Saturday, January 09, 2016

Shane's Excellent New Words: Autodidacticism ... and a biography of the poet Ezra Pound.

Pound with fascist kitty. Cribbed on-line.

Yesterday was the "regularly scheduled" debut of a weekly column written by Nick Vaughn.

Vaughn Within City Limits: Episode I, The Phantom Menace.


"Shane's Excellent New Words" also will be a regular weekly feature at NA Confidential. That's because a healthy vocabulary isn't about trying to show you're smarter than the rest. To the contrary, it's about selecting the right word and using it correctly, whatever one's pay grade or station in life.

This week's word is autodidacticism.

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education is the act of self-directed learning about a subject or subjects in which one has had little to no formal education. Many notable contributions have been made by autodidacts.

I'll use it in a sentence: "My autodidacticism often flares up in winter, and as a result, lately I've been studying the lives of poets."

One of them is genius-cum-fascist Ezra Pound, and tonight I'll begin reading a biography by John Tytell, called Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano.

To prepare for the book, I viewed an hour-long documentary film, which can be viewed via this link,

Ezra Pound: American Odyssey

Odd; I just searched the poems of Ezra Pound for the words "lawyer" and "attorney," but could not find a single reference to either.

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