Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
"Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to โtinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpusโ. โResearchingโ or โthinkingโ
smack of a
top-down activity."
More on Glander by Taleb:
"It is an
irony that the academy does not have a
word for the process by which discovery works best โbut
slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing:
French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called โGlanderโ, more precisely โglandouillerโ. It means โto idleโ, though not โto be in a state of idlenessโ (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal
French word is โne rien faireโ (to do nothing), which misses on the active part โso do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what
children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flรขner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing.
Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."
Newton was a โglandeurโ; In Dijksterhuis
2004:
George Spencer Brown has famously
said about Sir Isaac Newton that โto arrive at the simplest
truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.โ
I Glander whenever I am
bored and I come up with some awesome ideas! Some of them are even viable product ideas which could be used to make major money.