HARVARD SQUARE COMMENTARY
November 5, 2007
From Sanitas
A Lexicon for the 21st Century
John Turner
Confidant: One who gets to talk regularly to a famous person, thereby setting off squeals of envy and jealousy in the press.
Confidante: A female confidant, who may have the added advantage of not being real.
Confidence: A quality best kept in line with ability.
Confusion: Condition one attempts to escape only if he's willing to be thought a freak.
Confutation: That which exceeds a toothache in nagging discomfort.
Congenital: Adjective formed to promote hopelessness.
Congo: Region of Africa which became associated in the Western mind with unimaginably primitive delights, surrender to which led to equally unimaginably hideous degeneration.
Conjunction: A linkage more often than not marked by its ridiculousness.
Connubial: An adjective most often descriptive of beds, which gives it a pleasantly salacious air.
Conscience: A private line to God, short-circuited lately by the desire for personal growth.
Conscilience: A word re-coined by Edward O. Wilson to resolve a silly quarrel between two nonexistent entities: science and the humanities.
Consciousness: The source of our ability to tell that a thing is different from something else.
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