Learn less interesting stuff like density, chemistry and all that rot at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Whaddya mean, ``normally open''??!!!

Used to be a member of EFTA; like Iceland it has stayed out of the EU.

Here's the Norway page of an X.500 directory.

There's a Laurel-and-Hardy movie where Ollie rhetorically asks Stan Laurel (the generally sheepish one) if he knows how to spell ``not.'' Stan spells it out in response: ``en, oh, ott.''

In Italy, the Laurel-and-Hardy movies were long-ago dubbed using bad accents (i.e., the accents of Anglophones with poor ability to pronounce Italian). Even today, the Anglophone accent in Italian is known as lorelenardi.

(The definition was once a tone-setting feminist slogan.)

How's the weather on the sun, aside from hot? Find out here.

Oh.

2. He (helium)
10. Ne (neon)
18. Ar (argon)
36. Kr (krypton)
54. Xe (xenon)
86. Rn (radon)

They (mostly Xe) do form a small number of not-very-stable compounds, as well as some plain unstable compounds called excimers. Another way that noble-gas atoms can be bound chemically is in endohedral fullerenes -- fullerenes with nonbonded chemical species inside. The common notation for a Xe inside the standard 60-carbon fullerene is Xe@C₆₀ (and it's a tight fit; He@C₆₀ rattles around).

The closed electronic structure makes atoms of these elements chemically very unreactive -- hence the adjective ``noble''. They are also commonly called ``inert gases'' and ``rare gases,'' but these terms are better thought of as descriptions than names. The term ``inert gas'' can be ambiguous because it (and ``inert atmosphere'') are sometimes applied to non-oxidizing gases or to gases that are nonreactive in a particular situation (including nitrogen, carbon dioxide and even hydrogen, depending on context). The term ``rare gas'' is of questionable accuracy: helium, the lightest noble gas, is the second-most common element (at least of normal matter) in the universe, even if it is relatively rare on earth. Argon is 1% of the atmosphere by volume.

Another consequence of the spherically symmetric and ``rigid'' electronic structure is that their mutual van der Waals interactions are weak, so they have very low boiling and melting points (hence ``gases'').

[In fact, ⁴He does not even have a solid phase at ordinary pressure for any temperature. It undergoes a transition from a normal liquid state to a superfluid phase at 4.3 K. The superfluid phase is a sort of macroscopic equivalent of an atomic ground state: just as quantum mechanically, an atom in its ground state cannot lose energy even though it has positive kinetic energy, so the superfluid fraction of helium-4 does not lose energy by fluid friction. Yes, that's oversimplifying things a bit. For reassuringly normal behavior, raise the pressure to 26 atmospheres, and helium-4 solidifies just below 1 K.]

The noble gases are the group of elements in the rightmost column of standard periodic tables: group 8A in the sensible CAS group numbering traditionally used in the US and 18 in the stupid IUPAC compromise group numbering adopted in 1985.

Resistance to oxidation arises from multiple causes, but these can be broadly classed as thermodynamic and kinematic. Thermodynamics determines whether the oxidation is energetically favorable, kinematics determines how fast a thermodynamically favored oxidation will occur. Many metals, including gold and such non-noble metals as the pure metal aluminum and the alloys called stainless steels, form a thin but dense layer of oxide that prevents further oxidation. Hence oxidation of the bulk is prevented under conditions where it might be thermodynamically favorable.

Kinematic factors can depend dramatically on the oxidants and nonmonotonically on their densities, so they're a bit tricky to quantify. If you want a simple guide to just how noble an element is, thermodynamics is a better bet. In particular, I recommend the reduction potential, since I have a list of reduction potentials of common metals handy:

Reduction Half-Reaction	Standard Reduction Potential (volts)
Au+(aq) + e- --> Au(s)	+1.83
Pt2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pt(s)	+1.19
Ir3+(aq) + 3e- --> Ir(s)	+1.16
Pd2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pd(s)	+0.99
Hg+(aq) + e- --> Hg(s)	+0.80
Ru2+(aq) + 2e- --> Ru(s)	+0.8
Ag+(aq) + e- --> Ag(s)	+0.80
Rh3+(aq) + 3e- --> Rh(s)	+0.76
Cu+(aq) + e- --> Cu(s)	+0.52
Bi3+(aq) + 3e- --> Bi(s)	+0.32
2H+(aq) + 2e- --> H2(g)	+0.00
Pb2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pb(s)	-0.13
Sn2+(aq) + 2e- --> Sn(s)	-0.14

(Many of the metals listed have other oxidation states; I have given the reduction potentials for half-reaction from the lowest positive oxidation number.) Positive reduction potentials essentially correspond to oxidizing agents rather than reducing agents. Metals with positive reduction potentials do not react with ordinary acids to yield hydrogen gas. (Sulfuric acid is another story -- it's not just a strong acid but also an oxidizing agent.) Generally, more positive reduction potentials mean higher resistance to oxidation. Hence, a reasonable definition of noble metals might be those with reduction potentials above a particular value.

A better-defined group of elements including gold is its column of elements in the periodic table, sometimes called the ``coinage metal.''

