Epictetus wrote:

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

I think most people would identify with this quote on a sort of ‘individual topic’ level. If you’re a know-it-all in a field, it’s hard to admit that there’s something you don’t know, which is an obvious prerequisite to learning.

But I think Epictetus may also have had a bigger message: I think there’s an inverse correlation between ego and curiosity. The more you think you know in general, the less likely you are to notice things that don’t fit your preconceived notion.

Krishnamurti wrote:

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

The ability to separate observation from judgement is a key part of countless practices, from philosophy to psychology to management theory.

It’s only over the last week, though, that I’ve really noticed the link with ego—and how much harder it is for people with a large ego to make that separation. If you think you already know the answer, or already know how the world works, it is many times harder to look objectively at a situation and truly understand what’s driving it. Worse still, you might not even be motivated to try.

The disreputable former former former Prime Minister of the UK was quoted in their least-favourite newspaper this week:

I thought it was the wrong thing to do, and a bit petulant. Plenty of other European leaders sustain referendum defeats and carry on with their duties.

Once I’d processed the lack of self-awareness inherent in the hypocrisy of a certain eight-letter adjective, I came to reflect on the oddness of the word ‘sustain’. Things that ‘sustain’ us support or uphold us; yet we ‘sustain’ injuries and insults. How can it mean such different things?

It turns out that the word is derived from Latin: ‘-tain’ comes from ‘tenere’, which, as even a passing knowledge of European languages will tell you, means ‘to hold’. The ‘sus-’ comes from ‘sub’, as in ‘under’. So, ‘to sustain’ is to hold something up, supporting it from underneath.

Immediately, the two senses reveal themselves: things can support us, or we can do the supporting. While the former is largely positive, the latter is more complicated. We can hold together a friendship, and find that sustaining it is a wholly positive experience. Or we can hold up a weight that’s threatening to crush us, with almost unbearable burden and discomfort. The rich tapestry of life means that sustaining something can sometimes be both fulfilling and impossibly difficult at the same time.

To give the pompous wally his due, in the context of the quotation, ‘sustain’ could be read in the plain sense of enduring the defeat, or as a jibe about supporting the defeat by being a bit rubbish.

‘To sustain’ contains multitudes. It’s nice to see the complexity and ambiguity of the human experience reflected in language sometimes.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

Yesterday, you might have been taken aback by the appearance of a certain ‘z’ on the WD Stephen’s fountain:

The engraved text refers to ‘great organizations’—but surely we Brits, and especially the fastidious engravers of fountains in the early 1900s, prefer our organisations with the letter ‘s’ in the middle?

The jarring truth is that we don’t: even to this day, Oxford University Press persists with the ‘z’ spelling. The ‘z’ spelling is the more traditional, owing to the etymological root in post-classical Latin organizare. The ‘s’ is a modern affliction. It seems to relate to the French spelling, organiser, though some sources suggest that the switch is attributable to the influence of printers who felt that it looked better on the page alongside all of the other ‘-ise’ endings.

I’m not with the traditionalists on this one: it’s ‘organise’ all the way for me, I’m afraid, even if the World Health Organization disagrees.

While you ponder ‘organisation’, you might wonder—especially if you’re my organist brother—what the word ‘organ’ is doing in there.

Well, the original meaning of ‘organise’—as you might guess—was to accompany with an organ. Someone might be singing, and one might then ‘organize’ the performance by playing along. The modern sense seems to have come about via metaphor: to provide things with a bit of structure and form is metaphorically quite like formalising some singing by ‘organizing’ it.

Perhaps because of my medical background, I had previously assumed that the ’organs’ were bodily organs, but that’s seemingly not the case—even though the two senses of ‘organ’ share a common Latin etymology (organum).

Come to think of it, it’s quite odd that a musical organ is both an ‘organ’ and an ‘instrument’, when ‘organs’ and ‘instruments’ are utterly distinct in the medical world… but perhaps that’s for another day.

The second image in this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I’ve worried about the Virgin Mary before, but this book review in The Economist gave me new causes for concern:

They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?

Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.

This is one of those brilliant book reviews: it’s filled with humour and extracts the juice from the book without me having to bother with the whole volume. This seems just as well given the cutting verdict on the tone:

Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font.

Oof. This is good stuff.

I enjoyed this extract from Oliver Burkeman’s book, Meditations for Mortals, and this imagery in particular:

A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the current, and all you can really do is to stay alert, steering as best you can, reacting as wisely and gracefully as possible to whatever arises from moment to moment.

That’s how life is. But it isn’t how we want it to be. We’d prefer a much greater sense of control. Rather than paddling by kayak, we’d like to feel ourselves the captain of a superyacht, calm and in charge, programming our desired route into the ship’s computers, then sitting back and watching it all unfold from the plush-leather swivel chair on the serene and silent bridge.

The point Burkeman is making is about knuckling down and actually doing the things one wants to do in life, but I liked this imagery more for its root in stoicism. Life is unpredictable, and the best laid scheme gang aft agley, as Rabbie Burns had it.

