Wabi sabi is a beautiful Japanese idea and worldview of appreciating the small traits of imperfection, the changes in things as they age, and that nothing is wholly complete. It might be appreciating the unique unevenness in a hand made bowl, the cracks and weathering of wood as it is grows old, or the softened and coloured pages of an old book.

It's a lovely frame of mind that helps us see the beauty in things that aren't perfect and brand new. As a society it's probably something we could do with more of.

The simple phrasing of nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect is from Wabi Sabi Simple by Richard Powell.

Wabi sabi

The Norse Gods are still among us in the names of the days of the week.

Tuesday — from Old English Tiw, for Tyr the Norse god of combat

Wednesday — from Old English Woden, for Odin the one-eyed king of the gods

Thursday — for Thor, the quick to fight god of ordinary people with his magical hammer Mjollnir

Friday — for Frigg, wife of Odin and goddess of marriage and motherhood

While Saturday, Sunday and Monday follow the celestial bodies Saturn, the sun, and the moon.

As a wonderful introduction to the Norse myths and gods you could do much worse than the entertaining and beautifully produced Illustrated Norse Myths I was commanded to read by our 9-year old.

Illustrations based off of those by the excellent Matteo Pincelli.

Days of the week

Ah, that satisfying, superior, at once gleeful and slightly sinful feeling when the aggressive driver that overtook you gets his comeuppance and gets flashed by a speed camera. That feeling is Schadenfreude, a nifty German word made up of schaden for damage, harm or hurt and freude for joy. Taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes.

I hadn’t thought much of it beyond that before reading some excerpts from Tiffany Watt Smith’s book Schadenfreude. She makes the compelling case to examine the moments where we feel superior at another’s expense as a small window into ourselves. A little twinge of joy when a colleague doesn’t get a promotion might reveal your jealousy at their situation, or perhaps a deep down resentment of unfairness. If the person who pushed in front of you in the queue drops their ice cream straight after buying it your secret twinge of joy might be a sense of justice and equity for obeying the rules when they didn’t. Schadenfreude can be a little boost to your own self-esteem.

For a mini-intro try Tiffany Watt Smith’s TED Ideas article: Do you secretly feel good when others stumble? 5 ways to make peace with this very human emotion.

Schadenfreude

Chindogu are inventions that are not really useful but are at the same time, not completely without use. They make sense, but you’d never use them. They are also, as a result, often really funny.

This chindogu article gives some great examples while also sharing the 10 tenets of what makes chindogu, chindogu. Things like: there must be the spirit of anarchy —  they represent freedom of thought and action. And they must exist — just the idea isn’t enough, they must be made.

Apparently, the selfie-stick was invented as chindogu but failed as people evidently actually found it useful — though you can still see why it might have started as chindogu.

Chindogu

Remarkably, when we describe a noun we almost always, unconsciously, arrange adjectives in this order: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.

If you try mixing them up in a different order it just doesn’t sound right. Compare, for example, a super little Italian coffee, to an Italian little super coffee. Or as Mark Forsyth points out in The Elements of Eloquence: How to turn the perfect English phrase, you can have a great green dragon, but not a green great one.

Ordering adjectives

A word that when capitalized changes meaning, and sometimes pronunciation.

For years as a kid, no joke, I couldn’t understand why there was a polish club at the bottom of our road. Yes, it was a Polish club.

Some examples: turkey/Turkey, may/May, march/March, august/August, lent/Lent, reading/Reading, mobile/Mobile, polish/Polish, alpine/Alpine, china/China.

When they change pronunciation they’re also heteronyms.

Capitonym

A beautiful Japanese word for the acquiring and piling up of books without reading them. Constructed from 2 words loosely meaning piling up and reading.

The sketch is loosely based on my parents’ bedroom while I grew up, both of whom are experienced and talented tsundoku-ers/tsundokists.

Tsundoku

We all know that you make an acronym by taking the initial letters of a set of words and putting them together. So Random Access Memory becomes RAM, or the United States becomes the US. But I only found out recently that these two examples are actually different.

An acronym is when the initials of a set of words are said as a word, like ram, laser, radar, sonar, Nato, or NASA. An initialism is where a set of initials are spelled out as letters when saying them, like FBI, CIA, USA, BBC, or CD.

Acronyms and initialisms

This one rewards a little close attention—looking at each of the words and figuring out their different meanings or sounds.

I’ve always loved heteronyms and how we can have a single word spelt the same and yet pronounced quite differently — like read — and how that clearly makes English a crazy language to learn. And, as you probably do too, I pretty much woke up at night thinking how you could sort words into groups of the same or different spelling and the same or different sounds and begin to make sense of these curious groups of words like homographs, homophones and heteronyms.

