Plan for a New Manner of Dictionary

As it might be:

...

tones, a word.

tonetics, a word.

tong, a word.

tonga, a word.

tonger, a word.

tongue, a word.

tongueless, a word.

tonic, a word.

tonier, a word.

tonight, a word.

...

... and so on.

The Dandy

From Baudelaire's Journaux Intimes [2:ii]: 'Le Dandy doit aspirer à être sublime sans interruption; il doit vivre et dormir devant un miroir.' Did Christopher Isherwood translate this? He did: 'the Dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. he should live and sleep in front of a mirror.' True today, save for one alteration: for 'mirror' read 'the internet'.

Blue sky

The sky was a kind of famished blue, insufficiently dressed with a few stretches of muslin clouds.

The knight is ...

'The knight is the only piece able to leave the chessboard and return again to it ...' But this is wrong, on several levels. It's wrong in point of fact (rooks? Kings?), and in point of play (very often a player must pick up a bishop, say, in order to be able to trace out, in the air, the piece's diagonal between close set pieces and place it down again). But there's a more important point here. The knight piece is a stylised horse; its ability to 'leap over other pieces' is a function of a curiously literal approach to metaphorisation: it can leap over things because, in real life, horses can leap over things ... which is the same logic that prevents Gradgrind from papering his rooms with horsey wallpaper ('you wouldn't paper a room with representations of horses. Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality - in fact? Do you?') In that sense the knight does not leave the chessboard; it is, indeed, more closely tied to the symbolic logic supposedly underpinning the chessboard than other, freer-flying pieces ... the rook itself; the all-powerful queen, or best of all the eight sphere-topped spires we call pawns.

Applause

There's a rightness about the similarity between the sounds of applause and rainfall.

Nature-nurture

We have been in the habit of talking about nature versus nurture, but it's not a very good way of framing the question. Perhaps we should talk about essence versus sense.

Questioning

Questioning, as process, ought to be a process of detail, density, nuance and shrinkage.