Category Archives: word tasting notes

lanai, liana

Posted on June 5, 2016 | Leave a comment

Lana is out on the lanai with a nail to align the liana – she’s an anal one about keeping her lianas in line. Liane and Ilana, please enjoin her to be lenient lest she annihilate it!

A liana on a lanai? Such soft, tropical sounds, more vowels than consonants: a liquid l, a nasal n, a pair of a’s, and that mobile i. There is something almost Polynesian about it. Well, not almost: lanai is a word from Hawai‘ian. We use it for what they use it for: an open-sided roofed structure near a house. Somehow it seems more self-conscious than verandah and ever so much more elegant than porch.

Liana also has a warm-weather sound to it, something Italian or Spanish perhaps. In fact, it has been speculated (in the OED among other places) that its form in English may have come from a belief that it was a loan from Spanish. But we got it from French, in which it was (and is) liane, coming from lier ‘bind, tie’. And what is it? A climbing vine, a plant rooted in the soil but not rising on its own strength. Lianas wrap around trees and hang between them; they also climb walls and structures such as trellises, verandahs, and lanais.

Consider the kinds of names that have these sounds or similar ones in them: Lana, Ilana, Alina, Leanne, Elaine, Eileen, Ellen, Lannie, Anil, Anna Lee, Nell, Neal – all but Anil and Neal (also Neil and Niall) are names for women (though Lannie can be a man). We do tend to end women’s names with vowels, but beyond that, it seems the soft combination of /n/ and /l/ with these vowels (low central and high front – none of those dark heavy round back vowels) has something we tend to associate with femininity. We don’t go all in on it, but you can discern a leaning.

Not that lianas and lanais are leaning. A lanai should stand straight, even though it is a dependent structure; a liana depends on other things for structure, but it has different ways of clinging. They do, however, have a different feel from their associated terms verandah and vine. Those v’s are very vibrant, but they’re less loose. (They’re also less valuable: remember that V is 5 and L is 50.) The teeth bite on /v/; the tongue taps lightly on /l/ and /n/, the only difference being in how it lets air in on the sides with /l/ (like a lanai).

We don’t quite say lanai as a rearrangement of liana, but we do spell it that way. You couldn’t readily rearrange lianas to make a lanai, though: they’re not sturdy enough – in fact, unlike trees and shrubs, which have flexible younger parts and more rigid older parts, lianas are more flexible in the older parts. Which seems good to me: getting more flexible as you get older – and, in another way of looking at it, getting more open, like becoming a lanai – is a way to a happier life. It also helps you to recognize that you never truly stand alone.

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saturation

Posted on May 30, 2016 | 3 comments

How much is too much? When can you hold no more, when are you sated, satisfied, saturated?

In chemistry, it’s not such a hard question. Any substance that can dissolve in another substance will have a saturation point for any given temperature, above which no more can be dissolved, and that’s that. When the weather person tells you the humidity, it’s always in percentages, and 100% would be full saturation: any more moisture entering the air would not be able to stay in it for even a moment; it would condense or precipitate. When air is colder, it can hold less moisture, so the relative humidity is higher on cold days even though it doesn’t feel all that humid.

In other things, however, it is a more flexible concept. We talk about media saturation, or about reaching a saturation point in our use of technology or any other thing we figure we could reach a maximum tolerable level of. We’re often wrong – we have yet (as a society) to reach a social-media saturation, for instance, or for that matter any kind of technology saturation – and even when we’re right, it’s very hard to judge, and it changes. When has everybody had enough of this or that famous person?

Socially, any given person may have a particular saturation point, too. I know that if I’m at a party, once it passes a certain number of people, I find myself becoming a wallflower or finding a less populated room. It’s paradoxical: in chemistry, the thing that there is too much of precipitates out; socially, by contrast, the person who gets too much precipitates out.

Saturation comes from Latin saturare, which comes from satur ‘full’, which is related to satis ‘enough’. So sate and satisfy really are related to saturate. There may be things you’re sure you just can’t get enough of, but you’re probably wrong – although you may never get enough of them to find out how much is too much. I once remarked to a roommate that there was no such thing as too much basil in a pasta sauce, and whaddya know, he proved me wrong. Oh boy did he put a lot of basil in that sauce. Wow.

