‘My stars! Clio! I haven’t seen you in ages.’

‘It’s been ages.’

‘Far too long.’

‘What’s new with you?’

‘Well, as you can see, I’ve got a new job.’

‘I heard. You gave up on astronomers and navigators to inspire …’

‘Indexers! Librarians! The authors of search engines!’

‘How’s that going?’

‘Splendidly. The basic idea remains. I help the folks who help folks find things.’

‘That’s why I’m here. The historian I inspire has run into a problem.’

‘What sort of problem.’

‘Well, the back catalogue of his two Substacks has been growing like kudzu. It weighs in at … believe it or not … something like two thousand posts.’

‘Does he have a card catalogue for them?’

‘I’m afraid not. Mel, Thalia, Calliope, and I have been making some aggregators for him. But those can only go so far.’

‘I see. He wants readers to use the search features of Substack?’

‘Precisely. And that’s where you come in.’

‘So … I should tell readers about the little magnifying glass on the masthead. The one just left the Subscribe button.’

‘That’s right. Something tells me that you’d start with the magnifying glass.’

‘Well, I always keep one close to my heart!’

‘And then, you could explain The Gateway, which organizes articles by subject.’

‘Just like Topics and Themes.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Finally, you can remind them that most posts that feature pictures of us - the repurposed Muses - provide express lanes to articles of particular types.’

‘Like the one in which Thalia and Mel were …’

‘A little bit Country … and a little bit Rock-and-Roll.’

‘I love that song! One day, just for fun, I’m going to index the entire oeuvre of Donny and Marie.’

‘Finally, you can point out the archive feature on both The Tactical Notebook and Extra Muros.’

‘This sounds like fun, and right up my alley. When do I begin?’

‘Begin, Dear Urania? You’ve already finished the job!’

The maiden post of this series began with a paean to katzenfreundlich. However, in recommending the naturalization of that wunderbares word, I failed to mention that the language of the Brothers Grimm employs many other expressions that celebrate the weird and wonderful ways of our feline friends.

Thanks to The Katzenjammer Kids, who have graced the funny pages of American newspapers for more than a century, ‘katzenjammer’ has already found a home in American English. Moreover, while some friends of freedom fries have changed the pronunciation of that import, replacing the ‘y’ sound in ‘jammer’ with a hard ‘j’, all of us hold fast to the original meaning. That is, Americans use ‘katzenjammer’ to describe anything that resembles, whether in form or content (or both), the chaotic cacophony that sometimes erupts when Tom and Thomasina host a hoolie.

In 1927, for example, H.L. Mencken employed the word in the opening barb of a (less-than-friendly) review of four recently published works on the subject of American nationhood.

In the same year, the same author used the same word to make a more serious point.

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Two years ago, Rob Watts, the eponymous host of Rob Words, posted a program calling for the English-speaking world adopt ten untranslatable German words.1 In homage to that video, I offer my own list of expressions that, in my own most humble opinion, we Anglo-Saxons ought to import from the Müttersprache of our Continental cousins.

Let’s start with katzenfreundlich.

Literally translated as ‘friendly like a cat’, katzenfreundlich describes a person who feigns friendship in order to obtain an immediate reward.2

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Who sees the problem as a whole, has calmed the tempest in his soul.

Friedrich Schiller

For years, I plundered The Profession of Arms for depictions of battle in the age of Machiavelli and Michelangelo. Indeed, so eager was I to skim the combative cream that I neglected to watch the film from start to finish.

A few weeks ago, a spell of solo travel gave me the opportunity to make up for this failure to heed the advice Herr von Schiller. So, I loaded the full measure of the movie onto my venerable iPad Mini and preceded to work my way through the tale of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, the sword-swinging son of the unshakable Catarina Sforza and a minor Medici, who provided Il Mestieri delle Armi with its protagonist.

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Madness waits in ambush for any man who tries to make sense of the patois of the needle trade. Nonetheless, the brave soul who ventures into the world of wearables may, at times, plumb the secrets of many French words imported into English in the relatively recent past.

Consider, if you will, peignoir.

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The Three Musketeers have returned from their little holiday … tanned, rested, and ready to host the online meetings of the Decision Game Club.

