Occasionally, I post new-to-me words discovered during my reading rambles. I do this for my edification. If you’ve stumbled across this post and you're a word-nerd, you might enjoy these as well. Following each word is a short definition (sometimes with a thought interjected parenthetically), trailed by the context in which the word was found.
integer (ˈin(t)əjər): a thing complete in itself | “Yes it is a mantle, the confidence that you can ever know what words mean because really we don’t. They’re just these signs that we pretend to nail down in dictionaries, tokens of usage, but frankly they’re all wild integers. Disassembling it is a way of exposing that myth at the bottom of language.” | Interview with Anne Carson, Brick Magazine
icastic: imitative or figurative; making a likeness | “In his effort to convey complex ideas about literature, Calvino's most effective tools are mythology and visual imagery--what he calls icastic imagery, an archaic word in English, though common in Italian, from the Greek eikastikos, meaning ‘figurative.’” - Re: 20th Century Literature, W. Caleb Crain
vitrine (vəˈtrēn): a glass display case | (from a photo): “Zoe Leonard examines a vitrine containing her conceptual project, ‘The Fae Richard Photo Archive,’ at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. | From the article, “In quiet yet visceral works, Zoe Leonard captures the frailty, pain and eccentricities of human life” - Carolina A. Miranda, Los Angeles Times
prolegomenon (prōləˈɡämənən): a critical or discursive introduction to a book | “Because Foucault died before he completed the revisions of his seminar presentations, this volume includes a careful transcription instead...as a prolegomenon to that unfinished task.” - Technologies of the Self, A Seminar with Michel Foucault
cavil (kavəl): make petty or unnecessary objections | “Imagine a type of writing so hard to define its very name should be something like: an effort, an attempt, a trial. Surmise or hazard, followed likely by failure. Imagine what it might rescue from disaster and achieve at the levels of form, style, texture and therefore (though some might cavil at “therefore”) at the level of thought.” - Brian Dillon, Essayism