Complex Numbers

Baragouin

Write about a time you learned something new. Use and highlight at least 3 words in your entry that are not part of your normal vocabulary and provide your readers with definitions for those words.

I try to learn something new every day.

Many people do, of course. Others actively resist learning, dismissing any new information as inaccurate or false. To be fair, it's not easy to change one's worldview, and new information tends to do that. New facts become baragouin

baragouin: any jargon or unintelligible language

to them: meaningless, irrelevant.

Not me - I want to delve deeper and learn more. When you're a kid, learning comes naturally, like breathing or running. My running days are far behind me, but I do try to keep that childlike openness to new ideas. I'm not talking about jnana

jnana: knowledge obtained through meditation

, either; I mean real, objective facts.

As a counterpoint, though, I'm essentially lazy, so it's more of a hobby for me than an obsession.

I've told this story before, I know, but I don't remember where or when: in 7th grade, I had a science teacher who insisted that the Earth's gravity was induced by its rotation; in other words, if the planet were to stop rotating, we'd all float off like balloons. I think she was confused by reading science fiction where a space station rotated to create artificial gravity through centripetal force. (No, I'm not defining "centripetal." I'm an engineer. That's been part of my vocabulary for a very long time.) Nothing I said would change her assertion; after all, what knowledge could a 7th grader possibly have that a seasoned public school science teacher did not? Never mind that I was reading better science fiction.

Point is, I learned something that day, even though it was not what she intended to teach: that teachers can be wrong, not just about their opinions on whether or not I should goof off in class (they've always been wrong about that), but about actual, physical facts.

Ever since then, I try not to trust just one source for anything. That said, Wikipedia is not nearly as untrustworthy as some people make it out to be. Sure, errors creep in, but I remember one study that showed it was about as accurate as a printed encyclopedia. You could say that Wikipedia is a hodiernal

hodiernal: of, like or pertaining to the present day

encyclopedia, and much grander in scope.

So when you learn something, always keep in the back of your mind that it could be wrong. I don't care if the source is a teacher, the internet, or your parents. Or me, for that matter. We're all unreliable narrators. It's just as important to be willing to change your worldview in the face of new information as it is to want to learn new things.

For example, I used the new-to-me word "hodiernal" up there, but I can't be sure I used it correctly. Does "the present day" mean, specifically, 5 January 2019? Or the more general present-day with its technological and social milieu? This is not clear to me. The adjective seems to mostly be used in connection with tenses in writing, though, so I'll be sure to explore it further. When I'm not feeling quite so lazy.

(Incidentally, for anyone who wants to seek out new words and new vocabularizations, I found this   to be essential for creating this entry.)