The List

We'll talk about humor in the last part of the blog, but first I'm going to engage a point made in Frances Yates book: "[Albertus'] allusion to the melancholy temperament and memory. According to the normal theory of humours, melancholy, which is dry and cold, was held to produce good memories, because the melancholic received the impressions of images more firmly and retained them longer than persons of other temperaments." (69)

This gets me thinking about the idea of rational thinking because once someone told me that, and I'll paraphrase, people with depression think more truthfully and rationally than those who are happier. It's hard to confirm this point, but there's a character from a novel, a tragedy, whose argument against the existence of God is honest to bone-chilling core and irrefutably honest. So, you ask, how does this have to memory? Well, I don't know although this book fittingly came into my memory today in class. I remember that from about page 300 in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov I start to highlight words in the novel, there are simply too many words I don't know, so then I finish the book and write down the highlights in a notebook on a plane flight back home at the beginning of summer. Below you'll see the majority of what I've found in the notebook. The vocabulary is of two sorts, as in there is one of two reasons that I chose highlight a particular word: 1) It's completely unfamiliar and unknown. 2) It's recognizable, but its definition or concept isn't confidently understood.

So here you have it, 51 vocab words:

-Precocity, tinge, churl, gnash, insidious, free mason, magnanimous, amiable, ineluctable, ardent, ardor, rheumatic, timorous, mitigate, samovar, banal, amicable, abacus, promissory, troika, aphorism, ingenuous, lucre, physiognomy, lorgnette, impetuous, soiree, derisive, venerable, wheedle, talisman, apropos, homeopath, marquis, expatiate, parenthetic, inscrutable, arbiter, casuistry, buxom, trepidation, carrion, commiseration, partition, calico, inveterate, impudent, hetaera, iridescent, frock, balustrade

*Here you have the rest it, another 26:

-foisting, iota, promissory, titular, inexorable, appellation, pettifoggery, admonish, prattle, denouement, tumbler, rostrum, palatial, diocesan, besmirched, tatter, extenuation, repudiate, pensive, quash, emaciate, perspicacity, immolation, peony, liturgy, rending

On a different note, a while back in one of the first several classes Professor Sexson brought up the idea of an inside joke. Not everyone "gets it" because the joke is not an inside joke the first time or in other words "there are no inside jokes told once." This struck me and immediately this got me thinking about one of the most memorable vocabulary words I've ever been taught. From what I've already learned, an "enthymeme" is another way to say "inside joke," and it's only possible to understand an enthymeme the second time around. I remember it this way, even if what I've read online indicates otherwise, because my best friend introduced me to the word in high school. You know how it is with a best friend, you go through much together, many experiences, many stories, and many rememberings of those times which you laugh about later. These are the source your inside jokes, enthymemes of our memories which we are only able laugh at after the fact. So I'll conclude with a joke we'll get in the form of an Ong one-liner: "Memory is mother to amusement."