Giggle - The earliest known usage of giggle in English dates from the 16th century [Akin to gaggle: cf. OD. ghichelen, G. kichern.] To laugh with short catches of the breath or voice; to laugh in a light, affected, puerile or silly manner; to titter with childish levity. “Giggling and laughing with all their might At the piteous hap of the fairy wight.” J. R. Drake.

Gooey -1893, American English slang, from goo + -y. The first element perhaps somehow imitative, or shortened from burgoo (1787) "thick porridge." As for goo, 1903, American...

In Blood Meridian (1985) Cormac McCarthy writes of the Sonoran desert,

“…here was nothing more luminous than another and nothing more enshadowed and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.”

In such wildlands, he seems to suggest, individual consciousness and even morphic distinctions evaporate beneath the Universe’s gaze. In these landscapes too, something similar happens to time. It expands to become the eternal now. Left behind in the cosmic dust are such pettifogging notions like: the future...

A mathematician, an artist, a lawyer and an MBA walk into a bar…

You might think this is the start of a joke about null sets, oil paint, sharks and private equity, but it’s something completely different. It’s a salon, a real Salon, like the Algonquin Round Table in Manhattan, or Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon. These people meet every Friday night at the brightly-lit, well-appointed Solano Grill and Bar in a bustling Berkeley neighborhood, and they say it’s the highlight of their week.  And everyone has something to contribute -- from the theoretical to the personal, from the serious to the laughable, from the...

In an online chat venue, I encountered a post to the effect that Every rational person should have a Bucket list.  But after chatting up the subject with a number of Realizers, I’d modify that to something like, Every rational person should have an opinion about a Bucket list.  The Internet opinionator probably equated making lists with doing stuff.  Even my husband Bob, who, to date, has steered clear of the whole bucket meme, admitted it’s a fair point. “Since the clock is ticking,” he said, a to-do list in-a-bucket wasn’t a bad idea – assuming one really wants to do the enumerated...