Category Archives: chronicle

‘Remember that time is money’, wrote Benjamin Franklin in his short essay Advice to a Young Tradesman published in 1748. His words have been used time and time again as a warning against wasting time. The problem with time is its elusiveness. If time is intangible, then likening it to money makes its loss asContinue reading “Time is not money”

Preview(opens in a new tab) The knowledgeable and obsessive type is not a modern creation. Geeks have always accompanied every age. The classical world had its ancient geeks, peculiar individuals who would insist on a certain topic, activity or way of life, and who would attract the curiosity of those around them. Ancient geeks wereContinue reading “Geeks and ancient Greeks”

Translations never make the headlines. Translators don’t enjoy the same reputation as authors do, although a translation is, by many accounts, a work of authorship. And yet, cultures would have been very different if translations hadn’t existed. The background noise to a literate culture is made up of translations. In Western Europe, Christianity triumphed overContinue reading “Groundbreaking translations”

There’s no other way to say this: there is a lot of rubbish online, on websites, fora, social media, blogs (none is immune). But behind the rubbish, like any rubbish, is unchecked dissipation, in this case writing incontinence. Again, nobody is really immune, and this short rant might just be proving the point. Everything goesContinue reading “The blinking cursor”

Thank God for words like dépaysement. There’s nothing more [uncoined cognate adjective] to a language than words which don’t really belong. We refer to these words as ‘loanwords’, which is a bit doltish. On loan until when? It seems to me that no loanwords have ever been returned to their owner. Despite their half-baked name,Continue reading “Dépaysement”

Each age decides what’s newsworthy and especially when news happens. For our 0-lag age, news happens around the clock. We find out about it as it happens, and by virtue of our ability to record and broadcast the world around us almost in real time, we can be generators of news. Before radio and televisionContinue reading “Soundbite news”

We’ve been blocking undesired and uninvited people in our lives long before Facebook, Twitter or Whatsapp put us in charge of the block killswitch. Sometimes, we can go so far as to eliminate someone from our lives so completely that we’d even escape the dreaded ‘you’re dead to me’. There’s no worse block than that.Continue reading “‘You’re dead to me’”

There are private libraries and there are public libraries. Walk-in libraries and appointment-only libraries. Libraries that are easy and fun to use and libraries where you only go to when you really need to. Whatever they are, libraries are institutions, places of permanence and stability. Historically, libraries emerged in places that were least likely toContinue reading “Peer-to-peer libraries”

You might think Grammarly or the autocorrect function on your Microsoft Word are your best friends. They’re not. While some things benefit the individual in the short term, they might hurt the group in the long run. Adam Smith isn’t always right. The spell checker has been around since the mid 1980s, constantly growing inContinue reading “Auto incorrect”

Has a god recently blown through you or infused you with divine flavours? If you’re feeling enthusiastic, then it must have been the case. At least from an etymological point of view. Rabelais seems to have been the first to use the word enthousiasme, the root of the English word, as the ‘sacred delirium whichContinue reading “Enthusiastically yours”