Words with different spellings and different sounds generally just mean different words.

There are nice buckets of other words too like contranyms — words that can be their own opposite.

I did think a third axis of the same or different meaning may give the complete picture but would probably just serve to confuse things.

Some Greek: homo—same, hetero—different, graph—written, phone—sound

This sketchplanation was edited to remove contranym from words with different sounds and spelling as they’re the same word. D’oh

Homonyms, homographs, homophones, heteronyms… 

The Oxford comma is the comma after the penultimate item in a list. It’s normally a matter of style — you can happily choose to leave it out — though in some cases it can clarify what would otherwise be an ambiguous meaning, as in this well-cited book dedication “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” Or, more pertinently, in a recent legal case where ambiguity hinging on the lack of an Oxford comma is costing a dairy firm a $5m overtime payment to its drivers.

The Oxford comma

A word from the Sami people of Northern Norway, Finland or Sweden, from ‘coffee’ and ‘boil’, used as a measure of distance for how far you can go before you need a cup of coffee.

Kaffikok

The idea that people might inadvertently be drawn to careers related to their names. Sort of the opposite of someone with a surname of Baker because the family was once bakers, and instead suggesting that, if you are called Baker, you might unknowingly gravitate towards a career in baked goods.

Apparently coined in the New Scientist by reader C. R. Cavonius after people kept submitting examples, including those in the sketch. More examples here.

Nominative determinism

Not the easiest switch to make but given that jellyfish and starfish are not at all fish there is a move to call them sea jelly and sea star. As long as we all work to help protect them clearly it doesn’t matter a whole lot, but I think the move to sea jellies and sea stars makes good sense alongside others like the sea horse, sea cucumber, sea lion, sea lily, sea gooseberry…well, actually the sea horse is a type of fish, but you get the idea.

Sea jelly, sea star

A variation of Murphy’s law whereby if you happen to be criticizing someone else’s spelling or grammar you’ll have a mistake yourself. Or should that be criticising?

Muphry’s Law

With two small children, we’ve spent a lot of time reading and listening to A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh recently. The children love it, but so do the adults. If you haven’t read them for a long time you could do much worse than try them again. There is a lot of wisdom in those books. As one small example, I find there’s a lot of owl speak around as we get older, where we could all probably benefit with a dose of Pooh’s simplicity. For example, in another story Owl explains:

“Well, the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.”

“What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?” said Pooh.

…”It means, the Thing to Do.” says Owl.

How to speak plainly, by Pooh Bear.

A term I’d always found intriguing, mostly because it’s such an unusual word. It’s a concept from mathematics and computer science but can be applied more generally—not that it often is. Basically, it’s an operation that, no matter how many times you do it, you’ll still get the same result, at least without doing other operations in between. A classic example would be view_your_bank_balance being idempotent, and withdraw_1000 not being idempotent.

HTs: @aidmcg and Ewan Silver who kept saying it

Idempotence

Unless you were a maths, physics or Greek major, chances are your knowledge, like mine, may not have gone much farther than epsilon. I like how the letter names and shapes map or don’t to the Roman or Latin alphabet.

Know your Greek alphabet

The key to getting the whole thing the right way round in my mind is to remember that you need to cling tight (tite) to the ceiling. Once that’s established, you have a letter C in stactite that fits cling and ceiling. And stalagmites, with its cheeky G, naturally then is the other one which would grow on the ground. Sorted?

Stalactites, Stalagmites

A word that can be its own opposite. I learned this from Kathryn Schulz’ excellent article, What part of “No, totally” don’t you understand, about how “no, totally” came to mean “yes.” Contranyms — like heteronyms, portemanteaus, palindromes, and semordnilaps — are neat things to look out for. Like how you can dust something to pick up dust from a surface, and dust that surface to remove dust from it. So versatile. Or perhaps confusing.

Contranym

It’s curious how going downhill seems to have two opposite meanings.

The different faces of downhill

Ghoti is a constructed word intended to illustrate some of the craziness in English punctuation, in that, taking the sounds of its parts from different places, it could be said as fish.

In my book -ough in particular is the craziest as in enough, thorough, bough, through, although - all pronounced totally differently.

Credit: I’d heard it credited to George Bernard Shaw, but apparently his biography credits it to an ‘anonymous spelling reformer’.

Crazy English: ghoti

The best reference I found on quotations was the quotation section in Larry Trask’s Guide to Punctuation. Alongside clarifications [ ] and suspensions … it contains rules on fun things like quotes in quotes, when to capitalise, dealing with mistakes [sic], adding emphasis [emphasis added], and punctuation inside or outside. On this last point he suggests:

"You may follow your own preference in this matter, so long as you are consistent. If you opt for logical punctuation [putting the punctuation outside the quote], you will have the satisfaction of knowing that you are on the side of the angels, but you should also expect some grim opposition from the other side [that prefers punctuation on the inside]."
— Larry Trask

Quotiquette: The etiquette of quoting

Sadly it turns out that there is not reliable evidence for this derivation of the word POSH, but it’s so nice I’d finished the sketchplanation before I knew it. The story went that if you were travelling by boat from Western Europe to India and the Far East by boat back in the day the rich people naturally took the best cabins. And the best cabins on the way Out, were on the Port side so you got a great view of the coast all the way around Africa. And on the way back on the Starboard site to enjoy the view once more. Et voila POSH as a synonym for rich. After much digging I had to conclude that the story was apocryphal, but it’s nice nonetheless.

POSH: Port Out Starboard Home (apocryphal)

For a long time I’ve kept my ear (and eye) out for heteronyms. Homonyms are easy to spot - things like chip (food, processor), or bark (dog, tree) - but heteronyms are sneaky and you don’t notice them as easily. It always strikes me they must make English a pain to learn - “what do you mean read can be said as red or reed??! How’m I supposed to know that??”

A few other common ones (try to spot both pronunciations, it’s a little like the old out-cube/in-cube Necker illusion): bow, does, dove, import, lead, project, refuse, sow, tear, minute…

Also known, I believe, as a homograph (homo - same, graph - writing)

Hat tip to Richard Stevens for his nifty vintage-style heteronym list

Heteronym: spell it the same, say it differently

It was only relatively recently that I realised that the transposition of day and month that each does, also translates to the written out form. So in the US it’s common to say April 1st, whereas in the UK most would say 1st of April.

The most convenient way for most dates on a computer is yyyy-mm-dd however, so they always sort easily. You may have realised this when adding dates to filenames. Though a lot of software uses UNIX time which is, as you would expect, is “defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970, not counting leap seconds." So midday on the 12th March this year (or March 12th) at midday is of course 1426161600.

UK vs US date writing

From various sources I have learned that mandarins are the original, from China, and were rather fancy and therefore only suitable for high society, which included mandarins (bureaucrats).

Satsumas are a type of mandarin cultivated in the Japanese district of Satsuma.

Clementines are named after Father Clément Rodier who may have cultivated the variety himself.

And tangerines are so named as being from Tangiers in Morocco, one of the places where mandarins were first imported into Europe.

Origins of mandarins

Named after a Reverend remarkably enough.

Spoonerisms

Learning and using kind words first when travelling will take you further than others. Before I enter a country with a new language I write a list of these words and find out how to say them.

Learn kind words first in new countries

Turns out there are a lot of ways not to say the market is down and your investments have lost value. Try also: quieter or choppy.

Euphemisms for losing money

Hopefully this will help clear up any confusion.

Also see: Affect Effect; stationary stationery; Compliment complement

Less and Fewer

And, ideally, only exclaim exclamations. Woah!

Only quote quotes

There are others too. But these are big ones. Curious? Read Metaphors We Live By was a frame-changing easy read for me.

PS Accidentally, mixed my metaphors in the final sketch. The Mind Is A Machine metaphor is so pervasive it’s hard to ‘sketch’ across thinking without it.

Metaphors for ideas

Why fit in when you were born to stand out. (Dr Seuss)

The folk economics of ins and outs

Though the words are linked through two simple connections. Books used to be big and heavy, so rather than travelling market stalls the first shops for books were in fact stationary - stationarius. And writing implements, paper and the like began to be sold at these stationary stores. Various sites will explain the history.

Stationary and Stationery

Following on from the original, I love the words: Tofurkey, turducken, and cambozola.

Portemanteau food

Palindromes and Semordnilap

Two and a half words of wisdom from Steve Krug. Still worth reading Don’t Make Me Think.

Omit unnecessary words

Except in a sentence. Generally, I think this is helpful. Simpler, cleaner, and still clear. If it’s not clear, or if you’re writing a book or an article, keep the colon.

Use styling instead of colons

Make a portemanteau

PhD metaphors: a journey, product and quilt

Change your main vowels into u’s and talk more Irish

Great practice for research. Good practice for life too.

Prefer open-ended questions

These two are as easily mixed up as stationary and stationery.

Compliment and Complement

Affect. Effect

It was lovely to learn about the root of the word amateur: those who do something for the love of it. Via Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky, a book that I found enlightening all the way through.

Sketchplanations tagged with words