#362 / Tellurian

 

I subscribe to bulletins sent daily by the "Word Genius" website. You can subscribe, too. Just click that link if you would like to get a "Word of the Day" dispatched to your inbox, rain or shine, every day of the year. I think I am pretty good with vocabulary, but I quite often learn a new word or two, thanks to this free service.  

 

Recently, for instance, I was confronted with the word, "tellurian," and I properly guessed what it meant. Word Genius often makes you pick out a definition from a short list of possible correct answers as a way to give you the correct definition, but while I could pick the right definition of "tellurian" from the list provided, I don't think I can honestly report that this is a word that I would naturally think of when discussing things that are "of or pertaining to the earth."

 

 

Considering that my "Two World Hypothesis" is such an important part of how I think about the world, and about the lives we lead, I really should have "tellurian" in my quiver of possible and oft-used word options, as I continue to make the point that we all live, ultimately, in the World of Nature, and that this means that we are, truly, "tellurian" creatures. 

We fool ourselves into thinking, sometimes, that we live,  or can live, in a world that we create ourselves. Some of the billionaires think we can do it on Mars or the Moon. However, though we most immediately do inhabit a  reality which we have constructed for ourselves, that "political world," our "human world," is utterly dependent on the World of Nature, and that means Planet Earth. 

 

It is in our nature to think first about what we have done ourselves, as opposed to what we have been given, but we are inevitably confined (in such a sweet imprisonment) in a tellurian realm. The Earth is what we've got. It is a gift, and gives us life. 

 

Gratitude, not an assertion of our own prerogatives, is the only proper response.

 

 

Image Credit:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/list-of-words-you-love-to-hate/irregardless

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