Synonyms Of The Word Quotes

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

Intoxicated? The word did not express it by a mile. He was oiled, boiled, fried, plastered, whiffled, sozzled, and blotto.

Is there another word for synonym?

Call me," she whispered to him with a confidence that would fade as the days passed. Qhuinn smiled a little. "Take care." At the sound of the two words, Blay relaxed, his big shoulders easing up. In Qhuinn-landia, "Take care" was synonymous with "I'm never going to see, call or fuck you again.

The word feminism has become synonymous with man-hating when in fact it has more to do with women than men.

There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.

Lights," I said softly. This had become my favorite word over the past week. In my mind, it had become synonymous with freedom.

English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.

Everything turned on the word "we", a synonym for love, the thing that saves us all.

In normal life, "simplicity" is synonymous with "easy to do," but when a chef uses the word, it means "takes a lifetime to learn.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

Pride is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what would have others think of us.

To the ancient Greeks the word, dikaiosini,justice was often synonymous with ekdikisis,vengeance.

Colors flash like promises and black flickers like static, like memories, and everything is falling, falling, remembering, falling, remembering, the two words synonymous.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: babydoll. Pull on a sweater and, in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words? Thousands of hours of therapy have yielded a few ideas from the good doctors. They are often feminine, in a Dick and Jane, pink vs. puppy dog tails sort of way. Or they're flat-out negative. Number of synonyms for anxious carved in my skin: eleven. The one thing I know for sure is that at the time, it was crucial to see these letters on me, and not just see them, but feel them. Burning on my left hip: petticoat. And near it, my first word, slashed on an anxious summer day at age thirteen: wicked. I woke up that morning, hot and bored, worried about the hours ahead. How do you keep safe when your whole day is as wide and empty as the sky? Anything could happen. I remember feeling that word, heavy and slightly sticky across my pubic bone. My mother's steak knife. Cutting like a child along red imaginary lines. Cleaning myself. Digging in deeper. Cleaning myself. Pouring bleach over the knife and sneaking through the kitchen to return it. Wicked. Relief. The rest of the day, I spent ministering to my wound. Dig into the curves of W with an alcohol-soaked Q-tip. Pet my cheek until the sting went away. Lotion. Bandage. Repeat.

But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.

The qualities that make for excellence in children's literature can be summed up in a single word: imagination. And imagination as it relates to the child is, to my mind, synonymous with fantasy. Contrary to most of the propaganda in books for the young, childhood is only partly a time of innocence. It is, in my opinion, a time of seriousness, bewilderment, and a good deal of suffering. It's also possibly the best of all times. Imagination for the child is the miraculous, freewheeling device he uses to course his way through the problems of every day....It's through fantasy that children achieve catharsis.

And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.

You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.

I entered the word “crisis” into Thesaurus.com, it suggested “hot potato” as a synonym. I could not write this book without letting you know that Thesaurus.com lists “hot potato” as a synonym for “crisis.

But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for good or for bad.

Let us remind ourselves of the terminology. A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think about doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don't believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist's metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

People are often dismissive of librarians and libraries - as if the words are synonymous with boredom or timidity. But isn't that where the best stories are kept? Hidden away on the library bookshelves, lost and forgotten, waiting, waiting, until someone like me comes along, and wants to borrow them?

I moaned in frustration, trapped between desire and fear. “God, Roth.” “In your life, at this time, those two words could be considered synonymous.

Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it it very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or the other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have other think of us.

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick.

Once we have our atium, we'll be happy." "Not to mention rich," Ham added. "The two words are synonyms, Hammond," Breeze said.

That night was the first time in my life I felt like the words “gay” and “alone” weren’t synonyms for each other.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still...In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?

the word "dying" was not synonymous with "useless.

I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.

Sadness and grief aren’t the same thing. It’s why they have different words. Maybe it’s a subtle distinction, but we don’t keep a word in a language if it doesn’t still have a purpose of its own. Synonyms are never exact things.

This is what I think, but I don't say the words because the counterpoint of yes and no, love and hate, fear and longing, the need to tear down and the need to build up are synonymous and one.

It is easy enough to write and talk about God while remaining comfortable within the contemporary intellectual climate. Even people who would call themselves unbelievers often use the word gesturally, as a ready-made synonym for mystery. But if nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.

If a man is only as good as his word, then I want to marry a man with a vocabulary like yours. The way you say dicey and delectable and octogenarian in the same sentence — that really turns me on. The way you describe the oranges in your backyard using anarchistic and intimate in the same breath. I would follow the legato and staccato of your tongue wrapping around your diction until listening become more like dreaming and dreaming became more like kissing you. I want to jump off the cliff of your voice into the suicide of your stream of consciousness. I want to visit the place in your heart where the wrong words die. I want to map it out with a dictionary and points of brilliant light until it looks more like a star chart than a strategy for communication. I want to see where your words are born. I want to find a pattern in the astrology. I want to memorize the scripts of your seductions. I want to live in the long-winded epics of your disappointments, in the haiku of your epiphanies. I want to know all the names you’ve given your desires. I want to find my name among them, ‘cause there is nothing more wrecking sexy than the right word. I want to thank whoever told you there was no such thing as a synonym. I want to throw a party for the heartbreak that turned you into a poet. And if it is true that a man is only as good as his word then, sweet jesus, let me be there the first time you are speechless, and all your explosive wisdom becomes a burning ball of sun in your throat, and all you can bring yourself to utter is, oh god, oh god.

...who is looking at my mouth like he has just discovered the perfect synonym for a word that doesn't have any.

A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.

But in District 12, where the word tribute is pretty much synonymous with the word corpse, volunteers are all but extinct.

Vengence, betrayal, and love they all are synonyms for the same word: fake.

Both sexes have assholes, and both sexes have nipples. Yet only asshole is a genderless derogatory term. In the name of equality and linguistic diversity, I’m going to start using the word nipple as a synonym for asshole. Example: “Bra, you’re being an asshole.” “Nah, bra, you’re being the nipple.

I tried to find a word for it in my thesaurus, but there isn't one. At least, not one that doesn't belittle the plight of POWs and victims of famine. I guess we can just call it beyond suck. -Lulu Dark

Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. Deists differ from theists in that their God does not answer prayers, is not interested in sins or confessions, does not read our thoughts and does not intervene with capricious miracles. Deists differ from pantheists in that the deist God is some kind of cosmic intelligence, rather than the pantheist’s metaphoric or poetic synonym for the laws of the universe. Pantheism is sexed-up atheism. Deism is watered-down theism.

When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.

You think—I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it We’re destroying words—scores of them hundreds of them every day. It’s a beautiful thing the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms there are also the antonyms.

June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury. June had become a good listener.

Good for you. The word ‘faster’ is becoming a synonym of ‘better.’ As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet.

I said what might have been a bad word meaning excrement, but I hope that I used a polite synonym.

A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly.

The word “whale” was almost always synonymous with monster and interchangeable with giant.

Many times busyness is often mistakenly equated with productivity. But those words are not synonymous. Just because we're spinning our wheels, rushing from one commitment to the next, doesn't necessarily mean that we are doing anything worthwhile.

word “discipline” often evokes strong emotional reactions, particularly because it is often used synonymously with “punishment.” However, the original meaning of discipline is “to teach.

Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions. A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It’s also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It’s hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book.

For all that was happening to him, his voice was strong and inviting, and his mind was vibrating with a million thoughts. He was intent on proving that the word 'dying' was not synonymous with 'useless'.

Either A is B or C is D,” means, “if A is not B, C is D; and if C is not D, A is B.” All hypothetical propositions, therefore, though disjunctive in form, are conditional in meaning; and the words hypothetical and conditional may be, as indeed they generally are, used synonymously.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” At

He was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless’.

The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.

Why, in fact, is the word pain rarely used when describing depression? The dictionary uses synonyms such as melancholy, despondency, and sadness.

Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the profusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact synonyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning,

because words can encompass so much of the illusion of synonyms, and because metaphor is often subject to transformation: from “my homeland is not a suitcase” to “my homeland is a suitcase.

A brick could be used to say hello in a foreign language. Like most great words, it’d also have synonyms. One such synonym would be the word “Duck!” Not a Feathery Quack Maker, but Get down!


When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don’t use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.

One word to sum up and classify the unfathomable. An empty word. Change, transformation, shift: synonyms that appear to mean the same thing, though the choice of one over the other speaks to a distinct view of the world.

As their notoriety spread, these lethal men became known by a single word—Hassassin—literally “the followers of hashish.” The name Hassassin became synonymous with death in almost every language on earth. The word was still used today, even in modern English . . . but like the craft of killing, the word had evolved. It was now pronounced assassin.

