Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Even more pregnant and uniquer, too

The lead to this column from the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/sep/04/why-reading-dickens

suggests that Dickens is "even more ubiquitous" than he used to be. Are there degrees of ubiquity? Can you be "even more omnipresent"? Is it childish to be annoyed by this sort of thing?

I don't want to be ungrateful, though. I learned a new word from the column, aptronym, then, from looking it up, another, the synonymous euonym. I feel more omniscienter than ever.

2 comments:

Rolsen said...

I missed that class, but I think it's a calculus concept. Or maybe a unified field theory concept. Even the universe is expanding, no? So long as everywhere is finite, it's entirely possible that there could be a bit more Dickens today than yesterday even though he occupied the entire field both days.

Richard Epstein said...

Well, yes, of course, that's just what I was going to say, except that I was going to include some uninformed and inappropriate comment about Schrödinger's Cat.