2012-05-26

Words Have Meanings
Words have actual meanings!

Words have actual meanings, like eschaton and echelon. I'm a fast reader in that I can get through something and get the general gist of it quickly w/o knowing the precise meanings of a lot of words. Works wonders in marathon long DFW novels, but I realized just now how many levels of awesome I miss out on by being good at extracting meaning from context. For example, the tennis academy kids played a game called Eschaton in Infinite Jest. I spent the entire book thinking eschaton was vaguely similar to echelon and that was good enough. A few minutes ago I realized I didn't really know exactly what echelon meant so I looked it up along with a bunch of other words including eschaton which really means the end of all things, or the final destiny of the world. Nice name for a game about thermonuclear political domination.