On Saturday, 16 May 2026, they will begin a series of decision games, both imagined and historical, from the 1930s. One week latter, they will resume the series of decision-forcing case studies based on the experience of the American expeditionary force that landed in Siberia in 1918.

Athos, Constance, and Porthos invite all full-bore subscribers to join in the fun. To get on the distribution list for the weekly announcement - which provides times, readings, and log-in information - please send an e-mail message to thecasemethodclub@gmail.com.

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Every once in a while, I will fill an idle moment by looking up the publications of a person who, in days of yore, covered something that I wrote with comments and corrections. Such searches, however, rarely yield so much as a periodical byline, let alone evidence that the mighty spiller of red ink ever wrote a book.

Such investigations fall short of the standard of serious science. Nonetheless, the failure of those who sat in judgement of my writing to produce substantial works of their own brings to mind several hypotheses. When feeling charitable, I wonder if the devotion of so much effort to the composition of crimson criticisms deprived the censor of his ability to work in other genres.

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Authors follow trails blazed by others. If honest, they confess their debts to these pioneers. If false, they claim that the ideas they took from others emerged from their lonesome little brains like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully grown, fully armed, and ready for battle. In either event, few provide the reader with much that, upon inspection, would qualify as entirely new.

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The first two Saturdays in May - 2 May 2026 and 9 May 2026 - will find the Musketeers of the Decision Game Club on vacation. Thus, there will be no meetings on those days.

Regular meetings will resume on Saturday, 16 May 2026.

The following articles will tell you more about the Decision Game Club and the sort of exercises we engage.

With this essay, I begin a series of ‘discourses’ that build upon points made by Wallace Brett Donham in his Education for Responsible Living. As you might expect, both the title of this project and the approach that I take with the component essays owe much to the Discourses on the First Decade of Titius Livius of Niccolò Machiavelli.

In the course of their confinement, people who complete conventional classes suffer much in the way of caprice. Thus, they eventually learn the art of tolerating the tiny tyrannies of teachers. However, in the course of accommodating pet peeves of pedagogues, school-bound students rarely encounter surprises of the sort that abound extra muros, the unprecedented problems created by the collision of forces, whether fetid or fresh, in motion in the outside world.

Indeed, rather than preparing people to thrive in the face of such surprises, the experience of conventional schooling repeatedly assures them that, whatever the task at hand, some authority has already assembled an array of suitable solutions. Alas, and, indeed, alack (hat tip to David Crowther), the very nature of antecedent answers, which were necessarily composed before the appearance of the problem in question, deprives them of their utility.

What is worse, the expectation of authoritative answers makes people vulnerable to scams of a certain sort, traps set by scoundrels who prey upon people raised on the praise, prizes, and perquisites lavished on those who color within the darkly printed lines.

Wallace Brett Donham Education for Responsible Living (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1944)

In the age of the magic lantern, public speakers enjoyed the option of illustrating their orations with images imposed upon nearby screens. Indeed, such was the power of these pictures that they often played first fiddle in the experience, thereby turning decorated lectures into ‘magic lantern shows’. A few centuries later, the proliferation bite-sized photographic slides multiplied the number of possible projections. Soon thereafter, magazine-fed slide projectors freed the speaker from the need to load his illuminator in the manner of a single-shot rifle.

Analog image projectors of these sorts favored pictures. Indeed, as late as the last decade of the Cold War, a slide slinger found it easier to make a projectable copy of a classic oil painting than to work out a way of splashing the word ‘Rembrandt’ on a screen.

In 1984, I made text slides by typing words on thin sheets of paper, which I then made translucent with the aid of petroleum jelly. I quickly learned, however, that placing an object slathered with Vaseline next to the incandescent bulb at the heart of my slide projector put me on the wrong side of Smokey the Bear.

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Books start at a beginning and, unless truncated by cruel fate or an overzealous editor, finish at an end. Many authors, moreover, design their works to be read that way. Some books, however, need not be enjoyed from tip to tail.

The themes that bind the chapters of an anthology often prove stronger than the glue that connects the articles bound into a magazine. Nonetheless, each component chapter of single subject, multi-authored, compendium can easily able to stand on its own two feet, whether to tell a story, lay out a theory, or showcase a collection of related facts.

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Years ago, when the world was young, I ordered, from ad in the back of a magazine, a loose-leaf book that promised to teach Italian by exploiting the vocabulary that the language of Dante shared with that of Shakespeare.

