We Are Awesome discussion

It might be easier to do things this way:

    While you're reading anything, if you come across an interesting WORD, make a note of it and copy a paragraph or two containing the word.
    Next, post the WORD, its definition from a dictionary, and then also paste in the paragraph where you read it.
    This might be easier than having the word first, and then trying to search for a sample sentence or trying to compose one.

great idea:)but in the other thread just post the word:)and paragraph here:)

New York Times, Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2016, p.A3

Ousted Critic of Phillipine President Decries 'New McCarthyism'

MANILA — For one outspoken critic of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly antidrug campaign in the Philippines, the denouement came quickly.

...Senator Leila de Lima, was stripped of her post [in] the Senate Justice Committee, which recently had heard damning testimony from a professed Duterte hit man,...

Speaking on the Senate floor..., Ms. de Lima said... she was the victim of a “new McCarthyism” aimed at ending her inquiry into the president’s possible role in extrajudicial killings.

~ Huh Oh
    by Douglas Gilbert

The internet's a place where at best
there's more persiflage than conversation,
and hey, y'know you'll rue knowing
it's where never is heard
perspicaciousness, rather there

more flaky acquaintances than intimacy,
a place of laughing in silence,
and lonely isolation. But ouch

the dead of thought never
rue calling the Devil's name to
make wombats dig tunnels, while

taking slices of pizza, covered
in gopher blood, and justly
stuffing it in a marsupial's pouch

just because there's
an underground mystery,
and a flavor to a huh-whaaa oh

Great work, Douglas!

Thanks. I was flipping through the dictionary and saw some interesting sounds and wanted to see if I could put them together.
I'll do the definitions on a different day in the other thread.

Here Come Driverless Cars. Now What?
New York Times, Business Section, Sept. 22, 2016, page B4
[about self-driving trucks]
"... There would be deeper issues to consider: The threat of hacking, the narrowing economic control over a vital lane of national commerce, and a growing detachment from America's ineffable, often irrational love affair with the open road."

I have an ineffable love affair with coffee. LOL

Top Famous Quotes
"Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, or else for those resolute dead-enders, who have made up their minds to be content with the ersatz of Suchness, with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner."
Author: Aldous Huxley

"As an ersatz opening batsman, Tavaré did not so much score runs as smuggle them out by stealth."
Author: Gideon Haigh

"Books make the best ersatz friendships."
Author: Nenia Campbell

Another excellent definition, Douglas. I'm expanding my vocabulary because of you.

    "Watch it, minx," he warned with a lift of his brow. "If you intend to taunt me for every foolish statement I've made in my life, you'll force me to play Rockton and lock you up in my dark, forbidding manor while I have my wicked way with you."
    "That sounds perfectly awful," she said gazing at the man she loved. "How soon can we start?
--- Sabrina Jeffries
Sabrina Jeffries Quotes

Quotes tagged as "insouciant"
Wendy Wunder

“You need to be flagrantly insouciant.
You care way too much.
And because of that you will be paralyzed for life and miss out on everything.”
― Wendy Wunder, The Museum of Intangible Things

I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance,
Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance [sic*] [nuisance].
-- Ogden Nash

*sic means the exact quote is given the way it was written even if the writer quoting it is aware of a misspelled word. In this case done for humor by mocking and mirroring the French spelling of insouciance. And by the way, 'sic' is Latin for 'thus.' [When you quote someone, you're not supposed to change or correct anything if you're using it for a formal paper. ]

"He knows nothing of the irresponsible light-heartedness of boyhood, of the graceful insouciance of animal spirits."
-- Oscar Wilde

I think I've only seen this used in a negative way. They all seem to say that being carefree is a negative thing: lazy, foolish, oblivious to reality... It even even sounds like something evil. So I would guess that this is used only with arch sarcasm.

Wow. Sarcasm destroys a lot of words. "She is so precious," for example, said with sarcasm means the opposite. I don't know, do any positive words escape obliteration?

Sarcasm can do that, but it is still an artform.

[This thread has 9 views so it is indeed invisible. So I put this fuzzy thing here:]
   It Only Takes a Word to Conquer

Conquer at first with diplomacy.

To weaken the enemy,
send in the smarmy army
and a coctail or two will do
to suck out a bit of brain
through a tin ear that
hears only flattery.

Our unctuous Ambassador
is slick, wheedles out
a disarmament treaty

When their guard is down
we attack and control,
those not dead are
obsequious for us,
and our new slaves.

Swedish Curmudgeon
"Step aside Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a grumpy old man may soon be taking your place as America's favorite fictional Swede. Ove — that's pronounced Ooo-vah — is the lovable curmudgeon at the center of A Man Called Ove. The film, which opens in the U.S. on Friday, is based on a Swedish best-selling novel."
-- Lynn Neary, npr

THANKS FOR KEEPING TIS THREAD ALIVE GUYS:)ESPECIALLY DOUG:D

DOUG IS GREAT AT WHAT HE DOES FOR SURE!

“The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.”
― Herbert Butterfield, The Origins Of History

Raconteur Quote

Herbert Butterfield

The Origins of History

Dale Carnegie,How to Win Friends and Influence People:
"...I was attending a banquet one night given in Sir Ross's honor; ... the man...told a humorous story which hinged on a quotation 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.' The raconteur mentioned that the quotation was from the bible. He was wrong..."
    Dale Carnegie tries to correct him (It's from Hamlet), but his friend kicks him under the table and tells him that he is correct and explains later that as guests they should let him save face because he was not asking for a comment.
How to Win Friends and Influence People

I own that book!

xD

More on insouciance from The Literary Hub :

So Who Exactly is Bob Dylan, Newly Crowned Nobel Laureate?
The Poet vs. Songwriter vs. Showman Debate Rages On
October 13, 2016 By Lisa Levy

"Greil Marcus has devoted an entire book to one Dylan song, Like a Rolling Stone. ...The crux of the book is not Marcus’s reading of the song’s text—for that, best to trudge through Christopher Ricks’ exegesis in Dylan’s Visions of Sin,...—but the context of it. In some ways Marcus is too grown up to take on the song: he has a genius for context, but is that what’s required to parse a rant about the vicissitudes and insouciance of youth? In his chorus Dylan asks over and over, 'How does it feel?' In his book Marcus can only wonder, 'What does it mean?' Even a schoolchild could tell him that’s not the point of a fairy tale—unless you’re that scariest of monsters, an incorrigible grownup..."

:-)

Doug sweetheart I need more words and really wanna read,those poems of ya ....!where have ya disappeared to?;-(