Yearly Archives: 2013

A walk on the wildcard side

Posted on November 9, 2013 | 8 comments

In my experience, most editors – let alone less proficient users of Word – have little to no familiarity with Word’s wild cards and are afraid to try them. This is a pity: It’s like being afraid to learn how to copy and paste instead of retyping every time. Using wildcards is not hard, and it can save you a lot of time.

Do you need to memorize a whole bunch of rules? No. This isn’t a course where you will have a closed-book test at the end. Whenever you can’t think of what to do, the Microsoft Word MVP Site has a lovely resource at word.mvps.org/faqs/general/UsingWildcards.htm . You can just look there and refresh your memory. But I’ll save you a little time and effort with a rundown of the basic principles, followed by some useful examples.

Basic principle 1: Know your superheroes

There are a few symbols that, when you have “Use wildcards” checked under Find and Replace, become something magical and highly powerful:

  • *: The asterisk can represent any number of whatever characters. If you search w*rd you will find word, weird, walked backward, and even phrases such as what! To do 7 isn’t hard – anything that starts with a w and ends with rd and doesn’t have another w or rd in between. Also wrd, because * can stand for nothing at all.
  • ?: The question mark represents one character of any type. Search l??t and you will find lent, last, l33t, etc., but not lit or least.
  • @: The at-sign represents a repeat of the previous character zero or more times. If you search ah@ you will find ah, ahh, ahhh, etc.

Basic principle 2: Be more specific

Much of the time, you don’t actually want to use such high-powered ammunition. You may not be able to specify an exact word – if you could, you probably wouldn’t need wild cards – but you can limit it to a smaller set of characters. There are four tools you need for this:

  • <>: The angle brackets indicate the start and end of a word. So <*> is a word of any length, <?> is a one-letter word, and so on. You don’t have to use them together: ?> will find the last letter of any word.
  • []: Square brackets let you search for any one of a specified set of characters. If you want to find mad, bad, sad, or dad, you can search [bdms]ad. If you want to find a semicolon or colon, use [;:]. If you want any of a range of characters, you can use a hyphen to indicate the range: [0-9] means any numeral; [A-Z] means any capital letter; [a-z] any small letter; [A-z] any letter at all; [0-9A-z] will find any numeral or letter.
  • !: The exclamation mark means “not!” So if you want an occurrence of a letter other than lowercase p or q, for instance, use [!pq]. And if you want to find all words that are not capitalized, you can use <[!A-Z]*>.
  • {}: If you want more than one occurrence of the type of character just specified, you can specify how many using curly brackets. [0-9]{2} will find any two numerals: 29, 47, 68, etc. You can indicate minimum and maximum numbers of occurrences with a comma: [A-Z]{1,3} will find anything with one to three capital letters in a row; [0-9]{2,} will find any set of two or more numerals in a row (no upper limit). To find all capitalized words four or more letters long, use <[A-Z][a-z]{3,}> (if you don’t use the <>, you will also find the Phone in iPhone, for instance).

Basic principle 3: Divide and number

You are very likely to want to break down what you’re searching for into two or more parts, so you can change, move, or remove one part and not another. The way to do this is to use parentheses in your search term and backslash numbers in your replace term.

For instance, let’s say you have 99039 J Wilkins, 85042 K Palmer, etc., and you want it to be Wilkins: 99039, Palmer: 85042, and so on.

So you start with three parts: The number, the initial, and the last name. They are, respectively, [0-9]{5}, [A-Z], and <[A-Z][a-z]{1,}> – plus the spaces, don’t forget that there are spaces between the words. We can use parentheses to divide it into the following parts: ([0-9]{5})( [A-Z] )(<[A-Z][a-z]{1,}>).

We now have parts 1, 2, and 3. And that is how Word will know them – to be precise, as \1, \2, and \3. In your replacement, you are putting the third one first, then a colon and space, then the first one third – in other words, \3: \1. That’s it!

Basic principle number 4: Backslash your way out of conflicts

What if you want to find one of the special characters above as itself? What if you’re looking for parentheses, for instance? Just use a backslash before the character: \( and \) for the parentheses, \@ for the at-sign, and so on.

Now here are three examples of ways wildcard find-and-replaces can make your life easier.

Example 1: Putting en-dashes in number ranges

You want to change hyphens to en-dashes between numbers? You just need to find any number, hyphen, any number, and change it to the same but with a dash in place of a hyphen:

Find: ([0-9])(-)([0-9]) Note that you don’t have to backslash the hyphen – it only has special meaning inside square brackets.

