What a stunning 12th century definition of the work of lexicographers by Marie de France! Her passage beautifully captures how earlier scholars often wrote in metaphorical or obscure language, requiring future readers to decipher and interpret the meaning. But Marie is also remarkably prescient in recognizing this interpretive process as the essence of creating a gloss (or dictionary) elucidating the symbolic "letter" of a text by bridging context and definitions.
For all the dictionary-makers โ and their forever unfinished yet deeply meaningful job: Happy Dictionary Day!
[Illustration: Marie de France writing, Paris, BnF, Franรงais, 2173, f.93] #DictionaryDay#AngloNorman#Medieval
Attention bookworms: What are people using to get information about good new books that are out there? I'm a huge fan of science fiction, for example, and I know there's got to be tons of good books I haven't read simply because I've never heard of them. Sometimes I'll go window shopping, basically searching Bookshare and Kindle for certain words, just to see what comes up, and doing that I do stumble across some books, but I know there's a ton I'm missing because I don't even know it exists. Boosts appreciated.
one of my big problems in life is that i'm not good at motivating myself to do things. left to my own devices, doing thingsโeven things i enjoyโis sporadic at best.
music, drawing, learning programmingโall these things i'm interested in, but struggle to follow through on, & it's very frustrating. i need externally-imposed structure to get anything done.
i always struggled with homework, but my grades were great otherwise (honors, AP, etc). eventually i started doing my homework in school, cause i just wouldn't get it done at home.
& i don't really know what to do about this, which is doubly frustrating.
Hi @neilhimself ! I'm a huge fan and an aspiring writer with a... less than satisfactory range of vocabulary. How does one learn new phrases and words and actually remember them?
On the bird site, I followed quite a few #JaneAusten and #Bronte accounts. Here, when I search for either tag, it's typically only me that comes up. Surely there are other Austen and Bronte accounts on Mastodon??
It has been so long since I've been here. But I'm looking forward to reintegrating into the platform and finding my/new people. Are we still saying #histodons ?
The Whole Earth Catalog collection (and much more) changed my life for the better. It's all now online. This is seminal media and cultural history: https://wholeearth.info/
The -layout option is great, but if you want to then put together the paragraphs using the layout result, you have to watch the leading spaces.
Depending on the page images, you may find 0, 1, 2 or more leading spaces in front of each line for a whole paragraph...and then the first line may have 2 or 3 more, as the indent.
I usually go through the book or story to see what's what, then use a little regex and manual edits to get rid of any leading spaces except the paragraph indents you want.
Then I replace the real indent spaces with some unused character, blow away all the remaining line-feed and/or newline characters, then replace the placeholder characters with newline characters.
NOW I have a text file Calibre can turn into an epub with good paragraphs!
The Calibre heuristic processing option can do some of this, but it is not as accurate as doing it yourself.
I'm to stressed to read fiction, but last Friday, just before the war began I finished: Venomous Lumpsucker
Three words: Extinction Credit Economics
How would capitalism react to fines placed on causing extinction?
I was impressed by Beauman's understanding that you don't need to be evil to participate in the ecology's destruction. The extinction industry arseholes aren't competent or smart, just indifferent and greedy.