I must restrain myself from blogging this morning, to get work done, but quickly, I wanted to share two things with you.
1. When I first moved to Brooklyn, I befriended this girl who worked at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. She was a word snob, and she almost constantly made me feel badly about my vocabulary. So I bought a GRE book, and began making flashcards every day to improve my language skills. Seriously. I’m that competitive.
Anyway, this morning, when I was looking for a word for an article, I came across this list of the 50 words readers of the New York Times have trouble defining. It was fun to read, mostly because I still don’t know the definition to words like jejune and sclerotic. I already have a stack of notecards ready next to me, bitch.
On a side note, one time I tried to use the word “quotidian” in an New York Times article, which I think means so little that it isn’t even allowed in the paper.
2. This article in the New Yorker by Steve Coll, on why he’s leaving Facebook, seems a little extreme. What is he going to do all day? He’ll be back.
But I really liked this observation:
“There is something vaguely dystopian about oppressed peoples in Syria or Iran seeking dignity and liberation inside a corporate sovereign that is, for its part, creating great wealth for its founders and asserting control over its users.”