I think the use of saturate in publishing and photography gives a nice illustration – literally. It referred originally to the purity of an ink – the more saturated, the less diluted with black or white (and the richer in the intended colour). In other words, more saturated colours are purer, more intense.

But what inks are you using? Today, when we do so much on screen, our “inks” are pixels of red, green, and blue. So saturation these days means how little mixing of other colours in with the colour at hand, and how bright that colour is too. While this is in one sense paradoxical (since saturation in chemistry is a question of increasing mixture), your eyes will tell you that this saturation is indeed saturation: an increasing intensity, like sugar in a beverage or humidity in the air.

When you adjust the saturation on an image in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, or Image Ready (or some non-Adobe product), you can go down to 0% or up to 100%. But that 100% isn’t truly the maximum. You can take the resulting image and increase the saturation even again. You could iterate this quite a few times to get a saturation that would be several hundred percent – chemically impossible, but this isn’t chemistry.

Here’s an old barn in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. This is the original, with no adjustment of the saturation.

If I reduce the saturation by 25%, you can see that the colours are less intense. They are, in fact, more evened out between the three colours that make up your screen. It may look a little “older,” because films of times past were not always quite so vivid, and because prints tend to lose their vividness over time.

Let me take it down 75% – that is, to just 25% of the original saturation.

It looks almost black and white, doesn’t it? You can barely discern the green of the grass. If you desaturate fully, you get a black-and-white image (there can be more to a good B&W conversion than that, but I don’t want to glaze your eyes here).

Now let’s increase the saturation. If I push the slider up to 100% increase, you can see that the grass and barn and everything are very vivid.

This is a popular thing to do these days. Look at your Facebook news feed and you’ll probably see some “amazing!” photos that have had the saturation cranked way up. It’s like adding sugar to a sauce. The focus groups love it. It just seems so… wow.

But why stop there? Do those colours look like pure red, green, or blue? I think not. Let’s add another 50% (which we do by taking the 100% saturated image and treating it as the base for increasing saturation).

That graffiti is beginning to be pretty colourful, isn’t it? But wait: what about that old wood? It still looks grey. We have already learned that grey is what you get when you desaturate. I bet that the grey of that barn is not perfectly balanced between red, green, and blue. If we crank up the saturation even more, whichever colour it tilts slightly towards will come out in full force. Here, let’s increase the saturation another 100% on top of the last image, to make it 300% from the original.

Whaddya think? LSD vision, pipe dream, nightmare, or “mind=blown” Instagram filter? You still see the darks and lights – relative lightness is a separate matter from saturation – so you can still see that it’s a barn. But all of a sudden it looks, um, tie-dyed or something.

Some people like to max their saturation. They go to impossibly packed bars, binge-watch TV shows, drink Red Bull iteratively. Others prefer a life less vivid (or “loud”), more austere. Do you think oversaturation is a problem? Do you want to find a solution? You may remember the old saying “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I prefer the chemists’ version: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate.” Consider that every oversaturation is just a solution that was taken too far. At which point something has to drop out. It may or may not be you.

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laminate

Posted on May 29, 2016 | 4 comments

Every surface, however numinously limned or lambently illuminated, is a limen, a veneer. The face of it is the phenomenon, and what lies behind it is no more real to the mind than a noumenon: its existence is more nominal than phenomenal. Light, sound, and our animal touch reflect off the first layer of atoms, while underneath is entombed the untameable atman.

Look at these lovely curves in this photo, sinuous, insinuating. The white wall is hard, textured but rectilinear; the stone arch is cold and durable. But the wood licks the light and shapes the shadows; it flows like water; it animates. And yet. What do you see? Surfaces, with joins. You don’t know what they are joined to beneath, but you must know that what is thinner bends easier. What veers is veneers: when it licks like “l” and is warm like “m,” its innate form is laminate. Thin cortices of wood applied to an unknown underneath.

What is this word, laminate? It comes from Latin lamina, ‘thin plate, scale, layer, or flake’ (thanks to the OED for that). It is animal backwards, as though we were looking at the obverse of an image painted on a film. The Latins had leaves, sure, but also metal pounded into peels, and woods shaved thin. So from that we laminate (verb) objects, and they are laminate (adjective) and are laminate (noun). The lovely outer layer is held on with glue; the laminate adheres to what inheres.

