The custom of drinking milk or consuming milk products into adulthood is not universal. It only began with the domestication of animals, and did not become universal even among agricultural societies. In crude approximation, one may say that milk is a Caucasian taste. (Mnemonic: white.) In the US, milk and milk products are used extensively in prepared foods and restaurant meals, which is okay for probably ninety percent of the population.
Back in 1977 or so, when Warren and I were in college, he came down with this persistent intestinal problem -- severe gas pains. He went to a bunch of doctors who failed to diagnose his problem, although in retrospect it was as obvious as the color of his skin. He eventually visited a doctor who happened to be black like him, and who diagnosed LI. When the lactose isn't broken down by the body's own enzymes, intestinal flora feast on it and release gas.
If you are in a food-service profession, or even if you just happen to be raising children in Alabama, you may find our Hold-the-cheese entry instructive.
L.I. = pH - pHs ,where pHs is the pH of a solution with the same concentration of Ca2+ at the point where it is just saturated with calcium.
The idea is to keep the L.I. high enough to prevent precipitation of calcium carbonate (formation of ``scale'' or ``sinter''), but not so high that one risks corroding metal pipes.
If vapor pressure were measured this way, its L.I. would be something like the difference between actual temperature and the dew point.
Here's the Liechtensteinian page of an X.500 directory.
According to the principality's government, ``[a]s an important part of its sovereignty, Liechtenstein pursues an independent and active foreign policy.'' In 1990, it even joined the UN.
Early in the twentieth century, lithium bromide (LiBr) was used as a sedating tranquilizer. This led to our use of the word ``bromide'' for a trite, not to say slumber-inducing, saying. Somebody (I forget who: probably Gelett Burgess, but maybe Don Marquis) wrote ``Are You a Bromide?''
It turns out, however, that the psychoactive element is lithium. This was discovered, quite accidentally, by John F. J. Cade in 1949. Unfortunately, by the 1940's, lithium was considered dangerous, because its use as a sodium substitute in cardiac patients led to some deaths. Cade found that lithium was effective against bipolar disorder (then called manic depression). That story is told at the alkali metals entry here and in Peter D. Kramer: Listening to Prozac. [It helps Kramer make one of his central points, which is, roughly, that a successful therapy can define a diagnosis. That's part of the idea of the title: listen to the successful therapy Prozac, it tells us something about what we might or should call emotional health. See also this ED entry.]
Because of the distrust of lithium, and because of Cade's obscurity, lithium therapy did not catch on again until the sixties. I remember, though, a lot of glossy lithium ads in my grandmother's Journal of the American Psychiatric Association from those days. The ads were glossy, not the lithium. By that time they were marketing it in the chloride.
The group Nirvana had a song called Lithium, 4:19 in the album version. Its first words, sung morosely by lead vocalist Kurt Cobain, are ``I'm so happy.'' KC eventually committed suicide.
Learn more about the chemical element lithium at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Lithium batteries are kind of unusual. Normally, a battery has
- a positive electrode coated with a chemical species to be reduced,
- a negative electrode coated with a chemical species to be oxidized,
and - an electrolyte to move ions around.
A simple example would be Ag2O [silver (I) oxide] to be reduced at the anode, and Zn [zinc] to be oxidized at the cathode, with a water electrolyte. Lithium, however, is just burning to be oxidized, so one doesn't need anything special at the positive electrode -- water electrolyte itself serves as the oxidizing agent, with hydrogen being reduced and hydrogen gas being evolved.
I have encountered the new English verb liaise. You shouldn't use this word, no matter how convenient or useful it is, because that would be an innovation.
It's a French word, and in French one of the things it refers to is the transition between two words. One well-known consequence of liaison occurs in the pronunciation of a word-final letter ess (or zee or ex). A final ess preceding a consonant is silent (as illustrated by a pun or two at the lasagna entry), but it is normally sounded when the following word begins with a vowel sound (i.e., begins with vowel, possibly preceded by a silent aitch).
(3) To describe a candidate with lackluster credentials: "All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly."
Although this division of school subjects dates from the middle ages, it is helpful to recognize, as Vico reminds us [ ftnt. 33 ] that the original sense of the root liber was `noble.' Unfortunately, though, he was wrong; liber, a cognate of Eng. leaf, is related to the Gk. elphtherios (`freedom'). The association with nobility probably developed later, from the unfortunate fact that it was mostly the noblemen who were free.
