Words

Nutshell is a tool to make "expandable, embeddable explanations", like this! They can even be recursive. This lets your readers learn what they need, just-in-time, always-in-context.

What's more, you can embed explanations from other webpages and authors, even stuff written before Nutshell was made! This works because Nutshell doesn't require writing in a new format – just good ol' headings, paragraphs, and links. This way, you don't have to write all your expandable explanations from scratch: you can just build upon others', and others can build upon yours.

But why not links? Well, unlike links, Nutshell lets you include only the snippet you need, not the whole page. And instead of a jungle of new tabs, your reader stays on one page, keeping their flow of reading. Even if you interrupt a sentence, Nutshell recaps the sentence afterwards, so your reader never loses context.

Memoranda should be as short as clearness will allow. The Naval officer who wired "Sighted Sub - Sank Same" told the whole story.

Put the real subject matter - the point - and even the conclusion, in the opening paragraph and the whole story on one page. Period.' If a lengthy explanation, statistical matter, or such is necessary, use attachments.

Stay off gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up. For the Lord's sake, be short and say what you're talking about. Let's stop "pointing- up" programs, "finalizing" contracts that "stem from" district, regional or Washington "levels". There are no "levels" - local government is as high as Washington Government. No more patterns, effectuating, dynamics. Anyone using the words "activation" or "implementation" will be shot.

A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life.

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that how we name things changes what we see, changes the seer. (This, of course, is why we have poetry.) It is the birthplace of the imagination and forever its plaything: I remember my unabashed delight when a naturalist friend first introduced me to the various terms for groups of birds — from “a deceit of lapwings” to “a pitying of turtledoves,” and could there be a notion more charming than “an ostentation of peacocks”?

By this art you may contemplate the variations of the 23 letters.

It is toward the end of the second draft, if I’m lucky, when the feeling comes over me that I have something I want to show to other people, something that seems to be working and is not going to go away. The feeling is more than welcome, yes, but it is hardly euphoria. It’s just a new lease on life, a sense that I’m going to survive until the middle of next month. After reading the second draft aloud, and going through the piece for the third time (removing the tin horns and radio static that I heard while reading), I enclose things in boxes for Draft No. 4. If I enjoy anything in this process it is Draft No. 4. I go searching for replacements for the words in the boxes. The final adjustments may be small-scale, but they are large to me, and I love addressing them.

Text animation serves as an expressive medium, transforming static communication into dynamic experiences by infusing words with motion to evoke emotions, emphasize meanings, and construct compelling narratives. Crafting animations that are semantically aware poses significant challenges, demanding expertise in graphic design and animation. We present an automated text animation scheme, termed “Dynamic Typography,” which combines two challenging tasks. It deforms letters to convey semantic meaning and infuses them with vibrant movements based on user prompts. Our technique harnesses vector graphics representations and an end-to-end optimization-based framework. This framework employs neural displacement fields to convert letters into base shapes and applies per-frame motion, encouraging coherence with the intended textual concept. Shape preservation techniques and perceptual loss regularization are employed to maintain legibility and structural integrity throughout the animation process. We demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across various text-to-video models and highlight the superiority of our end-to-end methodology over baseline methods, which might comprise separate tasks. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in generating coherent text animations that faithfully interpret user prompts while maintaining readability.

The entry for “Contrary” is several paragraphs long. My eyes glaze, not over, but above — to the entry for “contrarian.”

That’s a word that usually has a negative connotation, right? “Oh, he’s just being contrarian.”

But let’s read the definition, anyways.

“con-trar-i-an n. an investor who makes decisions that contradict prevailing wisdom, as in buying securities that are unpopular at the time.”

Contrarian as investor?

Oh, I like this idea.

I don’t want to oppose the status quo just to oppose it — I was to invest in what I think is undervalued at the moment. (Like paper dictionaries.)

Now, I’m thinking about word that “prevailing.” That’s an interesting word. Let’s look that up.

