Floodlights and Goalposts

An online commonplace book

Tag: skill building

Degenerate Epigrams

October 28th, 2024

Of course there are, occasionally, clever antitheses, antitheses that draw fine distinctions or tell you something that you did not know already. Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves’. But we can’t all be Oscar Wilde, and it would be interminably dull if we were. The world would degenerate into one permanent epigram.

– Mark Forsyth

Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence is eloquent and full of surprise. The world degenerating into one permanent epigram isn’t a phrase I’d expect to see in a “writing” book.

Forsyth, Mark. The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. United Kingdom, Icon Books, Limited, 2014. pg. 19
Alan Jacob’s marginalia skillz

December 29th, 2022

I think reading and annotating books is thing I do best – it’s my most sharply honed skill. But that in itself has no market value, even though it has great value to me personally. And I find that difference interesting.
Jacobs, Alan. Homebound Symphony, my skillz. December 13, 2022.

I’d argue reading and annotating books does have market value. It’s the soil that allows all the other “market value” skills to grow from.

To be a professor, writer, and observer, one must read and capture thoughts in the margins well. Honing this skill must lead to new, important insights, no?