Glandoullier
I'm lifting this from Taleb's notebooks so that I can refer people to it easily when I use the word in a sentence:
It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best -- but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well ... I am involved in an activity called "glander", more precisely "glandouiller". It means "to idle", though not "to be in a state of idleness" (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is "ne rien faire" (to do nothing), which misses on the active part -- so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia).
Glander is how I write my books, how I brew ideas. Remarkably it best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to "tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus".
Taleb is a polyglot but doesn't know much about Sanskrit -- the word lila denotes the sort of joyful, purposeless behavior that seems perfect here. But "glander" makes a much more natural loanword for English, so I'm going to use it and hope it'll catch on.
It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best -- but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well ... I am involved in an activity called "glander", more precisely "glandouiller". It means "to idle", though not "to be in a state of idleness" (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is "ne rien faire" (to do nothing), which misses on the active part -- so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia).
Glander is how I write my books, how I brew ideas. Remarkably it best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to "tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus".
Taleb is a polyglot but doesn't know much about Sanskrit -- the word lila denotes the sort of joyful, purposeless behavior that seems perfect here. But "glander" makes a much more natural loanword for English, so I'm going to use it and hope it'll catch on.