Insinuatio. A big Latin word. You can probably tell it has something to do with “insinuate”. You may be shocked to learn that you’ve probably already seen an insinuatio in action. Maybe you’ve even used one without knowing it. Insinuatio is a rhetorical technique. The thing about rhetoric is that…

Aeneas falls for Dido says The Aeneid. Division of labour increases productivity says The Wealth of Nations. Don Quixote tilts at windmills says the eponymous novel. Virtue is the mean between extremes says The Nicomachean Ethics. All four of these ideas and events are well known. They have broken free…

John Webster, contemporary and sometimes equal of Shakespeare, could paint sickliness of spirit in living colour. In The White Devil, he captured one such curious sickness and displays it to us like a moth pinned behind glass. In the snares of her enemies, the tragic villain-heroine Vittoria laments: Oh, the…

There’s this idea bandied about that we beat the curiosity out of. Children, it’s said, have a naturally healthy attitude towards the world, one of wonder and questioning. From their wondering curiosity, they ask questions that we bland adults would not ask. Why is the sky blue? …

Here’s a common problem: we don’t know what we don’t know, and can’t see from a vantage we haven’t climbed. Someone of intellectual humility takes it on faith that, up on that vantage, there are sights to see. Someone of intellectual arrogance, however, from his place down below, will dismiss…

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,” said Napoleon. Or Robert Heinlein. Or Ayn Rand, or David Hume, or Goethe, or… or any number of figures who also didn’t say it. (According to Quote Investigator, the actual originator of this quote was a computer programmer called…

It always seemed to me a cheat that the Tarot for Death is really the Tarot for Change. Death is reduced to a metaphor, a symbol for the end of one job and the start of another, the end of singlehood and the start of marriage, or the end of…

When culture goes over your head, you can react in two ways: humbly or arrogantly. When I was fifteen, I watched La Dolce Vita, a three-hour movie about well-off Italians. It went over my head. I found it boring and meandering because I had no idea what it was about…

There’s a lovely moment in the finale of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner (until 32:53). I won’t spoil much, but the eponymous prisoner has been hauled before men who admire him. They want him to speak, to utter pearls of wisdom. They shout their assent: “Ay! Ay! Ay!” They shout so…