And so it is deception, unreal, just for show. Yes? We may think so. But it is real material, even if thin. And what you see on the outside is never quite like what lies within, no matter what the thing. For that matter, what you see on the outside is not what the outside is. You are using your eyes, after all, which sense reflected light in whatever colour and quantity it comes in, from whatever direction. The surface may look mottled and yet be smooth. We see layers through changes in intensity and colour, but that is all a phenomenon of the visual cortex – a bit of grey brain laminated on the white matter beneath.

What do you see when you look at the picture above? A sweeping staircase in front of an arch, perhaps. But if I were to remove the sweep from the photo, there would be no arch behind it; the photo is a flat arrangement of pixels. Flat? Not even that. It is all light shining from a single LCD layer on your screen. The reality you think you see has been eliminated, or at least minimalized to an illumination – a generation of waves to meet your retinas. And what is behind this laminate?

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cantabank

Posted on May 26, 2016 | 3 comments

“Why can’t a bank job be good enough for you?”

“Oh, mother,” Mark said, stepping down to pavement level, “I can’t abide it. I’d rather sing for my supper.”

“Why not go back to Cambridge,” Mark’s father said from the other side, “and become a scholar of note?”

“There shall be no Cantab ankh of immortality for me,” Mark said. “I am a scholar of notes.” He cleared his throat perfunctorily and hummed a couple of foreshortened notes. Then he mounted the bench again and started into a melody: “Like a song I have to sing, I sing it for you…” He paused, smiled down at his parents, and identified the source: “U2.” And at the same time, he said “You two” and “You too.” He straightened up and continued the song: “Like the words I have to bring, I bring it for you.”

His father looked over his shoulder nervously, then tugged on Mark’s coat. “Do stop, there’s no one around.”

“There will be.” Mark smiled.

“It all seems so… shady,” his mother said, looking down as she nervously kneaded the top of her oversize purse.

“Like a mountebank?” Mark said, stepping down again. He sat on the bench and propped his face on his fist as he lifted an eyebrow towards his mother. “Some charlatan hawking nostrums? A veritable saltimbanco? But the quality of what I give is not concealed. It is experienced first, then paid for. If you are not enchanted, you simply decamp.”

His father pursed his lips in a lemony moue and folded his arms. “With such a vocabulary, why don’t you do better than a street singer?”

“But that’s exactly it,” Mark said, looking up and then standing up. “I am a—” he sprung up once again onto the bench “—cantabank! Cantambanco! One who sings on a bench!” And again into song: “Volare! Ohh! Cantare… sul banco!”

“If you’re singing for your supper,” his father said, looking around again, “you can’t have much of a banquet awaiting.”

“Well, if it keeps me lean, then it keeps me leaning, and I so am banking one way or another.”

His mother reached into her purse and somehow presented a melon. “Have this.”

“Cantaloupe! Thank you, mother.” He took it and set it on the bench. “Can I sing for it?”

“No, just take it as a message, mister cantabank. If you can’t bank on a decent income, you also can’t elope with your girlfriend.”

Mark raised his eyebrows, took a breath, exhaled. “She has decamped. Recanted. Abandoned me…” he tilted his head… “for a banker.”

Then he stood at the canting edge of the bench and began, his eyes upwards: “E lucevan le stelle…”

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capybara

Posted on May 24, 2016 | Leave a comment

Toronto is thrilling right now to the news that two huge rodents are on the loose. Huge. The size of dogs.

Well, I suppose that’s better than having two chupacabras on the loose. Much better, in fact. But these creatures at least have a similar name: they’re capybaras.

How is capybara pronounced? /kapɪˈbɑːrə/ – sort of like it should be the coffee bar at the Copacabana. I’m tempted to say that two of them are gone because the first one escapyed and the second one was a capycat, but that’s trite. You can read more of the saga in this Toronto Star article, “Fugitive High Park Zoo capybaras duo elude search party after morning escape.”

