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…

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…