Cool, cool, what I thought, but OOOH look a picture of a PRETZEL.

I have recently been thinking about the idea of: What does the sound say when words fall short? 

Specifically, listening in relation to faith and composing as an act of worship or prayer. This thought process was inspired by a few passages that have been circulating through my mind.

...I gravitate to such writers within this channel as their works are so committed to the art of translating and wading through the depths of music. Music not just a pleasurable or entertaining activity, but music as a lifeline. These quotes remind me of the way sound facilitates itself as a mirror or sifter of sorts, allowing us to work through what language cannot bear. Send me a song and I’ll show you your heart.

I love encountering songs that speak to that texture or tone that I can’t quite put into words. I’m even more so fascinated when the song I encounter is in a language I can’t understand, but when I look up the lyrics it describes exactly what I’m feeling.

What we’ve learned from 10 years of moonshot taking about choosing your words wisely — and the many benefits of doing so:

• v0.crap
• Tiger Beetle Moments
• Killing our projects
• In the fog
• The Altimeter
• The Icebergs
• Headwinds & Tailwinds
• Chaos Pilots
• Patiently impatient, responsibly irresponsible, passionately dispassionate

With conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.

When you draw something you are forced to be specific — and honest.

Our illustration of an “idea” from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.

And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use “words in disguise”. Take a common illustration for “idea” for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.

The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word “idea”. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations — they are empty.

What would have happened if ChatGPT was invented in the 17th century? MonadGPT is a possible answer. MonadGPT is a finetune of Mistral-Hermes 2 on 11,000 early modern texts in English, French and Latin, mostly coming from EEBO and Gallica.

Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed.

Most of the stories that are in this book are to be found below. (The first thirty formed the text of a lecture titled Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, which I delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958)

If you use the words “just” or “simply”, you might have forgotten how hard the technical details can be.

...Gerald Weinberg calls “just” an example of Lullaby Language, which “lulls your mind into a false sense of security, yet remains ambiguous enough to allow for the opposite interpretation.”

He groups it with words like “should”, “soon”, “very” and “trivial”. All perfectly nice words that we see every day, but can carry a lot of hidden ambiguity an assumptions.

The Quingawaga and Mork, Fidknop and Ampoo are among the fantastical imaginings of Edward Gorey's Utter Zoo Alphabet. The twenty-six postcards (one for each letter of the alphabet) feature Gorey's illustrations of unusual and biologically questionable creatures, each one described by a typically witty Gorey couplet.

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

An image can take the place of a word in a proposition.

Ma is a Japanese reading of a Sino-Japanese character, which is often used to refer to what is claimed to be a specific Japanese concept of negative space. In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is taken to refer to an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece.

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul.

...I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And…

We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors!

At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat but­tery words, such as ooze, turpi­tude, gluti­nous, toady. I like solemn, angu­lar, creaky words, such as strait­laced, can­tan­ker­ous, pecu­nious, vale­dic­to­ry. I like spu­ri­ous, black-is-white words, such as mor­ti­cian, liq­ui­date, ton­so­r­i­al, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Sven­gali, svelte, bravu­ra, verve. I like crunchy, brit­tle, crack­ly words, such as splin­ter, grap­ple, jos­tle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowl­ing words, such as skulk, glow­er, scab­by, churl. I like Oh-Heav­ens, my-gra­cious, land’s‑sake words, such as tricksy, tuck­er, gen­teel, hor­rid. I like ele­gant, flow­ery words, such as esti­vate, pere­gri­nate, ely­si­um, hal­cy­on. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blub­ber, squeal, drip. I like snig­gly, chuck­ling words, such as cowlick, gur­gle, bub­ble and burp.

I like the word screen­writer bet­ter than copy­writer, so I decid­ed to quit my job in a New York adver­tis­ing agency and try my luck in Hol­ly­wood, but before tak­ing the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, con­tem­pla­tion and hors­ing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

We have a rule in our family: don’t use the word hate. Ever. You can say you don’t like something or that something is dumb, etc., but hate isn’t a word we use.

