Along with my ongoing campaign to make behemothesis (as in, “I am in no way prepared to face the behemothesis.”) a part of Princetonian vocabulary, I’ve also adopted “logarithmotechny” at Savethewords.Org. In the age of the slide rule, logarithmotechny came as a natural skill to those in some technical disciplines. I’m fairly sure it’s become somewhat rarer since the advent of the calculator.

Another linguistic curiosity — I noticed in shul today that Artscroll translates the phrase “אם-שמע תשמעו” to “if you hearken.” I’ve always thought it was spelled “harken,” like the Christmas carol that begins, “Hark! The herald angels sing,” but “hearken” is also a valid alternative spelling. I did a double take. Hearken looks like hear + ken (that is, to know)! Actually, hearken comes from Old English heorcnian and hark comes from Old English heorcian, which is an intensive form of the base of both words, hieran, “to hear.” So “hearken” is not only differentiated from “hark” even in Old English, but also doesn’t have much to do with kenning, either, although I should have known this because the -en ending is normal for infinitives of verbs in German and Old English. But it is an interesting reverse etymology. If we read “if you hearken,” as “if you hear-ken,” it’s actually pretty close to “אם-שמע תשמעו,” which literally is “if hear you will hear.”

Finally getting to things that have been put off for a very long time — and finishing them — is a very rewarding feeling. I just reduced my number of Gmail Drafts from 45 to 13. And negel vasser is, apart from its necessity, a cold burst of revitalization.

EDIT: Make that 4. I feel accomplished indeed.

EDIT (again): Make that 3.

“Control of attention is the ultimate individual power,” [New York Times columnist David Brooks] wrote. “People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them.”

…A person who works six hours a day but with total focus has an enormous advantage over a 12-hour-per-day workaholic who’s “multi-tasking” all day, answering every phone call, constantly checking Facebook and Twitter, and indulging every interruption.

Another thing I’m planning to work on this semester, along with reading more Malcolm Gladwell.

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I just realized that I really love walking. You wouldn’t know it, considering that I have actually dropped classes because they were at the Friend Center and I just didn’t feel like going there. And while I enjoy walking with people, I enjoy walking by myself somewhat even more. For the first time in a while, I felt entirely grounded. There was a time that it seemed to me as if my body was moving of its own accord and I was kind of watching it and following it around. There is that self-sense, almost like nostalgia, of being, and of the awareness of being, the awareness of purpose, of completeness in myself. I spent a very long time in earlier years trying to define myself in words, then trying to live up to that description, and while many of those observations are true, it is an incomplete picture. And I am glad of it.

Also, last Tuesday I was looking for a CVS that wasn’t where Google Maps said it was, and rather impulsively decided to meet up with a friend at Juilliard and go to a violin recital by a fourth year, Igor Pikayzen, and the whole of it was absolutely brilliant. I also never knew that Thomas Moore’s poem, “The Last Rose of Summer,” had been set to music and that there is a fantastically difficult solo violin piece consisting of variations on it.

I’m not sure why I thought this, but I have more or less always thought “tzeit” referred to the Yiddish word צייט rather than the Hebrew word צאת. Even though it probably should have occurred to me at some point. It’s just that they sound exactly the same to me, and they both mean “time.” And yet, are linguistically probably entirely unrelated.