Promises are like silly jokes, told around a table when the food is good and no one has anything to lose by telling a lie or two - lies should have been a synonym for the word 'promise' in dictionaries, but only a few people knew it.

...The words testament and covenant are virtually synonymous in their theological usage, the Latin definition of testamentum being "a covenant with God, holy scripture." Thus, the Old and New Testaments, as we commonly refer to them, are written testimonies or witnesses (the Latin testis meaning "witness") of the covenants between God and man in various dispensations.

It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days. I will not pass away. Every day millions of people pass away—in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation, e-mails to the corpse’s friends—but people don’t die. Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath, join their dear ones in heaven, meet their Maker, ascend to a better place, succumb surrounded by family, return to the Lord, go home, cross over, or leave this world. Whatever the fatuous phrase, death usually happens peacefully (asleep) or after a courageous struggle (cancer). Sometimes women lose their husbands. (Where the hell did I put him?) Some expressions are less common in print: push up the daisies, kick the bucket, croak, buy the farm, cash out. All euphemisms conceal how we gasp and choke turning blue.

Equality in mutual relations with the solidarity arising from it, this is the most powerful weapon of the animal world in the struggle for existence. And equality is equity. By proclaiming ourselves anarchists, we proclaim before- hand that we disavow any way of treating others in which we should not like them to treat us; that we will no longer tolerate the inequality that has allowed some among us to use their strength, their cunning or their ability after a fashion in which it would annoy us to have such qualities used against ourselves. Equality in all things, the synonym of equity, this is anarchism in very deed. It is not only against the abstract trinity of law, religion, and authority that we declare war. By becoming anarchists we declare war against all this wave of deceit, cunning, exploitation, depravity, vice --in a word, inequality-- which they have poured into all our hearts. We declare war against their way of acting, against their way of thinking. The governed, the deceived, the exploited, the prostitute, wound above all else our sense of equality. It is in the name of equality that we are determined to have no more prostituted, exploited, deceived and governed men and women.

The word “see” is often used as a direct synonym for “understand”—“I see what you mean.” Yet sometimes we see but we don’t understand; worse, we see, then “understand” something that isn’t true at all. Done well, a picture of data is worth the proverbial thousand words.

I don't know why people start thank you notes with the word 'just'. Just a quick note to thank you for a wonderful time. Just wanted to say thanks for everything. It reduces expecations right from the start. It says: I understand the importance of saying thank you, but I won't be writing a letter. It says: I'd like to follow the best social conventions, but I won't be spending that much time on it. I've even seen stationery that has "Just a note" printed on the front. If you start there, why write the note at all? Consider the synonyms: merely, barely. Would you write: barely a note to thank you for the visit? Merely a hasty parargaph to acknowledge all you did for me?

It has to do with intelligence. Yes. And again, when you’re talking about intelligence you’re talking about number. A claim that the mathless are quick to frown upon. It’s about calculation and the nature of calculation. Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you dont understand numbers you wont even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial—or not—depending on their nature. Of course one might also add that intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water.

Grumbling, murmuring, whining—whatever synonym you want to ascribe to complaining, they all have the same effect. They quench the Spirit of the Lord. Again, the language of heaven is thanksgiving, praise, and gratefulness. Complaining isn’t the language the Lord speaks; it’s not in His vocabulary.

Writing is, like gender or dominatricing, a kind of performance. But the craft of writing is primarily an art of making decisions. I often like to terrorize my students by insisting that every single notation—every piece of punctuation, every word, every paragraph break—in a piece of writing is a decision. You know when something is done, I tell them (they always want to know how to know when something is done), when you know the argument for every single choice, when not a single apostrophe has slipped by uninterrogated, when every word has been swapped for its synonym and then recovered. I don’t mean to take the fun out of creation, or even to impose my own laborious process on them, but I actually believe this. Not in the first draft, or even the fifth, but by the end, I want to have stripped as many tics and defaults, as many blind choices as is in my power. I want to be awake to all my choices.

Poverty looks grim to grown people; still more so to children: they have not much idea of industrious, working, respectable poverty; they think of the word only as connected with ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and debasing vices: poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.

It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true. By their very nature, myths inhere both legitimacy and credibility. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea, or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead, or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad, is to ask irrelevant questions. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is “What do these stories mean?

What gives this zeugma its flavor of oddness is that one of the meanings of the verb “restore” that it depends on is “to return something that has been lost”, while the other meaning used is “to make something regain its former, more ideal state”, and although these two senses of the same word are clearly related, they are just as clearly not synonymous.

The word ‘faster’ is becoming a synonym of ‘better.’ As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet.

He was intent on proving that the word "dying" was not synonymous with "useless.

Illusion is the best synonym for the word religion!

I've spent my entire life chasing wonder, and to me that word is synonymous with spirituality.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color.

He was intent on proving that the word “dying” was not synonymous with “useless.

Nothing holds back human progress as frequently as the misbelief that the words ‘impossible’ and ‘improbable’ are synonyms.

A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope.

Afraid of the word “politics” (which eventually became a synonym for Communism

Cancer accepted no substitutes. That was why we all shuddered when the word was uttered. Cancer was synonymous with loss of control for everyone involved.

Alone. Yes, that’s the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn’t hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.…

Dear final daughter, You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say all men are synonyms none the word you’re looking for

The first objection to Darwinism is that it is only a guess and was never anything more. It is called a 'hypothesis,' but the word 'hypothesis,' though euphonious, dignified and high-sounding, is merely a scientific synonym for the old-fashioned word 'guess.' If Darwin had advanced his views as a guess they would not have survived for a year, but they have floated for half a century, buoyed up by the inflated word 'hypothesis.' When it is understood that “hypothesis” means 'guess,' people will inspect it more carefully before accepting it.

Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings.

The word objective is sometimes taken to be synonymous with quantitative, but it isn’t. Instead it means seeing beyond our personal biases and prejudices and toward the truth of a problem.

Why is the word ‘settled’ synonymous with fixedness? Doesn’t settling down signify that you are content with your life? I’m content with my life at this point, and therefore, I feel settled.

We seem to measure the value of people’s contributions (and sometimes their entire lives) by their level of public recognition. In other words, worth is measured by fame and fortune. Our culture is quick to dismiss quiet, ordinary, hardworking men and women. In many instances, we equate ordinary with boring or, even more dangerous, ordinary has become synonymous with meaningless.

In French printer's jargon, cliche (which mimicked the sound of a mold striking molten metal) was a synonym for stereotype, which in turn evolved from the Greek for "solid impression." A stereotype was a printing plate that duplicated typography and that was used by the printer in lieu of the original. So a cliche is a word or phrase used over and over again in lieu of the original.

Crime and Punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment-- absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski's mind--no, I still didn't quite see...

The Athenaeum always managed to have a scribe on hand whenever anything interesting seemed like it might happen. Durham avoided scribes, figuring that 'interesting' was not a word that was necessarily synonymous with 'pleasant'.

At four Bela was developing a memory. The word yesterday entered her vocabulary, though its meaning was elastic, synonymous with whatever was no longer the case. The past collapsed, in no particular order, contained by a single word.

Stress and anxiety influence our way of reducing the ambiguity of the world around us, as well as, therefore, our biases. Studies have shown that people with anxiety21 reduce the ambiguity of certain words in a more negative manner than others. If we ask someone with anxiety what the word “mug” means, they will have a tendency to answer it means to attack (as opposed to the more neutral synonym for “cup” or slang for “face”). This is what we call interpretation bias.

I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low by-word among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly.

Let us now turn for a moment to the word karman which has been cited above. The meanings of the verbal root kar, present also in the Latin creare and the Greek κραίνω [kraino], are to make, do, and effect. And significantly, just as the Latin facere is originally sacra facere, literally “make sacred,” and as the Greek πoιέω = ἱερoπoιέω [poieo = hieropoieo], so karman is originally and very often not merely “work” or “making,” but synonymous with yajna, “sacrifice” and also with vrata, “sacred operation,” “obedience,” “sphere of activity,” “function,” and especially as in the Bhagavad Gita, with dharma, “justice” or “natural law.” In other words, the idea is deeply rooted in our humanity that there is no real distinction of work from holy works, and no necessary opposition of profane to sacred activities. And it is precisely this idea that finds such vivid expression in the well-known Indian philosophy of action, the “Way of Works” (karmamarga) of the Bhagavad Gita.

words in the Oxford English Dictionary? antidisestablishmentarianism—in short, conservatism; getting in the way of change. floccinaucinihilipilification—the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. MY FATHER’S FAVORITE COMEBACK IN AN ARGUMENT: “DON’T be facetious.” Nothing I said had meaning. It was always simplistic, flippant, juvenile, unsubstantiable, silly, girlish. The synonyms pile up, evacuating whatever claim I’d made, whatever feeling or fact stood behind the claim, turning my mouth into a black hole. Now, educated by Rebecca Solnit and Sarah Seltzer, I’d knowingly call what he was doing gaslighting, sealioning, lollipopping. Actually, I’d go one better: I’d call it Cordelia-ing: “Nothing comes from nothing. Speak again.” The rendering of a daughter as puppet, scripted, voice too sweet and low to carry meaning. No. I’d call it floccinaucinihilipilification. All the mansplaining tactics summed up: the action and habit of estimating something as worthless. It worked.

