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Word of the Day
Brought to you by Vocab Vitamins
Today's Word: equipoise This week's theme: Title IX equipoise noun 1. equality in distribution of weight, balance, or force; equilibrium: "They spent more than ten minutes shuffling items between their grocery bags to ensure equipoise for the long walk home." 2. an offsetting force or weight; counterpoise OriginApproximately 1635; replacing phrase 'equal poise'; from Latin, 'aequi-,' from 'aequus': equal, even. In Action: This photo acts as both a crystallization and inspiration for Peter Quinn, author of two outstanding novels, the historical novel about New York City in the Civil War, Banished Children of Eve, and the 1930's thriller, Hour of the Cat. As he scrutinizes the Irish faces of the 11 men, he discovers in their lean, wiry, confident, insouciant features resemblances familiar to him 20 years later during his childhood in the 1950's: 'faces of relatives, teachers, priests, Christian Brothers, cops, firemen.' What's more, 'looking at them, I am always struck by the thought that what they are sitting upon is more than merely a beam. It is the hyphen between Irish-American and they are straddling it in perfect equipoise.'" George W. Hunt. "A More Fitting Image," [Book Review: 'Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America' by Peter Quinn] America, The National Catholic Weekly (March 8, 2007). "Having chosen not to live in an art capital like New York or London, Wall professes that he could just as easily have lived anywhere, with little effect on his work. 'One thing I hate with small cities is the myth of their specialness,' he says. 'It's like in Europe, everywhere has its own ham, its own wine, its own cheese, and they're all nice, but it doesn't interest me.' He is after 'the indeterminate American look,' which he says he can find by not looking for anything in particular. 'You have to forget about the idea of the spirit of the place,' he says. 'It's one of the big, consoling myths of people who live nowhere.' Starting in 1980 with 'Steves Farm, Steveston,' in which he photographed a subdivision marching onto agricultural land, Wall has, in his landscapes, zeroed in on an equipoise between the natural and the man-made. In a Wall picture, the industrial structures that inhabit a harbor or the lofty pine that has survived suburban sprawl is no more or less 'natural' than the other aspects of the scene." Arthur Lubow. "The Luminist," [Photographer, Jeff Wall] The New York Times Magazine (February 25, 2007). "Looking backward we could almost see, suspended with the most delicate equipoise above the flat little island, the ghostly shapes of those twin orbs of the Empire, the cricket ball and the blackball." Patrick Leigh Fermor. [On Barbados] The Traveler's Tree (1951).
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