---

title: "Things I learned this week #2"
author: Thomas Wilson
date: 2020-08-21
slug: 2020-08-21-things-i-learned-2
draft: false
tags:
  - things-i-learned
---

- **This useful thinking tool**: good writing starts with observations, and moves to analysis. Making the transition is difficult. One way to spot a mental crutch is to see where you reach for words like "interestingly", "surprisingly", or "notably". These all _hint_ at a significance or meaningfulness, but don't actually clarify it. ([source](https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-001-foundations-of-western-culture-homer-to-dante-fall-2008/writing-resources/obser_ver_anlsis.pdf))
- **This hot takeaway**: Did you know that during the 1970s if you ordered a takeaway coffee it came in a styrofoam cup and a lid without a hole. If you wanted to drink your beverage, you had to take the lid off _and then put it back on_ - can you imagine? Obviously impatient, the hardcore mobile coffee drinkers (think: taxi drivers) kept ripping holes in the lid to drink their Joe on the Go. Where there's demand, there's business and thus was born a [whole field of design](https://designobserver.com/feature/coffee-lids-peel-pinch-pucker-puncture/39790/) for designing the most safe and ergonomic way to drink coffee from a cup without having to actually take the lid off.
- **This Frank etymology**: "Lingua Franca" describes a common language between a group of people. It emerged in the late 1700s and translates functionally as "Language of the Franks", with _Franks_ being anyone broadly from Westen Europe. The original Lingua Franca was a mixture of simplified Italian, Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan (a Romance language spoken around southern France and northern Italy and Spain - [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language)) , Spanish, Arabic, and Turkish ([source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca#Etymology))
- **These Kinswomen**: King James II had a thing for witty, plain looking mistresses. Two such mistresses were [Arabella Churchill](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabella_Churchill_(royal_mistress)>) and [Catherine Sedley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Sedley,_Countess_of_Dorchester). Arabella is described in [The Ladies Dictionary (1694)](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GfQ_TquTZicC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA30#v=onepage&q&f=false) as being "of no less Eminence for learning and ingenuous Parts than her Quality... she had a great facility in poetry and was a celebrated conversant among the Muses". Despite carrying four children for the man, she was later replaced by 16 year-old (yep) Catherine Sedley, who [remarked](https://archive.org/details/sexwithkings500y00herm/page/52/mode/2up) of being chosen that "It cannot be my beauty, for he must see I have none... and it cannot be my wit, for he has not enough to know I have any". James, buddy - you did not deserve these women.
