Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Words

First, an article entitled "Not Jewish but Jew-ish" provided quite the food for thought. It's by a Jewish man who considers himself cultural but not religious. He loves bacon, never goes to temple, and has no apologies for anything. An excerpt:

"I thoroughly enjoy and celebrate my culture, but I am deeply contemptuous of the madness and hypocrisy that has sprouted up in the organised religion, as it does in most cults. And I say this even though some of my best friends are frum and I'm a completely fake agnostic, because I still quietly recite the Shema when things get awkward."

Second, I just finished the book The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life. It was amazing. The author is a developmental psychologist as well as a philosopher. Parts of it were more engaging than others, but her last chapter, especially, is brilliant. I feel like I understand Xander's sense of consciousness and how he thinks much better now. Highly recommended.

Last but not least, in class today I was bored. To entertain myself I tried to decide upon my favorite word. I had a tie: "parallelogram" and "snuffle-up-ogus" (from Sesame Street). What are your favorite words?


6 comments:

Anonymous said...

My favorite word is Haleakala. It is the volcano on Maui. I just love the way it sounds :)

Clarissa

Michal said...

Ooh, that is cool, Clarissa!

Sheryl said...

triskaidekaphobia
it just trips of the tongue!
I also like writing Egypt - all the letter go above or below the middle line.

Michal said...

Sheryl, I just had to look your word up in the dictionary! I never knew it existed. Yeah... definitely a tongue-tripper. And I just hand wrote Egypt for fun. :P)

Anonymous said...

Hey Sheryl! I just recently got that on my Word of the Day:
triskaidekaphobia -- fear or phobia of the number 13!
How neat that you bring it up now!
While it trips off your tongue, it stumbles on mine!
Savta

lynn said...

My long-time silliest word (or maybe 2 words) is "door key". Even when I was a kid and the concept of "dorkey" wasn't around, that I know of.