The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other.

...For example, the way we describe the different kinds of work. In this world there are managers and “ICs”—individual contributors. Those are the folks who, ya know, get stuff done. They build stuff. They draw the mocks, write the code. To me, calling these folks “ICs” has always been dehumanizing, lazy, and sloppy. It makes it sound like we’re all parts in a giant machine that can be easily replaced with the flick of a switch.

...But besides the tone and feeling of this cruel abbreviation, there’s two reasons why I hate calling people who work this whole dumb “IC” thing.

First, it’s buck wild to me that managers don’t need an abbreviation or shorthand. This tells you something about how they think about the labor of employees, that they can be so easily abbreviated.

Second, there’s no such thing as “individual” contributions! All work, all labor—regardless of job or industry—is a collective. The problem here really starts at school, as they set you up in competition with your classmates and you have to see yourself as the hero that has to do everything for yourself. But actual, real work outside of school requires collective effort to get anything meaningful done.

A reverso is a poem with two halves. In a reverso, the second half reverses the lines from the first half, with changes only in punctuation and capitalization — and it has to say something completely different from the first half.

A cat        Incomplete:
without          A chair
a chair:         without
Incomplete.       a cat.

The patterns delineated here have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar.

In these pages I have confined myself to laying out only some of those I actually have seen. Words that come to mind to name them are: knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds.

I could have remained closer to the 'raw' data in which these patterns appear. I could have distilled them further towards an abstract logico-mathematical, calculus. I hope they are not so schematized that one may not refer back to the very specific experiences from which they derive; yet that they are sufficiently independent of 'content', for one to divine the final formal elegance in these webs of maya.

the authenticity of the gesture
as if the air had taken on substance
representation and re-presentation
a first order of presence
this painterly game of pick-up sticks
Irwin's "fetish finish"
questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them
the art is what has happened to the viewer
an art of things not looked at
a dialogue of immanence
the information that takes place between things
your house is the last before the infinite
his "project of general peripatetic availability"
that shiver of perception perceiving itself
a desert of pure feeling

This piece comes out of trying to explain a bit about mathematical incompleteness to a philosopher and realizing that the core problem in explaining this is that the way we typically present axioms philosophically is unhelpful for understanding what’s going on in mathematics.

So, let’s fix this.

If there is no term for something, it might be thought that the commodity is of small importance. But it is just as likely that this something is of such importance that it is taken for granted, and thus any conveniences, like words, for discussing it are unnecessary.

A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to clearly hear a lyric, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.

American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray" as "Lady Mondegreen".

Short words are best
and the old words, when short,
are the best of all.

AMANDA
We're running around, did I see it, did I not see it, how do I describe it, is it a normal one or one with extra spikes? Now it has a name, a glint, thank you, I can say that. "Did you see one?" "Yes, I saw a glint...let's hope it leads to a poem." The words, the words, I know what to call it!

Phonaesthetics is the study of beauty and pleasantness associated with the sounds of certain words or parts of words. The term was first used in this sense, perhaps by J. R. R. Tolkien, during the mid-twentieth century and derives from the Greek: φωνή (phōnē, "voice-sound") plus the Greek: αἰσθητική (aisthētikē, "aesthetic").

I always enjoy reading Mermin. He’s interested in the same conceptual topics at the heart of quantum physics and relativity that fascinate me, and also he’s always insightful about writing. Also, importantly, he’s funny. In this newsletter I’ll pull out a few highlights from Writing Physics and Boojums.

There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.

Which is to say you get a feeling about English that Calvin once got with his pet tiger on a day of fresh-fallen snow: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes. Let’s go exploring!”

