Category: Recalibrate
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As a word, ‘woke’ is a culture war casualty. It’s a word that once meant ‘pay attention, your life might depend on it’ is now tossed around like a slur—or worse, a joke. ’Woke’ was originally a word of deep awareness and resistance in African-American vernacular; to stay woke meant survival, vigilance, and solidarity. But…
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Sometimes we fall so much in love with something, a subject of our desire so tantalizing, it redefines our entire life path. When it works out, and we set ourselves on our merry way, things look bright and the universe appears to bend to our will. Of course, physics do their thing and all of…
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Grandiloquent is the adjective form of the noun grandiloquence, which means, “a lofty, extravagantly colorful, pompous, or bombastic style, manner, or quality—especially in language.” (Merriam-Webster) From that Merriam-Webster page, we learn that it’s one of many English words descended from the Latin verb loqui, meaning “to speak.” To be grandiloquent is, in short, to speak…
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Yesterday, I was looking up a word from my reading notes of Carl Sagan’s final book, Billions and Billions: adumbration. When I looked it up, I was given the verb ‘adumbrate,’ which seems to mean one of three things, according to Merriam Webster: The online editors also offer some helpful context, quipping: “Don’t throw shade…
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In high school I became obsessed with the concept of the definition essay. Blame the SAT prep we were constantly doing in English class, I suppose. Between begrudgingly scribbling out five-paragraph essays with absolutely no effort put into them, I started taking some word that I wanted to vibe with and just tried to not…