The word capybara comes to us probably from Tupi, a language of South America; it appears to mean ‘grass eater’. The Latin name for these beasties is Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris, which is a Latinization of Greek for ‘water pig’ – twice. (They’re not pigs, true, but neither are guinea pigs, which are capybaras’ closest relatives.) One way or another, they’re tailless things that seem generally inoffensive. Here’s a pet capybara repeatedly doing something like what the High Park duo may have done:

Well, if the door is open, they’re capyble of using it…

My first introduction to the capybara came thanks to the cartoon character The Tick, a prodigiously stupid superhero who, in one concussion-induced daze, encounters a capybara and adopts it as a pet:

Good luck for the capybara that The Tick wasn’t looking for a low-carb lunch. Its meat is eaten in some places, and in fact it can even be eaten during Lent by Catholics in some parts of South America. It’s not threatened – there are lots of them (capyous numbers?), so hunting is quite legal.

But where do you look if you want to find a capybara? Start by looking for other capybaras. They’re very gregarious animals. And where do you find the other capybaras? Down by the water, eating grass, of course. You haven’t forgotten the etymologies already, have you?

We can only assume that when the High Park duo are finally found, that is where they will be. The only problem is that there’s a lot of water and grass in High Park, so it may take a while…

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scenicest

Posted on May 23, 2016 | 3 comments

“It’s not the scenicest day,” I said to Aina, looking out the train window at a cloudy sky as we headed to Niagara for some wine and walking.*

Or perhaps I should spell that scenic-est, so you know I wasn’t saying it like “see nicest,” even though what is scenicest is nicest to see.

“Is that a word?” you may be thinking – or perhaps typing in an email to me. Well, I used it and you understood it, so yes. But is it a well attested word? No. You can find a couple hundred hits for it on Google, but it’s a safe bet most of them are – as I was – self-consciously using it as an awkward construction rather as Lewis Carroll used curiouser.

Why wouldn’t I just say most scenic? Because I like playing with words. Now it’s your turn: Tell me why scenicest shouldn’t be allowed. It’s a two-syllable word, after all, and it’s quite common to append –er and –est to one- and two-syllable words. The selection of those for which more and most are reserved is almost random-seeming. At the very least, the distinction is not black and white. For some words, it is a matter of personal taste which to use: beautifuller and beautifullest were formerly common enough, but now it seems we see the two-word version as the more beautiful.

I do think that what we see is part of the problem here. For assorted historical reasons (mostly to do with palatalization before front vowels in Latin and Romance languages), c “softens” before e and i. But the sound /k/ does not have an actual allophonic alternation with /s/ in modern English. We just retain the rule about c because of our borrowings from French and Latin. This makes a problem when we have something that sounds fine but runs into a spelling issue. Take chic. Lovely word, stylish, smart. Borrowed from French. By borrowed I mean adopted – actually I mean stolen. Anyway, it’s treated like an English word: it’s one syllable, so instead of saying most chic we often just add the –est and make it chicest.

Which looks horrible on the page. And chic-est looks at least as bad. And you can’t add or swap in a k because chikest would look completely wrong and incomprehensible and would conduce to yet another inaccurate pronunciation, and chickest is chick plus est. Somehow the chicest word to say is one of the unchicest (let’s say least chic) words to write.

Well, what do we expect? It should be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?

Am I the only one who feels certain that supercalifragilisticexpialidocious should be two words? Normally, morphologically, we can add only other suffixes after a suffix, not a whole new root, let alone a prefix plus a root plus a suffix. And yet that’s what appears to come after the the ic in supercalifragilistic. Another bit of evidence to marshal for its being two words is that the spelling would seem to require a pronunciation like “–listi sexpi–,” which is clearly wrong.

Which takes us back to our problem of the orthographic scenery. Now, –ic words often used to be spelled with a k, as in musick and magick. So could we borrow on that and make it scenickest? Hmm. It looks a bit of a snickerfest. It may also tempt a person to shift the accent onto the second syllable because of the “heavy” consonant ck.

Or we could just keep using it and writing it and people will get used to seeing it and saying it. That’s how a lot of things in English have come to be as they are.

We ought not to be distracted by looks, anyway. A cloudy day may be warm and lovely. Indeed, when the sun is out and it looks most scenic, you are at greater risk of getting burned.

 

*It was not a reference to the fact that we would not be taking in a play at the Shaw Festival, even though scenic referred to the stage a century before it referred to the natural environment – it comes from a Greek word for a stage.

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ket, ketty

Posted on May 19, 2016 | Leave a comment

You may not keep these words in your kit, but they could be a cute addition. Not cute like a kitty, though – these are not words to pet, even if they could be petty words. They are better suited to a kettle of fish, and not a fine one either.