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

Ewww gross! I can't believe you thought I'd copulate with him." I cringe. "Please don't ever use that word again." "Copulate? What's wrong with it?" I make a face at her. "Nothing, just... never say it again in my presence." "What about fornicate?" Ugh , this is why I don't want kids. Was I this annoying as a teenager? "No." "Coitus?" "No." "Intercourse?" I glower at her. "It's fucking. Making love if you're into that wishy-washy bullshit, and sex if it's meaningless. No other terms." "Not even boinking?

Empathy has become a misused buzz-word. It is transformed into a catch all term for everything good as a synonym of the morality, kindness and compassion. It is frequently mistaken for sympathy, which means aligning yourself with someone suffering, not inhabiting it.

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still.

When people are calculating how much to give, and how much to hold back – like Jesus said, “You can’t serve me and Mammon at the same time.” When Jesus used the word ‘Mammon,’ he used it to be almost synonymous with pleasure. So Jesus said, “You can’t serve me and Mammon at the same time. If you want to be my disciple, you have to leave Mammon.” If you’re seeking comfort – it’s not that you shouldn’t be comfortable; it’s not about having comfort or not, but if you’re seeking comfort, forget it. This path is definitely not yours. What he said is very true. The

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and ‘punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water.

Fore Word Poetry and prayer are synonymous in my life, and because both are a gift, which I accept with joy and sometimes pain, I seldom know whether I have served the gift well or ill. But perhaps that doesn't really matter; the important thing is to be willing - to want to serve the gift whenever it comes, either as verse or prayer... My heart's climate is not constant; I doubt if anyone's is. My inner weather shifts with the days. But much sunshine has shone on me through the sharing and giving and receiving. And so I am taught to pray. And so I am taught to be.

Basically, it was p’ch’zarni’chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K’turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word “squernt” (“the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper”) begins to approach it in general depth of feeling. The closest translation is as follows: the nasty little sound of a sword being unsheathed right behind one at just the point when one thought one had disposed of one’s enemies

Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn’t it a shame to let it slip away?

Phoebe Hurty hired me to write copy for ads about teen aged clothes. I had to wear the clothes I praised. That was part of the job. And I became friends with her two sons, who were my age. I was over at their house all the time. She would talk bawdily to me and her sons, and our girlfriends when we brought them around. She was funny. She was liberating. She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything. I now make my living being impolite. I am clumsy at it. I keep trying to imitate the impoliteness which was so graceful in Phoebe Hurty. I think now that grace was easier for her than it is for me because of the mood of the Great Depression. She believed what so many Americans believed then: that the nation would be happy and just and rational when prosperity came. I never hear that word anymore: Prosperity. It used to be a synonym for Paradise. And Phoebe Hurty was able to believe that the impoliteness she recommended would give shape to an American paradise. Now her sort of impoliteness is in fashion. But nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise. I sure miss Phoebe Hurty.

[What is honor]—I suspect that if, after reading this book, you were to go and ask the question of your friends and acquaintances, you might experience some difficultly finding someone who could give you, off the cuff, an accurate and adequate definition of honor. Those who do respond will probably offer synonyms, digging into their memories for other words that are seldom used in today's world, like integrity, probity, morality, and self-sufficiency based upon an ethical and moral code. Some might even refine that further to include a conscience, but no one has ever really succeeded in defining honor absolutely, because it is a very personal phenomenon, resonating differently in everyone who is aware of it. We seldom speak of it today, in our post-modern, post-everything society. It is an anachronism, a quaint, mildly amusing concept from a bygone time, and those of us who do speak of it and think of it are regarded benevolently, and condescendingly, as eccentrics. But honor, in every age except, perhaps, our own, has been highly regarded and greatly respected, and it has always been one of those intangible attributes that everyone assumes they possess naturally and in abundance. The standards established for it have always been high, and often artificially so, and throughout history battle standards have been waved as symbols of the honor and prowess of their owners. But for men and women of goodwill, the standard of honor has always been individual, jealously guarded, intensely personal, and uncaring of what others may think, say, or do.

Addicts wear the shit out of that word, to the point where it becomes synonymous with “I fucked up again, can we just pretend it never happened.” Our families, friends, co-workers, colleagues, are all sick of hearing us apologize. It’s meaningless. There is nothing to it, a simple cop-out for whatever insane behavior we recently

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously...Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us. (21) For herself, she was humbled; but [Elizabeth] was proud of [Darcy]. Proud that in a cause of compassion and honour, he had been able to get the better of himself. (175)

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.’s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It's also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that makes success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that makes success easier to achieve. It's hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book. When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they have enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.

In some instances, the process of pejoration rebrands a feminine word as an insult not for women but for men. Take the words buddy and sissy: Today, we might use sissy to describe a weak or overly effeminate man, while buddy is a synonym for a close pal. We don’t think of these words as being related, but in the beginning, buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It’s also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It’s hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them.

English. I believe the ultimate gauge of success is this: Does the text free the reader? Does it contribute to our physical and emotional health? Does it put “golden tools” into our hands that can help excavate the Beloved whom we and society have buried so deep inside? Persian poets of Hafiz’s era would often address themselves in their poems, making the poem an intimate conversation. This was also a method of “signing” the poem, as one might sign a letter to a friend, or a painting. It should also be noted that sometimes Hafiz speaks as a seeker, other times as a master and guide. Hafiz also has a unique vocabulary of names for God—as one might have endearing pet names for one’s own family members. To Hafiz, God is more than just the Father, the Mother, the Infinite, or a Being beyond comprehension. Hafiz gives God a vast range of names, such as Sweet Uncle, the Generous Merchant, the Problem Giver, the Problem Solver, the Friend, the Beloved. The words Ocean, Sky, Sun, Moon, and Love, among others, when capitalized in these poems, can sometimes be synonyms for God, as it is a Hafiz trait to offer these poems to many levels of interpretation simultaneously. To Hafiz, God is Someone we can meet, enter, and eternally explore.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It's also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that makes success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It's hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them.

You can’t serve God and Mammon.” When Jesus used the word “Mammon,” he used it almost synonymously with pleasure. So Jesus was saying that you can’t serve God and Mammon at the same time. If you want to be his disciple, you have to leave Mammon. It’s not that you shouldn’t be comfortable; it’s not about having comfort or not, but if you’re seeking comfort, forget it. This path is definitely not yours. What he said is very true.

Intelligence is a basic component of evil. The more stupid you are the less capable you are of doing harm. Except perhaps in a clumsy and inadvertent manner. The word cretin comes from the French chrétien. Supposedly if you could think of nothing good to say about a dullard you would say that he was a good Christian. Diabolical on the other hand is all but synonymous with ingenious. What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

Or, to express it differently, planning and competition can be combined only by planning for competition but not by planning against competition. It is of the utmost importance to the argument of this book for the reader to keep in mind that the planning against which all our criticism is directed is solely the planning against competition — the planning which is to be substituted for competition. This is the more important, as we cannot, within the scope of this book, enter into a discussion of the very necessary planning which is required to make competition as effective and beneficial as possible. But as in current usage "planning" has become almost synonymous with the former kind of planning, it will sometimes be inevitable for the sake of brevity to refer to it simply as planning, even though this means leaving to our opponents a very good word meriting a better fate.

In Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom reports that Morrie Schwartz, his former professor terminally ill with ALS, “was intent on proving that the word ‘dying’ was not synonymous with ‘useless.’” The immediate question is why one would have a need to prove this. No human being is “useless,” whether the helpless infant or the helpless ill or dying adult. The point is not to prove that dying people can be useful but to reject the spurious concept that people need to be useful in order to be valued. Morrie learned at a young age that his “value” depended on his ability to serve the needs of others. That same message, taken to heart by many people early in life, is heavily reinforced by the prevailing ethic in our society. All too frequently, people are given the sense that they are valued only for their utilitarian contribution and are expendable if they lose their economic worth.