The Seven Liberal Arts are illustrated/personified/epitomized here.
Sigmund Freud adopted the term for his psychoanalytic theory, in which context it is defined or described as a psychic drive or energy. Since I'm not qualified to opine (or at least, since I know nothing about the subject), I can fatuously affirm that the great utility of Freud's concept is in its liquid or fungible aspect. Desire, in ordinary terms, is thought of as something fixated on an object. In Freud's understanding, this was a bit too rational. Libido in his theory is desire that can be transferred to a different object, or that can be an underlying drive. The term is particularly associated with sexual desire. Here we bump into a common irritation with Freud: from time to time, he issues disclaimers briefly but carefully explaining that it doesn't have to be about sex. Then he goes back to ignoring anything that isn't to do with sex. See LIBF for a more plausible theory.
The translation of library into another Western European language is usually a cognate of the French word bibliothèque (German Bibliothek, Spanish and Portuguese biblioteca; exception: Italian libreria). In French, librairie (librería in Spanish, llibreria in Catalan) means `bookstore.' For more of this sort of noncorrespondence of words and translations, see the faux ami entry. For online Spanish bookstores, see the links on this page (Librerías Españolas). (They're mostly small. The best database I could find of books in Spanish is the Consultas page at Librería Canaima. Casa del Libro offers to email you the results of a search if their search form doesn't return any results.)
I would mention the conventional ``free as in speech, not as in beer,'' but I won't, since it's not very original.
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Vladimir M. Shalaev, Constantine Douketis and Martin Moskovits: ``Light-induced drift of electrons in metals,'' Physics Letters A, vol 169, pp. 205-210 (1992).
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Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech.
R. Jayaraman, V. Rumennik, B. Singer, and E. H. Stupp, ``Comparison of High-Voltage Devices for Power Integrated Circuits,'' IEDM Technical Digest, 258-261 (1984).
``Light Brigade'' must have seemed a clever punning name, and it is unquestionably memorable, but it works because most people do not remember the true nature of the exploits of the famous ``Light Brigade.'' A famous poem by Tennyson immortalized the dramatic action of this brigade, able to make stunning rapid progress because it was light. Another consequence of its light armament, and also of its reckless rapid advance, was heavy casualties. The charge of the light brigade at Baklava on the Crimean peninsula, on October 25, 1854, was a pointless exercise in glorious suicide, as futile as Pickett's Charge a decade later. French General Bosquet commented ``C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.''
Very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness.I hope she can clear up my questions about gravity during her next in-depth interview. I also look forward to her cameo in ``SCUBA Diving Basics.'' She needs to do more work in a bathing suit or with something nonverbal in her mouth, so this will be perfect.
Milan Kundera is another blond public intellectual. (A silver blond, aetatis causa.) He also pondered lightness, but his thoughts were not highly profound, and he didn't do anything for oceanography either (see being).
- I pick up my guitar and I'm like... `gosh, why can't I just play something. I want to play it perfectly off the bat... instant gratification!'
- I think some people look at it like `Man, what am I gonna do when I'm 40?' And I'm like `Brother, I don't know.' I used to think that it would be a good think to have a job that you work from your early twenties and by the time you get to be 40, you're pretty well on your way.
- I went back there after I met Susan, at it was really weird. People there... the `alternative type' people that saw me when I came back were so excited that I had moved. And they were like `What's it like? What's it like?,' you know? And I'm like it's so easy. Just move there! You guys should go and get out of here!
- CL: The guy from Pavement came up to me, he's like, `You're so
brave.' I'm like, `Why?' He's like, `To cover a Bunnymen song,' he's
like, `I wouldn't have the nerve.' You know, and nobody, like, admits,
like, the Bunnymen were, like, the greatest band. Like in my marriage,
the compatibil... [sic] Like, at one point we were listening to KROQ,
and they were having one of their great, like, flashback weekends, and
Kurt was like,... and I was singing every word to, like, `The Killing
Moon,' and Kurt was like, `Man, this music you used to like is so...
ROMANTIC.' You know? I'm like, `Yeah, OK.'