``Good night'' in Spanish is buenas noches, literally `good nights.' I have no idea why. ``Good day'' can be done with either number: buen día or buenos días.

If making no comment by not commenting is too difficult for one's spokesman, perhaps the solution is to have no spokesman (spokesperson? spoker?) at all. As of 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton has a number of spokers. One is her Senate spokesman, Philippe Reines. Commenting in May on two new biographies of Clinton, Reines asked ``Is it possible to be quoted yawning?'' (``Aw-oouahhh''?)

In Joseph Heller's Good As Gold, the hero electrifies (it's a metaphor, okay?) a White House flack by coining the original phrase ``I don't know.'' Later, a presidential spokesman deploys this work of rhetorical art during a press conference, and everyone is stunned. I'm working from memory here, so some details may be off.//

/**/

There used to be an advertising campaign for a cigar: a heart attack waiting to happen -- a sedentary suit, unconcerned by his BMI, planted on a plush leather chair -- would issue the stirring ad slogan: ``We're gonna getcha.'' He meant that you couldn't resist becoming a White Castle cigar smoker. As if their tobacco were addictive or something. Hah! Usually, when somebody smiles confidently and says that ``we're gonna getcha,'' it's not a friendly smile. The we refers to less retiring persons who have been delegated the task of ``getting you,'' possibly with some discretion as to how they instantiate or ``concretize'' the relatively vague promise.

This is a meaty topic. I'll fill in some more stuff later.

Oh wait -- I think it was White Owl cigars, not White Castle. Whatever.

Some of you more inquisitive readers are probably wondering why this particular phrase. It doesn't look like a take-home exam problem. I was not vouchsafed this information. I provided the Latin translation on a don't-ask-don't-tell basis. Furthermore, the resemblance of the Latin verb sistere and the English word sister is purely coincidental, and does not reflect any special message tailoring on anyone's part.

Hmm -- I can see that some of you more inquisitive types just won't give up. You want to know ``well then, what was the sex of your email correspondent''? Look, you must realize that if I start giving out detailed information like that you'll be able to guess the identity of the person who made the query. Then, given your filthy imagination, you will probably go and destroy this probably-innocent coed's reputation. Therefore I vow to tell you nothing about my correspondent unless you drag it out of me.

It's important to know that there's a singular-plural distinction even in the imperative. If she had been commanding more than one person to not stop, she would want to say Nolite sistere! I provided this information just in case (JIC). Things have been known to get kinky at that school.

BTW, there are other verbs that translate `stop,' and slightly milder ways of expressing an imperative (specifically, by using the ``jussive'' sense of the subjunctive; `may you not stop').

In his nomenclature essay, Price was concerned with the direct psychosocial consequences of certain names; how these exert an irresistible force on one's fate. For example: ``Cora has good posture and a severe hairdo.'' He notes that, as a 1920's Roger, he had been destined to a life of near-sighted studiousness and giving the class oration at high school commencement. (In clear confirmation of his prediction, these things had in fact already come to pass. My own research has determined that Norberts are at high risk of becoming dix-huitièmistes. See also our advisory on Virginia at the NJCA entry.) Price failed to adduce another strong piece of evidence for his hypothesis: the well-known cases of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodrow Wilson, and Werner Erhard (the est guy), who changed their names and their lives. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (A bit more on Woody and Werner at the electrical banana entry. BTW, Mad Libs came into the world as Roger Price was in the kitchen carving a banana. Bananas have the highest humor content of any tropical fruit.)

The meanings Price was concerned with had little to do with the original meanings of the names -- their etymologies. If you want to know about given-name etymologies, the site to visit is Behind the Name. See also IncompeTech's NameDB.

Not really appropriate to this entry, but I don't have another place to list them right now, are The Funny Name Server and Name of the Month. See also the Kabalarian Philosophy Home Page (``Teaching the Principles of Mental Freedom''). The Kabalarian Philosophy is similar to the idea of this entry, but they seem to be in dead earnest, so I concede they might be a lot funnier. On the other hand, we are informative.

This glossary entry is concerned with names that have an evident meaning, whether that is the same as the original meaning or not, where those names have operated magically, molding their bearers so that the names would come to be ironic commentary.

One way or another, the idea that the meaning of a name affects its bearer has a classical provenance:

Nomen est omen

Paul N. ``RED'' ADAIR

A daring firefighting specialist. The nickname ``Red'' he had from childhood, for the fiery color of his hair, before he started wearing his trademark red overalls. He was the most famous pioneer in capping oil-well fires and blowouts, both on land and off shore. Oil-well fires are noisy, and he became noticeably hard-of-hearing. He earned the nickname ``Hellfighter'' for his exploits. In 1968, a movie called ``Hellfighters'' was made starring John Wayne as ``Chance Buckman,'' the red-overalled Adair character. Red Adair was a technical advisor for the film, along with a `Boots' Hansen and a `Coots' Matthews who also have no other movie credits.

Brad ADGATE

A senior vice president at Horizon Media, a company that buys ads. He was named Advertising Age 2002 Media Maven, and in 2005 he was ranked the #3 most quoted executive in Advertising Age's annual 'Media Talk' listing.

