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May, 2025
May 28 How to Pronounce "Forte"
I just stumbled across a short podcast episode by the Executive Editor of the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD) promoting their book 100 Words Almost Everyone Mispronounces. The podcast is a riveting 16 minutes of examples of such words.
The most notable of those few examples from the 100 is the difference between forte and forte. I always understood this to be one word with two senses — the one you use in music to mean loud and the one you use to boast about yourself to mean strength. But these are, in fact, two separate words from two different linguistic origins that are merely homonyms.
Forte, like what a director might shout at his choral students, is of Italian origin and is pronounced as two syllables, as you normally would hear this word: fôrtā.
Forte, as in "singing isn't my forte" is of French origin — a land famous for silent 'e's — and is pronounced as one syllable, exactly like the English word fort.
These two words are as different as the borrowed French noun résumé is from the English verb resume.
May 28 The language we use for love is perverted. We say that we fall in love as if from Eden and into sin. We say that we catch feelings as if love is a virus. We say that we become smitten with someone, which is the past participle of the verb to smite, as if God seeks retribution by making one feel love for another. The truth is that we rise to the challenge of love, that we long to receive it because it is healing, and that it can absolve. Love is a choice, and one can choose to love anyone.
This insight was inspired by Chance Peña's performance of his song Dominos, specifically this lyric:
Love is how we rise, not how we fall.
May 27 I'll write an entire essay or book chapter to earn single aphorism. Quips and quotable, pithy statements only powerful in context. It's not enough to simply state the thing; the author must also show the thing outside our heads, manifested somehow in the world. She must guide a reader up and down the Ladder of Abstraction.
May 27 The only good debt is debt tied to an appreciating asset. This seems obvious, but breaking this rule is how people ruin themselves financially. Here are the good debts, to allow if you must: a mortgage, a small-business loan. Note that they are very few. Here is a non-exhaustive list of bad debts, to be avoided at all costs: student loans, car loans, multi-month credit card debt. If I am not building a business or buying a house, I ought to be debt-free.
If there is any goal to meditation, it is to be mind-full, not -empty.
May 26 Commas with "So": This is up to your discretion. All of these commas are optional. So, (haha) leave the comma in when you want a pause and omit it when you don't.
May 25 Enlightenment is the cessation of one's desire for deliverance.
May 24 There is no sense in making something stale. No matter how meaty or how meaningful your subject matter, also make it funny.
My mind barely moves unless my body has already.
May 24 Here is an excellent use of a semicolon from one of my favorite writers of all time, Albert Camus:
"Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken."
May 23 Attend to this, here, now rather than that, there, then.
May 23 God, or the Absolute, is entirely inaccessible in life and yet God is manifested all around and within us.
Everything happens in time. What you know to be right for yourself or for someone else — infinitely, absolutely, abstractly — might not be what's right now. Everything must come about via an organic process of growth and change. Any state or outcome you try to fabricate will come at the expense of the present or at the expense of authenticity or freedom. The right thing will come in time. Just make sure that right now is right for you.
May 22 Mice in the city aren't even organisms but mobile shadows. They scurry as the shadow of a leaf does as the 3-D thing flutters along between the pavement and the sunshine.
May 20 Reciprocity is a force so powerful that it seems to be the reason the Earth spins on its axis.
May 20 Self-Investigative Journalism: Plumbing the depths of one's own soul, via some adventure, and reporting back in lucid prose
May 18 Sinatra said, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere." But he failed to say, "If I wind up there I might not ever go anywhere."
May 18 Less vs. Fewer
Any native speaker of English knows better than to say, "This costs fewer money than that," but they likely don't know why.
In English, there are countable nouns and uncountable nouns—e.g., dollars and money, respectively. When comparing the count or amount of these nouns, the educated speaker/writer makes a decision between the adjectives less and fewer (the word more is applicable to both types of noun). Less describes an uncountable noun, and fewer describes a countable noun—a collection of individual items rather than a solid mass of one thing.
One would never say "fewer money," but one may say "fewer dollars." Use fewer for nouns that you can count and less for nouns that you can't. "Would you rather have more or fewer apples?" vs. "Would you rather have more or less happiness?"
There are nuanced cases of this where a noun or noun-phrase could serve as either a countable or uncountable noun, and in those cases, the use of either fewer or less indicates the meaning of the noun/noun-phrase. Take these two examples:
- "My meal costs less than ten dollars."
- "My meal costs fewer than ten dollars."
In the first example, "ten dollars" is a noun-phrase that answers the question "What amount of money?" And the sentence means that the meal costs some amount of money—any amount—that is less than the value of ten dollars.
