Advice from Sydney Smith (And why wouldn’t you want the advice of a man most famous for his poetic salad dressing recipe?):

1. Live as well as you dare.

2. Go into the shower bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 or 80 degrees.

3. Amusing books.

4. Short views of human life—not further than dinner or tea.

5. Be as busy as you can.

6. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you.

7. See as much as you can of those acquaintances who amuse you.

8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely—they are always worse for dignified concealment.

9. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you.

10. Compare your lot with that of other people.

11. Don’t expect too much from human life—a sorry business at the best.

12. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy, sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion, not ending in active benevolence.

13. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree.

14. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue.

15. Make the room where you commonly sit gay and pleasant.

16. Struggle by little and little against idleness.

17. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice.

18. Keep good blazing fires.

19. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.

(via Alan Jacobs and The American Journal of Nursing, Vol 9)

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Update: These ditties are based on “Song of the Volga Boatmen,” which is really quite mesmerizing.

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Has anyone else ever noticed that in shows like Lost or 24, when referring to their parents, characters always say mother or father, and never say mom or dad like normal people do?

Why do you think this is?

(And if you haven’t ever noticed, listen for it. It’s kinda disturbing.)

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If you’re interested, take the University of Richmond’s Journalism Department’s vocabulary quiz and see how you fare.

I got a C—77%. It’s multiple choice, though, so that helps. If I’d had to write what each word means, I would’ve gotten more like 50%.

Which reminds me: I used to always get a smart-alecky kick out of the use-it-in-sentence vocab test. Because if you say, “Use legerdemain in a sentence,” then you just did use it in a sentence. This is the same reason that I also used to make the case that every word was sometimes a noun… I was a problem child in some respects.

Anyway, go take the quiz and let us know how you did in the comments.

(via TYWKIWDBI)

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