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June 21, 2002
Hello everyone,
Just a quick supplement to let you know that I have now settled on a newsletter name which will accompany all further mailings, as you can see in the header above. (Notice the handy hyperlinks on the right?) I want to thank you all for sending in your entries: as I mentioned previously, I obviously couldn’t use them all. I had a number of excellent suggestions, but there was only one I used in modified version: the subtitle. Le Penseur Réfléchit is French, translating to “the thinker reflects.” (To hear it pronounced, click the small bronze square » . Special thanks is extended to Laura K. Lawless, language guide and web hostess of french.about.com, for her helpfulness in ironing out the proper subject and verb agreement of the phrase.) The noun penseur—thinker—also carries with it the connotation of the adjective pensif, the masculine version of the feminine pensive. Of course, in English, we borrow only the feminine form (pensive) to describe a person, as explained below.
I believe this name is a good description of these writings and it is somewhat ambiguous, which allows for more than one interpretation. “Pensive” and “reflective” both could well describe the tone of these newsletters, covering the spectrum of thought they encompass. Listen to these distinctions and decide for yourself if the name applies (from Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary):
Pensive, meditative, reflective suggest quiet modes of apparent or real thought. Pensive, the weakest of the three, suggests dreaminess or wistfulness, and may involve little or no thought to any purpose: a pensive, faraway look. Meditative involves thinking of certain facts or phenomena, perhaps in the religious sense of “contemplation,” without necessarily having a goal or complete understanding of action: meditative but unjudicial. Reflective has a strong implication of the orderly, perhaps analytical, processes of thought, usually with a definite goal of understanding: a careful and reflective critic.
The pensive describes my artistic sensibilities, the reflective my analytical core; both poetic and philosophic reflected in the title, the choice of the French language also representative of artistry and refinement. So with a title like this, one could perhaps ask: does it refer to the deep thoughts of a shallow mind, the shallow thoughts of a deep mind, neither, both, and further: which one, if either, is preferable and what is the meaning of life after all? Okay, so get off my back already. I had to name the stupid thing something, and why not add a creative flair to a novel enterprise? One has to have a sense of humor about these things, you know. :)
God bless,
Eric
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