I have this colleague who describes a need to study for a few hours each day. I couldn't think that I'd heard an adult use the term "study" before in US English, so I suppose it stuck in my ear. It's a great word, I'm into it...
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Study isn't "I am a Job or Activity." It's not a hobby word either. It's a, "Hey, I devote attention to learning about something." You can do that forever, there is no beginning or end or done. It's an active contemplative doing.
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Heh I’ve been explicitly labeling a bunch of my time study too lately. Weird how hard it is to study as an adult. It’s perceived as frivolity on par with play. It becomes indistinguishable from its childhood opposite.
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“This is serious, we don’t have time to study, we have work to do.”
Where used it’s in a different adult professional analysis sense of “study this proposal” not general topic mastery
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That child/adult flip on the term is so stark. I started thinking about how as a kid, I'd describe a lot of my unstructured play as studying. So maybe that need to spend some time figuring out is just a long arc.
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This feels related: my eldest (8) has long set aside time to for daydreaming and imagining scenarios. He describes this as something he needs time for everyday, like he knows he's doing something by staring into space.
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In the US, even kids use “study” in an immediately instrumental sense as in “I have to study for the test”
The idea of study as a life discipline is now just a lolcow trope “while you partied I studied the blade, now you dare ask me for help?”
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Right like, there's a reason "study" gets a whole room. We aren't going anywhere. We're living here.
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