Crime and Punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment-- absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski's mind--no, I still didn't quite see...

It’s always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we’ve lost more than the losing side’s version of history. We’ve lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs. He answers prayers; forgives or punishes sins; intervenes in the world by performing miracles; frets about good and bad deeds, and knows when we do them (or even think of doing them). A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs. Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings.

Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.

In Sri Lanka, the people you lived amongst, the people you went to school with, the people in whose houses you ate, whose jokes you shared: these were not the people you married. Quite possibly they were not your religion. More to the point they were probably not your caste. This word with its fearsome connotations was never, hardly ever used. But it was ever present: it muddied the waters of Sri Lanka's politics, it perfumed the air of her bed-chambers; it lurked, like a particularly noxious relative, behind the poruwa of every wedding ceremony. It was the c-word. People used its synonym, its acronym, its antonym-indeed any other nym that came to mind - in the vain hope its meaning would somehow go away. It didn't. But if the people you chose to associate with were the very ones you could not marry, then the ones you did marry were quite often people you wouldn't dream of associating with if you had any choice in the matter.

By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

The word “yoga” has become synonymous with physical postures in modern society, which is a narrow view, of course. Nevertheless, the popularity of yoga postures is a good thing. Once practitioners get a taste of the benefits that come from yoga postures, it is natural to look to the broader scope of yoga methods that are available, ultimately leading many to deep meditation, pranayama (breathing techniques), mudras, bandhas, and other practices comprising the multi-limbed tree of yoga.

The word caste, which has become synonymous with India, did not, it turns out, originate in India. It comes fro mthe Portuguese word casta, a Renaissance-era word for 'race' or 'breed,' The Portuguese, who were among the earliest European traders in South Asia, applied the term to the people of India upon observing Hindu divisions. Thus, a word we now ascribe to India actually arose from Europeans' interpretations of what they saw; it sprang from the Western culture that created America.

believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

GROW THE ACTION HABIT Practice these key points: 1. Be an activationist. Be someone who does things. Be a doer, not a don’t-er. 2. Don’t wait until conditions are perfect. They never will be. Expect future obstacles and difficulties and solve them as they arise. 3. Remember, ideas alone won’t bring success. Ideas have value only when you act upon them. 4. Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Do what you fear, and fear disappears. Just try it and see. 5. Start your mental engine mechanically. Don’t wait for the spirit to move you. Take action, dig in, and you move the spirit. 6. Think in terms of now. Tomorrow, next week, later, and similar words often are synonymous with the failure word, never. Be an “I’m starting right now” kind of person. 7. Get down to business—pronto. Don’t waste time getting ready to act. Start acting instead. 8. Seize the initiative. Be a crusader. Pick up the ball and run. Be a volunteer. Show that you have the ability and ambition to do. Get in gear and go!

Crime and punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged ‘crime’ and 'punishment’ side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment—absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski’s mind—no, I still didn’t quite see … Such thoughts were flashing through my head like a revolving lantern…

As for Resistances! They are almost an item of dogma in the current secular religion. Persons who would never dream of going to the time, expense, or trouble of a full analysis will tell you complacently that they have “a resistance” to this or that, and feel that they have done all and more than can be asked of them by admitting their handicap. Remarkable cures of resistances, however, have been observed in those who took solemnly the advice to replace that word with our ancestors’ outmoded synonym for the same thing: “bone-laziness.” It is not quite so much fun, nor so flattering, to be foolishly lazy as it is to be the victim of a technical term, but many are crippled for knowing an impressive word who would have had no such trouble if they had lived in a simpler and less self-indulgent society. Those who are genuinely, deeply, and unhappily in the grip of a neurosis should turn at once to one of the well known therapies. Unless one is willing to do so, it should be made a matter of social disapproval to refer technically to such difficulties.

So why did the King James translation of the Bible use the word ‘kill’ rather than ‘murder’? Because four hundred years ago when the translation was made, ‘kill’ was synonymous with ‘murder.’ As a result, some people don’t realize that English has changed since 1610 and therefore think that the Ten Commandments prohibit all killing. But, of course, they don’t. If the Ten Commandments forbade killing, we would all have to be vegetarians—killing animals would be prohibited. And we would all have to be pacifists—since we could not kill even in self-defense.

In today's church, the word "music" is often freely substituted for the idea of "worship"; however, music is not necessarily synonymous, or automatically interchangeable with, the idea of worship. People will often say, "It's time to worship" and what they mean is that it is time to begin singing. But, music is merely one form or means by which individuals can act on and express their worship to God. The substantive content of worship does not change, but there are many different ways in which worship of God is manifested through the actions of individuals.

It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of

Due to the monstrous activity of a handful of extremists, the majority of the human society has been conditioned to believe that the term 'musalman' is somehow synonymous with terrorism. But the reality is, the term 'musalman' refers to someone with 'musallam iman,' that means, a pure conscience. Thus any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves his or her neighbor is a Christian. Hence, scriptures can't define your religion, only your actions with other people do.

It might be worth pausing over the variety of ways in which we can think of signs in language, all of which have to do with the way in which a given sign might be chosen to go into a speech sentence. Take the word "ship." "Ship" is very closely related in sound to certain other words. We won't specify them for fear of a Freudian slip, but that is one cluster. That is one associational matrix or network that one can think of in the arrangement of that sign in language, but there are also synonyms for "ship": "bark, "boat," "bateau," a great many other synonyms--"sailboat," whatever. They, too, exist in a cluster: "steamship," "ocean liner," in other words, words that don't sound at all the same, but are contiguous in synonymity. They cluster in that way. And then furthermore "ship" is also the opposite of certain things, so that it would also enter into a relationship with "train," "car," "truck," "mule," modes of transportation, right? In all of these ways, "ship" is clustered associationally in language in ways that make it available to be chosen, available to be chosen as appropriate for a certain semantic context that we try to develop when we speak.

There is no natural safeguard in the English language against the faults of haste, distraction, timidity, dividedness of mind, modesty. English does not run on its own rails, like French, with a simply managed mechanism of knobs and levers, so that any army officer or provincial mayor can always, at a minute’s notice, glide into a graceful speech in celebration of any local or national event, however unexpected. The fact is that English has altogether too many resources for the ordinary person, and nobody holds it against him if he speaks or writes badly. The only English dictionary with any pretension to completeness as a collection of literary precedents, the Oxford English Dictionary, is of the size and price of an encyclopedia; and pocket-dictionaries do not distinguish sufficiently between shades of meaning in closely associated words: for example, between the adjectives ‘silvery’, ‘silvern’, ‘silver’, ‘silvered’, ‘argent’, ‘argentine’, ‘argentic’, ‘argentous’. Just as all practising lawyers have ready access to a complete legal library, so all professional writers (and every other writer who can afford it) should possess or have ready access to the big Oxford English Dictionary. But how many trouble about the real meanings of words? Most of them are content to rub along with a Thesaurus—which lumps words together in groups of so-called synonyms, without definitions—and an octavo dictionary. One would not expect a barrister to prepare a complicated insurance or testamentary case with only Everyman’s Handy Guide to the Law to help him; and there are very few books which one can write decently without consulting at every few pages a dictionary of at least two quarto volumes—Webster’s, or the shorter Oxford English Dictionary—to make sure of a word’s antecedents and meaning.

Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

Psychologist J.P. Guilford, who carried out a long series of systematic psychological studies into the nature of creativity, found that several factors were involved in creative thinking; many of these, as we shall see, relate directly to the cognitive changes that take place during mild manias as well. Fluency of thinking, as defined by Guilford, is made up of several related and empirically derived concepts, measured by specific tasks: word fluency, the ability to produce words each, for example, containing a specific letter or combination of letters; associational fluency, the production of as many synonyms as possible for a given word in a limited amount of time; expressional fluency, the production and rapid juxtaposition of phrases or sentences; and ideational fluency, the ability to produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements in a limited amount of time. In addition to fluency of thinking, Guilford developed two other important concepts for the study of creative thought: spontaneous flexibility, the ability and disposition to produce a great variety of ideas, with freedom to switch from category to category; and adaptive flexibility, the ability to come up with unusual types of solutions to set problems.

The world was filled with weapons and combat was a way of life. Perhaps the only way of life. He’d bled to whips and words, to punches and glances. He’d been bludgeoned by invisible shields, blindsided by unseen clubs, and had laboured under the chains of his own vows. And as Samar Dev would say, one survives by withstanding this onslaught, this history of the then and the now. To fail was to fall, but falling was not always synonymous with a quick, merciful death. Rather, one could fall into the slow dissolution, losses heaped high, that dragged a mortal to his or her knees. That made them slow slayers of themselves.

Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.” Much later,

It is now time to face the fact that English is a crazy language — the most loopy and wiggy of all tongues. In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day break but never fall? Why is it that when we transport something by car, it’s called a shipment, but when we transport something by ship, it’s called cargo? Why does a man get a hernia and a woman a hysterectomy? Why do we pack suits in a garment bag and garments in a suitcase? Why do privates eat in the general mess and generals eat in the private mess? Why do we call it newsprint when it contains no printing but when we put print on it, we call it a newspaper? Why are people who ride motorcycles called bikers and people who ride bikes called cyclists? Why — in our crazy language — can your nose run and your feet smell?Language is like the air we breathe. It’s invisible, inescapable, indispensable, and we take it for granted. But, when we take the time to step back and listen to the sounds that escape from the holes in people’s faces and to explore the paradoxes and vagaries of English, we find that hot dogs can be cold, darkrooms can be lit, homework can be done in school, nightmares can take place in broad daylight while morning sickness and daydreaming can take place at night, tomboys are girls and midwives can be men, hours — especially happy hours and rush hours — often last longer than sixty minutes, quicksand works very slowly, boxing rings are square, silverware and glasses can be made of plastic and tablecloths of paper, most telephones are dialed by being punched (or pushed?), and most bathrooms don’t have any baths in them. In fact, a dog can go to the bathroom under a tree —no bath, no room; it’s still going to the bathroom. And doesn’t it seem a little bizarre that we go to the bathroom in order to go to the bathroom? Why is it that a woman can man a station but a man can’t woman one, that a man can father a movement but a woman can’t mother one, and that a king rules a kingdom but a queen doesn’t rule a queendom? How did all those Renaissance men reproduce when there don’t seem to have been any Renaissance women? Sometimes you have to believe that all English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane: In what other language do they call the third hand on the clock the second hand? Why do they call them apartments when they’re all together? Why do we call them buildings, when they’re already built? Why it is called a TV set when you get only one? Why is phonetic not spelled phonetically? Why is it so hard to remember how to spell mnemonic? Why doesn’t onomatopoeia sound like what it is? Why is the word abbreviation so long? Why is diminutive so undiminutive? Why does the word monosyllabic consist of five syllables? Why is there no synonym for synonym or thesaurus? And why, pray tell, does lisp have an s in it? If adults commit adultery, do infants commit infantry? If olive oil is made from olives, what do they make baby oil from? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian consume? If pro and con are opposites, is congress the opposite of progress? ...

The Apocalypse gave you your time back. The time you can now use to look, to see, and to focus on your conscious process of cognitive evolution.” Master repeats the word ‘see’ in three local synonyms. Back then, they thought they all meant the same. Except, they didn’t. “The Apocalypse took your society, responsibilities, and useless recreations. Those were the distractions. Those things slow the process,” Master continues in the scene, the side of his face glowing from the daylight entering the cave. The visual details are as much as his brain retrieved from his memory. “Is this why monks hate recreation? Society?” Ruem asks—he looks just as Yuan’s memory recollected Ruem’s teenage self. “They don’t hate recreation,” Master says in the scene. “They just know they have to hate it.” “So, you like recreation?” Ruem asks in a confused tone. “Did I say I am a monk?” Master replies in the scene. “You never answer the question!” Ruem sounds annoyed. And for a moment, it makes the Monk—wrapped in the old shawl—smile as he watches his own old memory, remembering how impatient they both were before. “Fine,” Master begins. “The monks force themselves out of recreation because the rulebooks tell them to. People only follow rulebooks. But they don’t know why they should follow them. They don’t look at the true purpose of their rituals. They blindly follow, evolving neither spiritually nor physically.” “So, we should accept recreation, society?” asks Yuan’s teenage self, in the hologram scene. “Yes and No, my boy. It’s a perspective. You can find the secret from wherever you are as long as you aren’t drunk on indulgence, distracted from the One.” “Master, do you know why you wear orange cloth?” Ruem asks. “You caught me, my boy!” says Master, chuckling. “No, I don’t know. I wore it because the rulebooks told me to. Now it doesn’t matter which color I wear. No need for pointless rebellion over some uniform color!” “Because everything is the same?” Yuan’s teenage self asks. “Because everything is One.” Master’s eyes twinkle.

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution. But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

The Problem” always resulted in suicide. Fox News had reported the word so often that they were now using synonyms. “Self-destruction.” “Self-immolation.” “Hari-kari.” One anchorman described it as “personal erasing,” a phrase that did not catch on. Instructions from the government were reprinted on the screen. A national curfew was mandated. People were advised to lock their doors, cover their windows, and, above all, not to look outside. On the radio, music was replaced entirely with discussions. A blackout, Malorie thinks. The world, the outdoors, is being shut down. Nobody has answers. Nobody knows what is going on. People are seeing something that drives them to hurt others. To hurt themselves. People are dying. But why?

The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics is important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage. Heroics is often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that’s pretty extraordinary.1

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It’s also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It’s hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book. When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits.

It is understandable how this shame came into being. The nation made the black man's color a stigma. Even linguistics and semantics conspire to give this impression. If you look in Roget's Thesaurus you will find about 120 synonyms for blacK, and right down the line you will find words like smut, something dirty, worthless, and useless, and then you look further and you find about 120 synonyms for white and they all represent something high, noble, pure, chaste - right down the line. In our language structure, a white lie is a little better than a black lie. Somebody goes wrong in the family and we don't call him a white sheep, we call him a black sheep. We don't say whitemail, but blackmail. We don't speak of white-balling somebody, but black-balling somebody. The word 'black' itself in our society connotes something that is degrading. It was absolutely necessary to come to a moment with a sense of dignity. It is very positive and very necessary.

Benedict Arnold was appointed to the rank of general in the Continental Army by George Washington during the American War of Independence. It was up to him to protect the fortifications at West Point, New York, which in 1802 became the U.S. Military Academy. Arnold however planned to surrender his command to the British forces. When his treasonous act was discovered Arnold fled down the Hudson River to the British sloop-of-war Vulture, avoiding capture by the forces of George Washington, who had previously been alerted to the plot. Arnold was hailed a hero by the British, who gave him a commission in the British Army as brigadier general. In the winter of 1782, after the war, he moved to London with his wife where he was received as a hero by King George III. In the United States his name "Benedict Arnold" became synonyms for the words “TRAITOR & TREASON.” Cohorting with a foreign power to overthrow the government or purposely aiding the enemy is an act of Treason!

Archaism, in the linguistic order, is not, in any event, synonymous with simplicity of structure, very much to the contrary. Languages generally grow poorer with the passing oftime by gradually losing the richness of their vocabulary, the ease with which they can diversify various aspects of one and the same idea, and their power of synthesis, which is the ability to express many things with few words. In order to make up for this impoverishment, modern languages have become more complicated on the rhetorical level; while perhaps gaining in surface precision, they have not done as as regards content. Language historians are astonished by the fact that Arabic was able to retain a morphology attested to as early as the Code of Hammurabi, for the nineteenth to the eighteenth century before the Christian era, and to retain a phonetic system which preserves, with the exception of a single sound, the extremly rich sound-range disclosed by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered, [...]

Over the years I have seen the power of taking an unconditional relationship to life. I am surprised to have found a sort of willingness to show up for whatever life may offer and meet with it rather than wishing to edit and change the inevitable...When people begin to take such an attitude, they seem to become intensely alive, intensely present. Their losses and suffering have not caused them to reject life, have not cast them into a place of resentment, victimization, or bitterness. From such people, I have learned a new definition of the word 'joy.' I had thought joy to be rather synonymous with happiness, but it seems now to be far less vulnerable than happiness. Joy seems to be part of an unconditional wish to live, not holding back because life may not meet our preferences and expectations. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole, and to show up to meet with whatever is there. It has a kind of invincibility that attachment to any particular outcome would deny us. Rather than the warrior who fights toward a specific outcome and therefore is haunted by the specter of failure and disappointment, it is the lover drunk with the opportunity to love despite the possibility of loss, the player for whom playing has become more important than winning or losing. The willingness to win or lose moves us out of an adversarial relationship to life and into a powerful kind of openness. From such a position, we can make a greater commitment to life. Not only pleasant life, or comfortable life, or our idea of life, but all life. Joy seems more closely related to aliveness than happiness. The strength that I notice developing in many of my patients and in myself after all these years could almost be called a form of curiosity. What one of my colleagues calls fearlessness. At one level, of course, I fear outcome as much as anyone. But more and more I am able to move in and out of that and to experience a place beyond preference for outcome, a life beyond life and death. It is a place of freedom, even anticipation. Decisions made from this perspective are life-affirming and not fear-driven. It is a grace.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston?