[Glossarist's useful remark: in the early 90's sometime, Courtney Love and Hole played a club in Buffalo and she pronounced herself disappointed in the moral character of Buffalonians, although she phrased it differently.] - Ron English: I'm basically a billboard pirate. According to the law I'm the bad guy, but on a higher social plane I'm like the Robin Hood, I'm like the good guy.
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was in production, Arthur C. Clarke made a remark to the effect the MGM publicity department must have typewriters with a single key that would type ``Never before, in the history of motion pictures.'' 2001 was released in 1968. It's 2003. We still don't have colonies on the moon or manned interplanetary expeditions, but we have achieved keyboard shortcuts (and calmly uncooperative computers, but that is no news).
(Notice how the French version of the name is librairie corresponding to the English booksellers? More of that sort of situation is discussed at the libraries entry.)
The Lima in Ohio has ``City'' in its official name, but with a population of something over 40,000 it's hardly any bigger than the ``Town'' I grew up in, which no one ever called a city. Whether one uses a word like city or town depends on more than just population and zoning ordinances. A city tends to be regarded as a slightly exceptional thing. You can have a string of towns one right after the other, but people are not yet used to the idea that many cities could sit cheek by jowl. So Lima, surrounded by rural Ohio, is separate enough to be a city. Westfield, one of many similar-size bedroom communities along the rail line west from New York City, is a town.
The Lima in Indiana, incidentally, is not a municipality but a township. It's a rectangle about five miles wide and four miles high. (On the map, that is. I'm avoiding a more natural description while I reassess my capitalization convention on compass directions.) It's along the Michigan border in Lagrange County. Look, a picture is worth a thousand words. You want to know more, look in Township Atlas of the United States, published by Andriot Associates of McLean, Virginia, in 1979. Those are actually the associates of John L. Andriot, compiler and editor of this wonderful reference. Anyway, the radio stations in that part of Lagrange County, and people from around there, use the placename about as everyone else uses the name of a town. Elsewhere in Indiana, there's also a Peru.
Isabela Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942. She lived in Chile until the military coup that overthrew the president, her uncle Salvador Allende. She left. Smart move; I know less prominent people who stayed. She must be the most famous writer in Spanish now living in the US, though in recent years she has been writing novels in English.
Hey, it takes up an entire shelf and it's mostly in foreign languages!
Let the State of Florida tell you more about tropical and subtropical fruit.
Another interesting thing about the Florida Keys is that the US states that have prominent strings of islands are at the extreme geographic corners -- Alaska (Aleutian island chain), Florida (Florida Keys), and Hawaii (Hawaii). Then again, maybe it's not so interesting. You wouldn't expect Iowa to have a major island chain. A lot of Atlantic coast states have lines of what some are pleased to call barrier islands. See OBX.
The word Limey originally referred only to British sailors, but was later extended. (It was a reference to sailors' eating of citrus to prevent scurvy. The Germans pioneered the practice of vitamin-C supplementation with Sauerkraut. This was adopted by the British first; the switch to citrus came later.)
The word Limey ironically undercuts itself -- it's a weasel word to itself. It'd be downright postmodern, if it weren't so retrograde. Another class of words that may be regarded as self-denying, in a contrived sort of way, are heterological words like monosyllabic.
Well, the above was based on what I learned long ago. Apparently though, the German meaning has drifted. Now Limo and Limonade both mean `fizzy drink,' and if you mean lemonade you have to say Zitronen-Limonade (literally `citrus lemonade').
The same word, or string, let's say, also functions as the female form of the adjective `clean.' Note that the stress in limpia falls on the first syllable. This is considered the penult (the penultimate syllable) because the final ia is pronounced as an a with a palatalization of the preceding consonant. In Spanish words with two or more syllables, the default stress is on the penult if the final letter is s, n, or a vowel, and on the ultima (final syllable) otherwise. An explicit accent (acento gráfico), in the form of an acute accent on the vowel of the stressed syllable, is used to indicate deviations.
Finally, limpia serves as the familiar (tú) singular imperative. That is, ¡Límpialo! means `Clean it!' The explicit accent occurs because the enclitic pronoun lo doesn't change the location of the stress in the verb (such invariable stress is a general pattern in Spanish).
The word limpia also occurs as the first element in various compound nouns, in much the same way that cleaner (in English) occurs as the final element. Here are but a few examples:
- limpiabarros: `boot scraper.' From barro, `mud.' A doormat is a felpudo or estera, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of messy semantic overlap.
