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In the haze, the horizons of distant peaks braided together. The nature writer Robert MacFarlane observes, in his book “Landmarks,” that a Scottish painter once described this phenomenon to him as landskein. “Skein” can mean either a coil of yarn or a flock of birds flying in a V formation. Landskein, a neologism, uses both, knitting the V’s of mountaintops together. Each time I saw the jagged, braided horizon, I thought about how happy I was to know the word.
The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere
newyorker.com
Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about itself, even though it’s more complete — as if to remind you that the word came first, that the word isn’t defined by its definition here, in this humble dictionary, that definitions grasp, tentatively, at words, but that what words really are is this haze and halo of associations and evocations, a little networked cloud of uses and contexts.
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary « the jsomers.net blog
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Initially, Japan’s traffic lights were green as green can be. Despite this, the country’s official traffic documents still referred to green traffic lights as ao rather than midori. While international traffic law decrees all “go” signals must be represented by green lights, Japanese linguists objected to their government’s decision to continue using the word ao to describe what was clearly midori. The government decided to compromise. “In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature,” Allan Richarz writes for Atlas Obscura.
This Is Why Japan Has Blue Traffic Lights Instead of Green
rd.com
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