Month: September 2018

OSCILLATE (verb)

Os – cil – late / Oscillate ; Oscillating

1. a. To swing backward and forward like a pendulum // The fan was oscillating.

b. To move or travel back and forth between two points // He oscillates regularly between his comfortable home… and his downtown office-laboratory.

( Merriam-Webster )

Wind Sand and Stars is where I encountered this word on chapter three called The Tool on the sixth small paragraph. I have seen this word from reading this passage in class.

Now I have a better understanding of the word Oscillate. The meaning of the word could mean anything that goes up and down , back and forth from a graph to emotions to mechanics.

https://goo.gl/images/qxbeUJ ( Link of picture for example )

Futile: (adjective) That serves no useful purpose, effortless or worthless.

At first point, I wasn’t very familiar with the word Futile and therefore I didn’t understand what the first sentence was try to say until I looked up on a Dictionary and by knowing its definition, reading it once more with knowing the word “Futile” it now make sense and I get the message of the first sentence.

Website (dictionary): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/futile

So far, I understand that the story is talking about a prediction of technology in the future, and the author point out that it would be futile to create a new technology when we will have to confront something chaotic for an advance technology. It would be all for nothing if we create something that it won’t benefit us and harm us in a devastated way. Something futile can’t help us and technology evolve in a better way than just doing nothing.

Noun

Physics that deals with the mechanical action or relations of heat. This definition comes from the Merriam-Webster dictionary. I encountered this word while reading “The Tool” reading.

The author uses the word in the sentence “In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work.”

Thermodynamics deals with the transfer of energy

Fictictiuos: (Adjective)

Definition: Not real or true, being imaginary or having been fabricated.

Source: www.google.com/ficticious

Encounter: “The tool” 8th paragraph. “Numerous, nevertheless, are the moralists who have attacked the machine as the source of all the ills we bear, who, creating a fictitious dichotomy, have denounced the mechanical civilization as the enemy of the spiritual civilization.’

Comprehension: I now understand this word because, Through the reading I understand that a false contrast was made between two things included on the reading.