Fool that I was, l lent the book to someone I barely knew, a fellow who, I need not tell you, never saw fit to return it. What is worse, none of my attempts to locate the work in question, its author, or, despite much time leafing through bound back issues, the original advertisement, brought any satisfaction.

Nonetheless, I absorbed enough of the method to make it my own. Thus, when presented with paragraphs in a language new to me, I often begin my engagement with a search for cognates: words of similar appearance, ancestry, and meaning that appear in both the new vernacular and idioms of auld acquaintance.

Recently, it occurred to me that I could employ a large language model to build a variant of this technique. To begin with, I could use a silicon search agent to find texts that contained a high proportion of cognates. That done, I could ask my android amanuensis to make a list of words from the passage, failed to qualify as kissing cousins.

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In the course of my life, I often find myself in the market for a new word or two. In most cases, I have been able to fill this gap in my active vocabulary by attaching new meanings to words already close at hand. Thus, while none of the members of the society to which this newsletter belongs sails upon the sea, I have come to describe it as a ‘flotilla’.

By the way, this collective also provides a home to The Decision Game Club, The Tactical Notebook, The Military Learning Gateway, and both versions of the Warfare Mastery Institute.

When such repurposing fails to furnish a suitable solution, I resort to the coining of brand new words. Thus, in the course of editing a sixteen-page catalog, I began to refer to the wee book as a kittenlog*. (This led to the effortless emergence of lionlog*, which I intend to deploy when next faced with the need to describe an especially leonine list of offerings.)

The inspiration for this little exercise in supply-side linguistics comes from the anonymous genius who decided to honor Patience and Fortitude, the stone lions who guard the main entrance to the main building of the New York Public Library, by christening the electronic catalog of that especially blessed institution with the name of CATNYP. (I am sorry to report that this laudable jeu de mots seems to have gone the way of Siegfried and Roy.)

For a quick overview of the neologisms that made their debut in Extra Muros, please visit the Glossary that keeps company with the masthead of this publication.

Marvelous to say, the copular constructions that plague present-day English often employ variants of verbs we can use to replace them. Thus, when we write ‘the attempt by Anna Phylaxis to take control of Extra Muros was shocking’, the cure for the clumsy construction – ‘shocked the residents of Mount Ida’ – lies close at hand. Likewise, when we seek to avoid minting a minor monstrosity like ‘the rescue of the newsletter by the forces of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty was admirable’, we need travel too far afield to find ‘inspired admiration in all who heard of it’.

With this in mind, I composed the following little listicle, a kitten of a catalog that offers active alternatives to the adjectival assemblies that deprive our writing of the power it might otherwise enjoy.

Broke                     Bespoke                     Baroque

is boring                bores                          bores to the point of tears      

is impressive         impresses                  makes a mighty impression     

is surprising          surprises                    surprises the socks off

is shocking            shocks                        shocks like a sit down in Ol’ Sparky

Recently, I read an a very fine article about the ‘five v’s of big data’:

1. Volume

2. Velocity

3. Variety

4. Veracity

5. Value

In the hope of making this scheme more memorable, I asked an artificial intelligence program to generate an image in which a concrete object represented each of these concepts.

‘Please paint a picture’, I prompted ‘on a landscape canvas, on a background consisting of bright green binary code on a black backdrop, in which allegorical figures, each in the form of an automobile, represent 'the five v's of big data' - Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value - described in the following article …’

Here is what I got:

The eyes sported by four of the five vehicles did little more than remind me of adverts for an animated film I never saw. I therefore asked the program to remove them. Likewise, I requested that it remove redundant, superfluous, and duplicative indicators, such as the burning rubber of Velocity and the money bag on top of value. Finally, I suggested that the car LARPing as a detective be replaced with a bookmobile.

I could have continued to refine the set of automotive allegories. However, I suspected that any further travel down that particular highway would do little to improve the ability of these concept-carrying images to find a permanent home in my mind.

I therefore asked the large language model to come up with a set of five dogs, each of which might remind me of one of the five characteristics of big data.

As before, I found myself disappointed by the breed that the program chose to stand for Veracity. To be more precise, while I have been fond of collies since childhood, I wanted to breakup the neat row formed by Variety, Veracity, and Value. I thus replaced the border collie with a blood hound.

