Word of the Day: Ozymandian
I must confess to first seeing this word just today, over at Malcolm Pollack's excellent weblog embedded in this post. My Webster's failed me, and I am too lazy to pull down my massive OED, which I suspect would fail me as well. So I gained instruction here:
Ozymandian: huge or grandiose but ultimately devoid of meaning; an ironic commentary on the fleeting nature of power and the enduring power of human egotism. (M-W Dict. of Allusion) From the lovely sonnet (1818) by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Word of the Day: Ozymandian
- Word of the Day: Ambisinistrous
Posted by William F. Vallicella on
Thursday December 1, 2005 at 9:24am
Actually, I had thought I coined the word myself as I wrote that post! But considering that there is no word in our language that exactly expresses the concept, while Shelley's sonnet nails it perfectly, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.
Sad that the Times would publish such a letter, no?
The Grey Lady is definitely in decline. And it is strange that the letter you menioned would appear in the Science section. Does the NYT still run a chess column? Or will that be replaced by astrology?
The letter was in the Science Times section (which is printed every Tuesday) because it referred to an article that had been published in that section the previous week.
There still is a chess column, yes. It's written by Robert Byrne, who took over from the late great Al Horowitz some years back. It only runs on Saturdays, though, down from twice a week.
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3. The Comments area is not an open forum for anyone to say anything about any topic. As the name implies, it is primarily for commenting on the author(s)' posts. But to comment on them, one must have read them. And if I have spent three hours on a post, a reader will not understand it in thirty seconds. Secondarily, the Comments area is to facilitate civil discussion between and among commenters as long as the discussion remains on-topic.
4. Some undesirables: The skimmers, those who cannot read but only read-in. The sophists who, abusing argument, argue for the sake of argument. The ideologues, those who are out for power, not truth. The uncivil. The illogical. The politically correct. Worst of all, perhaps, are those who exemplify the anti-Socratic property: those who think they know what they don't know. If Socrates was famous for his learned ignorance, these types are marked by their ignorant unlearnededness.