Replace: \1–\3

Be careful, though – if you have phone numbers in your document, you will need to avoid them or change them back.

Example 2: Converting US-style large numbers to metric-style

How about if you need to change numbers such as 4,231 to 4231, but numbers such as 67,853 to 67 853? First change the 5- or 6-digit numbers (because the 4-digit numbers also occur inside the 5- and 6-digit ones):

Find: ([0-9]{2,3})(,)([0-9]{3})

Replace: \1 \3

Then change the four-digit numbers:

Find: ([0-9])(,)([0-9]{3})

Replace: \1\3

But beware: if you have numbers over a million, they will be affected by this, so you’ll have to deal with them first.

Example 3: Formatting titles in a bibliography

Let’s say your bibliography entries are like this:

Garfield TC. The mechanisms of purring. Journal of Feline Biomechanics 23:7 (1998): 12–45.

And you want them to be like this:

Garfield TC. “The mechanisms of purring.” Journal of Feline Biomechanics 23:7 (1998): 12–45.

Because you can’t apply formatting to just part of the result, you need a multi-step process. First add the quotes and some markers for where the italics will start and stop (I’ll use | and §, assuming those are used nowhere else in the text to be dealt with). Turn off the automatic smart quotes – Word may curl them the wrong way.

Find: ([A-Z]. )([A-Z]*.)( )([A-Z]*)( [0-9])

Replace: \1"\2"\3|\4§\5

Then let’s italicize the title:

Find: (|)(*)(§)

Replace: \2 Specify format as italic

Then you need to turn on autocorrect to smart quotes and find and replace all the quotes (find " and replace with " and it will curl them all for you). Et voilà: like magic!

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stupor

Posted on November 7, 2013 | 3 comments

The mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, recently made the news pretty much everywhere by admitting that he had smoked crack, but excusing it as having been “in one of my drunken stupors.”

The question that’s on everyone’s mind now is, of course, “Is stupor related to stupid or is that just a sweet coincidence?” An additional question that is apparently on the minds of many Canadians is “Shouldn’t that be stupour in Canada?”

Yes and no. I mean yes, it’s related, and no, it shouldn’t be stupour. The etymology answers both questions. The words stupor and stupid originate in the Latin verb stupere, ‘be stunned or benumbed’. (Incidentally, in some parts of Canada, and perhaps elsewhere, stunned is also a common colloqual word for ‘stupid’.) That became, still in Latin, the past tense form stupidus ‘stunned, numb’ and the noun stupor. So stupid is to stupor as torpid is to torpor (and, originally, horrid was to horror). And I suppose you could say stupid is as stupor does…

You will see that the noun has not changed spelling from its Latin original. Some other words that have come from Latin -or words (such as color) have passed through a French influence long ago and come out with an added u (subsequently lost in American English). But stupor never did. Well, not never – up to the 1600s (it was borrowed in the 1300s) it was sometimes also spelled stupour. But that was finally dropped. Perhaps it seemed stupid.

Good word, stupid. It’s well formed for describing and decrying a disdained mental insufficiency. It starts with a combination that pretty much spits, [st], and has an additional puff of disdain in the middle with [p], then ends with the [ɪd] that also starts idiot. The stressed vowel adds something extra special: your choice between the pinched, almost hissing [ju] diphthong (which, in [stju], practically forces the face into a moue of disdain as though sniffing a turd) and the stripped-down (Canadian-style) plain [u], which, aside from sounding duller, is itself disdained as stupid by snobs with palatalized pronunciations.

Stupor has most of the same characteristics (plus – in a British accent – the sound of a Buddhist monument (stupa) around which one may circumambulate), but it is not usually used for insults. Not that it is used with approbation; a stupor is not a thing one generally wants to be in. And yet somehow it is a thing people get themselves into. And usually the same way: you drink yourself into a stupor; you are then in a drunken stupor. Most modern uses of stupor refer to being stupid drunk. You know, like someone you see stopped and stooped over on a stoop, unable to take another step, stumbling and mumbling, perhaps trying to circumambulate their residence in search of a door (or their forsaken sobriety). The language has many, many terms for various states of inebriation, and this expresses one of the most severe.

How severe? Severe enough that you might get your letters mixed up, perhaps, and go looking for a p for support (or vice versa), or drop an r and get upsot, or, more likely, become like Proust and find yourself À la recherche du temps perdu – not, as the English title of the book would suggest, remembering things past (as if!), but actually in search of lost time. Ha, good luck with that. If you’re anything like Rob Ford, you’ll discover what you did when someone releases a video of it.

