though I doubt whether there really are any new emotions that are unrelated to our relationship with technology.
After all, we humans are pretty much the same as humans were a thousand, two thousand years ago except we know what's happened since and we build on what's gone before.
We begin to make finer descriptions of and distinctions between feelings. I was quite surprised to learn that "empathy" as a word didn't exist 100 years ago, though "pity" and "sympathy" did.
Elevation is a new word to describe that warm tingling feeling in the chest you feel when seeing, even reading about, acts of kindness or heroism that motivates you to be better.
Now there's idolspize, a word that succinctly describes the tricky emotion between idolizing and despising in the Washington Post.
The best book I know about "new" emotions is "They Have a Word for It : A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases by Howard Rheingold.
It's so good that I've decided to create a new category so I can talk about some of them.