Valerio, old friend and avid reader / supporter of my blogs, posted a comment on my British understatement blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/03/british-understatement-letter-to-school.html), reporting on how his own clever turn of phrase had netted a sympathetic response from an ex-employer who might not have forgiven him for deserting them for a different university -- my words.
He thinks he might've made a British understatement on that occasion, which he's attributed to his four years in London.
To do him justice, you'll have to read his full comment yourself at the bottom of the British understatement blog (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/03/british-understatement-letter-to-school.html).
I concur, calling it osmosis, something I myself am very prone to.
(from googling)
Quote
osmosis
- 1.Biology•Chemistrya process by which molecules of a solvent tend to pass through a semipermeable membrane from a less concentrated solution into a more concentrated one.
- 2.the process of gradual or unconscious assimilation of ideas, knowledge, etc.
Unquote
An ex-student had very kindly shared his Netflix account with me a few years back, so I started watching a lot of Korean dramas on it.
Quite a few of the modern ones feature scenes of people dining out in restaurants which have a cooking ring in the middle of the table for grilling pork -- a common practice among the Koreans, it seems. I then found myself eating marinaded pork for the following weeks.
I have now switched to YouTube, having lost the Netflix share.
The series that I was watching a little while back (Romance in the Alley, set in the China of 1977–1992, which had given me loads of blog material) has quite a few noodle-eating scenes, so I started eating noodles after that.
Talk about being impressionable...
(from googling)
Quote
About "learning by osmosis": the first time I heard the expression was when I was in graduate school, attending some talk or lecture by some well established professor or maybe invited speaker, and with the usual feeling of profound ignorance of the topics being discussed, that happens about 99% of the time for 99% of the people attending math talks. Then somebody in the audience asked the speaker where he could find a reference for some interesting result that had just been stated. The speaker answered: "Oh, I wouldn't know, it's one of those things that you learn by osmosis in this field". The expression quite impressed me. I began imagining me becoming as knowledgeable as him just by waiting for the knowledge to trickle down into my brain in a rather passive way...
ReplyDeleteAs an aside note: another favorite and about equivalent expression that I have often heard is "This result is folklore". This means that no clear original source or author is known, but people learn it just because they work in the field, "by osmosis".
Ha! I was just going over something similar to this in my group lesson today. Will have to do a different blog for this, as the answer is a bit long.
Delete