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omphalos, omphaloskepsis

Posted on November 7, 2013 | 4 comments

Today’s tasting is a guest tasting by Anthony Shore, who writes about brand naming at operativewords.com.

Contemplate the navel: The locus of life, button of our underbellies. The place from which every placental mammal was nourished in utero. Students of meditation, enrollees of the navel academy, look within themselves and contemplate their navels to gain an introspective perspective.

Taking shape as innies and outies, the omphalos – ὀμφαλός to the Hellenically-incined, and umbilicus to the medically-inclined –  is our most visible (and sexy!) scar: the belly button.  Ambient squealing peals are the soundtrack as our umbilical cord is cut, leaving us with a resounding, adorable mark. And despite being a marker of life itself, 90% of navels are depressed. The other 10% are happy outies.

Is it any wonder navels are centers of attention? They lie at the very center of our bodies – and, some say, the center of the world. The Vitruvian Man pinpoints the center of human geometry at the tummy button, equidistant from the periphery of the great circle formed by da Vinci’s sepia-toned, spread-eagle snow angel.

Considering the body further, the Latin word for a place of observation was templum, and so when we contemplate our navels, our bedimpled bodies are a temple, etymologically speaking.

Among the erudites, navel-gazing is called omphaloskepsis, a mouthful of chewy consonant clusters cooked up by classical Greek phonology.

Inspecting skeptics might wonder, how is it that this is even a word, this omphaloskepsis? The first syllable is a chomp and an exclamation: oomph! They do not belong together, these zounds, but somehow, like a flounder genetically entwined with a tomato, it kinda works. Other Greek-derived words that begin with this kind of -mph– include amphetamine, amphitheater and emphatic. As far as Greek goes, MPH must stand for More Phonetic Hutzpah.

The latter and more familiar half of omphaloskepsis looks like skeptic, one who inquires or doubts. The philosophical school of skeptics was founded by Pyrrho of Ellis, who himself was schooled by the gymnosophists, those naked lovers of wisdom native to India. Early followers pursued a special brand of skepticism called Pyrrhonism, which, though bearing resemblance to Pyrrhus (known for qualified victory), actually shares no common etymon. Only Greek, which has taken so many hubristic liberties with phonology – sphere, pterodactyl, mnemonic, acne, iatric, phthisis, pyknic – binds Pyrrho and Pyrrhic by origin.

Omphaloskepsis takes us on a long, strange trip through sonority. We set out with our mouths agape, saying “aaah,” as if to afford an attentive physician a better view of our tonsils. Next comes the nasal-fricative [mf] like a one-two punch. It is guttural and visceral and entirely satisfying. We flow into a liquid [l], smooth and fluid, but then are greeted with a skidding, stoccatic fricative-stop-stop-fricative-fricative washboarded stretch of heavy, beclustered syllables.

Omphalos and omphaloskepsis offer what any great vacation should offer: Something exotic, adventurous, and an opportunity, in looking outside of ourselves, to learn more about what lies within.

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zarf

Posted on November 6, 2013 | 4 comments

Here’s a word that I think could see its use extended a bit. Although in its strictest sense most people don’t use a zarf very often, in a slightly expanded sense a great many North Americans get their hands on one every day.

What is a zarf? Aside from a word useful in crosswords and Scrabble, I mean. Is it one of those little half-barks that dogs make when dreaming? No. Is it some faddish new item of apparel, the last word in a scarf, perhaps? Nope, although it does wrap around something. Is it the beginning of frazzle backwards? N— well, yes, it is that too, but who uses it for that? Is it like zaftig? If by “like” you mean it starts with the same two letters and has a third letter in common, then yes; otherwise, not really.

If you have every consumed a hot liquid from a cup (probably glass or porcelain) that was held in a (usually) metal holder with a handle, usually a pretty and ornate thing that goes about halfway up the cup, then you have touched a zarf. This is most likely in the context of Middle Eastern (especially Lebanese) food, although I have had Italian-style beverages from such cups too. Actually, somewhere in my apartment we have a set of them. I think I know where.

But how about those corrugated paper sleeves, those little tube-tops for coffee cups, that are used for holding the paper cups at Starbucks and other such places? Tell me, what do you call them? And if other people started calling them zarfs, would you? I would. Actually, I already do. They’re not metal, true, and they don’t have a handle, but they serve the same function: to wrap around a cup of hot liquid to enable easier holding without burning fingers, staying in place due to the fact that the cup is wider at the top than at the bottom. I think those are the most essential qualities; the material and the protruding handle are less central to the semantic construct.

