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Doug's Word of the Week
(Note: Doug claims that his word offerings are not intended to have any political or cultural subtext whatsoever.)
propinquity / pro-PING-kwi-tee /noun: 1. Nearness in space, time or relationship
Notes & Etymology: From the Middle English propinquite, from the Latin propinquitas (nearness), from prope (near).
Usage: "I believe that ... propinquity of descent, -- the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings, -- is the bond, hidden as it is by various degrees of modification, which is partially revealed to us by our classifications. "
Charles Darwin; On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; 1859.
Use this word in conversation at least twice in the coming week and it's yours forever!
2 comments:
So here's a comment I left on Chris Pirillo's blog (http://chris.parillo.com/how-to-blog/) that has to do with the ethics of title/content agreement in blog posts--whether their propinquity implies some kind of intimacy (of shared content)? And about other things too, as my comments tend to be.
Well, I'm an old dog trying to learn a few new tricks, for a bunch of reasons.
Two of the really important ones are, first, that learning new tricks is supposed to be a guaranteed way to keep an old dog's brain in shape and maybe even bulging out in some new places. Blogging well might be just such a new trick for me.
Second-- next to the pancake supper I host each and every Mardi Gras featuring some of the best homemade grid cakes on the planet topped with always amazing and always warm Massachusetts small batch maple syrup--next to that, I'd say that what you call noise contains, here and there, serious human brain and community growth potential and that makes the old dog's tail wag up a storm. Finding new ways to tap into that potential and engage that community uncovers, always, a world of new tricks for this old dog!
That being said, just a couple of grizzled old dog quibbles. While I'm a huge "writing well" fan and know something about the skill and the art, I'm always a little wary of the "writing well rules." Who makes them? And why? And who gets to apply them? Or in the case of Lockergnome, is writing well like that old Supreme Court definition of obscenity: you know it when you see it? That's cool, of course, except it doesn't give the aspiring Gnomes much to aim for.
So, just to push this a little, does writing well mean for you using the (English) language well? If so, how do you decide what that means? In this post, you (and Kontera too) exhibit a fondness for verbs-turned-into-nouns-that-end-in-ization, such as the always seductive "monetization" and the oddly weird "customization." Question might be asked: might not "advertization" be preferable to the oddly antique "advertising" or "constructivizing" to the old fashioned "constructing"? I mean, who's to say?
So that's the language quibble. The other one is about heading/content agreement in blog posts. Question is, is Gina (post just above) right? Does she have a point? Because to this (again grizzled) eye, nothing in this "How to Blog" post is about how to blog. It's all interesting stuff--about customization and monetization and optimization of the blog. But the basic, advertised-in-the-title question, "How to Blog" --well, that'll have to wait for another post.
So, bottom line from the uninitiated, is there any kind of blog ethic that suggests that blog post titles and blog post content need to be connected? Or can we nascent bloggers just assume that a title's as good a way as any to get people to find us, whether or not what follows is what the title promises?
So, all that being said, yours is a blog I read often and often find helpful and frequently funny (that great combo!). So thanks. And Gina and I'll wait for the real "How to Blog" post, on the off chance blogging is reducible to a post--or even should be!
Jim
So maybe I should get my own blog? or do I here raise a serious theological/ethical issue for the blogasphere?
More propinquity!
This is of the variety that ends up with people whom I never met coming close to me, than circling around and coming back again, through the aegis of a third-party and the strange meanderings of fortune.
In this case, the players are a recently deceased philosopher, Jay Rosenberg, the place and people of the northern Massachusetts community where I've spent the last few summers, Singing Brook Farm (www.singingbrookfarm.com) in Hawley, MA,(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawley,_Massachusetts) in particular the farm's resident cooking guru and chanteuse, Tinky Weisblat, and the women in my family who taught me to love and to be unafraid of cooking. Recently, in her blog, In Our Grandmothers' Kitchens (http://grandmotherskitchens.com),Tinky featured a tuna casserole recipe of another desultory SBFer, Faith; and it reminded me of how I learned about the nuts and bolts of cooking, as well as where a certain expansive view of the art was first inculcated.
