seasoned, pedantry, farce, ludicrous, commiseration, Analects, grove, 'lucas a non lucendo'

Webb Telescope Reveals a New Vision of an Ancient Universe

By Dennis Overbye, Kenneth Chang and Joshua Sokol

Spectacular imagery from the largest-ever space telescope brought tears to the eyes of seasoned scientists and dazzled the public.

Major Wheat had called the first company raised the “Old Dominion Guard." But another company named " The Tigers," and having the picture of a lamb with the legend " as gentle as " for its absurd device (lucas a non lucendo), exhibited such reckless daring and terrible havoc in their hand-to- hand struggle with the head of the attacking column, that the name of "Tigers," as often as " Wheat's Battalion," was thereafter its popular designation.




Beckett saw Joyce as a magician who could do anything with language: he could turn a word into its opposite, or discover its relation to any other, by altering a couple of letters. And so with Isidore—he can disclose the relation between a man (homo) and the dirt (humus) of which he is made. And he can turn a word into its opposite, too: in Origines I.29, on etymology itself, he mentions the class of etymologies 'ex contrariis [datae]', ie. those traditionally called 'antiphrastic'. The most famous of these analyses is the traditional 'lucus a non lucendo', which derives lucus (grove) from lucere (to shine), because groves are so dark that no light can shine through. As Isidore has it, ''lucus', quia umbra opacus parum luceat'. Although apparently ludicrous ('silly'), this type of etymology exhibits the logic of the negative, exploited by magical thinkers throughout history; compare, for instance, Freud on the 'antithetical meaning of primal words'.



Managing a Flu Threat With Seasoned Urgency
By GARDINER HARRIS and LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
Most experts praise Dr. Margaret Chan, director general of the W.H.O., in responding to the swine flu outbreak.
pedantry, farce, ludicrous, seasoned, commiseration, Analects


"There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat."
--from "The Pickwick Papers" by Charles Dickens

When nature exceeds culture, e have the rustic. When culture exceeds nature,
we have the pedant."
Analects--6.16 文質

Dictionary.com puts up its words of the year
Inquirer - Harrow,England,UKBy our online pedant: Thursday, 13 December 2007, 10:58 AM ANOTHER DICTIONARY is climbing on the word of the year bandwagon - the latest culprit being ...

• Theater: 'Last Analysis' of Saul Bellow Arrives (1964)
"By the standards of neat, conventional theater, 'The Last Analysis'
is a wildly untidy play. But it would be rank pedantry not to be
grateful to Saul Bellow for the flood of antic imagination, mad
rhetoric and comic fantasy that he has poured into this improbable yet
serious farce."


Germany calls Zimbabwean Election a 'Farce'

The final round of Zimbabwe's presidential election with only one
candidate was "a farce," German Foreign Minister Steinmeier said
Saturday, June 28. The US says it will introduce a UN resolution
next week.

To read this article on the DW-WORLD website, just click on the
internet address below:

http://newsletter.dw-world.de/re?l=evyr80I44va89pI0


To win the right to host these Games, China promised to honor the Olympic ideals of nonviolence, openness to the world and individual expression. Those promises were systematically broken, starting with this spring’s brutal repression in Tibet and continuing on to the ugly farce of inviting its citizens to apply for legal protest permits and then arresting them if they actually tried to do so.

commiseration

kəˌmɪzəˈreɪʃn/

noun

1. sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others; compassion.

   "the other actors offered him clumsy commiseration"

ludicrous

ˈluːdɪkrəs,ˈljuː-/

adjective

1. so foolish, unreasonable, or out of place as to be amusing.

   "it's ludicrous that I have been fined"

pedant Show phonetics
noun [C] DISAPPROVING ━━ n. 学者ぶる人; 空論家; 微細な事［規則］にうるさい人.
a person who is too interested in formal rules and small unimportant details

pedantic 
adjective DISAPPROVING
giving too much attention to formal rules or small details:
They were being unnecessarily pedantic by insisting that Berry himself, and not his wife, should have made the announcement.

pedantically s
adverb

pedantry
noun [U]
There was a hint of pedantry in his elegant style of speaking.
farce
n.

1. 1. A light dramatic work in which highly improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters, and often slapstick elements are used for humorous effect.
   2. The branch of literature constituting such works.
   3. The broad or spirited humor characteristic of such works.
2. A ludicrous, empty show; a mockery: The fixed election was a farce.
3. A seasoned stuffing, as for roasted turkey.

tr.v., farced, farc·ing, farc·es.

1. To pad (a speech, for example) with jokes or witticisms.
2. To stuff, as for roasting.

[Middle English farse, stuffing, from Old French farce, stuffing, interpolation, interlude, from Vulgar Latin *farsa, from feminine of farsus, variant of fartus, past participle of farcīre, to stuff.]

farce

(färs) 
n.

1. 1. A light dramatic work in which highly improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters, and often slapstick elements are used for humorous effect.
   2. The branch of literature constituting such works.
   3. The broad or spirited humor characteristic of such works.
2. A ludicrous, empty show; a mockery: The fixed election was a farce.
3. A seasoned stuffing, as for roasted turkey.

tr.v., farced, farc·ing, farc·es.

1. To pad (a speech, for example) with jokes or witticisms.
2. To stuff, as for roasting.

[Middle English farse, stuffing, from Old French farce, stuffing, interpolation, interlude, from Vulgar Latin *farsa, from feminine of farsus, variant of fartus, past participle of farcīre, to stuff.]

━━ n. 笑劇, 茶番（劇）, 悪ふざけ.
━━ vt. （文章・話に）おもしろみを添える.
 far・ci・cal　━━ a. こっけいな, 茶番的な.

grove 
noun [C]
1 a group of trees planted close together:
Orange groves grow around the village.

2 Grove used in some road and place names:
Ladbroke/Camberwell Grove


lucas a non lucendo
(Latin, literally 'a grove, so called because it is not light') an entymology that is absurd, anything the qualities of which are the opposite of what its name suggests