Well, so say I. I also just like saying “zarf”; it sounds like a sound effect for a Van de Graaff generator. And it has a fun look, with the angular z at one end and the tall, floppy f at the other. The original looks quite different, since it’s an Arabic word (ظرف), and it sounds a little different too. But, then, it also originally meant ‘container’ or ‘envelope’, so that pretty much settles it. Wikipedia agrees, too: “Coffee in disposable cups is often served by fast-food restaurants in holders of stiff paper. These too are zarfs.” Or, if you feel like using the Arabic plural (which, since we’re speaking English, I don’t encourage), zuruuf.

Well, there it is. An eye-catching form that serves to ease the handling of something fluid; a container borrowed from one place to serve a purpose in another. Such is zarf the word. And zarf the thing.

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Why the clicks?

Posted on October 31, 2013 | 2 comments

Imagine if someone, instead of saying your name, replaced the first consonant of it with “tsk!” – for instance, “Tsk! ames” for “James.” Now imagine that that was somehow more polite than just saying your name. Now imagine that English started adding clicks to its words just for that sort of reason. Well, it’s already happened in Zulu and Xhosa – it’s how they got their clicks. Find out more in my latest article for TheWeek.com:

A brief history of African click words

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oasis

Posted on October 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

What is an oasis? An interruption, a place in the middle of a sameness where you will find nothing the same – zero (0) as-is. In a desert, a great expanse of sand and dust with no trees and no water, an oasis is a pause for refreshment, an interruption of a spring and vegetation.

So what would an oasis be in the middle of a sea? When there is water, water, everywhere, an oasis of the sea could be a bit of land, but that would be just an island. Interrupt all that you expect about the sea, and in the interruption put metal, a shopping concourse, trees, people, dry surface, and few views of the surrounding water, and you have an oasis of the sea – indeed, an Oasis of the Seas, which is the largest cruise ship in the world.

As I type this I am sitting on the Oasis of the Seas in a park surrounded by a half-dozen storeys of balcony suites. There are trees and other plants, real ones; there is an open view above of the night sky. There is no sound or smell or sight of the sea, and barely even any motion to make you think there may not be bedrock beneath you. If I go to my cabin and lean over the balcony railing, I can see a long high wall of balconies, an enormous hotel, and where it should meet the ground it instead meets the sea. A building is simply cruising around, and a very large building at that. And while we find ourselves in the middle of water now, whenever we stop we head to a sandy beach: all these people, all this water, and they all seek that bit of desert that sits between forest and ocean.

Well, why not. A vacation is a liminal experience; why not seek the limen? Or perhaps not so much a limen – a transition between one state and another – as an excursion, a digression, an interruption, an epicycle. A getaway, an explosion of something-elseness into the constancy of your quotidian existence. This ship certainly is that. If you want a getaway, get Oasis for your getaway system. For a week you can live like royalty. Royal Caribbean? Well, yes, but also Cleopatra. She was an burst of Greek into Egypt; oasis is (as far as we know) as burst of Egyptian into Greek. And now a burst of Greek into English, but really, English has quite a lot of Greek in it.

It’s getting a little busy here in Central Park on the Oasis of the Seas. After I write this and post it, perhaps I’ll go up top and survey the surrounding dark ocean. And how will I post it from in the middle of the Caribbean? Oh, there’s internet here. Lately, you’re only away from the internet if you want to be. And even then its electromagnetic waves flow through you, just as the common flow of humanity is always there like space-time, even though you may except yourself from its immediate presence.

No man is an island, as John Donne said. But perhaps one may be an oasis. Here on this ship, I am among six thousand people. I like having all those people around; I get lonely if there are no people. But I don’t like having to be in the immediate presence of all of them, and deal with their noise, and walk slowly behind them because they are walking in a wide group at a very leisurely pace and I can’t get past. If there were only 20 people on this ship, it would be problematic, because you would very quickly get to know each other and have to acknowledge each other. With five hundred dozen, I can have all the people to ignore I could possibly want. I have enough people to be anonymous, and I can still find a place to get away from them in the middle of them: I can sit in this quiet park with a half-dozen people in sight at a time, while three decks down or a hundred metres away there are great masses of noisy people all being together. I want them there; I simply want to be in an oasis in the midst of them.

