✍️ I can smell your aura, a new blog post from yours truly is out now.
As far as I can tell, these are sense-words; adjectives meant to describe an effect that we feel but can’t necessarily link to a specific visual trait. It’s like supercalifragilisticexpealidocious, but for attentional faculties. It’s what we say when we don’t know what to say.
I pull on everything from Ivan Illich to Frank Sinatra to Gandalf to explain pop culture’s misunderstanding of “aura.” These thoughts are half-baked, but hopefully teach something about language, media ecology, and perception.