But I think there is something in Burkeman’s recognition that there can be ‘wisdom’ and ‘grace’ in the response. I usually associate those qualities with well-laid plans which come off, but Burkeman helped me to remember that it’s demonstrating them in the face of unexpected challenge which is both the most difficult and the most worthy outcome.

And it’s also a reminder that when we look at others and perceive them to be in their own superyachts gliding towards some goal, we are mistaken: in the end, we’re all in kayaks, and we’re all at the mercy of fortune and the unknown.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I have an on-off relationship with physical notebooks. Only last year, I mentioned that I transitioned to using OneNote; yet today, I’m back to using a combination of OneNote and a paper notebook from Papier.

I therefore very much enjoyed this book excerpt by Roland Allen in The Walrus about the history of Moleskine—the notebook manufacturer to whose paper diaries Wendy is especially loyal.

The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket, and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block, ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use, it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level.

My Papier notebook, I note, does not exhibit all of those features, and would be better if it did. I particularly liked the article’s take on the little leaflet that’s tucked inside Moleskine notebooks:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities—usefulness and emotion—to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

It’s one of those articles which is packed with insights and titbits I’ve never thought to wonder about, and I’d highly recommend giving it a few minutes of your time.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It’s hard to know what to write about this 2022 novel. It is a reflection on a female writer’s lifelong relationship with her mother, who has recently died. The writer shares some characteristics with McCracken, and there is a lot of reflection in the text about the boundary between a novel and memoir.

This is one of those books where the standout quality is not the plot, nor even the memorable characterisations, but the writing itself: it is lyrical, evocative, funny, and clever. It is a complete pleasure to read, and I found sections of it to be deeply moving.

I have a strong suspicion that this is a book that would divide opinion: some will be turned off by the meta discussion of what it is and isn’t, the ambiguity about fact and fiction. But I found it beguiling, and perhaps you will too.

Here are a few of the many passages I noted down:

The least appetizing words in the world concern English food: salad cream, baps, butties, carvery, goujons.

Everyone knows that it’s noble to go to museums unaccompanied. Look at us solitary exhibition gawkers: We pause to read the captions, we wander the rooms at a thoughtful speed, we think things, and therefore we’re allowed to drink early and often.

“You never told me that your mother was a cripple,” a seventh-grade friend once said to me, and I said, shocked, “You never told me that your mother was fat.” I didn’t mean it unkindly. I had a fat father. The shock was partly the nineteenth-century awfulness of the word but also that she thought my mother’s physical self was something I should have mentioned. The point was that neither of us had described our mother’s body to the other. What twelve-year-old girl would? How would we have even brought it up?

I didn’t believe in hell or an afterworld of any sort. What netherworld could be more nether than this one?

I won’t point out the obvious—that my mother never said she loved me—because it’s academic. My mother loved me. It’s not a question. I knew it and she knew it. Her inability to say so felt no different from her inability, her refusal, to speak French.

When you’re old, safety is overrated. Safety is the bossy Irish lady, who is, after all, your employee, taking away your wineglass, saying, “That’s enough, that’s enough now, that’s enough now, darlin’.” Safety puts you in a nursing home and turns you over regularly so that you do not die in your sleep. You could be kept for years if you weren’t careful, like a roped-off chair in a museum that nobody is allowed to sit in, which makes it only something shaped like a chair. Watch out for safety. It will make you no longer yourself, only an object shaped that way.

There was plenty my mother didn’t tell me about being disabled and Jewish in small-town Iowa. Her memory for unhappiness and misery was terrible. Maybe she willed this into being and maybe it was neurological, but somehow I have inherited this tendency—of all my inheritances, it is my favorite, the most useful, though I do remember some grudges. She was (have I mentioned this? my mother herself would joke) stubborn. It served her well. She hid a lot of hard work and heartbreak. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, but that doesn’t mean people didn’t say no or you can’t or don’t or we can’t, all the time. I don’t know what doctors advised her about having children. At some point she decided she wouldn’t be deterred from a single thing she wanted to do, and she did it with good cheer. Not the good cheer of the storybook cripple (as my seventh-grade friend had called her), looking on the bright side, a bird in a cage. My mother’s good cheer was an engine that would burn you if you tried to touch it, hoping to switch it off. Her body was her body. It wasn’t something to overcome or accept any more than yours was.

I remember she was once presented with a piece of toast spread with Marmite, and she ate it all, and when asked how she liked it, she said, “I’m not eager to repeat the experience.”

Wife, daughter, mother, friend, some people write in their social-media biographies. Why on earth? Applying any words to who I am feels like a straight pin aimed at my insect self. I won’t have it. I can’t do it.

I recently came across this 2013 article by Adee Braun in The Atlantic, which takes a historical perspective on the perceived medical benefits of time spent at the seaside. From a British perspective, there wasn’t much here that was particularly new: I’m sure we all learned in school history lessons about the Victorian obsession with the seaside.

