TIL: hendiadys

-- the expression of an idea by the use of usually two independent words connected by and (such as nice and warm) instead of the usual combination of independent word and its modifier (such as nicely warm).
For example, his character Macbeth, speaking of the passage of life, says "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." For Shakespeare, the construction "sound and fury" was more effective than "furious sound." The word hendiadys is a modification of the Greek phrase hen dia dyoin. Given that hen dia dyoin literally means "one through two," it's a perfect parent for a word that describes the expression of a single concept using two words, as in the phrase "rough and tough."

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hendiadys

“as Thucydides warned two thousand years earlier, words in crises can lose their meaning, leaving in the “ability to see all sides of a question [an] incapacity to act on any,”82 then Shakespeare and his Great Queen found safety in multiple meanings, some repetitive, some opposed, but all so implanted as to make them unforeseeably applicable. Hendiadys positioned a culture against paralysis in a world that was to come.”

--- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

p.s. Putin delenda est.

Good news

This morning I meditated for an hour and a half. In the process, I figured out a way to break through the blocking pain in my toes which were frostbitten long time ago when I was a kid. Somehow, the conversation I had a with a colleague more than a month ago about circadian cycles helped me develop the right mantra and imagine a healing process. A slightly modified mantra and a process worked for cleaning up the mind.

Now, I need to practice more and, eventually, write-up the technique.

Putin delenda est

Коммерсант показывает фигу в кармане. На заглавной странице фото горящего российского десантного корабля в порту Бердянска, но это понятно только тем, ктo в теме. Ни в заголовках, ни в текстах ничего об этом нет.




upd. Еще интересно, что курс доллара, устанавливаемый ЦБР понизился. К рынку это имеет отдаленное отношение, потому что компании не могут свободно продавать валюту, а обязаны сдавать 80% государству, за что им теперь положено меньше рублей.

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This study is a great candidate for this year's IgNobel in biology:

Japanese commonly describe a person frozen with fear as looking like “a frog scared stiff by a snake.”

A team of scientists from Kyoto University tested the notion that frogs freeze in place when faced with a snake by staging experiments that pitted the arch enemies against each other.

They found that frogs intentionally stay still at the sight of snakes as a means of escape.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13263159

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