Continuing on with the word treasure hunt in this four-part series. This round has some good words!
Today’s Word Gems
- Quixotically (adjective) - caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreasonable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality.
- Deep Work, pg 219 - “The value of deep work vastly outweighs the value of shallow, but this doesn’t mean that you must quixotically pursue a schedule in which all of your time is invested in depth.”
- Damoclean (adjective) - threatening and precarious.
- Deep Work, pg 241 - “The Damoclean cap on the workday enforced by fixed-schedule productivity has a way of keeping my organization efforts sharp.”
- Seiche (noun) - a temporary disturbance or oscillation in the water level of a lake or partially enclosed body of water, especially one caused by changes in atmospheric pressure.
- Buddhism Plain and Simple, pg 145 - “A seiche is the kind of wave that forms in a basin or bathtub when the water sloshes back and forth. This kind of movement goes on constantly in our mind when it's occupied with conceptual definitions.”
- Parsimonious (adjective) - unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal.
- Why We Sleep, pg 45 - “Combine these last two, and we have at least one parsimonious explanation for why the two types of sleep cycles across the night, and why those cycles are mutually dominated by NREM with REM sleep reigning supreme in the second half of the night.”
- Stochastic (adjective) - randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
- I didn’t record the location for this word….
- This was meant unironically, but I see the irony here
Ponder This
- What strategies do you use to remember and incorporate new vocabulary into your daily life?
- Can you identify any recent situations where a more extensive vocabulary might have helped you explain a concept or idea more effectively? Or even the opposite scenario?
Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
Books
- Deep Work - Cal Newport
- Daily Stoic - Ryan Holiday
- Buddhism Plain and Simple - Steve Hagen
- Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker