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| troglodyte: A prehistoric man who lived in caves. The earliest mention of the troglodytes occurs in the work of Pliny (AD 23-79), a Roman historian and naturalist. Today, "troglodyte" is applied to individuals who act or think in a coarse or primitive manner; degraded, brutal. Timbuktu: Founded in 1087, this city in Mali, the former French Sudan in western Africa, was once a center of Muslim trade and culture, renowned for its gold and slave market. In 1591 it was ransacked by a Moroccan army; thereafter it deteriorated, until it was just a mass of ruins when the French occupied it in 1893. Today, Timbuktu stands for any remote, strange place. tabula rasa: Latin for "blank slate". The English philosopher and political scientist John Locke, the father of British empiricism, declared in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" that the mind of every human being at birth is a tabula rasa, upon which personal experience inscribes itself. Only with this experience , which comes through the senses, can one reason. Some people's talent for forgetting the unpleasant is so great that they can be said to start each time from a tabula rasa. |
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