josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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3 May '13 02:55:28 AM

'Public', i.e., for the grownups.

1 May '13 08:33:51 PM

Even some kinds of tactlessness call for tact.

'Tact', mid seventeenth century (denoting the sense of touch): via French from Latin tactus 'touch, sense of touch', from tangere 'to touch'.

Tact is not just having a light touch, but knowing when to use a light touch, and when not to—and having the control and sensitivity to be able to touch lightly. Which means, not to disturb—not to stir up.

Touch here has to do with intimacy, with privacy, with what is concealed or (better) what is visible but unacknowledged.

1 May '13 06:41:23 PM

Snow.

1 May '13 04:20:27 AM

—They're exposed when they talk on the phone. By picking up the phone, they risk exposure.

28 Apr '13 07:08:21 AM

They sure talk on the phone a lot on NYPD Blue.

28 Apr '13 03:39:02 AM

'''We never solved it because we felt that it would be a disservice to the real girl, to have this fake TV solution,'' Mr. Fontana explained. ''Because it's not O.K. that she died, that no one took responsibility.'''

27 Apr '13 06:44:55 PM

A verb of Dewey's, 'qualify', like an abstraction of 'redden' or 'quicken'.

27 Apr '13 06:44:02 AM

'Tear his life apart', an investigator is sometimes told, because a life still in one piece might conceal something the rest of us need to know.

—Lives fold within themselves, hide more life behind the life. —Our lives conceal themselves from others, not necessarily through anything we do, but in the course of their being lived. —We live lives which are almost never fully open to view by others, laid out, capable of being taken in 'by inspection'. —'A life' isn't just looked at, or even looked into, when the stakes for knowing are highest.

27 Apr '13 03:49:40 AM

'These are self-portraits of the artist as someone who knows inspiration is the least important part of creativity, and that art is more a matter of problem-solving than personal expression.'