Shamblin's Universal Annotated Dictionary and Glossary
~or~
The World as I see it.
This is a continuing project. The start of artificial intelligence. Maybe.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Concepts
How to Describe stuff.
A description of something can only exist in context and in the context of an understandable language. For example, to describe a pill, the listener needs to already understand the concepts of small and large, various shapes, drugs with some concept of what they do, and the concept of medicine. At least. If you don't know that stuff, there's about no way you can understand what a pill is.
So, all the descriptions here are in the context of the American language, to an audience that has at least some level of post-grade school education.
So why am I doing this? I'm one of those nuts who will actually read a dictionary page, or can be very happy spending an afternoon browsing through an encyclopedia volume. While most of these things do a pretty good job at what they do, I don't know that I've ever seen this kind of annotated list of stuff described in what is hopefully everyday plain language.
It's also colored by my perceptions. I'm probably not anymore unique than anyone else, but I'm not really good at writing books, and I'm too lazy to speak in public, and I really like showing off the few brains I got. I've probably had a fairly boring life, but one of the few probably unique things I've done is make the conscious decision early on to be an observer of the human condition, like Mark Twain, or Hemingway, or Heinlein, for that matter.
The Web becomes an almost perfect medium for my short attention span. No chapters, no editors, just writing on this stuff once in awhile with a few descriptive pictures or clips thrown in for fun.
As near as I can research it, all this stuff is factual, either from observation, education, or (usually) informed opinion. This is meant to be somewhat entertaining as well as factual, so I play a little bit, too. If you enjoy it, fine. If you don't, that's OK too.