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An ugly word to describe physical beauty.
I mean, sound it out, it can't mean that, can it?
Nevertheless it does. Perhaps a backhanded way to describe a beautiful woman one doesn't particularly like...
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Home: A curious word with no synonym. I mean - home, it has an internal resonance, it confers a sense of belonging, comfort, place.
Yet we've replaced it largely with words like "Apartment" and "House" - words that describe the style of our accommodation, but not our intrinsic relationship with it. An "apartment", "duplex", "condo", "house", these are places where we live, but they confer no warmth or intimacy.
Searching I've concluded that there seems to be no synonym for it.
Consider Love. There are a wide variety of synonyms, it's gradients, there's fondness, affection, like, limerence, crush - all implying some shade of love.
But there's no place - or synonym - for Home.
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Now this was a stray thought that came out of nowhere - the tale of the Elves and the Shoemaker. Which is a bit of a "WTF", but it must have come out of my disjointed half-remembered dreams. Anyways, if you're not familiar with it you can read it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elves_and_the_Shoemaker
Anyways, completely out of the blue, and so I googled it this morning, wondering "WTF", and it's pretty much the tale I remembered, and the "epiphany" - if you can call it that - is that the shoemaker simply slept on his problems and his dreaming (unconscious) mind solved them for him.
Bizarre.
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A link to an interesting "social" experiment conducted in the 70's with mice:
John B Calhoun set about creating a series of experiments that would essentially cater to every need of rodents, and then track the effect on the population over time. The most infamous of the experiments was named, quite dramatically, Universe 25.
In this study, he took four breeding pairs of mice and placed them inside a "utopia". The environment was designed to eliminate problems that would lead to mortality in the wild. They could access limitless food via 16 food hoppers, accessed via tunnels, which would feed up to 25 mice at a time, as well as water bottles just above. Nesting material was provided. The weather was kept at 68°F (20°C), which for those of you who aren't mice is the perfect mouse temperature. The mice were chosen for their health, obtained from the National Institutes of Health breeding colony. Extreme precautions were taken to stop any disease from entering the universe.
As well as this, no predators were present in the utopia, which sort of stands to reason. It's not often something is described as a "utopia, but also there were lions there picking us all off one by one".
The experiment began, and as you'd expect, the mice used the time that would usually be wasted in foraging for food and shelter for having excessive amounts of sexual intercourse. About every 55 days, the population doubled as the mice filled the most desirable space within the pen, where access to the food tunnels was of ease.
When the population hit 620, that slowed to doubling around every 145 days, as the mouse society began to hit problems. The mice split off into groups, and those that could not find a role in these groups found themselves with nowhere to go.
Read the full article here: https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/footage-shows-the-infamous-universe-25-experiment-that-turned-into-a-mouse-apocalypse/
Or watch the Video on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CXj0AGuh4c
And, yes, people have more complex wants and needs than mice, but - you can certainly some parallels in our society at the moment.
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Largely (but - not necessarily "Entirely") disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment, the Luminiferous Aether was postulated to be the medium that permeated space and allowed electromagnetic waves and light to propagate across a vacuum.
Now - while we of course reject the earlier theories that - for example - the stars and planets are candles or lights hung up in crystalline spheres - we might have been I think a little hasty getting rid of this one. Call it intuition.
Links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
While light can explain it's propagation by being both a particle and a wave - and electro-magnetic waves are explained away using "fields", it does seem that we have replaced the Aether with the term "Space", invented dark matter and a variety of other constants and equations to explain away - never satisfactorily - our relation to both space and neighboring celestial bodies. While the theory of relativity has held up for this long - the presence of an Aether, or medium - which slowed it down, or capped it's speed, would go a long ways towards overcoming it. Certainly the abundance of other planets, stars, celestial bodies in general suggests there must be some reasonable means for us to communicate - or traverse the voids - to them. Accepting the speed of light as an upper bound to the speed of our travels is not a particularly attractive option.
Anyways, the things that get me thinking far too early and never with enough coffee...