It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good.’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?

Vatika has several other related meanings in ancient Etruscan. It was the name of a bitter grape that grew wild on the slope, which the peasants made into what became infamous as one of the worst, cheapest wines in the ancient world. The name of this wine, which also referred to the slope where it was produced, was Vatika. It was also the name of a strange weed that grew on the graveyard slope. When chewed, it produced wild hallucinations, much like the effect of peyote mushrooms; thus, vatika represented what we would call today a cheap high. In this way, the word passed into Latin as a synonym for “prophetic vision.” Much later, the slope became the circus, or stadium, of the mad emperor Nero. It was here, according to Church tradition, that Saint Peter was executed, crucified upside down, and then buried nearby. This became the destination of so many pilgrims that the emperor Constantine, upon becoming half-Christian, founded a shrine on the spot, which the Romans continued to call the Vatican Slope. A century after Constantine, the popes started building the papal palace there.

Most of us think the word racism is synonymous with the word prejudice. But racism is more than just discrimination based on skin color. It’s also about who has institutional power. Just as racism creates disadvantages for people of color that make success harder to achieve, it also gives advantages to white people that make success easier to achieve. It’s hard to see those advantages, much less own up to them. And that, I realized, was why I had to write this book. When it comes to social justice, the role of the white ally is not to be a savior or a fixer. Instead, the role of the ally is to find other white people and talk to make them see that many of the benefits they’ve enjoyed in life are direct results of the fact that someone else did not have the same benefits. I began my research by sitting down with women of color. Although I knew that peppering people of color with questions is not the best way to educate oneself, I hoped to invite these women into a process, and in return they gave me a gift: they shared their experiences of what it really feels like to be Black. I remain so grateful to

...he [Perry Hildebrandt] broached the subject of goodness and its relation to intelligence. He'd come to the reception for selfless reasons, but he now saw that he might get not only a free buzz but free advise from, as it were, two professionals. 'I suppose what I'm asking,' he said, 'is whether goodness can ever truly be its own reward, or whether, consciously or not, it always serves some personal instrumentality.' Reverend Walsh [Trinity Lutheran] and the rabbi [Meyer] exchanged glances in which Perry detected pleasant surprise. It gratified him to upset their expectations of a fifteen-year-old. 'Adam may have a different answer,' the rabbi said, but in the Jewish faith there is really only one measure of righteousness: Do you celebrate God and obey His commandments?' 'That would suggest,' Perry said, 'that goodness and God are essentially synonymous.' 'That's the idea,' the rabbi said. 'In biblical times, when God manifested Himself more directly. He could seem like quite the hard-ass--striking people blind for trivial offenses, telling Abraham to kill his son. But the essence of the Jewish faith is that God does what He does, and we obey Him.' 'So, in other words, it doesn't matter what a righteous person's private thoughts are, so long as he obeys the letter of God's commandments?' 'And worships Him, yes. Of course, at the level of folk wisdom, a man can be righteous without being a -mensch.- I'm sure you see this, too, Adam--the pious man who makes everyone around him miserable. That might be what Perry is asking about.' 'My question,' Perry said, 'is whether we can ever escape our selfishness. Even if you bring in God, and make him the measure of goodness, the person who worships and obeys Him still wants something for himself. He enjoys the feeling of being righteous, or he wants eternal life, or what have you. If you're smart enough to think about it, there's always some selfish angle.' The rabbi smiled. 'There may be no way around it, when you put it like that. But we "bring in God," as you say--for the believer, of course, it's God who brought -us- in--to establish a moral order in which your question becomes irrelevant. When obedience is the defining principle, we don't need to police every little private thought we might have.' 'I think there's more to Perry's question, though,' Reverend Walsh said. 'I think he is pointing to sinfulness, which is our fundamental condition. In Christian faith, only one man has ever exemplified perfect goodness, and he was the Son of God. The rest of us can only hope for glimmers of what it's like to be truly good. When we perform an act of charity, or forgive an enemy, we feel the goodness of Christ in our hearts. We all have an innate capability to recognize true goodness, but we're also full of sin, and those two parts of us are constantly at war.' 'Exactly,' Perry said. 'How do I know if I'm really being good or if I'm just pursuing a sinful advantage?' 'The answer, I would say, is by listening to your heart. Only your heart can tell you what your true motive is--whether it partakes of Christ. I think my position is similar to Rabbi Meyer's. The reason we need faith--in our case, faith in the Lord Jesus Christ--is that it gives us a rock-solid basis for evaluating our actions. Only through faith in the perfection of our Savior, only by comparing our actions to his example, only by experiencing his living presence in our hearts, can we hope to be forgiven for the more selfish thoughts we might have. Only faith in Christ redeems us. Without him, we're lost in a sea of second-guessing our motives.

The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln. To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in US history. The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas. This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. --- These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties. The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid. Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky. Everything is in the language we use. -- Without money, store credit, or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve. The Dakota people were starving. The Dakota people starved. In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis. -- Dakota warriors organized, struck out, and killed settlers and traders. This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising. Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising. More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison. As already mentioned,“Real” poems do not “really” require words. --- I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.

It is a pity that the beautiful Christian metaphor “salvation” has come to be so hackneyed and therefore so despised. It has been turned into a vapid synonym for “piety”—not even a truly ethical concept. “Salvation” is something far beyond ethical propriety. The word connotes a deep respect for the fundamental metaphysical reality of man. It reflects God’s own infinite concern for man, God’s love and care for man’s inmost being, God’s love for all that is His own in man, His son. It is not only human nature that is “saved” by the divine mercy, but above all the human person. The object of salvation is that which is unique, irreplaceable, incommunicable—that which is myself alone. This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction, from immersion in the common, the nondescript, the trivial, the sordid, the evanescent. We must be saved from immersion in the sea of lies and passions which is called “the world.” And we must be saved above all from that abyss of confusion and absurdity which is our own worldly self. The person must be rescued from the individual. The free son of God must be saved from the conformist slave of fantasy, passion and convention. The creative and mysterious inner self must be delivered from the wasteful, hedonistic and destructive ego that seeks only to cover itself with disguises. To be “lost” is to be left to the arbitrariness and pretenses of the contingent ego, the smoke-self that must inevitably vanish. To be “saved” is to return to one’s inviolate and eternal reality and to live in God.

What is the vril?” I asked. Therewith Zee began to enter into an explanation of which I understood very little, for there is no word in any language I know which is an exact synonym for vril. I should call it electricity, except that it comprehends in its manifold branches other forces of nature, to which, in our scientific nomenclature, differing names are assigned, such as magnetism, galvanism, &c. These people consider that in vril they have arrived at the unity in natural energetic agencies, which has been conjectured by many philosophers above ground, and which Faraday thus intimates under the more cautious term of correlation:— “I have long held an opinion,” says that illustrious experimentalist, “almost amounting to a conviction, in common, I believe, with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest, have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent that they are convertible, as it were into one another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. These subterranean philosophers assert that by one operation of vril, which Faraday would perhaps call ‘atmospheric magnetism,’ they can influence the variations of temperature—in plain words, the weather; that by operations, akin to those ascribed to mesmerism, electro-biology, odic force, &c., but applied scientifically, through vril conductors, they can exercise influence over minds, and bodies animal and vegetable, to an extent not surpassed in the romances of our mystics. To all such agencies they give the common name of vril.

