Nomological - defining by diagram

Here's an adjective you don't hear every day or maybe any day - nomological.

It is uncommon. And a bit awkward to say. What if I told you knowing about this word nomological might help you better understand other people?

The dictionary definition of nomological is:

♦️ relating to or expressing basic physical laws or rules of reasoning.

 

Dry and unhelpful, you will probably agree. Something about rules that describe how people think and reason. Who would think there could be rules about that?!

According to revolvy:

♦️ In philosophy, nomology is concerned with the thinking process of the mind. In the mid-19th century, nomology was described as one of two grand divisions of philosophy, the other being metaphysics. The word nomology is made up of -ology suffix for ‘order’, ‘word’ and ‘reason’. The nom- part is ‘rule’ and ‘law’, and means being objectively lawful (i.e. predictably following laws of logic, as in economics).

Mmm, I thought definitions were supposed to help you work out what a word meant. I've got another approach for this word. 

TATKOP 106

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who can interpret a Venn diagram and those who put words in circles.

See more in the TATKOP series.

Gruntled - dichotomy humour

Snipped from the socials

By guest explorer: Fred Shivvin

A meme on social media about gruntled being the long-lost opposite of disgrunted caused me to stop scrolling. Haha emoji.

But really? I googled for a while. Heaps of hits resulted - even t-shirts and gruntled websites. The re-discovery of this word seems to have made a lot of people gruntled and amused.

Part of the humour lies in the way the unearthing of gruntled seemed to right a wrong, an unknown sense of something lacking, providing something that should have been there but was not.

Where had the opposite of disgruntled been all this time?

TATKOP 105

There Are Two Kinds Of People: those who think we 'have' gender and those who think we 'do' gender.

See more in the TATKOP series.