In the second example, "ten" is an adjective (not part of a noun-phrase) answering the question "How many dollars?" And the sentence means that the meal costs some number of dollars fewer than ten—maybe $9 or $8 but not $9.50.
Each non-singular noun is either a number of things or an amount of something; it's either countable or uncountable.
If you're ever struggling with a case of less vs. fewer, slot the noun in question into this sentence, and see if it makes sense: "How many [] do you have?" How many money— Nope! How much money? How many dollars? That tells you that money is uncountable and that dollars is countable. Much and less go together with an amount of something; many and fewer go together with a number of things.
Now that you know the difference between amount and number, less and fewer, you'll have much less stress and many fewer worries."
Bonus Examples
- Here is an unintuitive and irregular example: "Hockey has one fewer period than football." Period is still a countable noun, even though it's singular rather than plural; you can't have an amount of periods, only a number of periods.)
- "Less than one week" means fewer than seven days, whereas "fewer than three weeks" means either one week or two weeks.
May 17 God did not give man dominion over the Earth and its creatures. He gave each man dominion over himself only, for oneself is all one can control—and even that, hardly.
May 17 Mortality is a gift, for the burden of morality is too heavy to carry for eternity. See how much one struggles to be moral for a hundred years and imagine what it would be like to live for billions more. Maybe you can, but I cannot fathom it. Without mortality, we would be gods. Only He is fit to carry that burden for eternity. It was an act of grace for us to be cast from Eden; God refused to pass His infinite burden on to Her children.
[[Eden Is Hell Too]]
(A Prayer): Please help me see what path for me would be most beneficial for all.
May 16 Lucidity means seeing reality as it is; it is freedom from delusion (and an acceptance of the absurdity of existence).
An Absurdist Ethics by Antithesis What Camus says we ought to do
The central question of ethics is "What is it that one ought to do?" or "What is right?" For Camus, that question is more specific. With all of his fiction and more explicitly in his nonfiction, he asks, "What is it that one ought to do in the face of the absurd?"
Neither Monsieur Meursault (the protagonist of The Stranger) nor Clamance (the Judge Penitent in The Fall) are suitable role models. By their decisions and behavior in these novels, Camus's characters model what not to do, revealing the ought via antithesis.
Each of these characters (and others in his fiction, like the protagonist in "The Guest") demonstrate a different error in response to the absurd. Both Meursault and Clamance accept the absurdity of existence, but, to use Camus's terms, they do not properly revolt. They do not remain lucid to the truths of reality but rather shirk and avoid and pervert them in their minds.
To put it simply, Meursault uses the absurd as an excuse to resign from the world and become dejected and dispassionate and utterly unconcerned with his own behavior and his impact on others. He fails to create meaning. And Clamance betrays the truth of his existence by absolving himself via self-judgement. He is so concerned with how he is perceived and whether he considers himself a good person that he forgets to do good deeds and instead spends all his energy rationalizing and justifying his actions and judging himself and others, rather than doing what he knows he ought to do.
The philosophical value in Camus's fiction is not a positive argument for a certain ethics, revealed through subtext; rather, it is that each of his characters offer a lucid, intimate confrontation with the many ways we can deny the absurd and the truths of existence, and the myriad consequences those failures produce.
May 16 At the end of this awesome video (behind the scenes of the Doom Eternal soundtrack), I realized that the tagline for the game was "Raze Hell," which is a perfect pun and great copy — also an example of riffing on clichés.
May 7 My task in life is to find my natural bearing and, to it, match my heading.
May 5 A tragedy in one line of dialogue:
"Sir, your daughter killed herself five years ago."
Grammar is not oppressive. Or, if it is, it is only as oppressive as gravity. Grammar doesn't keep you down; it keeps you grounded.
May 3 Essay idea: Abstinence from All Vices Lede: Sex is not a vice.
- About the virtue and utility of abstinence, and how warped our view of abstinence is (how it's tied to religion and sex-negative, -taboo thinking)
- Personal anecdotes about how well abstinence has worked for me: alcohol, drugs, social media, and most recently my elimination diet (for my skin — tell the story)
- Abstinence helps me focus on what matters and helps me make better decisions, ones that are better aligned with my values. I applied to one college, dated one girl, applied to one job, only had one job before starting my own business, and at restaurants I only ever order water.
May 1 Energy is everything. Everything is energy.
The natural state of the world is harmony, and the natural trend of the world is toward discord.
The concept of a dissonant chord may seem oxymoronic (an agreement that lacks harmony), but it is in fact a paradox. It is not a confusion of terms; both parts are equally true. The chord is an agreement of notes, meaning that they go together, but the sound they produce may seem disharmonious/dischordant. Yet, the dissonant chord surely has a place in the broader form of Nature's composition.
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