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Learned Volume 5, Issue 53
This week: We take a break to discuss calendars, the state of the Learned, and what to expect and look forward to in Volume Six. Read on!
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Hi! You may have noticed that this week’s Learned looks a little different. Volume Five is all wrapped up and Volume Six has yet to begin; instead, this week, we're taking a break in the form of this interstitial issue. But why, you ask? Because Julius Caesar1.
When I started Learned, I chose the first week of April as a launch date because it coincided with the Japanese school year and felt like a good time to try something new. I decided I’d do one issue a week, publishing on Mondays, and away we went. Now, five years later, the calendar has done what it does and, due to the odd number of days in the year, the Volume Six start date has drifted back into the last week of March2. Which isn’t really an issue until you’re trying to do 52 consecutive issues over the course of a year.
So I decided to skip a week. Which brings us back to this issue.
Over the past 52 weeks, the Learned readership has gone up by over 400%. Thank you all so very, very much. I am truly grateful and value each and every one of you. But, since there are so many new readers, I thought it might be a good time to review some of the past volumes, and why I refer to them as volumes as well as talk a little about what you can expect in Volume Six3.
Generally, each new volume has a new look, a new array of post-article addendums4, and a new theme. Kind of. Here's a quick recap:
Volume 1 - Lifelong Learning - I wrote about topics I was interested in learning more about, mainly language learning, drawing practice, and musical skills. Coincidentally, I also started work on my Master’s degree about the same time.
Volume 2 - All About the Idioms, Baby - By now, I was really enjoying my studies and decided to lean into some of the linguistic topics I’d been studying. What this meant for Learned was that I started to apply my research skills to a lot of the idioms students have asked me about over the years. This led to a lot of fun articles about phrases like "easy come, easy go," and "get thee behind me, Satan."
Volume 3 - Comparative Pedagogy - Most of the titles in volume three are comprised of a pair of words I used as markers to guide that week's essay. In most, I more fully embraced the etymology and lexicography that my studies were pushing me towards as well as continued to delve into topics I was, and remain, genuinely curious about.
Volume 4 - Words We Use When We Talk About Words - This was the first time I tried to really close in on an over-arching title for the year and dedicated each issue to the history and understanding of a word we use to describe collections of words.
Volume 5 - Say It Again, But Slowly - Volume Five has been the most difficult year of writing, and one where I felt like I bit off more than I could chew. I tried to find new words, i.e. words I didn’t already know, each week and that was troubling not because it was difficult but because I had to watch and read a lot of news to do so and that has not been good for my brain.
Which brings us to Volume Six, No Two Words Alike.
I don’t believe in synonyms. Or, at least, I don’t believe in exact synonyms. I don’t think that there are many cases in English where two words mean exactly the same thing. Take, for example, huge and enormous. What's the difference? And, if there isn't one, why do we have two words that do mean the same thing? Isn't that redundant?
These are the kinds of questions we'll be looking at in Volume Six. We'll take a look at pairs or groups of words that have similar meanings and try to figure out just why and how that has happened. We’ll be doing this through the lens of my day job, which is teaching English to Japanese university students. It’s through them I encounter questions like the ones mentioned above.
The answers are out there, but they’re often a bit abstract. So, the goal for each set of words in Volume six is to find a concise, well-thought-out answer to the question of how are these words different?
I think it's going to be an interesting series. But, in the meantime, I want to say thank you again to all readers, new and recent alike, and I want to make one small pitch:
Palimpsest is a sister-publication to Learned, one that will run twice a month for subscribers only, starting in April. These issues are a bit longer and much more open in topic. They're more autobiographical and talk about my experiences as a teacher, an inadvertent immigrant, author, and all kinds of other stuff.
So, if you're interested in reading more of my writing and / or want to support both Learned and myself, please consider upgrading to the paid version of Learned. If that's not in the cards at the moment, for whatever reason, I appreciate you being here anyway and I look forward to more of the interactions and conversations that have made the first five years of this newsletter so worthwhile.
Thank you,
Joel
Well, technically, blame the English Parliament of 1750 for deciding that they only needed to update, rather than replace, the Julian / Gregorian calendars.
Volume 1 - April 2, 2018; Volume 2 - April 1, 2019; Volume 3 - March 30, 2020; Volume 4 - March 29, 2021; Volume 5 - March 29, 2022.
And hopefully, none of you will unsubscribe until after you've seen what it will look like!
These are things like Volume One's "What We're Reading," Volume Two's "Sidetracks," or Volume Four's "Trivially Yours."
Don't believe in synonyms, huh? Imma be thinking about this now all day.