I have an instant association with ket, but it’s not an English one. It’s from a set of lessons in Breton, which is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany, France. (If Breton and Brittany sound like Britain, it’s not a coincidence: the people in question were, a long time ago, Britons, but they were driven across the channel by the Anglo-Saxon invaders.) The dialogue includes this classic line, which you can even hear spoken on the page at Kevarker.org: “Ac’h ! N’eo ket gwin !” Which means “Ecchh! That’s not wine!” The ket is the second half of a two-part negator (French has ne…pas and Breton has ne…ket). So it’s negative. And in the dialogue in question, it’s rather disgusted.

That is not where the English ket comes from. Rather, you should turn to Scandinavian languages: Swedish kött, Icelandic kjöt, Faroese kjøt, Norwegian kjøtt, Danish kjød or kød. They’re all from the same origin as ket. In those languages, it refers to flesh or meat. But in English, it’s gone downhill a bit. It’s raw flesh, thence carrion, and rotten meat, and by extension from that trash or rubbish. And ketty means… let me quote the Oxford English Dictionary for that: “Having bad flesh; carrion-like; rotten, foul, nasty; worthless. Of soil: Soft, peaty.” So… disgusting.

It’s kind of a pity, isn’t it? A cute word like this one, so crisp, even a bit rakish. Its overtones are not nasty: kit, cat, cot, cought, cut, pet, kitty, jetty, cutty, kept, kex… Why would you want to cut this out of your kit? Other than the fact no one will understand it, of course. But if you want to slip in some petty cutting remark, it’s there for recourse. “This is a fine ket of beef you’ve served.” “Oh, there’s your little ketty cat.” And it’s less crude than some other ***t and ***tty words.

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ping-pong

Posted on May 16, 2016 | 3 comments

我們打乒乓球吧!

That’s Mandarin Chinese for ‘Let’s play ping-pong!’ It’s understandable to imagine that ping-pong was invented in China, since they dominate the game now. Have a look:

And then there’s that name. The actual ‘ping-pong’ part is 乒乓, pronounced just like we say it in English (but with level tones, which we usually don’t use). It looks just perfect, doesn’t it? As though it was invented for it. The characters together look like a ping-pong table with a net. (They also kind of look like squared versions of eyes with lines under, perhaps tired from playing too much ping-pong…)

In truth, the original Chinese character those characters come from is 兵, which is pronounced “bing,” means ‘soldier’, and is derived ultimately from a representation of two hands holding a short weapon. From it came two onomatopoeic words, 乒 and 乓. They didn’t come from it for the game, though. They showed up during the Ming Dynasty to represent the sounds of a fight. In fact, 乒乒乓乓 is idiomatic for consecutive percussions, as in a gunfight, a ruckus, or – these days – a ping-pong match.

Ping-pong, however, was invented in England (or perhaps by British in India) in the later 1800s. It was popular as an after-dinner parlour game among the upper class. The various equipment was still evolving at first, of course, as was the name. Ping-pong was an obvious onomatopoeia, imitating the percussion and using the i/o alternation to indicate back-and-forth, here-and-there. And it was in common use as a name for the game in 1901 when J. Jacques & Son came out with a proper high-quality kit for playing it… and trademarked the name. They sold the US trademark to Parker Brothers. This is why in official tournaments, including the Olympics, it’s called table tennis.

Various improvements to the equipment have been made over the years, but the play itself is pretty simple. Especially if you’re just playing it with friends and none of you are all that good at it. It’s the sort of game you can just kind of play without, you know, keeping score. As I have on various occasions at such places as a friend’s country house.

As we did this past Saturday at a friend’s birthday party at a ping-pong club. Yes, that’s right. Ping-pong tables, bar service, platters of meat and cheese and so on, and a guy going around with a nifty device made from a modified tennis racket on a stick with which he picked up balls by the dozen. Once we saw him do that, we stopped bothering to pick them up ourselves.

You can play singles ping-pong.

You can play doubles ping-pong.

You can even play with a beer in your non-racquet hand.

Maybe you won’t always hit the ball with your racquet. But what is this, the Olympics? Name another actual sport you can play in a normal-sized room while holding a beer. And not care about keeping score. And not worry too much about getting injured. Because those balls are pretty light. They weigh about the same as a half teaspoon of beer. Meaning that a big bucket’s worth of 200 will weigh the same as the beer in a pint glass. And, the way I play it, will take about as long to get through.