If you have three words, the order usually goes 'I-A-O.'
tic-tac-toe

If there are only two words, ‘I’ is the first and the second is either ‘A’ or ‘O.’
click-clack
King-Kong

Melodies are worth considering because there aren’t that many musical notes in total, and likewise not many valid ways (relative to invalid ways) you can configure a sequence of notes, especially when the set of possible melodies is compressed under the operation of key transposition. It’s not that uncommon for musicians to come up with a tune, only to find out that it’s already part of some other song. In other words, the smaller the symbol alphabet—along with, moreover, rules about what symbols are allowed to follow others—the more likely it is that longer sequences of symbols will collide.

How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?

• The right combination of street signs, viewed from a artful vantage point
• Words on bit of packaging, torn to reveal and conceal as needed
• The output of a command line tool, perhaps unexpectedly
• Overheard words, drifting along, liberated from their initial context
• A form, at first appearing bureaucratic, revealing humanity on deeper reflection
• An idea, if you consider it divine enough

A common existential concern of mine when I was suffering from undiagnosed anxiety as a teen (I am, of course, completely fixed and normal now) was that one day humans would run out of words. There is a finite number of words, my thinking went, and a finite number of ways to order them before we inevitably started to repeat ourselves. I’ve since traded this spiral for more tangible anxieties, but lately it’s been creeping back into my consciousness as news like this makes the rounds: “Flink, who recently acquired Cajoo, will no longer be sold to Getir.”

...Flink has acquired Cajoo but will not be sold to Getir. Viterra might merge with Bunge. Ape holders can use multiple slurp juices on a single ape. All these very real sentences carry the whiff of a society that has completely run out of words. We’re not just creating new ones, but introducing entirely new sounds into our lexicon, and these are in turn credulously repeated in headlines in a way that, frankly, borders on gaslighting. You can’t just say “bunge” like that’s a thing we say. I’ve never said “bunge” or anything like it in my life.

Society, in other words, has abandoned words for syllables, and the tech industry is the worst offender.

I myself am neither a descriptivist nor a prescriptivist. I think it’s a false binary, a classic case of academics over-taxonomizing.

...I want to simply lay out two basic points about the fundamental tensions within a purely descriptivist stance.

The first is that descriptivism is always meta-discursively prescriptivist...[and the second is] any accurate descriptive account of real language use must admit to the fact that many people and institutions are prescriptivists.

Our memory of exact word sequences usually fades more quickly than our memory of (contextually interpreted) meanings.

More broadly, the exact auditory sensations normally fade very quickly; the corresponding word sequences fade a bit more slowly; and the interpreted meanings last longest.

These generalizations can be overcome to some extent if the sound or the text has especially memorable characteristics. (And the question of what "memorable" means in this context is interesting.)

Posits certain neologisms as arising from their own cultural necessity—his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you're getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself.

He had but to speak aloud the words that came into his head, and those around him would fall in line.

If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you’d probably get 100 different answers. There’s a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound mellifluous to the ear. While there’s no way to reach a universal consensus, many esteemed linguists have favorites of their own. These are a few of them.

• Ailurophile
• Tremulous
• Murmuring
• Nefarious
• Mother
• Radiance

At the dawn of digitization in 1995, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard observed, “Words move quicker than meaning.”

Now with the advent of AI, words, images, and video are created quicker than their meaning.

What happens to us when all of this information is created and proliferated faster than anyone can really make sense of it?

There will be only one thing left to automate: meaning. The last task of the computer is to give our lives meaning.

I was ready to amaze with some fancy medieval origin for the term gatefold — having, I hoped, to do with drawbridges and portcullises — but the Oxford English Dictionary brings us down to earth with the disappointing news that the term only dates from the 1960s when the word was first used in The Nation. I suppose after all just folding a bit of paper over does make it work a bit like a gate to a field.

Which reminds me: never climb over a gate into a field at any point other than as close as possible to the hinges. Better, if you can to open it — and remember to shut it behind you: cows will wander.

It is hardly possible that human beings could have decided logically that they needed to develop language in order to communicate with each other before they had experienced pleasurable interactive communal activities like singing and dancing. Aesthetic curiosity has been central to both genetic and cultural evolution.

