What I Learned Today

Courtesy of lifehacker, today I learned how to reopen the last tab I closed in Firefox. Perfect for those overly zealous command-W moments! And how do you do it? Why, command-shift-T! Nicely cognitively adjacent to command-T, which opens a new (blank) tab. (Bonus: their article also mentions command-L, which moves focus to the address bar — I didn’t know that one either. Hurray, yet another click I don’t have to make any more!)

I finished reading “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey yesterday. Wow. I wrote a brief review of the book, but what I want to focus on here are five words I learned from the book.

• diapason: an organ stop sounding a main register of flue pipes; poetic/literary: the entire compass, range, or scope of something
• panegyric: a public speech or published text in praise of someone or something (this word ably describes the book and its relationship to the desert)
• pellucid: translucently clear (from Latin ‘pellucidus’, from ‘perlucere’ = “shine through”)
• usufructuary: a person who has the right to enjoy the products of property he does not own (in Abbey’s usage, he was a usufructuary in Arches National Park, able to explore and enjoy the park although he did not own it)
• vermiculate: full of worms (this one I could guess from the “vermi” prefix) (he used it figuratively, to describe the appearance of some blobby, twisted sandstone forms — I know exactly what he means)

These might be tricky to work into an everyday usage, but I’ll see what I can do!