Sapphic Love‏

Sappho was a poet from the island of Lesbos who lived between 630 and 612 BCE. She wrote many love poems addressed to women and girls. The love in these poems is sometimes requited, sometimes not.

Orlai Petrics Soma’s Sappho

Sappho is thought to have written close to 12,000 lines of poetry on her love for other women. Of these poems, only about 600 lines have survived. As a result of her fame in antiquity, she and her native island have become emblematic of love between women.

The term Sapphic love‏, therefore, has become synonymous with lesbian love.

On a related note, the great philosopher Plato mentions lesbianism in his Symposium; he discusses women who “do not care for men, but have female attachments.”

Aphorism

“Aphorism. Noun; Predigested wisdom.” – Ambrose Bierce

An aphorism is a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation. For a saying to be called an aphorism, it has to be memorable and spoken or written in a laconic sense.

“I have forgotten my umbrella.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Or rather,

“The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book, or what everyone else does not say in a book.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Modulation‏

In music, modulation can be summarised in two sentences: when music switches from one related set of tones to another, the music has modulated. This is usually accompanied by a change in key signature.

Leitmotif‏

In the arts, a leitmotif is a recurring theme associated with a particular character, place, thing or idea in an opera.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

If you notice a subject coming up again and again in a book you’re reading, if you hear a melodic tune repeated every now and then, or if you see a certain pattern in a work of art, this is called a leitmotif – a theme that recurs.

The noun leitmotif is most used when talking about music, and it usually comes up in the context of classical music, whenever a particular phrase or tune is repeated. The word comes from the German Leitmotiv, which literally means “lead motif,” or “guiding motif.”

Though leitmotif makes music experts think of Wagner’s operas when they hear it, it’s been around at least since Mozart’s time.

On My Second Best Bed

“I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture.”

– William Shakespeare

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Or so he wrote in his will.

Floccinaucinihilipilificate [Verb.]

To describe or regard something as worthless.

Call of the Weird

“The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.”

– Louis Theroux

Henry IV Part II (act III scene i)

King Henry IV (…) ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

– Reed International Books Ltd. 1992. The Illustrated Stratford Shakespeare London, Great Britain: Chancellor Press (1996) p. 427