It’s just like the kind of party I like: lots of people all gathered together, and a place or two to get away from them, by myself or with one other person, a quiet corner or outlook with the roar of the party offstage. You can’t do that at a small party, and it’s not the same if there’s no one else. I want to have people to get away from, to ignore, to be an exception to. I want to be an oasis.

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hypnopomp

Posted on October 27, 2013 | 3 comments

This word appears to be falling into – or out of – something, the h tumbling to y and into the pillow-person p with cushion n o and again the p and more cushion o m and again the p: is it falling asleep? Or is it falling from sleep? If you know your Greek prefixes you know hypo is below, but no, not below: hypno, sleep… and if you know your Sanskrit you know om, the divine syllable, the chant of meditation, a state not sleep but other than normal wakefulness… As you come from sleep you find your pillow is plump, but that means you are becoming aware. You are greeted by reality… with pomp? But are you aware of the circumstance?

F.W.H. Meyers named the two liminal bookends of sleep. That state leading into sleep is hypnagogic (also spelled hypnogogic): your rational mind relaxes, lets the dream world ease it, intrude; it opens, dilates, reality becomes elastic as your brain becomes chalastic. You are agog as you are led into the dreamworld – it is ἀγωγός agogos, Greek ‘leading’. But the state leading out of sleep is hypnopompic, the pomp from Greek πομπή pompé ‘sending away’, and is characterized by the reverse process: the oneiric visions persist into reality for a moment or a time before disappearing, the emotional associations fading like bright colours in the harsh sun of the rational world, or evaporating like spirits on a drying surface, or simply evanescing like a flame taken from its fuel.

And, as a psychopomp is a spirit guide, is a hypnopomp a guide out of the world of dreams? No – hypnopomp is simply the name for the hypnopompic state. The state says goodbye to itself, it is its own valedictorian; the setting is the character. Why not? Such is the fluidity of the state from which your are emerging.

But sometimes, surely, we wonder what is hypnopompic and what is hypnagogic. I am sitting now in one or the other: I have left the quotidian repetition, the fever dream of daily work, the samsara of commute-compute-commute-compute, for a week in a freer state, the obligations being only to eat, relax, enjoy myself, show up to a few things on time, write. Every time I do this I feel as though I am awakening to freedom. And every time I come back from it I feel as though I am awakening from a restful dream. But what is the more real: the free self, intoxicated but open and joyous, or the constrained self, seeking only further sips of intoxication and freedom? Why, when we have a last resonating savour, not altogether faded, of some beautiful vision, do we think we are in a hypnopomp, leaving behind a dream? Perhaps we are in a hypnagog, losing our grip on the truth we had found, and we may yet awake again to find it once more.

Thanks to Anthony Shore for suggesting today’s theme.

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Perm

Posted on October 24, 2013 | Leave a comment

Language goes through many permutations and permanent mutations. It can be rather like hair: styles come in, styles go out, but sometimes the style changes the form quite a bit, permanently.

When you see the name Perm, you will likely think first of a perm, a thing one can do for styling hair. Chemicals break down the inner structure of the hairs, making them more susceptible to reshaping; heat and physical devices reshape them. This perm is short for permanent wave, and has been in the language as such from the 1920s. Permanent comes from Latin per ‘through’ and manere ‘stay’; we can see that in perm most of the manere has not remained. Fashion led to the curtailing of the word form, and that curtailing seems to be enduring, although the memory of the original is not altogether lost.

But there is another Perm, a capitalized one (well capitalized with industry – except, oops, industry built up during communist times), a city of a million people in Russia, in the Ural area, straddling the Kama river, suturing it with bridges. It was founded in the 1500s and renamed in 1780 as Perm. My Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names declares that this came from Finnish perya ‘rear’ and maa ‘land’, because to the Vep people who had moved to the area from closer to Finland it was really the back of beyond.

So this Perm is also styled, cut down from peryamaa. But it has grown out to a new form: Permian, which is the name of a geologic period, the last period of the Paleozoic Era, ending some 252 million years ago with a rather massive extinction episode. At the time, all the land masses of Earth were one big Pangaea, which subsequently broke up and left formerly contiguous bits widely separated. And, anent that, in parallel with the Vep displacement and the dislocation of the back half of perm, deposits from the Permian Period have come to be found in widely separated places. Near Perm is one such place, of course (hence the name), but another is in northwest Texas, an area commonly called the Permian Basin, a source of much oil production (i.e., reusing old stuff for new ends) and home of towns such as Marfan and Odessa (another far-removed place name duplication). From cold and communist to hot and capitalist – such a split.

