tuitive

I’ve just (well, a couple days ago) gotten a huge file of correspondence from two years ago, and have been reading through it with the bizarre and morbid interest with which one ought to look at the corpse of a dead self, or more aptly the shed skins of bugs. I have to visit sleepland fairly soon here, as I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning to discuss the salient bits of Dansgaard-Oeschger events and the afleveringopgave for my climate modelling class, but before that happens I’ve been reminded of a little backhanded back-formation neologism I committed, and neglected to atone for.

The word I wanted was tuitive, which of course should be the opposite of intuitive. So it describes things that ought be obvious but aren’t, like the interpretation of quantum mechanics or why I saw a guy wearing a white t-shirt and a gas mask bicycling down the same bit of Holmensgade on two mornings in a row a couple weeks ago, but haven’t seen him since. If we take the etymology a little further, we find that the opposite of intuition is of course tuition, thus disproving this silly libertarian notion that privatized education is obviously the solution to all our problems.

So you see how I deserve punishment. Perhaps some old photographs of Kongens Nytorv will help? There are more old pictures of Copenhagen where those came from. And while we’re on the subject of old photos, it’s always fun to check out the Caltech photo archives - they found science in a basement somewhere, I think.
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