Georg AGRICOLA (1494-1555)

The surname is a Latin word meaning `farmer.' The subject of this subentry was a German physician who wrote several works on mineralogy and metallurgy. You might ask, ``how is this any more noteworthy than a German physician who wrote several works on mineralogy and metallurgy and was named Georg Landwirt [`George Farmer']?'' It's more noteworthy because it's not common for Germans to have Latin surnames. When medieval and early modern Germans have been known by Latin names that are not essentially their German names translated, then one could expect the name to be chosen to make some point (e.g.: Paracelsus). The point here, if there was one, seems wildly off-target.

Agricola's most famous work, De Re Metallica, was published in 1556, when he was already sleeping with the minerals. Yes, that was a lame joke. We know -- we're experts at that sort of thing. We only included it here because we want to expose you to every kind of humor (diverse humor includes differently-abled humor, ha, ha). Otherwise, we'd have written that it wasn't about the rock group. That would have had you ROTFL, because it puns both on Metallica and rock group. (It would have. It hasn't because of the timing. We know. Another thing about timing: Georg Agricola was a near contemporary of Paracelsus, another physician. Paracelsus was the first great champion of medicinal chemistry. The novelty of Paracelsus's idea might be inferred from the fact that Agricola, a physician interested in chemical processes (in mining and metallurgy) wrote little or nothing about medicinal chemistry. Then again, Agricola wrote only what he knew; Paracelsus went beyond what he knew and so was able to say a great deal (pretty much all of it nonsense, alas).

Oh wait -- his name was German: Georg Bauer. (Bauer meant `peasant'; in Latin translation he gave himself a free upgrade.) So his books were actually by Georgius Agricola -- the mixed German and Latin is sloppy and misleading. Hmmph. Oh well.

De Re Metallica was Englished by Herbert Clark Hoover (an engineer who became famous as organizer of relief efforts in Europe after WWI and later became president of the US) in collaboration with his wife Lou Henry Hoover. (And look, if a girl gets Henry as her surname, how much sense does it require to avoid giving her a name like Lou as well? People surnamed Henry should be able to see this coming and make appropriate preparations.) The Hoovers also collaborated on an English translation of the De Architectura of Vitruvius Pollio.

There's a Georg-Agricola-Gesellschaft, e.V. (founded in 1926), but it's not primarily about him. It's ``zur Förderung der Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik'' (`for the advancement of the history of the natural sciences and technology').

Erin ALLDAY

Under her byline, the San Francisco Chronicle published an article on Americans not getting enough sleep (``Waking up grumpy is Zzz factor,'' November 8, 2007).

ALPHA

A borough in Warren County, New Jersey. It's the first municipality you notice upon entering the state (on I-78 from Pennsylvania). Okay, it's not actually the first one you pass through. Harry Zikas, Jr., was elected mayor there in 1999, at 21 the youngest mayor in New Jersey. After his reelection in 2003, he said ``I will ALWAYS keep Alpha priority one ....'' (I know it doesn't look promising now, but I swear to you that this is a very exciting subentry.)

Alpha was founded because of the high quality and quantity of limestone deposits found there. The limestone attracted the cement industry, which flourished in the early part of the twentieth century. Alpha was incorporated in 1911 and is named after the Alpha Portland Cement Company.

I should probably clarify the ``first municipality you notice'' thing. It has to do with geometry, but the details will have to wait until the next time I'm east-bound in that area. I really want to clear this priority thing up and find out which is the real alpha town, but all I can tell you now is what I witnessed the last time I left New Jersey on I-78. Near the 3.8 mile marker, there's a sign announcing that you're entering the township of Hopatcong. Then, just 0.4 miles later: ``Entering the Boro of Alpha.'' But wait-- at the 2.8 MM, ``Entering the Twp. of Hopatcong.'' I didn't realize I'd left. But Alpha comes roaring back! Again after just 0.4 miles: entering Alpha. Things quiet down. At 1.8 miles, no Hopatcong riposte, 1.4 miles, 1 mile, looks like Alpha is going to take it to the finish line. But wait! At 0.8 miles -- Hopatcong! The tension mounts! Help me, Dashboard Jesus, I can hardly steer! At 0.6 miles, 0.5 miles, Alpha is silent. It's 0.4 miles, still haven't seen a sign, 0.3 .... The bridge is coming into view, still no new entering sign. Is this it? Just before the bridge -- I see a sign! A SIGN! Hang on tight -- it's gonna be a cliffhanger! At 0.1 miles, just feet from the shore, I see -- ``Entering... the town of Phillipsburg''! Gasp! It's over! It's alll over!! Oh my heart! Omigod! Ohh--mega!

(For those of you who sincerely care: I-78 bypasses Alpha in a semicircle around the south. It avoids the residential streets but goes through a couple of arms of the roughly star-shaped incorporated area.)

AMA

It's the American Medical Association or something.

Scott AMEDURE

Amatore, Amadori, etc., now used as surnames, are versions of a common given name borne by various medieval saints, many of them martyrs. The original given name was the Latin Amator, meaning `lover,' implicitly of God. Scott Amedure suffered and died for a different kind of love.

Jonathan T. Schmitz, a waiter in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, agreed in 1995 to appear on the Jenny Jones talk show, where he was told that he would learn the identity of a secret admirer. When the show was taped in Chicago on Monday, March 6, he learned that his acquaintance Amedure was the secret admirer. According to Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions (which produced the show), ``We observed nothing confrontational or any signs of embarrassment between any of the guests before, during or after the taping.''

On account of adverse publicity or whatever, that show was never aired, but it was screened by the jury in Schmitz's trial for murder the next year. During the show, Amedure outlined his sexual fantasies about Schmitz, which involved "whipped cream and champagne" and focused on Schmitz's ``cute, little hard body.'' All members of the jury agreed that they observed signs of embarrassment.

Schmitz said later that he thought he had handled the situation well and was putting it behind him. On Thursday morning, Schmitz found a note attached to his apartment door. The note ``contained sexual references,'' as they say. (That makes me think of C++, but I'm pretty perverted.) In reaction, Schmitz bought a 12-gauge shotgun and five rounds of ammunition, and drove to Amedure's Orion Township, Mich., mobile home, confirmed that Amedure had written the note, and shot him twice in the chest, allegedly. I like to add ``allegedly'' because it shows that I'm being careful to cover my ass. Don't want to be provocative.

LANCE ARMSTRONG

If he had gone into track and field, he would have been a natural for the javelin throw. Instead, he went into bike racing and had some success, taking the Tour de France (TdF) a few times (seven, a broken record) -- sounds like a touristy thing -- but got testicular cancer. Now he's the poster boy for more comfortable bicycle seats.

Interestingly, there's another, unrelated guy with the same name -- Lance Armstrong -- who also races for the USPS team, though not as successfully. He gets regular autograph requests. (You wouldn't think it'd be a likely mistake for fans to make, since he's a black man and the famous Lance Armstrong is a blonde, but I guess the name is everything. Or maybe we've finally achieved the true ``color-blind'' society!) Knowing the post office, they probably get each others' mail as well. Evidently there's something about the name that predisposes one to bike race for the post office.

I don't believe in Peter Pan,
Frankenstein, or Superman.

-- ``Bicycle Race'' (Queen)

ASPLUNDH

There's a Swedish surname Asplund, with the meaning `aspen grove.' I don't know where the extra h came from, but Carl Hjalmar Asplundh came from Sweden in 1882 and worked as an accountant in Philadelphia. After he died in 1903, Carl's second son Oswald took up work as gardener and later founded a landscaping and tree surgery business, employing his three younger brothers as tree trimmers as they worked their way through college. Those brothers, Griffith, Lester, and Carl Hjalmar (junior) founded the Asplundh Tree Expert Co. in 1928. This history is cribbed from that company's website's history page. According to itself, in 2006 ``Asplundh is the world's leading vegetation management company, with over 28,000 employees serving utilities and municipalities in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.''

And on the subject of surprising final aitches, don't forget Jean Anouilh.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

This is the name of an unexpectedly aptly named song on Ashlee Simpson's debut album. But before we get into that, I want to point out that Ashlee is an artist, a musician, a creator (creatrix?). As a mere indication of both her musical acumen and ability, here is an unsparing and perceptive self-critique that she allowed to be published. About burping the alphabet, she commented ``[m]y worst letter is S. It is a closed consonant and at the end when I am out of wind.'' But she's also fair: ``... my favorite letter is G. It is an open consonant and it is at the beginning when my wind is strong.'' Modestly, she concedes that her older sister ``Jessica burps the alphabet better than me. She has better wind and she is a much louder belcher.'' (Thanks, sis.) Maybe Ashlee should discuss this with her singing coach. I hear that if you control your voice just so, you can conserve your wind so as to make it through a longer piece. Then again, maybe a natural singing talent doesn't have to worry about that breathing stuff.

Well, I guess I'll tell you more about it later. Right now I feel a sore throat coming on.

HARRY BAALS

Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1934-1947 and 1951-1954. Fort Wayne was named after (and apparently by) General ``Mad'' Anthony Wayne. The actress Shelley Long is from Fort Wayne.

The image at right shows Shelley Long and Harry Baals on the set of the NBC show ``Cheers'' in 1984. Shelley Long is the one to the left. Hmmm. I think maybe the guy with her is actually the actor Ted Danson. I guess I don't have a picture of Harry Baals. I can't honestly say that bothers me very much.

Also not shown at right is Britney Spears. Why do I mention Britney Spears? The reason I mention Britney Spears, and Britney Spears images in particular, is that if you have (or even just mention) pictures of Britney Spears on your web page, you can increase your hit count. This is what's called ``shameless promotion.'' It's nothing special, and I didn't invent it. I should probably mention Brittany Speers as well -- it'll rank high in searches on the misspelled name. If you want to know how to spell her name (it's an odd variant), go to Britney's record producer's official webpage and see Britney Spears's name written in big letters. They also have pictures of Britney's album covers.

December 2, 2001: I just checked on Google: the ``Brittany Speers'' thing hasn't worked so well -- this page only ranked thirteenth out of ``about 193'' (most of those unintentional mispellings). I'm going to type it in a third time now and see what happens: Brittany Speers.
Oh yes: nekkid.

It's obvious that you just can't get enough of this stuff. Go see the Alana Miles entry.

April 14, 2002: We're up to third of ``about 706.'' YES! (Google is trying hard to help steer people to pages with the name spelled properly, but we know you're looking for us.) And we'll also try to get you with brittany spears.

Jeff BAGWELL

Houston Astros first baseman, as of this writing (2004 postseason).

Harvey R. BALL

Harvey R. Ball (July 10, 1921 - April 12, 2001), an ad executive, was the person with the strongest claim to having invented the smiley face -- the simple, circular yellow face with an ear-to-ear grin and no ears ().

In 1959, Mr. Ball founded an advertising and PR agency in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1963, one of his clients, State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, asked him to help with the reassurance of workers in the wake of a merger. According to Ball's claim, corroborated by issues of the Worcester Times & Gazette of that time, and by State Mutual Life company records, that was the beginning of the smiley face. It stands to reason: the meaningless smiley originated as a meaningless feel-good PR gesture substituting for a substantive assurance of continued work or placement and transition help? Oh well. State Mutual Life is now Allmerica Financial Corporation. Ball recalled that he was paid $45 for his artwork and never applied for a trademark or copyright. At least he wasn't fined.

According to the AP, the smiley's popularity peaked in 1971, when fifty million smiley buttons were sold. In 1999, the USPS issued a smiley-face stamp. Who says there isn't a distinctive American culture?

In 1989, Charlie Alzamora stepped forward to dispute Ball's claim of priority. You wouldn't think, by that time, it would be anything that anyone outside the post office would want to claim credit for. Alzamora, by then program director for New York radio station WMCA (AM 570; I don't think it had religious programming in those days), told the New York Times that a happy face with a slightly crooked smile was developed by the station in 1962 as a promotion for its DJ's. The face, with the slogan ``the WMCA good guys,'' was printed on thousands of sweatshirts distributed by the station.

They say that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. This must be an exceptional case.

PEGGY BANKS

Well, you may have a little money in a piggy bank, and you may add to it, but you're supposed to wait before you get it out. Margaret-Eleanora Banks, known as Peggy, was 22 in 1745, an orphan living with her brother. At the time, she and Harry Grenville already planned to marry, but her fortune was a mere 5000 pounds. They didn't marry until 1757, by which time her sister had died unmarried, doubling Peggy's fortune by the terms of their father's will. (Harry Grenville, as governour of Barbados, had also improved his own circumstances.)

BANNING, California

A town of 25,000 an 85-mile drive east on I-10 from downtown Los Angeles. (Pass Ontario, CA, along the way.) In December, 2002, a lesbian student at Coombs Middle School there sued the Banning Unified School District. She had been banned from gym class for over a week because administrators felt that other girls would be uncomfortable getting undressed in front of her. The plaintiff, 14 at the time of the incident, is being represented by lawyers of the ACLU and the NCLR. She claims that she felt ``humiliated and denigrated.'' Is it okay to use that word again?

In an interview with Reuters, she explained that ``It's fine if they're uncomfortable but it's still discrimination.'' But apparently it's not fine if she's uncomfortable.

Bob BARKER

Host of the TV shows ``Truth or Consequences'' for 18 years and ``The Price is Right'' for 30 years. I'd like to say that that makes him something like a carnival barker, but his role was not so full-throated. So that's not the excuse for this entry.

He's a vegetarian and very active animal-rights advocate. He co-hosted the 1986 PATSY awards with a dog named Mike.

PÍO BAROJA y Nessi

Son of Serafín Baroja. The given name Pío is the Spanish form of the Latin name Pius (meaning `pious'). The surname Baroja is not likely to be related to Baroque (barroco in Spanish). It does, however, suggest Hebrew vocabulary related to piety. Words with the same consonants in Hebrew (b,r,kh) are various conjugations of `bless' and related words. (For example, the noun for benediction, transliterated into Spanish, is barajá. A common boys' given name in Hebrew is Baruch, `blessed.' ) Actually, baraja is a Spanish word also: barajar is `to fight, stir [as a pot], mix [especially cards -- i.e. shuffle].' The origin or the word is unknown. See also baraka.

When you consider the position of the hands, barajar naipes (`to shuffle cards') resembles Christian prayer. Maybe the Spanish word comes from the Arab-speaking Muslim world, as playing cards themselves did. (Okay, Corominas y Pascual reject an Arabic origin, which proves that if barajar has an Arabic origin, they're wrong.) Arabic, another Semitic language, has a cognate of the Hebrew root. The same Arabic word was adopted into Swahili, a Bantu language of coastal East Africa. Although Swahili is the native language of only a minority of Bantu-speakers, it is widely used as a commercial lingua franca. US Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) is the son of a Kenyan, and his first name means `blessed.'

It's plausible to speculate that Baroja is a ``New Christian'' name -- i.e., a surname of (Roman Catholic) Spaniards descended from converted Jews. It is much more probable that the name is simply derived from the place name Baroja (annexed to the municipality of Peñacerrada in the province of Álava). The name of Álava is derived from Basque and means `intermountain region.' Interestingly, however, Álava is a homophone of alaba (`[he] praises') except that the stress in the latter word is on the penult. Serafín Baroja, a mining engineer (born 1840 in San Sebastián), was a writer of popular cantos in Basque (lyrics that various others later set to music). I don't have to tell you what Serafín means and that it's derived from Hebrew, do I? Good.

Pío, also born in San Sebastián (Dec. 28, 1872), like his father had a practical profession but is remembered for his artistic work (novels and literary essays, mostly). He became a physician and practiced for two years in Cestona, but that life was too dull and he moved to Madrid. There he tried his hand at various businesses, and successfully established a bakery with his brother Ricardo (a painter and self-taught engraver). You don't need to know this, but then you don't need not to know it either. All you really need to know you learned in kindergarten, so stop reading and get back to work.

The first sentence of his Memorias is

Yo no tengo la costumbre de mentir.

(`I am not in the habit of lying.') This may suggest to sensitive persons like me that he was an unselfaware scold. Referring in the memoir to the publication of El Árbol de la Ciencia in 1911, he noted that he put in it his concerns as a physician and as an amateur philosopher. He adds that this novel ``es el libro más acabado y completo de todos los míos, escrito en el tiempo que yo estaba en el máximo de energía intelectual.'' (That `it is the most finished and complete of all my books, written at the peak of my intellectual energies.')

The title El Árbol de la Ciencia is an obvious allusion to the Biblical ``tree of the knowledge of good and evil,'' so right there you've got your nomen-est-omen money's worth. (The title is the traditional, now archaic, expression of `The Tree of Knowledge.' See árbol entry for details.) The novel follows one Andrés Hurtado. Hurtado sounds like it ought to be related to huerto, `garden' (< Latin hortus), and therefore stand as another reference to the Garden of Eden. Then again, maybe not. Hurtado is a common surname in the Spanish-speaking world, so common that one never thinks of its meaning: `stolen' or `hidden.' Hanks and Hodges suggest that ``the reference was probably to an illegitimate offspring, whose existence was concealed, or to a kidnapped child. (Portuguese has the equivalent surname Furtado. Both surnames are the past participle of a verb -- hurtar, furtar -- ultimately derived from the Latin fur, `thief.')

Let's take a closer look at that novel, then (and let's call it Tree, which rhymes with brevity). The book follows Hurtado from the beginning of his medical education (hey -- write what you know). Paragraph three is this sentence:

Por una de estas anomalias clásicas de España, aquellos estudiantes que esperaban en el patio de la Escuela de Arquitectura no eran arquitectos del porvenir, sinó futuros médicos y farmacéuticos.

[`By one of these classic anomalies of Spain, those students waiting in the courtyard of the Architecture School were not architects to be, but rather future physicians and pharmacists.']

It turns out that the general chemistry class for first-year students in medicine and pharmacy was taught in an old converted chapel, and that the entrance to that was via the Architecture courtyard. I mention this not because it is interesting in itself, but because it is not interesting in itself. It's not unusual in any large educational institution for classroom space to be taken where it can be found; to find in this some indication of Spanish singularity suggests a limited experience. It's too bad, because the novel fairly bursts with broad assertions about national and regional character which I wish I could pass along in good conscience. Instead, I shall have to pass them along with a bad conscience.

Yes, I will finish this entry, honest. Where did I put the book???!!

I found the book! Maybe later I'll use it.

Baroja is considered an important influence on Ernest Hemingway and on John Dos Passos. Hemingway is said to have adopted the ``spare realism'' of Baroja. This sort of thing is always relative. Cervantes was celebrated in part for his unwordy style. Look, not to take anything away from Cervantes or even Baroja, but Spanish as ordinarily spoken and written is often verbose and embellished and wordy. Any competent writer of any century who wants to maintain his readers' interest must write more tersely than average.

Peter BEERING

Security coordinator for the 2002 Indianapolis 500. Spectators may bring coolers no larger than 14 inches wide and 14 inches high. If there's no length restriction, that could pack enough beer. You can also bring a ``small backpack.''

Alexander Graham BELL

When I was a kid, I thought it was called ``Bell Telephone'' because a bell rang when there was a call.

Ladan and Laleh BIJANI

Bi- is a Latin prefix for `two,' and jani is the nominative plural form of janus. Janus was the name of an old Italian deity with two faces on opposite sides of one head.

In Farsi, Ladan means nasturtium and Laleh means tulip. Ladan and Laleh were twin sisters born in Tehran on Jan. 17, 1974, conjoined at the head (two brains, joined skulls). They made headlines (sorry about that) around the world when they underwent an operation to become separate.

They took their gamble at the Raffles Hospital in Singapore. The operation began at 10 AM Sunday, July 6, 2003, with one team removing a vein from Ladan's thigh and another spending a reported six hours to saw through the skull. The vein was needed for grafting into Ladan's brain; conjoined, the twins shared one vein). On Monday evening, 32 hours into the operation, the grafted vein had blocked. This was not immediately fatal -- presumably because their circulatory systems were still joined and apparently because there were a number of collateral blood vessels. It was decided to continue the operation, and around noon on Tuesday they were separated and placed on separate operating tables. Then blood vessels in the bases of both of their brains burst, and despite strenuous efforts both died -- Ladan after 2 hours and Laleh 90 minutes later.

The preceding paragraph is the most coherent account of the operation that I was able to reconstruct from a review of press accounts at the time. There were a number of conflicting and even incomprehensible reports at the time, which I'll try to sort out later.

In a July 10 Op-Ed for the New York Times William Safire wrote: ``In the 19th century, Chang and Eng had no such choice, and lived out their lives as sideshow curiosities, often called monstrosities, though they managed to father 22 children. [SBF: I guess they spent a lot of time in bed.] In our time, two famed Iranian sisters, ...29-year-old law school graduates whose brains were linked in the womb... found a hospital in Singapore and a score of neurosurgeons willing to carry out [their] decision to risk their lives for physical independence.''

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about the French monarchy, observed that when a regime tries to reform itself, it can trigger a revolution by kindling hope in those who had despaired: ``Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds.'' The French revolution was also known for the separation of heads, by a procedure invented by one Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin.

The Bijani sisters returned to Iran in separate coffins.

François BILLETDOUX

In French, billet doux means `love letter.' I was tempted to suppose that the surname was adopted (or imposed, like Faux-Pas-Bidet), but so far as I can tell Billetdoux got his name from his parents in the usual way. (I might mention that François is the Old French form of the word français, `French,' but this is not exactly unusual. I can't think of any other country for which a parallel naming phenomenon is remotely as common.)

According to the 2005 Encyclopedia Britannica, he was a ``French playwright whose works, linked with the avant-garde theatre, examined human relationships and found them doomed to failure.'' Love it.

His daughter Raphaëlle Biletdoux is a novelist and scriptwriter. A Virginie Billetdoux acted in various movies between 1974 and 1980 (mostly French, but the 1980 was Spanish), but that's as much as I know about her.

Joseph BLACK

Although he is best remembered today for his discovery of latent heat, his first published scientific work was his M.D. dissertation (1754), a chemical investigation of magnesia alba -- `white magnesia.'

Milk of magnesia is a white suspension of magnesium hydroxide (Mg(OH)₂) in water, used today as an antacid and mild laxative. Magnesia alba is magnesium carbonate (MgCO₂). It's a mildly basic salt, rather than a base like milk of magnesia, so it's not very useful as an antacid, but it was a popular laxative at the time of Black's historic study.

Not that it has aught to do with any of this, but Joseph Black was a Scotsman born in Bordeaux. (That's in France, okay? My amusing observations are more amusing if you know enough to be mildly surprised.) His father and maternal grandfather worked there as factors (in the wine trade). Once in Procter Hall (the graduate college dining hall) I asked an economics Ph.D. student I was talking with what she was doing her dissertation on, and she said something like ``factors in widget production,'' although it wasn't widgets but something I've forgotten, lo, these 25 years later. So I said, approximately, ``oh, I know -- don't tell me -- factors are uh, uh... commissioned commercial agents!'' I was heartbreakingly pleased with myself for knowing this bit of economic arcana, but I hadn't guessed what she meant. She just gave me the look. On another occasion, in a different food service facility (The Debasement Bar, downstairs from the dining hall) a different economics graduate student (name withheld because I don't remember it) gave me a virtually identical look, and then explained it with the memorable words ``I can have any man I want here.'' [Believe me: I would not, could not, make this up.] She obviously understood the law of supply and demand, even if she could not recognize intellectual enthusiasm. So perhaps the factors woman's look meant the same thing -- it was in the same toxic male:female ratio.

And the point here is about mathematics. At the time it didn't occur to me to associate any mathematical sense of the word factor with economics, because economic behavior, like all human behavior, seems too slippery to make any very sophisticated mathematical analysis appropriate (I was right, of course). Joseph Black is remembered as the father of modern quantitative chemistry. (It's also said that he weighed the guineas his students paid to attend his popular courses.)

Mildred and Robert WOODS BLISS

A philanthropic couple who in 1920 acquired a woodsy property in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. called Dumbarton Oaks. ``The name combines a reference to the original [from the last time the glaciers receded, presumably] great oaks on the site, several of which are still standing, with the eighteenth-century name `Dumbarton,' taken from the Rock of Dumbarton in Scotland.'' Twenty years later they conveyed the estate, including gardens, a nineteenth-century ``Federal-style'' house, and their collection to Harvard University. It's a long way from D.C. to Cambridge; I'm pretty sure ``convey'' here does not mean physically transport. Whatever. So Harvard now uses Dumbarton Oaks as a research resource (CHS) in Byzantine studies, the history of landscape architecture, and pre-Columbian studies. The collections of Byzantine and pre-Columbian art and the rare books and prints relating to the gardens are on public display.

To those who are more concerned with post-Columbian civilizations, Dumbarton Oaks is best known as the site of high-level discussions among the major WWII Allies that led to the creation of the UN. These were officially known as the ``Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization'' and better known by the short (I believe unofficial) name of ``Dumbarton Oaks Conference.''

Loreena BOBBITT

If I weren't hewing to alphabetical order, I would have put this little item right after HARRY BAALS's.

Vocabulary word for this lesson: bob.