There’s also a split in pronunciation. You know how perm is pronounced: three phonemes, thanks to a syllabic /r/ in the middle – like “purr” with “mm” added at the end. Soft, lazy, comfortable. You might suspect that Perm would be said a little differently, and you would be right. In perm the tongue may curl comfy like a cat in the mouth, but in Perm, the end is palatalized due to the source, and the beginning is palatalized due to Russian phonemics. This word begins and ends in bilabials that physically cannot palatalize, but the tongue twists for them anyway because they are nonetheless phonemically “palatalized.” And so is the /r/, which actually can be, but maybe don’t hurt yourself trying. The tongue doesn’t loll its body lazily near the palate; it presses its blade parlously close to the alveolar ridge, as if curled unnaturally – though the sounds are natural enough to Russian speakers.

Imagine actually seeing the tongue doing that. Imagine, say, taking an ultrasound wand and putting it under your chin and looking at the screen-borne phantom of the tongue twerking away in the interests of phonological fashion. As it happens, I had the chance to see just that sort of thing this afternoon, in a linguistics talk called “Tracking and Imaging the Tongue: New insights into language-particular phonetic variability,” presented by Alexei Kochetov – now of the University of Toronto, but originally from Perm.

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chalastic

Posted on October 23, 2013 | 3 comments

Now, here’s a scholastic word for an elastic vocabulary. First thing to know about it is that we pronounce the ch as /k/. The rest of the pronunciation should be obvious (stress on the middle syllable, please). The sense is perhaps less so. Is there a savour of challah, or something cataskeuastic about it, or perhaps choleric, pyroclastic, or even cataclysmic? Hmm, rather not. Does it seems like a word that could be chic? Alas! That does not suit it to a t.

But if on the other hand it makes you cataplectic or acts as a laxative, well, congratulations: you have divined it. The word comes from Greek χαλᾶν khalan ‘relax’, from which issued χαλαστικός khalastikos ‘laxative’. So, yup, that Dulcolax you have in the cabinet is a chalastic – never mind the hard stops at front and back of the word /k/ /k/ that would seem to contain the liquid /l/ in the middle. But the other sense of it relates not to intestinal relaxation but to full-body loss of tone: cataplexy or sleep paralysis – in fact, sleep paralysis is sometimes called a post-dormitial chalastic fit. Which, honestly, is a bit of terminology that may induce its object.

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enchiridion

Posted on October 23, 2013 | 6 comments

This is a big word for a small thing, a fancy word for a thing that may well be plain. It has an air of encyclopedic enquiry, but if you are enriched by an enchiridion it is because it is condensed, information-rich. The word may look a little out of hand, but it is all about keeping things well in hand – literally: its Greek source is a word made of ἐν en ‘in’ plus χείρ cheir ‘hand’ (you see this also in words such as chiropractic) plus a diminutive suffix ιδιον idion. It names a handbook, a little manual, a concise treatise on something. Rather than hacking through the dense bush of an encyclopedic disquisition for the birds of enlightenment, an enchiridion gives you a bird in the hand.

The word pushes off with a kick from the back and then dances on the tip of the tongue; the chi rhymes with “sky” and the the stress is on the rid. The printed form looks a bit like a stretched-out accordion, but in the meaning, as with accordions, it is the compression that produces the effect.

There are several books of note that call themselves enchiridions. Perhaps the most noted of these is the Enchiridion of Epictetus, written by a Roman philosopher who had been a slave but was freed when his master was executed. It expounds stoic philosophy – a philosophy perhaps best expressed in the modern time by the prayer, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

The Enchiridion is actually condensed notes by a student of Epictetus, and it cuts to the chase, starting off by telling us that we can change the things that are within our power, and can’t change the things that aren’t within our power, and if something is not in our power, we have no reason to attach our happiness or unhappiness to it, and if it is in our power, we should simply do what will achieve our goals. Do not desire; simply act, or be detached. It seems at first like good, practical philosophy, and is in line with insights offered by Buddhism, among other lines of inquiry, but it does run into the problem of discernment of what is and is not within our control – and there is also the fact that sometimes we enjoy our attachments to things beyond our control, even if we risk negative feelings should we lose them. Most people will find stoicism is very useful much of the time – but sometimes you just want to let things get a little out of hand, just as you sometimes want to use a fancier word than you need to.

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