A Comment, Behold!

Comments are thin on the ground at The Doughty Traveler. So, (though admittedly I didn't do this with Maria Macia's fine note...sorry) I'll republish the latest comment in its entirety.

The word 'aporetic' and the noun form, 'aporia,' are Greek in origin: an alpha-privitive, 'a-' prefix followed by the word 'poros' which probably means 'path.' A literal rendering might be 'pathless.' The word is used in Plato's dialogues to describe the point at which an argument reaches an impasse, i.e., the interlocutors don't know how to proceed -- they've lost the path. I guess you could think of it as a point of confusion or doubt about how to proceed. The condition of aporia results from an encounter with a paradox or seeming paradox.

More interesting Strauss words would be: zetetic, logographic necessity, and esoteric.

Aha! There you have it. Not surprisingly, my flippant treatment of the word in the Curious Word section failed to do justice to its full meaning.

My full thanks go to the nebulous Anonymous who corrected my omission. Better yet, he pointed me in the direction of a small host of new curious words. They won't neceswsarily come up immediately, since I'll obviously have to brush up my stuff before I dare post them to the web, but nonethless, some tasks lie ahead.

Wot Ho!