The October 23 Scrabble post listed toponyms (place names and words derived from places) in the first half of the alphabet. Today’s post includes a list of toponyms in the second half. Studying these playable proper nouns–playable because they’re also common nouns–offers you additional opportunities to broaden your vocabulary and up your game.
- oxford: a type of shoe, also known as a bal or balmoral
- panama: a type of wide-brimmed hat
- paris: a type of plant found in Europe and Asia that produces a lone, poisonous berry
- roman: a romance written in meter
- scot: an assessed tax
- scotch: to put an end to; or to etch or scratch (as in hopscotch)
- sherpa: a soft fabric used for linings
- siamese: a water pipe providing a connection for two hoses
- swiss: a sheer, cotton fabric
- texas: a tall structure on a steamboat containing the pilothouse
- toledo: a type of sword known for its fine craftsmanship, originally from Toledo
- wale: to injure, to create welts on the skin
- warsaw: a type of grouper fish
- waterloo: a definitive defeat
- zaire: a currency of Zaire
Unexpected Finds Follow-Up
Yesterday’s post detailed how perusing the works cited list for the peer-reviewed article “The Everyday Life of Artificial Intelligence: The Humanism of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” by Sunyoung Ahn, led me to three potential sources.
Future posts will likely included annotated bibliography entries for two or more of those. For now, I offer the first draft of my entry for Ahn’s article:
Sample Annotated Bibliography Entry
Ahn, Sunyoung. “The Everyday Life of Artificial Intelligence: The Humanism of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, Mar. 2020, pp. 73–92. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.47.1.0073.
In Sunyoung Ahn’s “The Everyday Life of Artificial Intelligence: The Humanism of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” Ahn cites French philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s The Critique of Everyday Life (1977), in which Lefebvre speculates “that in the not-too-distant future human cells will be created artificially (which is perfectly conceivable) and given consciousness” (qtd. in Ahn 73). From that premise, Lefebvre supposes that such artificial intelligence will face the same struggles in everyday life as humans. For Ahn, Lefebvre’s philosophy aligns with Ted Chiang’s depiction of his digients’ development and their relationships with the trainer Ana Alvarado and the animator Derek Brooks, the humans who work with the digients at Blue Gamma and later become their caregivers. Ahn notes that such scenarios in science fiction are rare. Rather than turning to the trope of the cautionary dystopian tale, Chiang presents characters who “take responsibility for their own creation[s]” (88) and who, along with the digients, “stay useful and relevant by constantly modifying themselves” (87).
Ahn’s study delineates Chiang’s focus on the formative stage of artificial intelligence as a point of contrast to AI as it is widely imagined as “developed, perfected, and therefore culminant” (78). Ahn demonstrates the singular vision of The Lifecycle of Software Objects as a narrative in which “humans anthropomorphize the digients” (87) and the digients lead the humans to “think digitally” (87).
Sunyoung Ahn, an associate professor of English at Korea University in Seoul, is the author of “New Sincerity, New Worldliness: Post 9/11 Fiction of Don Delillo and David Foster Wallace.”
Secondary Quotations
The summary paragraph of my annotation includes a secondary quotation, also known as a secondary citation or indirect citation, which is line from another source quoted by the author of the source I am annotating. Because I name the author, Henri Lefebvre, in the sentence, the paranthetical citation is (qtd. in Ahn 73), which denotes that his words are quoted by Ahn on page 73. If I had not named Lefebvre in the sentence, his last name would be included in the parenthetical citation: (Lefebvre, qtd. in Ahn 73).
If you are quoting a writer or speaker who is not the author of your source, be sure to present the words as a secondary quotation. Otherwise you will commit a factual error.
Next Up
Monday, we will examine Chapter Seven of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and you will have additional time to work on your annotated bibliography and preface