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salix

Posted on May 14, 2016 | 2 comments

As I stroll through the neighbourhood where I work, I see mostly apartment blocks and trees. I like the trees; they are calming, anodyne. There is one tree that is especially salient. It rains green on the lawn between a road and a building; none of the others around can match its winsome nobility. It is an elixir for the eyes.

I am told that if I were to lick its bark, I might be absolved of pain temporarily. I think it’s better to leave that extraction to others. But this tree, this regal green-duster, is a salix. It is from its bark that we derive salicylic acid. If that has a familiar sound, it is because its acetate – acetylsalicylic acid, also called ASA – is the active ingredient in Aspirin.

I like this word, salix. It starts with a curve and ends with a cross, and in the middle there is a tree or perhaps two. The word as a whole is slick, even slippery, but crisp.

Perhaps you don’t see the word too much. It names a whole genus, comprising some 400 species. Do they have other names? Some are called osier; some are called sallow (a word that is cognate with salix); but as whole, and for most individual species, they are known as willow.

Yes, willow. That famous tree of love and longing, of wisdom and wind, of weeping and whomping. The usual word is soft as a pillow, liquid and gliding, and in shape so willowy with the w and w fairly dripping with leaves and the ll reaching above. It is a tree of pain and relief, of despair and perseverance: where there is a willow, there is a way. But why not, as the occasion allows, use the Latin word, which has been formally adopted into English as well, though not often used? Why not call it salix? We can call holly ilex if we want, and there are other plants that also carry a Latin name for dropping into conversation. We may, if we will, wallow in willow, but I will on occasion elect to relax in the sunlight under a salix.

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tenebrity

Posted on May 12, 2016 | 5 comments

Times are dark, thoughts are dim. The current tense celebrity of some shady figures tempts many to ebriety in hopes of managing at least some glow in the turbidity to match the afterglow of retreating brightness. How may we frame the situation? How do we see ourselves in this tenebrity, overshadowed, benighted? Are we left to pray in the dark hours?

That might seem suitable; tenebrae is the name of a Christian service held in the dark hours before the last three days before Easter. It is marked by the extinguishing of candles, leaving the congregation in the gathering gloom. But tenebrity refers not specifically to this but to darkness more generally, not only of the earth and firmament but of the mind and mood and spirit and heart. Its Latin etymon is tenebræ, but in Latin that just means ‘darkness’.

But what is darkness? Are you now, as you read this, in darkness? If not, is there anywhere that is brighter? If you are inside, you are not in the brightest circumstance you could be in; step outside into daylight and you may squint at first. If it is after dusk and before dawn, however bright your surroundings, they are still too dim for high-quality photos from many a camera. If you are in darkness, how do you read this? The glow from your screen is bright, yes? But if it is like my computer or my phone, the screen adjusts its brightness according to context. Sit where there is light on the screen but not on the camera and the screen will seem excessively dim. The truth of tenebrity is that there is almost nowhere that brightness is ten out of ten. We simply adapt our eyes to the dimness. It’s all a matter of how you frame it.

Consider the photo above, taken by the elevators in the building where I live. I am in the dark, little light reflecting off my face, my eyes almost vanishing in the well of shadow. If it were not for the glowing frames of the repeating mirrors, there would be nothing at all. And yet that’s true anyway: without a light source, whatever wherever, we can’t see – our eyes don’t reach out and grab objects to perceive; they await the light, and they adjust to its level.

And sometimes they adjust too well. And sometimes we adjust our view too much to try to bring the truly bright down to an acceptable level so we can see its contours better. When I am standing at those mirrors, I can see the surfaces of the lights and yet I can also see myself well: the hallway is not dim but quite acceptably bright. But when I point my camera at the mirror, it adjusts its narrower dynamic range to the brightness; my face, quite clearly lit to the eye, shows in the image as badly overshadowed.

Tenebrity is relative. What light level is shadow in one place is a bright spot in another. Likewise in our minds and our lives: we know tenebrity by contrast. If we adapt too much to the brightest lights, all else will seem unduly dim. The truly dark will always seem dark, but there is much else that could be bright if we would let it.

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