- limpiabotas: `shoeshine.' That is, a person who shines shoes and boots (Spanish: botas). The term ``bootblack,'' has been used, but not by me. I really don't know what the proper term would be, these days, since the activity is considerably rarer. The last time I personally saw a manned shoeshine station was in 1985 or so, in a multistory mall in the Georgetown section of Washington. Back in the 70's, when a group of us went to film bits of a movie at the old Newark Airport (it was part of a book report for 10th-grade English), there were some shoeshine boys in the upper viewing deck who wanted to get into our movie, and they shone my shoes and Doug's sneakers (Norman was the cameraman, so his footwear didn't get shined). I mention this to point out that one mustn't take too straitlaced (love that word) a view of what a limpiabotas does. But don't let him polish your sandals.
- limpiadientes: `toothpick.' From dientes, `teeth.' ``Palillo de dientes'' is rather more common, though (palillo is a diminutive form of palo, `stick').
- limpiaparabrisas: `windshield wiper.' This one has its own entry, because it's an official ``queer Spanish word.''
It's obvious that the element limpia in the examples above is related to the lexeme limpiar, and it happens to coincide with three identical forms. If one had to choose one of those and say it occurs in the compound, the indicative form (meaning `it cleans') seems to make sense, but it's not necessary to make this choice.
Earlier I implied that the familiar second-person singular verb forms in Spanish are associated with tú (singular nominative `you'). That's true in most of Spanish-speaking world, but not in Argentina and Uruguay, and not in most of Central America and western Colombia. There the familiar forms are associated with a pronoun vos, and a different set of conjugations. The imperative form for vos is limpiá.
There's a lot more to the various second-person forms, but here I just want to round out the discussion of explicit accents in Spanish. As noted above, accentuation is used to indicate stress. The default rules make it unnecessary to indicate stress in the majority of words, and an acute accent is used to mark the default behavior. In addition, accents are used to make semantic distinctions among very common homophones. For example, tú means `you' (in the restricted sense detailed above) and tu means `your.' In the sentence ``Sí sé si se acentúa'' (meaning `yes I know if it is accented'), sí means `yes' and si `if,' while sé means `I know' and se is a reflexive pronoun used to construct a kind of passive voice (as discussed at the Ú. entry).
In the preceding examples of accents making a semantic distinction, the words distinguished were monosyllables, so there was no unstressed syllable to distinguish from the marked one. Semantic accent marking also occurs in multisyllable words. For example... wait a second: is it really possible I never explained this before? I think I'm going to hold off until I'm sure I haven't.
The wiring FAQ has some info on how delivered power (at least to distribution substations) is three-phase, and on voltages.
The reason for the switch from DC to AC was fairly well known, I thought: In order to have voltage supply at least approximately independent of the number of customers, customers must represent loads in parallel. If you think of the distribution system and users as parts of a voltage divider, you see that as you increase the number of loads in parallel, the largest fraction of the voltage is dropped by the distribution lines. The solution was thicker cables and more closely spaced dynamos. Edison and backers had all the patents free and clear, and were perfectly happy to continue in this approach.
The alternative was AC power, which could be transmitted at high voltage and stepped down by transformers. Edison tried valiantly to kill this technology, particularly by raising the safety issue. (Although as presented, the concern was deceptive, it was nevertheless true that in practice, transmission lines would carry very high voltages and be more dangerous.) The DC partisans brought their safety case to the New York state legislature at the time when a more-humane execution method was sought, and painted such a picture of instant death that the legislature bought the first electric chair (AC, of course). (A ghastly bungled horror, BTW; the condemned not only smoked, he also continued to gasp.)
A practical problem in AC distribution, however, was the absence of a good motor. Nikola Tesla, motivated at first by a desire to create a brushless motor, came up with the idea of an induction motor that ran on AC. His asynchronous design developed high torque even when starting; with this and his complete design for a polyphase power system, he revolutionized the industry. Westinghouse, who had made his money from the design of the air brake for trains (and an early evangelist for standardization) had already licensed some European designs for part of an AC distribution grid, and he soon bought Tesla's patents for a cool million. That brings us close to 1893.
