Did you know that's called a "confidante"?
I ran across that bit of furniture arcana after reading the headline "Biden confidants see VP choices narrowing to Harris and Rice" (at AXIOS). Maybe you're fascinated by the endless discussion of Biden's VP choice — it is interesting that it's between Harris and Rice, but didn't you already know that? — but I got distracted by the spelling "confidants." Is it "confidant" or "confidante"? Seems like the "e" belongs... or is that just something you add when the person is female?
"Confidant" is correct. The OED says it originated after 1700, although the noun "confident" — with the same meaning and an accent on the first syllable — had already been in use for a century. The "-ant" ending — as opposed to the "-ent" — comes from French. And it's because of French that you get the separate female form, adding an "e." It's what they do in France.
The female version — "confidante" — has a second meaning: "A name given by the English designer George Hepplewhite (d. 1786) to a species of settee.... 'an upholstered settee with somewhat triangular seats beyond the arms at each end.'" That strange item you see pictured above. It can also refer to "Two chairs coupled on an s-plan" or "three chairs, joined like the spokes of a wheel."
It's hard to come up with new ideas in seating! Once you invent the chair and the sofa and maybe the lounge and the stool, there really isn't much left that anyone is really going to want.
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It'll be Harris. She's slightly less Indictable.
Not popular now, but I've seen the 'S-shaped' (as seen from above) chairs.
People sit facing opposite directions but their heads are next to each other. You can speak will looking straight ahead...
It's hard to come up with new ideas in seating!
"It is part of the grammar of the word 'chair' that this is what we call 'to sit on a chair'. . . ." That you use this object that way, sit on it that way, is our criterion for calling it a chair. You can sit on a cigarette, or on a thumb tack, or on a flag pole, but not in that way. Can you sit on a table or a tree stump in that (the "grammatical") way? Almost; especially if they are placed against a wall. That is, you can use a table or a stump as a chair (a place to sit; a seat) in a way you cannot use a tack as a chair. But so can you use a screw-driver as a dagger; that won't make a screwdriver a dagger. What can serve as a chair is not a chair, and nothing would (be said to) serve as a chair if there were no (were nothing we called) (orthodox) chairs. We could say: It is part of the grammar of the word "chair" that this is what we call "to serve as a chair". The force of such remarks is something like: If you don't know all this, and more, you don't know what a chair is; what "chair" "means"; what we call a chair; what it is you would be certain of (or almost certain of, or doubt very much) if you were certain (or almost certain, or doubt very much) that something is a chair. "Certain", "almost certain", will come up even under optimal conditions (when, that is, the context is not one in which the object is, e.g., partially hidden, or in bad light, or in fragments) when in an unfamiliar environment (visiting a foreign tribe, perhaps; but how do you know it is a tribe?) you see someone more or less sit on something more or less like (what we call) a chair, and perhaps hear the people say something about it using the words we have already translated as "chair" and "sit". Perhaps he doesn't bend when he "sits" on it: it is nothing so much as a plank stood on end, about the height and width of an average human being, tipped and braced back slightly from the vertical, into which there are fitted at right angles two pegs which, you discover, are to go under the armpits, and a saddle peg in the middle to "sit" on. We might feel he's not so much sitting on the thing as hanging from it. But he looks comfortable enough.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, p.71
A cousin of the tête-à-tête.
Whatever happened to the Papasan chair? Are they still a thing? My grandparents at a huge one in a den that all the kids would pile onto ru watch the television.
Rice?
I would gladly put that piece of furniture in my house.
it is interesting that it's between Harris and Rice,
0000000=============
trick question
would Biden know if Condoleeza was slipped into the list?
The Party
The Party - A clerical mistake results in a bumbling Indian film star being invited to an exclusive Hollywood party instead of being fired.
Jupiter: "Rice?"
Rice would serve 2 purposes:
- Obama would be in direct control of a potential Biden administration
- Rice would claim the investigation into obamagate would have to stop since she is a candidate, similar to how all the dems and FakeCon LLR grifters claim investigating Bidens family members receiving millions from Slow Joe selling his office cannot be investigated because Joe is a candidate
Maybe you're fascinated by the endless discussion of Biden's VP choice
It seems to be the only plank in his platform!
Women love the drama of a selection, but then half of them are disappointed.
Good luck with that!! The fatter, and uglier, the hotter the scorn!!
I think they mead Susan. But if it’s Condo I’m good.
I wonder if the name comes from the ability of the important person in the middle to scoot over and listen to the advice of a confidante on the side if he wanted to?
GHW Bush established with his selection that no veep matters for the election. (He still should have replaced him the second time.)
Papasan chair! My best friend and sometime roommate had one, but we called it the Filipino radar chair. It was not very comfortable, and not very practical.
The library tower built on campus in 1968 had those godawful Wassily tube-and-belt torture chairs. I'd lose circulation to some limb or other after five minutes of sitting in one.
Narr
That Confidante will haunt my dreams
Liz Warren.
I like Van Gogh's chair. I suppose the confidante provides adequate seating for a Picasso
portrait subject.
Try a barrel shaped swivel chair placed so you can turn and talk to two other seating groups.
It'll be Rice.
Then anything and everything about the Russia investigation will get the Ukraine-impeachment treatment: Any Justice Department investigation of possible crimes will be recharachterized as the criminal politicization of justice. The Durham investigation must stop, because it's using government resources for a purely political attack on the opposing VP-nominee. And so on.
The Biden campaign is doing a fine-grained analysis of Rice.
It'll be Harris. She's slightly less Indictable.
Even Democrats don't like Harris because this year they've decided to be against law & order and she was a prosecutor. And she hails from one of Biden's can't-lose states. How could this possibly make sense?
Both women are terrible picks. I swear, whoever is making these decisions wants Biden to lose.
It’s like the word ‘diligence’ which also means a horse drawn coach/bus type of conveyance.
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