After playing with the dogs (and wishing that they were real), I decided to go where no allegorist has gone before and see what the meme mixer at the far end of my broadband connection might do with garden vegetables.

The green grocer’s analogues for Volume and Variety hit their targets. Moreover, in a realm in which nothing travels fast, using heat as a proxy for speed made the hot pepper a reasonable representation of Velocity.

I must, however, take exception to the last two of the computer-cast characterizations. ‘Speak truth, Sir, like a cabbage’ said no man ever. The equation of corn with Value, moreover, tells me only that the maize monger’s lobby, no longer satisfied with its undue influence in Congress, has managed to infiltrate the algorithm of our automated amanuenses.

Thanks to this little experiment, I began to appreciate the wisdom of the many artists who, over the centuries, employed human beings, and, especially, good-looking women, to portray abstract concepts. For one thing, we human beings are blessed with the ability to distinguish between individual members of our species. For another, we can provide anthropomorphic (or, in this case, gynomorphic) figures with accessories, whether clothes of particular kinds or objects to hold in their hands, that connect them to concepts.

With that in mind, I offer you, Gentle Reader, the Five V’s of Big Data, as they might have appeared, in 1985 or so, as customers of a Maine-based vendor of preppy, outdoorsy, informal clothing.

Gentle Readers,

I am delighted to report that, thanks to the help of my beloved sister, Clio Avatar, and a powerful posse composed of our Substack subscribers, the Musketeers of the Decision Game Club, and the Militia of the Museum at Mount Ida, the forces of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty have overthrown the shadow-rich regime of the Mistress of the Dimly Lit.

In the course of regaining control of the Old Headquarters Building, we managed to capture the maleficent Anna Phylaxis. After giving her a fair trial (that is, a drumhead court martial) we consigned Anna to a place where she will enjoy much opportunity to reflect upon her many crimes. Indeed, we piously hope that, with the help of improving books, she will eventually decide to mend her wicked ways.

In the meantime, Extra Muros will resume its previous program of publication, providing articles of interest to folks fond of self-directed education, especially aficionados of active verbs, the employers of ear dragons, and devotés of words recently imported from French.

Yesterday, while enjoying a stroll through a bucolic meadow, my best friend forever, Calliope Avatar, fell prey to an overdose of sunshine and rainbows. While she recovers from that dreadful malady, I have agreed to ‘hold down the fort’ at her little media empire. (I almost wrote ‘keep the wolves from the door’. But then I remembered my many friendships with creatures of the lupine persuasion.)

As you might expect, my seizure of power purely temporary supervision of this little newsletter will result in a number of changes. For one thing, it will, henceforth and, indeed, forever, go by the name of Extra Vivos. For another, we have adopted a new mission statement. Where Extra Muros helped readers to provide themselves with a first-class liberal education “beyond the walls” of our dying universities, Extra Vivos will help readers savor the sounds of long forgotten languages, revel the rhymes of poets long dead, and delight in all things delivered by the dead hand of the past.

With that in mind, I invite you, Sweet Mortals, to join me in the moonlit meadow and dance among the poppies … to the music of the Children of the Night.

The Three Musketeers (also known as Kathleen, Kevin, and Bruce) cordially invite readers who have taken out paid subscriptions to The Tactical Notebook to take part in the online case discussions hosted by the Decision Game Club.

As a rule, these discussions take place twice each Saturday. Thus, participants enjoy two opportunities - one at noon and one at eight in the evening - to discuss the decision-forcing case study for the week.

At present, we are working our way through Siberian Caper, which puts us in the shoes (and leggings) of the American soldiers who find themselves in the middle of the Russian Civil War. We will, moreover, soon begin Leadership in Cyberspace, which will present participants with problems of a much more contemporary kind.

To receive weekly announcements (complete with log-in information and readings), please send an e-mail message to thecasemethodclub@gmail.com.

On Saturday, 4 April 2026, Major General William S. Graves, commanding US forces in Siberia, will attempt to solve the problems that emerge when his troops perform Garrison Duty.

On Saturday, 12 April 2026, we will find ourselves on the other side of Russia, playing the role of the President of a small country that is trying to become A Boring Nordic Nation.