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man. Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life. Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words “to live” and “to be among men” (inter homines esse) or “to die” and “to cease to be among men” (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

[Our Contemporary Lexicon] As years go by And lives are wasted, As we lose everything, We discover the real meaning Of the words shaping our lives… Words that have filled our contemporary lexicon, We know the words yet don’t fully grasp them, And the more we hear them, The more confusing they become… Words like War Bank Justice Media Capital Investment Advertisement Weapon School University Hospital Humanitarian organization Civil society Ethnicity Race Religion Modernity Backwardness Secularism Trade Love Family Prison Home Immigration Visa Passport Borders Democracy Elections Car Plane And countless others… Words that may pretend to oppose each other publicly, Yet are secretly in bed with each other Making love, acting as synonyms and French kissing… Words that in reality Walk hand in hand and are united against us To achieve the mutual goal of depriving most of us Of having a decent life with dignity… Words used by allies and foes alike, as needed! Words that have become rustier than our souls, Yet their fake glitter continues to deceive millions upon billions Of people believing faithfully in them Or working hard to access their imagined benefits... As years go by, We learn late in the game That all the meanings we ascribed to such words Are in fact killing us Raping us In the homeland On the border And in exile! As the game continues, At a late hour, We discover that Our worries and sleepless nights In hopes of a bearable world Have all been wasted in vain… What is happening today Has happened throughout history… And the game shall continue Until we reexamine this lexicon Until we destroy it And rewrite all its pages To erase all the monsters its words Within all of us… (February 6, 2015)

The word “justice,” as still used in the law, is more similar to Plato’s conception than it is as used in political speculation. Under the influence of democratic theory, we have come to associate justice with equality, while for Plato it has no such implication. “Justice,” in the sense in which it is almost synonymous with “law”—as when we speak of “courts of justice”—is concerned mainly with property rights, which have nothing to do with equality. The first suggested definition of “justice,” at the beginning of the Republic, is that it consists in paying debts. This definition is soon abandoned as inadequate, but something of it remains at the end. There are several points to be noted about Plato’s definition. First, it makes it possible to have inequalities of power and privilege without injustice. The guardians are to have all the power, because they are the wisest members of the community; injustice would only occur, on Plato’s definition, if there were men in the other classes who were wiser than some of the guardians. That is why Plato provides for promotion and degradation of citizens, although he thinks that the double advantage of birth and education will, in most cases, make the children of guardians superior to the children of others. If there were a more exact science of government, and more certainty of men following its precepts, there would be much to be said for Plato’s system. No one thinks it unjust to put the best men into a football team, although they acquire thereby a great superiority. If football were managed as democratically as the Athenian government, the students to play for their university would be chosen by lot. But in matters of government it is difficult to know who has the most skill, and very far from certain that a politician will use his skill in the public interest rather than in his own or in that of his class or party or creed.

Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash) decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the chase” for rewards like money and status. Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame. Our personalities also shape our social styles. Extroverts are the people who will add life to your dinner party and laugh generously at your jokes. They tend to be assertive, dominant, and in great need of company. Extroverts think out loud and on their feet; they prefer talking to listening, rarely find themselves at a loss for words, and occasionally blurt out things they never meant to say. They’re comfortable with conflict, but not with solitude. Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions. A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly. One of the most humane phrases in the English language—“Only connect!”—was written by the distinctly introverted E. M. Forster in a novel exploring the question of how to achieve “human love at its height.” Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not.

..reincarnation is a truth, because in existence nothing dies. Even the physicist will say, about the objective world, that nothing dies. You can destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki but you cannot destroy a single drop of water. You cannot destroy. Physicists have become aware of this impossibility. Whatever you do, only the form changes. But nothing can be destroyed in the objective world. The same is true about the world of consciousness, of life. There is no death. Death is only a change from one form into another form, and ultimately from form to formlessness. Only Gautam Buddha has given the right word for this experience. In English it is difficult to translate it, because languages develop only after experience. It is just arbitrarily that I am calling it "enlightenment." But it is very arbitrary; it does not really give you the sense that Buddha's word gives. He calls it nirvana. Nirvana means ceasing to be. Strange... ceasing to be. Not to be is nirvana. That does not mean that you are no more; it simply means you are no longer an entity, embodied. The dewdrop drops into the ocean. Now it is the whole ocean. Existence is alive at every stage. Nothing is dead. Even a stone - which you think seems to be completely dead - is not dead. So many living electrons are running so fast inside it that you cannot see them, but they are all living beings. Their bodies are so small that nobody has seen them; we don't even have any scientific instrument to see the electron, it is only guesswork. We can see the effect; hence we think there must be a cause. The cause has not been seen, only the effect has been seen. But the electron is as alive as you are. The whole existence is synonymous with life. Here nothing dies. Death is an impossibility. Yes, things change from one form to another form till they become mature enough that they need not go to school again. Then they move into a formless life, then they become one with the ocean itself.

Another dangerous neoliberal word circulating everywhere that is worth zooming in on is the word ‘resilience’. On the surface, I think many people won’t object to the idea that it is good and beneficial for us to be resilient to withstand the difficulties and challenges of life. As a person who lived through the atrocities of wars and sanctions in Iraq, I’ve learnt that life is not about being happy or sad, not about laughing or crying, leaving or staying. Life is about endurance. Since most feelings, moods, and states of being are fleeting, endurance, for me, is the common denominator that helps me go through the darkest and most beautiful moments of life knowing that they are fleeing. In that sense, I believe it is good for us to master the art of resilience and endurance. Yet, how should we think about the meaning of ‘resilience’ when used by ruling classes that push for wars and occupations, and that contribute to producing millions of deaths and refugees to profit from plundering the planet? What does it mean when these same warmongers fund humanitarian organizations asking them to go to war-torn countries to teach people the value of ‘resilience’? What happens to the meaning of ‘resilience’ when they create frighteningly precarious economic structures, uncertain employment, and lay off people without accountability? All this while also asking us to be ‘resilient’… As such, we must not let the word ‘resilience’ circulate or get planted in the heads of our youth uncritically. Instead, we should raise questions about what it really means. Does it mean the same thing for a poor young man or woman from Ghana, Ecuador, Afghanistan vs a privileged member from the upper management of a U.S. corporation? Resilience towards what? What is the root of the challenges for which we are expected to be resilient? Does our resilience solve the cause or the root of the problem or does it maintain the status quo while we wait for the next disaster? Are individuals always to blame if their resilience doesn’t yield any results, or should we equally examine the social contract and the entire structure in which individuals live that might be designed in such a way that one’s resilience may not prevail no matter how much perseverance and sacrifice one demonstrates? There is no doubt that resilience, according to its neoliberal corporate meaning, is used in a way that places the sole responsibility of failure on the shoulders of individuals rather than equally holding accountable the structure in which these individuals exist, and the precarious circumstances that require work and commitment way beyond individual capabilities and resources. I find it more effective not to simply aspire to be resilient, but to distinguish between situations in which individual resilience can do, and those for which the depth, awareness, and work of an entire community or society is needed for any real and sustainable change to occur. But none of this can happen if we don’t first agree upon what each of us mean when we say ‘resilience,’ and if we have different definitions of what it means, then we should ask: how shall we merge and reconcile our definitions of the word so that we complement not undermine what we do individually and collectively as people. Resilience should not become a synonym for surrender. It is great to be resilient when facing a flood or an earthquake, but that is not the same when having to endure wars and economic crises caused by the ruling class and warmongers. [From “On the Great Resignation” published on CounterPunch on February 24, 2023]

As old horses go to the knacker's yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad.

the Loring Center kids. Orphaned, disabled, or delinquent. Our abandonment scared people, as if it might be contagious. Upon meeting any of us for the first time, people were amazed if we had our faculties intact, as so many did not, and shunned us regardless. In our city, the word “Loring” was synonymous with “retarded.” “Isn’t he Loring?” or “You look so Loring!

Magick: The English language was only relatively recently formalized and so older documents are characterized by creative spelling. “Magic” is often spelled “magick” but the words were intended synonymously. “Magic,” like “witch,” is an imprecise word that means different things to different people. Some practitioners of the occult find it insulting to be lumped together with practitioners of illusion (and the feeling is often mutual). Thus a “k” is added so that it is clear to readers exactly what type of magic is being practiced. Aleister Crowley was the first to consciously and explicitly use this spelling to distinguish the occult arts from the tricks of stage magicians.

Scholars pointed out everyday phrases such as black sheep, blackballing, blackmail, and blacklisting, among others, that had long associated Blackness and negativity. Two other words could’ve been included—words that still exist today: minority, as if Black people are minor, making White people major; and ghetto, a term first used to describe an undesirable area of a city in which Jewish people were forced to live. But in the racist context of America, ghetto and minority became synonyms for Black. And all three of those words seemed to be knives.

As the twentieth century continued to roar, the idea of information grew in status to an idea of global importance. Yet as the idea of information became more popular, we slowly began to forget about the physicality of information that had troubled Boltzmann. The word information became a synonym for the ethereal, the unphysical, the digital, the weightless, the immaterial. But information is physical. It is as physical as Boltzmann’s atoms or the energy they carry in their motion. Information is not tangible; it is not a solid or a fluid. It does not have its own particle either, but it is as physical as movement and temperature, which also do not have particles of their own.

Heathen: This Anglo-Saxon word literally means “dweller on the heath.” The heath is the area outside the settlement; post-Christianity, those wishing to maintain old traditions retired to the heath, hence the name. It came to be synonymous with “Pagan,” sometimes with the added implication of rude, ignorant barbarian. The word has been reclaimed by Neo-Pagans subscribing to Northern European traditions and today is used with pride. See also Asatru

It was more than a wind. The 'Wehen' was a wind that gathered snow, turned it to ice and used it as a sharp weapon. Not for nothing was the word 'Wehen' used as a synonym for "distress.