The seaside resort was where the serious healing took place. The sea air along with the ocean views and warm weather were considered critical to a patient’s recovery, especially when treating tuberculosis.

Something about the presentation of the article, though, made me reflect on how restoring a walk at the seaside is for me—and how, in its own way, that’s a modern perspective on the health-giving benefits of the seaside.

Wendy and I love a walk along the coast or the beach, and we are therefore particularly lucky to live in the North East, where many miles of spectacular coastline are close by. If we’re feeling down or not quite ourselves, a bracing walk by the sea always helps. This is undoubtedly partly due to the physical exertion, but I think it’s also to do with the perspective that the coastline brings: the vast scope and the view out to an impossibly distant horizon serve as a reminder about how small we and our problems are in reality.

We have many friends and colleagues who dip into the North Sea year-round, as Braun describes people doing for hundreds of years. Braun says that a dunk in the freezing sea can resemble ‘waterboarding far more than a spa treatment,’ with ‘the twin effects of cold and suffocation causing terror and panic.’

That’s not for me, but I continue to enjoy a long stroll along the coast.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3. I not sure what’s going on with the doctor’s teeth, and can confirm that I’ve never worn a stethoscope at the beach.

I recently began reading The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins, first published in 1954. Early on, Jenkins describes a character’s dark eyes, and where I would use the word ‘irises’, Jenkins used the word ‘irids’:

Her skin had the warm whiteness of marble in sunlight, her eyes were so dark the irids were indistinguishable from the pupils; the whites were a pale blue.

Why have I never seen or heard the word ‘irids’ before? Where did it come from? Why don’t we use it anymore?

To the OED!

As it turns out, the distinction between the words is not massively clear: as you’d guess, they share an etymology.

Certainly, ‘iris’ is more common than ‘irid’ these days, though some people prefer ‘irides’—with that extra ‘e’—as a plural form rather than ‘irises’. Indeed, ‘irides’ is listed in the 1900 OED as the preferred plural. There are two iris-related adjectives listed in the OED, both of which prefer a ‘d’ over an ‘s’: ‘iridal’ and ‘iridic’.

Comparing the frequency of usage of ‘irid’ and ‘iris’ is complicated by the fact that ‘irid’ is specific to the structure in the eye and the genus of plants, whereas ‘iris’ can also refer to the Greek goddess, a shape of crystal, and an asteroid—among other things.

One of the other things that can be described as an ‘iris’ is a rainbow. You might think you’ve never heard of this usage, but you probably have—just with a ‘d’ form of the word. The much more common word ‘iridescent’ is used to describe items that show many different colours when seen from different angles. ‘Iridescent’ is an adjective related to ‘iris’ in its ‘rainbow’ sense.

The preference for ‘iris’ as the anatomical term seems to have followed the standardisation of terms as medical publishing became a thing: Gray’s Anatomy has consistently used ‘iris’ since its first publication in 1858, and most textbooks—and latterly medical journals—followed suit. As medical science advanced rapidly in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a strong push towards the standardisation of medical terms to ensure clear communication between medical professionals: see also the virtually total replacement of ‘apoplexy’ with ‘stroke’, of ‘consumption’ with ‘tuberculosis’, and of ‘dropsy’ to ‘oedema’.

Curiously, though, ‘irid’ was already pretty uncommon by the time Jenkins’s novel was published: its frequency of usage was similar to today’s. It was, however, much closer to its peak fifty years earlier, when Jenkins would have been growing up—so perhaps it was lodged in her lexis.

Perhaps in a similar way, I sometimes get teased for using certain words in medical notes: ‘don’ and ‘summarily’ are two examples. Both are words whose usage has collapsed since the decade when I was born, but which seem like perfectly ordinary, everyday words to me. As it happens, both were also less common in the 1950s than in the 1980s: the popularity of words can rise as well as fall.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

In the FT Weekend, Tim Harford recently played with the latest version of ChatGPT and concluded that:

large language models can be phenomenal bullshit engines. The difficulty here is that the bullshit is so terribly plausible. We have seen falsehoods before, and errors, and goodness knows we have seen fluent bluffers. But this? This is something new.

It made me reflect on the types of, erm, lexical nonsense I come across in my day-to-day life.

The kind I find most irritating by far is deliberately obfuscatory language. I recently received an email referring to a ‘pathogen agnostic enabling technology’ and wondered why on Earth someone would write that: I didn’t understand what it meant, I’m fairly certain that most other readers didn’t either, and I’ve a strong suspicion that the author would also be unable to concisely define it. They were hiding their lack of understanding—or perhaps their inability to describe something clearly and concisely—behind a jargon phrase.

Yet, from a reader’s perspective, the advantage of this sort of word salad is that it’s clearly visible: it telegraphs a lack of understanding up front.

Perhaps I really ought to be more exercised about plausible rubbish: the sort of stuff whose clarity of expression lulls one into a false sense of assurance, from which the logical leaps are harder to spot. That seems far more insidious.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.