Hey! It's been a while since my last PC broke down, but I'm back with a replacement at last.

Since starting college I've taken a couple of introductory courses (you know, those gigantic classes where one portion of the students are majoring in the subject, the other is actually interested, and everyone else is there to fulfill some miscellaneous requirement - I tried to be part of the second group). Most of them were predictable enough. All of them taught me something invaluable, and were fun to further explore with TAs and such. There was really only one course that surprised me: GEOG 150 (World Regions in Global Context).

Couple of reasons for this:

• I thought, as the global affairs nerd, that I had my geography down. Turns out that geography analyzes deeper than bordered nations.
• There was theory and a great level of abstraction.
• My professor was a grad student. Yes, he was very eloquently spoken and knowledgeable, but he also laughed at all the Gen Z slang references that came up. Can't say that happened elsewhere!

Since geography is such a broad field with deep interpretations - I mean, anything related to space and scale is fair game, which is a great amount of ground to cover - we would work through the written works of academics in the field, and from this, I found that despite what I had previously thought, that there are many, many, MANY words that I simply had never heard before. The more we explored these works the more I felt that language is a sharpshooter that can pinpoint just about any specific intention. There is a word for absolutely anything, whether it is solidified in your language or borrowed from another.

Throughout the semester, I wrote down the most interesting words to me. Here are some of them.

TL;DR, geography is not what you think, and though I probably will not become a geographer, I and anyone else could benefit from exploring it a little more deeply.

1. Palimpsest: the faint traces of writing that remain once you've erased it from some medium in order to write something else instead. In other words, the traces of the old remain subtly engraved behind the new.
2. Vouchsafe: to grant/give something, but in a condescending manner (this is indeed an English word!)
3. Raison d'état: a purely political action with lesser consideration for factors like moral justice.
4. Burkean: a traditionalist-conservative approach of seeing people as subservient to their traditions; the human condition is limited. Edmund Burke condemned the Enlightenment's focus on theory accordingly (this word sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole... thanks, Professor Shapiro, for putting your lectures online for this random NYC student to deep dive into)
5. Politicking: the action of engaging in political activity (there's a verb for this?!)
6. Ontological: a form of metaphysical analysis, specifically analyzing what defines existence, what makes a being real... "What is xyz" type of questions
7. Epistemological: another form of metaphysical analysis, but this time asking what can be known and how we can go about acquiring knowledge
8. Sovereignty is Mortgaged: much like how you would have to pay your loans on a house or risk getting it taken away, democratic states risk getting their power taken away if they don't "pay" their citizens back for voting them in
9. Chimerical: a sort of imagined or illusion concept, think "mythical," though when I read it in the context of 1917 Russia it was used far more condescendingly!
10. Insofar (as): finally, a favorite of my professor... "to the extent that." Except I'm never saying it this way again because this word is so much fun to use in daily conversation. It makes people do a bit of a double take, I've learned.