In the days of DC, a few miles was "long distance." The first customer for Niagara Power, in 1895, was (what became) ALCOA, 22 miles away in Buffalo.
Those who deem the insertion of an initial el an insuperable problem generally assume that the French word (with a Romance origin) was adopted into English, and don't see the loss of the el as a problem in English. (I suppose lingot might have been misunderstood as l'ingot. Why does this sound familiar?) The leading etymon candidate on the French side is Latin lingua (`tongue'; a typical ingot looks vaguely like one, and when the mold first starts to fill, the metal looks like an extending tongue). There are some detailed technical problems with this, including (as I understand it) the fact that in the process of gaining a Romance -ot, the word would be expected also to have exchanged its i for an e or a. Alternative Romance derivations have their alternative technical problems. Similar sorts of problems have been adduced for the Anglo-Saxon derivation.
There is an Ethnologue Database of world languages.
Some translation and language information is available at ECHO.
There's a site associated with The Linguist List.
The most famous method was that of inversive geometry:
``We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it, and lock it. We perform an inversion with respect to the cage. The lion is then in the interior of the cage, and we are outside.''It was published in American Mathematical Monthly. Readers were appreciative of the careful concern for such practical details as having hunters and hunted on different sides of the cage.
The name Pondiczery, spelling anglicized to Pondicherry, occurs as the name of a rich Indian prince in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That's in chapter three. In chapter four, radical measures against chocolate-industrial espionage are described. How does Grandpa Joe know all this stuff?
What?
Louisville's Theorem.
``Louisville's Theorem''? I am not aware of any theorem by that name.
The Louisville Theorem. You just proved it during class!
I did?
Yeah. The one about how the volume of a phase space region is conserved under Hamiltonian evolution.
Oh! You mean Liouville's Theorem!
[In the preceding reconstruction of dialogue, the student's cogency has been enhanced for brevity.]
Less mild spelling correction is described at the Dr. entry. Anyone who came here from the Flourine entry might now, having read the above cautionary tale, wish to visit the F entry. And if you came from the Furrier Series entry, you're looking for Fourier Series. We don't have an entry for that yet, but in search engines, ``spelling counts.''
In practice, ``lipid'' is a catch-all term intended to include everything that isn't a protein or a carbohydrate. To define lipids more positively, if that is the term, one may say that most lipids are fats and oils. Fats and oils, as materials, consist overwhelmingly of chemicals called triglycerides. Other common lipids are fatty acids, steroids, some vitamins, and phosphoglycerides. The Hormel Institute studies lipids.
Lipids play an indirect rôle in the microelectronic device fabrication process, because without them there'd be no one alive to staff the fab line, see?
Georges Perec, who was circa aet. 3 when Wright's inspirational story of youth was published, undertook similar but longer project in French. La Disparition (1969) was written without any e (which is the most common letter in French, as it is in English, where only about one third of words are e-less). With these projects, the question one is bound to ask, and bound not to receive an adequate answer to, is ``Why?'' Well, he liked word games. The book grew out of his involvement with the famous experimental writers' group Oulipo. At least we can say definitively that Perec (1936-1982) survived the stunt. (FWIW, one of the many mildly interesting and largely pointless foibles of Oulipo is that published lists of its membership did not distinguish between living and dead members.)
Perec wrote another, less well-known lipogram: the short story ``Les Revenentes,'' which excludes all vowels other than e.
Perhaps the most heroic lipogram is the translation of a lipogram from another language. Gilbert Adair's lipogrammatic translation of La Disparition was published in October 1994 by HarperCollins (postdated to 1995). It couldn't be titled The Disappearance, of course; it was A Void. The title character is Anton Vowl, who goes missing. (In the original, the character is named Anton Voyl; voyelle is French for `vowel.')
a protein which is bonded to a lipid. This is the principal means of transporting lipids in the blood. Due to the great variety of lipoproteins, ordinary chromatographies and electrophoresis cannot determine precisely the lipoprotein content in blood samples -- chemical characterization is laborious. Instead, blood tests report back the fraction in different ``density'' ranges: sometimes VLDL, and LDL, HDL -- very low, low, and high ``density.''
It is now the common and intellectually slovenly practice of the medical profession to refer to the whole class of lipoproteins by the term cholesterol, which is the name of a completely different chemical which does not happen, itself, to be a lipoprotein. Imagine: premeds take a minimum of two years of college chemistry. Sheesh!