All big things grow from little things, but new little things will be destroyed by their environment unless they are cherished for reasons more like love than purpose.

I like words, and I note down ones that catch my eye as we cross paths.

Sometimes I read over the list, random access style, just to remind myself of forgotten thoughts. Each word is a bookmark into a little cascade of concepts in my brain.

So because I’d like to keep these words somewhere I can find them in the future, I’m putting them here.

Storm Doris
Mimecom
Cloudbleed
Athleisure
Cromwell
H7N9
Trappist-1
... (+448)

It would not be clear where the boundary of sanctioned speech lay until an attempt had been made to cross it and that attempt had failed. Such efforts Wittgenstein regarded with benevolence. He treated them as reconnaissance expeditions, perilous to be sure, but well worth the effort expended on them.

Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand ‘felt’ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that ‘jerk’ and ‘twerp’ and ‘punk’ and ‘nitwit’ and ‘dork’ and ‘ass’ and ‘goon’ and ‘twit’ and ‘dodo’ and ‘bum’ and ‘nerd’ and ‘dunce’ and ‘turd’ and ‘boob’ and ‘chump’ and ‘bitch’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘prude’ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add ‘turkey’ and ‘squirrel’ as well?

In the first nuclear reactor, constructed by Enrico Fermi in 1942 under the bleachers of the University of Chicago football stadium, the control rods were held up by a manila rope. A man with an axe was told to cut the rope if the reactor got out of hand. This "safety cut rope axe man" is supposedly the origin of the term SCRAM for an emergency shutdown procedure.

1. (psychology, physiology, of mental activity) Of, pertaining to, or involving conscious awareness; above the threshold of the subconscious.
2. (rare, philosophy, parapsychology, of mental activity) Of, pertaining to, or involving a supposed kind of awareness which is above and beyond the experiential range of normal consciousness.

This deeper meaning of a word isn’t confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crew’s actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.

Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

Who decided that the American public couldn’t handle “a soft and fitful luster”? I can’t help but think something has been lost. “A soft sparkle from a wet or oily surface” doesn’t just sound worse, it actually describes the phenomenon with less precision. In particular it misses the shimmeriness, the micro movement and action, “the fitful luster,” of, for example, an eye full of tears — which is by the way far more intense and interesting an image than “a wet sidewalk.”

It’s as if someone decided that dictionaries these days had to sound like they were written by a Xerox machine, not a person, certainly not a person with a poet’s ear, a man capable of high and mighty English, who set out to write the secular American equivalent of the King James Bible and pulled it off.

There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call ‘inherent meaning’ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is ‘Is-ness’ meaning. Inherent meaning is a word’s identity, and reference merely its resumé, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. ‘Is-ness’ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing – the word – appear to be many things – its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.

A fagot is a bundle of branches tied with a string. They used to be kept in a corner of a barn or shed, and people used to hide things (wine, valuables, etc) behind them often for a long time, and forget about them. It is a way of saying that [a thing] is very good, but has been forgotten for a long time and recently re-discovered.

Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.

One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”:

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

"Eleven plus two" is an anagram of "twelve plus one".

— Craig Sharp

/

Twelve + One = Eleven + Two
I love the beauty of this numeric/anagram equation for 13

— Linda Vanderkolk

Contrafreeloading is an observed behavior in which an organism, when offered a choice between provided food or food that requires effort to obtain, prefers the food that requires effort.

There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim.

Perhaps I shall name the cat that scratches at my broken window Van Gogh.
Or Vincent.
One does not name a piece of tape, however.
There is the piece of tape, scratching at my window. There is Vincent, scratching at my window.

Good morning, Vincent.

The New Oxford American dictionary, by the way, is not like singularly bad. Google’s dictionary, the modern Merriam-Webster, the dictionary at dictionary.com: they’re all like this. They’re all a chore to read. There’s no play, no delight in the language. The definitions are these desiccated little husks of technocratic meaningese, as if a word were no more than its coordinates in semantic space.

Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.