Here's my comment on that recipe post:
"Nice to be reminded of Faith and those summer days that now seem long ago–and her bathing suit that lingered on the changing cabin railing long after she was gone. Now as to that tuna casserole, it got me thinking about just about the first thing I ever cooked, another version of the tuna casserole thing based on a recipe from an amazing and awesome little cookbook called “The impoverished students’ book of cookery, drinkery, & housekeepery” by Jay Rosenberg, who when he wrote it in the late 1960’s was a student at Reed College, where it can still be had from the college bookstore (http://bookstore.reed.edu/) for $9.95 (half of which goes to a scholarship fund at Reed in Jay’s name). I learned, pretty much, how to cook from this book, which I acquired in 1970. Not only did it frame cooking as an open-ended and creative endeavor, but it was full of your basic advice on implements and such, and it’s written with great good 1970’s undergrad humor. It’s never been out of print, despite what Amazon says, though early editions are now selling for big bucks. As for the tuna casserole, it’s rightly one of the book’s recommended staples; but so expansive is Jay’s view of cooking that the simple noodles, condensed soup, canned peas, and tuna version he included has evolved in my family over time to include, as above, fresh mushrooms, fresh frozen petite peas, fresh dill, sour cream, bechamel sauces, cayenne pepper and even once fresh tuna! The current gourmet’s delight, which I last made last summer at SBF, would never have come to pass without the influences of my grandmothers and Professor Rosenberg (http://www.unc.edu/~jfr/). Jay went on to become a very important figure–philosopher and teacher–in 20th century American philosophy, a generalist with a bent for Kant whose subsequent canon is nearly indecipherable to me and who, alas, died last year, just my age, of esophageal cancer–but that wasn’t the fault of his tuna casserole! So I applaud the variation in recipes that keeps cookery away from being a dead science and pushes it always toward art! Let’s hear it for fresh mushrooms, 1% milk, and all the varieties of creamed soups there are–there’s a great comfortable casserole embedded in each! Yum!"
Now about that propinquity: Jay and me in small, smart liberal arts colleges at the same time (early 1960's), a continent apart. (Same time, different space.) At the behest of fellow students, he gathers some of his recipes and some commentary into a cheerful little tome, the above-mentioned "Impoverished Students' Book of Cookery...." Mysteriously, it makes its way to me when I'm in seminary and shapes my culinary life forever. Then Jay goes to my homestate university, UNC, to do philosophy and he becomes a great teacher (by all accounts) and a great 20th century American philosopher (by all accounts but mine: I can scarcely make heads or tails of it, though I think Jay would tell me that heads and tails is precisely its subject matter, in some sense). I pass near him dozens of time over the ensuing years, by virtue of spending time in that Chapel Hill world, but we never meet. (Same place and time, different space.) An early parishioner of mine at St. Mary's, Penn Law and philosophy professor, Samuel Freeman (http://www.phil.upenn.edu/faculty/freeman/, come to think of it, may have studied with Rosenberg when Sam was doing his undergraduate or maybe even law degrees at Carolina--if so, more coincidental propinquity. Then many years later, I am reminded that Jay Rosenberg essentially taught me how to do a casserole in that little book, which sends me into the SBF nexus to praise his name. Whilst I am trying to track him down, I learn of his very untimely death last year of cancer. So now I am left to think that his philosophy of common sense could have no better exemplar for ordinary people than the common sense of "The Impoverished Students Book."
Paths cross and make meaning, whether we know it or not. Does that mean that "there's a divinity that shapes our ends, roughhew them how we will"? (Hamlet, V, ii: http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/hamlet/21?term=there\%27s%20a%20divinity%20that%20shapes%20our%20ends&no_cj_c=0)
Probably not--it's a huge mistake to confuse good (or bad) fortune, even propinqitous good (or bad) fortune with the will of God! There lies what I believe to be a fundamental theological error: solipsism. But that's probably another story--which should properly follow another word of the day or week--maybe it could be "solipsism"!
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