Word of the Week: flâneur (flä-NÛR) Definition (Noun) A lounger or saunterer, an idle "man about town." In Context "All in all, and with his days as a dilettante and a flâneur far behind him, he looked set upon pursuing a professional career as a responsible married man." Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction, 2002.
Word of the Week: vatic (VĂT-ĭk) Definition (Adjective) Of or pertaining to, characteristic of, a prophet or seer; prophetic, inspired. In Context "In 1990, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn emerged from his isolation in Cavendish, Vermont, and issued a vatic manifesto entitled 'How to Revitalize Russia.'" David Remnick, "Putin's Pique," The New Yorker, March 17, 2014.
Word of the Week: prescient (PRĔSH-ənt) Definition (Adjective) Having foreknowledge or foresight; foreseeing. In Context “In 1984, written in 1948, George Orwell left a prescient description of the sort of totalitarian architecture that would soon dominate the Communist bloc, imposing and hideous: the Ministry of Truth, an ‘enormous, pyramidal structure of white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace, three hundred metres into the air . . .’” Ben Macintyre, “Look on Those Monuments to Megalomania, and Despair,” The Times, March 30, 2007.
Tom Lake (2023) by Ann Patchett Critical Evaluation “Tom Lake” collects enchanted places, sites of congregation like the lake and the stage, or like Chekhov’s cherry orchard and the town in “Our Town.” Patchett suggests that in these timeless locales, with their renewable springs of ghostly personae, characters can safely warehouse past versions of themselves and others. Or at least that’s the idea. Rather than fear the cemetery, Lara and her kids love it and its promise of “everlasting inclusion.” As a girl, Emily “liked to run her fingers along the tombstones, the letters worn nearly to nothing, the stones speckled [...]
