Agent Plus Environment

Habits are hard to break

Right now, I have no blue bin in which to pile my cardboard, glass bottles, and tin cans. Checkout clerks look puzzled when I say, “I brought my own bags.” My apartment complex advertises its own convenient trash compactor.

It wasn’t until I was faced with a lack of “Be Green!” signs and a deficiency of bins for recyclables inseparably paired with every trash can in sight that I realized just how ingrained in me this behavior is. Yes, that’s right, I am trained to recycle.

I’m okay with that. I like recycling. It leads me to wonder, though, what other behaviors I’ve picked up without consciously deciding to do so–I’m sure there are plenty of them. Which won’t I notice until some outside event disrupts my pattern of behavior? Which habits are good habits; which exist as conventions simply because nobody has bothered to change them?

Regardless, I’ll take my five-cent discount for each reusable shopping bag, thanks.

Words are great.

The vocabulary I habitually utilize hardly taps the well of words available in the English language. This isn’t news: most people fail to employ the full range of lexical jewels stashed in their thesauruses. As such, I’m delighted to announce that the book I’m reading now is full of fantastic words.

I’m reading Perdido Street Station. No lie: The man who wrote this book, China Miéville, has a lexicon just as prodigious as the world he paints. Here are a few novel and infrequently seen words I’ve espied thus far:

• detumescing
• veldt
• sciolist
• eidolon
• vertiginous
• aesthete
• bombastic
• moribund
• inveigled
• oneiric
• febrile
• necrotic
• pusillanimous
• bivouac
• chthonic
• dissident
• querulous
• inchoate
• paean
• patina
• desiccate
• moniker
• nacre
• solipsistic
• autotelic
• liminal
• deracinate
• sepulchral

Aren’t these splendid? I didn’t start taking notes on words until a hundred pages in, and I’ve got several hundred pages to go. Just think what wordly wonders I may encounter next!