Usage: ``We won't feel comfortable until we get total cholesterol below 200.'' [Notice the use of the ``medical we,'' a first and second person singular personal pronoun in Hospitalese, construed plural.]
``LIRA-Lab is now located in Villa Bonino, a beautiful XVII century building with frescos and old slate portals, surrounded by a nice garden with palms and cherry trees.''
Through most of the post-WWII era, the lira had a value of roughly 0.1 cents of a US dollar. When I was there in 1989, you could still find a few coins in one- and five-cent (i.e. cents of a lira) denominations. If you needed a custom-made washer, I guess you could drill a hole through the center. Alas, where can one be a millionaire so easily any more? One way to find out is to read magazine covers. Archivos del Presente, an international-affairs door-stop published in Buenos Aires, lists its price in the various countries where it allegedly circulates. For Year 8, no. 30:
- Argentina $15
- Uruguay $200
- Brasil R$28
- Chile $7500
If you noticed that Queens is on Long Island and also, technically, if you insist, part of New York City, beware: noticing things like that is one of the seven warning signs of Captiousness. Treatment is available; send money and we may be able to help you.
Yes, they really spell Rail Road as two words, but it took Mark two emails to convince me.
1 chopin = 2 gills 1 pint = 2 chopins 1 quart = 2 pints 1 pottle = 2 quarts 1 gallon = 2 pottles 1 peck = 2 gallons 1 demibushel = 2 pecks 1 bushel = 2 demibushels 1 kilderkin = 2 bushels 1 barrel = 2 kilderkins (a barrel is a firkin) 1 hogshead = 2 barrels 1 pipe = 2 hogsheads 1 tun = 2 pipesNote that if a pint is a pound, then a tun, at 2048 pints, is about a ton. Note also that at 512 lb., the hogshead is perhaps optimistically defined.
Traditional French liquid measures, when still used in the seventeenth century, seem to have been about twice the size of the corresponding English measures (I think the weight measures were comparable): a chopine was 16 oz., or two English chopins. Half a chopine was a septier (8 oz.), and a quarter chopine was a posson or, confusingly, poisson. This according to Elizabeth David: Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices (Penguin, 1994), p. 102.
Try
- An Introduction to Common Lisp from Marty Hall
- ANSI Common Lisp from Jan de Leeuw
- The comp.lang.lisp newsgroup.
- Lisp faq from Mark Kantrowitz
- The Lisp language family
- Common Lisp: the language, second edition
- AutoLISP information at the CAD entry.
(As of Nov. 15, 1999, those numbers are 27,842 public lists out of 147,082 LISTSERV lists.)
For other mailing list indices and search tools, see the general mailing list entry.
As a matter of usage, although other software is common, ``listserv'' has become an alternative generic term for mailing list or mailing-list software.
In its January 24, 2000 issue, the American Cynic reported that doctors in Taiwan operating on a 76-year-old woman found a twenty-gram lithopaedion from a miscarriage the woman suffered when she was 27. The Cynic reported that
It's an extremely rare event, recorded only three times before in medical history. ... The earliest recorded case of a lithopaedion dates to 1582, when a rocky fetus at least a quarter-century old was found in a French woman's abdomen.
Stone Baby is the name of Joolz Denby's maiden effort as a novelist. Every book is a labor of love.
This was intended to be a humorous entry, but I hadn't gotten around to finishing it. Until I do, I'll mention that in reality, and in contradiction of an enormous number of news reports, lithopaedia are not quite so rare, occurring in about 0.0045 percent of pregnancies.
Isn't it amazing how the use of abstraction and mathematical language can take all the interest out of a thing? I could have used the example of ``Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.'' Then I would have pointed out that this was not litotes if you regard Dorothy's statement as tentative, and definitely litotes if you think she really suspected that they were very far from Kansas. However, if I had used this example first instead of the boring example involving a and b, you might still be reading this entry. I guess I used the dry example to speed you on your way. Don't mention it! If Judy Garland had been listening to the background music, she'd have realized immediately that they were somewhere over the rainbow.
BTW, litotes is the singular form. The plural form is litotes. Don't get them mixed up! The original Greek term equivalent to litotes was apophasis (don't use it!) and it got mixed up with itself.
