The Imperfect Sieve

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a Brobdingnagian word

Brobdingnagian (Brob·ding·nag·i·an) - I came across this word today while reading a random post. It means gigantic. And me being of slow body and mind, took some time to figure out the pronunciation. Then pondered a bit. It’s a long word that essentially means big. That’s quite interesting!

This jolted my rusty brain back to my school years where one of my friends was trolling everyone with the spelling of a new word he found in the dictionary - Onomatopoeia (on·o·mat·o·poe·ia). The word describes a classification of words that mean what they sound like. For example, woof, buzz, bang. 

On a broader scale, all these words are self referential at some level.

Another memory comes trickling back! 

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the ‘fear of large words’. I had to  google this one ‘cause I suffer from Hippopotomusicannotrememberlongwordsforgodsakephobia. But there’s is one word I will always remember (Took me two days to remember back in school) - Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

And going back to self referential words, found these two also today

Sesquipedalian (ses·qui·pe·da·li·an) - meaning a long word or polysyllabic

Anapest (an·a·pest) - A metrical foot consisting of three syllables, two short and one long 

Hit me back if you know another one!

I was an envious child

As a kid, I never understood why I never was ‘four and a half’ or ‘six and a half’ years old. Everyone I knew, had at least once had come of that age. But whenever I had asked my parents how old I was, they never said something ‘and a half’. I though of myself as less special for the entire duration of my childhood.  I wondered why god was co cruel to me. I asked to blessed with at least one ‘half year’ every birthday, and it never came. I was repeatedly disappointed, and finally realising that I was truly unlucky. God! I envied everybody! 

The Problem with Human Intelligence

Easter Island is a remarkable place
not only for its giant stone statues,
one thousand of them, each weighing
18 tons and standing 15 feet tall, but

also for its fossil pollen record and
what it tells us about Human Beings.
Easter Island is completely treeless
but the fossil pollen tells us that

a fruit palm tree flourished on Easter Island
for thousands of years and the decline of that species
began about 1200 years ago and continued for
several hundred years until the tree became extinct.

1200 years ago is when the Humans came to Easter Island.
If you stand on the island’s highest point
you can see nearly the entire island so
the people knew what they were doing:

systematically they were destroying their paradise
and the man who cut the last tree, the very thing
he depended upon for his survival,
knew it was the last tree standing and

he cut it anyway.

Source: The Art of Dying by Red Hawk

The Narwhalian Rhapsody