2020年4月10日 星期五

facetious, jocular maxim, standpoint, nonbeliever, samizdat


Are the poor and marginalized the most severely impacted by epidemics?
Here we go back to what I said earlier, that epidemics each have their own personalities. Some choose only particular groups disproportionately. Some, if I could be facetious, are more democratic; they affect everyone in a society. So it’s not true to say that the single key to epidemic disease is poverty.
Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

On Eve of Sentencing, a Show of Solidarity

On Thursday, a samizdat kind of crowd turned out in New York in support of a Russian punk group whose three young members have been jailed in Moscow since March.

 . Losing My Religion: Critical Thinking May Weaken Faith
By Alexandra Sifferlin
Most of the world's population believes in God, or gods, but alongside them there are also hundreds of millions of nonbelievers. What makes one a believer or not?


"In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes—how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work."—Steven Poole, Guardian



There is no arguing with faith. As the comedian and outspoken nonbeliever Bill Maher travels the world, interviewing Christians, Jews and Muslims in the facetiously funny documentary “Religulous,” you begin to wonder if there might be two subspecies of humans.



So, looking at Beijing from the standpoint of one who hasn't lived here in more than 20 years, let me be the one to express a slightly facetious nostalgia for the way Beijing was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just before the economic explosion began.




I look at him and am struck by the aura of louche glamour he carries — like a lounge lizard who reads Flaubert — daring you to cause ripples in his carefully arranged and well-defended image. It is a daunting presentation — Stoppard referred to his "unfortunate and relentless facetious streak" in a talk with the theater critic John Lahr that I went to the day before — and I begin to understand, even before I try to draw him out, why everything I have read about Stoppard seems to recycle the same anecdotes and quips.


White Bordeaux: Oft-Forgotten Bliss
By ERIC ASIMOV
There are some serious, potentially profound dry whites from Bordeaux, which takes almost literally the jocular maxim that the first duty of wine is to be red.

. on Page 13:
"From a dynastic standpoint everything was to play for in 1714. Many urged the Pretender to consider that London was worth the abandonment of the mass"
2. on Page 87:
"not easy to identify what, in the last analysis, was at issue from the British standpoint, even at two centuries' distance. By 1775 most of the aims of the post-war ... "


V.i.&t.立足,立場 [li4zu2], [li4chang2]↓.
Words19. 立足 [li4zu2], v. i., stand on one's own feet, (lit. & fig.) 立足點 n., standpoint.

 

 “Maybe agnostics and atheists will embrace [The Good Book]; maybe Christians will embrace it too as a valuable collection of insights. It might begin as a curiosity and then flourish or remain a cult favorite or just a curiosity. I suppose some might be offended byThe Good Book but they needn't be. You don't have to be a nonbeliever to find solace and wisdom in the distilled ideas presented here.” – Huffington Post on The Good Book

samizdat (SAH-miz-daht)

noun: An underground publishing system used to print and circulate banned literature clandestinely. Also, such literature.

Etymology
From Russian samizdat, from samo- (self) + izdatelstvo (publishing house), from izdat (to publish). Coined facetiously on the model of Gosizdat (State Publishing House).

Usage
"This remarkable little book (People Power Uli!) includes jokes, text messages, cartoons, and poems of the revolt. It is both funny and a valuable record of samizdat literature and Philippine popular culture." — Alastair Dingwall; Estrada's Fall From Grace; Far Eastern Economic Review (Hong Kong); Jan 17, 2002.

 facetious

(fə-sē'shəs)
adj.
Playfully jocular; humorous: facetious remarks.
[French facétieux, from facétie, jest, from Latin facētia, from facētus, witty.]

facetious 
adjective DISAPPROVING
not serious about a serious subject, in an attempt to be amusing or to appear clever:
facetious remarks
He's just being facetious.

ìì a. ひょうきんな, こっけいな.

faˇceˇtiousˇly ìì ad.
faˇceˇtiousˇness ìì n.


jocular 
adjective FORMAL
1 amusing or intended to cause amusement:
a jocular comment

2 describes someone who is happy and likes to make jokes:
Michael was in a very jocular mood at the party.maxim PhoneticPhoneticnoun [C]
a brief statement of a general truth, principle or rule for behaviour


standpoint 
noun [C]
a set of beliefs and ideas from which opinions and decisions are formed:
"I have to put aside my emotions, " he says, "and consider it from a professional standpoint."

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