For more on being very far from someplace, see the I dunno entry.
Litz wire consists of many fine insulated conducting filaments intended to be not significantly larger in radius than the skin depth. If these filaments were parallel or merely twisted together, however, it would not solve the skin depth difficulty: in such a configuration, the magnetic field and Faraday effect of all the separate wires would add constructively, so that only the outer layer of filaments would conduct. Therefore, an additional aspect of Litz wire is a braiding which brings all filaments to the surface periodically and which reduces the vectorial B-field sum in any filament.
This has nothing to do with the chemical phenomenon of luminescence.
The fab four were Liverpudlian.
The liver is an organ with many functions, including the recovery of iron (vide Hb) from worn-out blood cells. Back in the days when bleeding or `leeching' a patient was among the lesser tortures performed by members of the medical profession (who were in fact often called leeches themselves), there was a need for large-scale leech production. This was done in large pools filled with leeches. Old horses not eaten or turned to glue were pushed (not led!) into these pools and quickly died by exsanguination. That's one way that large mammals brought down by hyenas die: the hyenas pack-attack and rip open the underbelly, and the animals go into shock as they're disemboweled. This is a nicer and probably a quicker way to go than being killed by a lion. Lions typically take the animal around the neck and wait for it to suffocate if they haven't broken its neck.
I know why I didn't go into biology.
I suppose none of this is etymologically relevant to the name of Liverpool, but so what?
In one of his books (The Periodic Table, maybe), Primo Levi described how paint left too long in the can forms a soft solid. The process is called `livering.'
And now, Shock! Indignation!. It turns out, as you may see for yourself, that the Liverpuddle neologism is not so neo.
Fine. In Latin, the word lividus meant
`black-and-blue.' That's what livid originally meant in English.
The word was used figuratively, in phrases like ``livid with anger' or loosely,
as in `livid [i.e., darkened but not in a blush] with fear.' As a
result, for various users of the language, livid came to mean
crimson (the imagined color of anger) or furious or ashen
or pale. As these meanings propagated, dictionaries came to list them.
On the facts as listed in the preceding paragraph there is general agreement, but beyond, the descriptivists and the prescriptivists part company. The descriptivists will argue that the lexicographers' work is descriptive and not normative. The prescriptivists say ``you blithering idiots! If your scruples prevent you from from reaching out the ink-stained hand of hope for the poor wretches floundering among dictionary pages in search of knowledge and guidance, how dare you tell the lexicographer his business!?'' A dictionary cannot help but be normative: it lists only the senses it can find in its source corpus, so it already uses a coarse measure of frequency to bias the meanings listed, and then confounds the process by inconsistent and inaccurate indications (obs., rare, arch.). And a dictionary is prescriptive by default -- it can't help but be: this is how people use it. The only question is not whether to be prescriptive, but what criteria to use.
As this balanced presentation clearly demonstrates, the prescriptivists have the full force of reason on their side. If you want further proof, however, consider this: among academics and all university humanities-type people, descriptivism is dominant and prescriptivism is considered discredited.
Now that you are completely convinced of the truth of the prescriptivist position, you want to know what criteria to use. Fortunately, I will tell you. It is not straightforward, however, but requires the application of considered judgement. Rome wasn't built in one glossary entry, you understand? You don't unnerstand? I mean SEND MONEY, dammit! The oaks of wisdom don't bloom in a freakin' desert, you know.
Okay, okay. Here's a light drizzle of the wisdom storm that will drench you when you subscribe. A major purpose of prescriptive semantics is efficiency, and one principle of efficiency resembles a statement of Occam's razor:
After further impartial and careful analysis too subtle to describe for free, the certain conclusions are drawn that
- Conventional expressions like ``livid with anger'' are to be retained for the use of the uncreative, but in these expressions, livid is not to be regarded as having an independent meaning. That is, ``livid with fear'' means about the same as ``ashen-pale from fear,'' but livid does not have a productive sense `ashen' that can be applied in new phrases.
- In certain restricted cases, livid can be used as if in the mistaken sense crimson, as an intentional malapropism, to suggest ignorance in an ironic way. This use requires a valid and current literary license.
- In all other cases, livid describes the bluish-black of recently bruised skin.
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The application of water to solid mixtures, for the purpose of extracting the solid parts.