Ambition in the Favorites list
"WHAT IT FEELS LIKE …… to lose 119 consecutive Presidents Races" immediately precedes "How to Become a MacArthur genius."
They come just a few links above the weekend's Date Lab episode, a rare but fun success. "How you're D.C. … Alma: Utilizing the Metro daily to go to work and taking in the exhibits. Adam: Full of ideas, hopes and love. All the ingredients for utopia, but falls far from perfection."
A few links up, there's a nice little story about Wired changing "Internet" to "internet" in its style. "This should not be interpreted as some kind of symbolic demotion," an editor explains. "Think of it more as a stylistic reality check." As someone who can't get enough of nice little stories, from all walks to life, I find myself thinking diminutives and wishing there was one for these kinds of stories, both the Wired piece and the ones above. In newspaper world, all short gets you is a brief. In TV, you get a clip or a soundbite. Even in lit, you go smaller than a novella and all you have left is a short story. What awful reward! None of the terms describe the feeling.
Those Romans, they knew their diminutives. Take our friend Catullus. In the opening poem, his little book was a "libellus." When the sparrow died, "poor little" was "miselle" and "little eyes" was "ocelli." Counting the kisses did similar work, "then another thousand, then a second hundred…." By the time the poet wrote "I hate and I love," the little things had enough definition that the big needed none.
