This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year at a Google “Zeitgeist conference” in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was “dead.” (Jim Holt, “Physicists, Stop the Churlishness,” The New York Times, 6/8/2012.)
Disoblige can also be a synonym for insult or affront…
John [Lennon] took the song [Hey Jude] to be about him, and his need for Yoko [as opposed to a song about John’s son Julian]. … John was not alone in his solipsism. Many Beatles songs have a vague, fluid quality that pulls the listener towards personal interpretation. (Craig Brown, 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, FSG [2020], p.234.)
solipsism can also be a synonym for egocentricity, egotism, self-centeredness, narcissism, self-regard, self-importance, and vanity…
The vision, which now seems distinctly prelapsarian, was of the Web as a bottom-up phenomenon, with no bosses, and no rewards other than the satisfaction of participating in successful innovation. (Louis Menand, “Wikipedia, “Jeopardy!,” and the Fate of the Fact,” The New Yorker, 11/16/2020.)…
[This word, which is a noun because it is referring to the mood itself, is usually preceded by “the”, as in “have the mulligrubs” or “having a case of the mulligrubs.] Living with a depressed person is hard. … “Hey Juliet,” I’d say. “Are the mulligrubs any better today?” [or “Looks like you’re in the doldrums again, Juliet” [or] “Got the mopes today, honey?” (Amity Gaige, The Sea Wife, Knopf [2020], p. 142.
This word can also be a synonym for being in a cranky, dejected, sad, despairing, unhappy, irritable or depressed mood.…
The highlight is Albers’s recently rediscovered tapestry … commissioned for a hotel built for the 1968 Olympics. Ten feet square, it agglutinates irregularly alternating triangles of pink, scarlet and wine into a syncopated pattern that seems to shift and fizzle. (Jason Farago, “New York Galleries,” The New York Times, 10/2/2019.)
agglutinate (an in combine separate elements into one group, as if with glue) can also be a synonym for unite, merge and join …