The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart." Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic.

One thing that the global justice movement taught us is that politics is, indeed, ultimately about value; but also, that those creating vast bureaucratic systems will almost never admit what their values really are. This was as true of the Carnegies as it is today. Normally, they will—like the robber barons of the turn of the last century—insist that they are acting in the name of efficiency, or “rationality.” But in fact this language always turns out to be intentionally vague, even nonsensical. The term “rationality” is an excellent case in point here. A “rational” person is someone who is able to make basic logical connections and assess reality in a non-delusional fashion. In other words, someone who isn’t crazy. Anyone who claims to base their politics on rationality—and this is true on the left as well as on the right—is claiming that anyone who disagrees with them might as well be insane, which is about as arrogant a position as one could possibly take. Or else, they’re using “rationality” as a synonym for “technical efficiency,” and thus focusing on how they are going about something because they do not wish to talk about what it is they are ultimately going about. Neoclassical economics is notorious for making this kind of move. When an economist attempts to prove that it is “irrational” to vote in national elections (because the effort expended outweighs the likely benefit to the individual voter), they use the term because they do not wish to say “irrational for actors for whom civic participation, political ideals, or the common good are not values in themselves, but who view public affairs only in terms of personal advantage.” There is absolutely no reason why one could not rationally calculate the best way to further one’s political ideals through voting. But according to the economists’ assumptions, anyone who takes this course might as well be out of their minds.

All living beings within the "realm of desire" (kāma-dhātu). Human beings and animals live together on the surface of the Mount Sumeru realm. Spirits and demonic gods live 500 yojanas under the earth, and the inhabitants of the hells, even deeper. Gods of various types live in the upper places, in the realm of form (rūpa-dhātu) and beyond that, in the realm of formlessness (ārūpya-dhātu). The realm of desire, form, and formlessness are known collectiveness as the "three realms" (tri-dhātu), in other words, the three kinds of worlds in which living beings exist. Tri-dhātu is a synonym for the universe as a whole, or for all existence.

This ability to access the overall concept of the word we’re blanking on is what sometimes causes us to come out with ludicrously long-winded synonyms, out of sheer desperation. Case in point, I once blanked on the word pen, and called it an ‘ink pencil’. Case in another point, a friend of mine once referred to Starbucks as ‘the coffee pub’.

photos of their gaping, rotting bodies stretching to the horizon remind me that our subjects name is synonymous with its own demise, for the word fish means both the animal adn the act of catching it

photos of their gaping, rotting bodies stretching to the horizon remind me that our subject's name is synonymous with it's own demise, for the word fish means both the animal and the act of catching it

No action of Laura’s now, no word, ever lacked this air of having been chosen with discretion, after prolonged thought. Deliberation was anathema to Clare. In her experience it was synonymous with hypocrisy, equivocation, as if the real which was always at hand, and clear to see, spontaneously presenting itself for use, was always mechanically rejected in favour of some cautious piece of strategy, some much-thumbed grubby piece of thought.

She was, it might be noted, a perfect example of why the word jerk needs so many off-color synonyms.

Schizophrenics are victims of the Russian word гибель (gibel), which is synonymous with “doom” and “catastrophe”—not necessarily death nor suicide, but a ruinous cessation of existence; we deteriorate in a way that is painful for others.

But here in the contemporary West, we don’t really do elders: instead, we have “the elderly.” The connotations are quite different. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary online, “elderly” is nothing more than “a polite word for ‘old.’” The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary informs us that “elderly” can also mean “old-fashioned.” In Lexico, the Oxford online thesaurus, the word is associated with synonyms such as “doddering,” “decrepit,” “in one’s dotage,” “past one’s prime,” “past it,” and “over the hill.” It doesn’t paint a pretty picture; these are not exactly the adjectives that most aging women would aspire to embody. But the aging woman has had a particularly troubled history in Western culture. The last convictions might have taken place in the eighteenth century, but in many ways we still haven’t quite recovered from our demonization in the witch trials. Older women, when they’re not rendered completely invisible, are still trivialized and marginalized, and often actively ridiculed. “Little old ladies,” we call them here in Britain; “old bats” (if we think they’re crazy), or “old bags” and “old trouts” (if they don’t live up to our expectations that old women should rarely be seen, and certainly should never be heard).

This word ‘Aryan’ was a linguistic term, originally referring to the Indo-European group of languages. Since before the end of the nineteenth century it had already been distorted as a concept by a number of writers, among them Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who gave it racial connotations, and used it to denote superiority over the ‘Semitic’ races. Yet the term ‘Semitic’ itself was originally not a racial but a linguistic term, relating, not to Jews and non-Jews, but to a language group which includes Hebrew and Arabic. None of these refinements troubled the new racialism. For Hitler, ‘Aryan’ was synonymous with ‘pure’, while ‘Semitic’ was synonymous with ‘Jew’, and hence ‘impure’.

Asking for help in the military is changing. Before, it used to be seen as weak or shameful. It was synonymous with you could no longer handle your load. Fortunately now, it is not normally seen that way. When your household, career, religious beliefs, Dojo, friends, family, or associates view asking for help as being weak, then shame will prevent you from asking for help. We hold in high regard the people and things closest to us. Those inside our circle, especially our circle that we choose. There is no shame in doing a thing of which everyone you love already approves. In other words, you have to feel like it's not acceptable to feel shame. Sometimes this shame and the negative environment is created unintentionally; when the people you surround yourself with never admit mistakes, never have problems, and never forgive mistakes. These create a negative environment. A better description of it is a misleading environment.

Today, we’re going to start practicing something that’s simultaneously simple and hard: being still. We tend to think of stillness as being synonymous with boredom, and it’s true that we often use both words to describe the same state of mind. But while the word boredom carries with it an element of feeling trapped, stillness offers an opportunity for peace. As Pema Chödrön writes in her book, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, “If we immediately entertain ourselves by talking, by acting, by thinking—if there’s never any pause—we will never be able to relax. We will always be speeding through our lives.

Since the eighteenth century, the Celtic fringes have posed for the urban intellectual as a location of the wild, the natural, the creative and the insecure. We can often find it said, with warm approval, that the Celts are impetuous, natural, spiritual and naive. I try in what follows to make a clear that such an approval is drawing on the same system of structural oppositions as is the accusation that the Celt is violent (impetuous), animal (natural), devoid of any sense of property (spiritual), or without manners (naive). I include the bracketed terms as effective synonyms of the words that precede them, that we would use to praise rather than deride... We are dealing here with a rich verbal and metaphorical complex, and I have not thought it very important to distinguish between those who find a favourable opinion of the Gael within this complex, and those who dip into it to find the materials for derision. In both cases the coherence of the statements can only be found at their point of origin, the urban intellectual discourse of the English language, and not at their point of application, the Celt, the Gael, the primative who is ever departing, whether his exit be made to jeers or to tears.

commandments that we are called to keep; and it is not God generically whom we are to imitate, but Jesus. The literal walking of Jesus and earth-given commandments also contrasts the Gnostic notion of a purely spiritual connection with a heavenly Jesus. 17. While word has a broader connotation than commandments, the terms are practically synonymous. 18. Calvin, quoted in Jason B. Hood, Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013), 205. 19. Yarbrough, 1–3 John, 88. 20. Luther, “Lectures on the First

And we need to recognize that Jesus uses the word wicked in a conventional sense: the wicked are those who live wicked lives, inflicting evil upon others. Jesus does not use the word as a technical term for all of humanity except those who have “accepted Jesus into their hearts.” Jesus does not use wicked as a synonym for non-Christians! The idea that all non-Christians are wicked is the result of some very arrogant and deeply mistaken theological systems.

It was always astonishing how badly mangled the meaning of words had become in the modern world, especially those words related to science. There was a time when a fact had been an accepted truth. Not anymore. For some, the word fact had become synonymous with a claim or assertion. Any person offering an argument could simply stack up their own set of alternative facts and, in their mind, be entirely justified. It often left Daniel wondering if there was any hope for the evolution of the species.

THE 7 FORMULAS OF HUMOR: 1. POW's -- plays on words 2. Reverses (quick switch in audience point of view) 3. Triples (build to exaggerated finale) 4. Incongruity (pairing two logical but unconventional ideas) 5. Stupidity (so audience feels superior) 6. Paired phrases (using antonyms, homonyms, synonyms) 7. Physical abuse (slapstick)