mindmap root((MINI/MINU)) minimalism A style or technique （as in music, literature, or design） that is characterized by extreme spareness and simplicity.
🌱He'd never understood what anyone liked about minimalism, since minimalist stories always seemed to leave out any description of people's characters and motivation and rarely even described their surroundings. 🌳In the 1960s, a few composers, including Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams, began writing music inspired by the music of India and Southeast Asia, often with a quick pulsing beat and chords that are repeated quickly over and over while small changes are slowly introduced. Minimalist art, which began appearing around the same time, tries to strip away all personal elements, often leaving only pure geometric forms; you may have seen the plain silver boxes of Donald Judd, or the straight neon tubes of Bruce Nauman. In literature, the stripped-down fiction of Samuel Beckett and Raymond Carver is often considered minimalist. But there's a real question whether these various types of minimalism should even be considered the same concept. minuscule Very small.
🌱For someone who had been living on a minuscule budget since graduating from college, even the paycheck for a minimum-wage job felt like wealth to her. 🌳As a noun, minuscule means a style of ancient or medieval handwriting script with smaller letters than earlier scripts. There were actually several minuscules, but the most important was promoted from around A.D. 800 on by Charlemagne, who believed that any educated person in the Holy Roman Empire should be able to read the Latin written by anyone else. If you've ever looked at a medieval manuscript, you've probably seen minuscule script, along with so-called majuscule （for modern type, we would use the words lowercase and capital instead）; even today most of us can read medieval minuscule and majuscule without too much trouble. Be careful about spelling minuscule; we tend to expect a word meaning "small" to begin with mini- rather than minu-. minutiae Very small or minor details.
🌱She likes "thinking big," and gets annoyed when her job requires her to deal with what she considers minutiae. 🌳As you might guess, this word comes straight from Latin. The Romans used it in its singular form, minutia, to mean "smallness," and in the plural to mean "trifles"; today we almost always use it in the plural with that same "trifles" meaning. Hardly anyone ever talks about minutiae except to dismiss their importance. So you may talk about the minutiae of daily life or the minutiae of a contract, or about getting bogged down or buried in minutiae at the office. Just don't forget that the devil is often in the details. diminutive 1、 Indicating small size.
2、 Very small.
🌱In German, Hänsel is a diminutive form of Hans （which is a diminutive form of Johannes）, and Gretel is a diminutive form of Margaret. 🌳Just as diminish means "to grow smaller," diminutive means "very small." When writing about language, diminutive as both an adjective and a noun refers to particular endings and the words made with them to indicate smallness. In English, such endings include -et and -ette （piglet, dinette, cigarette, diskette） as well as -ie and -y （doggy, bootie, Bobby, Debbie）.However, diminutives are more common in many other languages. Outside of language, diminutive is used for many things, including people （"She noticed a diminutive figure standing shyly by the door"）, but often not very seriously （"We were served some rather diminutive rolls"）.