Jay BonanSINGa

Well, the interviewer on the radio repeatedly pronounced his surname ``Bona-SINK-uh,'' and I'm going with that. He's the author of The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy (Kensington Publishing, 2005). It's not entirely forgotten -- there are annual commemorations and a dedicated historical society (EDHS, q.v.). But, as tragedies go, the fame of this one is underproportionate to the number of lives lost -- 800.

CHASTITY Sun Bono

I suppose, in principle, that a lesbian may be as chaste as anyone else. Nevertheless, chastity is a traditional conservative notion, and out-of-the-closet lesbianism isn't. Her friends call her ``Chas.'' Her mother Cher played the title role in the movie Chastity. Chastity Sun was born on March 4, 1969; the movie was released on June 24. Is having a lesbian daughter some kind of occupational hazard of Republican pols?

BORING

This is the surname of a writer of engineering textbooks. I'll look up some of his work later. For now I'll quote Douglas Richman, a UCSD virologist. In 1993, analyzing the frustration widely shared by scientists at the media's impatience with ambiguity (easily explained by rich ignorance peppered with stupidity, ISTM), he said ``[t]he trouble is, a balanced scientific presentation is intrinsically boring to the public.''

[Cue the falling calendar tear sheets to indicate the passage of time.]

Well, I checked some library catalogues, and it turns out that the Borings are an industrious tribe. So far, though, I've only found historians, a theologian, a probate lawyer (hmmm...looks promising), an agricultural entomologist, and a psychologist. I will keep digging.

[Cue the tick-tock sound to indicate the passage of time. Use some echo-chamber effect to make it sound a little ominous, build to anticlimax. Why are you reading this? These are the editing directions!]

You know, I think I was just confusing Dull and Boring. (But if you think I was just confusing, dull, and boring, why are you still reading?)

Well anyway, here's some of the Boring fare I found:

• Current Probate Decisions and Legislation, by James L. Boring and Alan F. Rothschild, (Chicago, Ill.: American Bar Association, 1995). I suppose if you stand to inherit some loot, it may be interesting. Dickens made an interesting story (Bleak House) out of a Court of Chancery case that lasted until... well, I won't spoil the story, but let's just say it was a case of rather poor rich estate planning. I didn't know that sort of case could be ``thrown out'' of court. Also in the story, someone goes up in smoke. No -- literally! An instance of SHC.
• Fire Protection Through Modern Building Codes by Delbert F. Boring, James C. Spence, and Walter G. Wells, (Washington, D.C.: American Iron and Steel Institute, 1981).
• Literacy in Ancient Sparta by T. Boring (Leiden, 1979).
• Managing Insect and Mite Pests of Texas Small Grains, by Emory P. Boring and Carl D. Patrick, (College Station, Tex.: Texas Agricultural Extension Service, Texas A&M University System, 1994).

Bob BOYLE

Robert Boyle made a number of important early discoveries in chemistry, and is best known for his work in the theory of gases. The irony of his name has not escaped wits before me. Thomas Hood once suggested to the Duke of Devonshire that ``Boyle on Steam'' would make a fine sham volume in a library. [See Bon-mots [sic] of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Walter Jerrold (London: J. M. Dent, 1897), p. 88.]

Boyle discovered that for a fixed quantity of gas at a constant temperature, pressure and volume vary inversely, publishing this fact in 1662. A mere quelques années plus tard (1676), the Frenchman Edme (Peter) Mariotte also discovered this law. For this reason, we all call it la loi de Boyle-Mariotte.

Lawrence BRAIN

A psychiatrist who counsels affluent teenagers throughout the Washington metropolitan area.

Walter Russell BRAIN

A British neurologist, created the first Baron Brain in 1962.

BRAUNSCHWEIG

The north-central German city of Braunschweig gave its name to a couple of foods. One is a yeast-dough cake with brown-sugar icing; it's still popular in Denmark, where it is known by the name Brunsviger. The other is a very homogenized smoked liver sausage. Loosely, therefore, it's like a cold hot dog. In fact, considering what's allowed to go into hot dogs, one would probably prefer a Braunschweiger to a Frankfurter. Still, it's not recommended that you eat it raw directly by biting the end of it.

In October 2002, a 35-year-old man in Braunschweig was arrested for kicking his pet and biting it on the nose. He was reprimanded, and the dog,a black and white husky crossbreed, was put in a shelter to await a new owner. Considering that this was a classic case of man bites dog, it's surprising how little coverage this story received. Even the newswires didn't bite.

[Braunschweig is known as Brunswick in English. Both names are derived from the personal name Bruno (related to brown). The second part of the name (also spelled -wich in various English place names) comes from a widely-used Indo-European root for a collection of houses. The Latin reflex is vicus, `village, row of houses.']

Arthur A. BRIGHT, Jr.

Author of The Electric-Lamp Industry -- Technological Change and Economic Development from 1800 to 1947, (New York: MacMillan Co., 1949) and various shorter works on the same subject.

Calvin BROADuS

The name of the, uh, entertainer -- yeah that's it, entertainer -- who performs as Snoop Dogg. He is the host of the ``Girls Gone Wild'' video series, in which young women (``amateur girls'' is the enigmatic technical term I see in the spam that gets through my filters) bare their breasts at cameras and later sometimes sue the distributor of the videos (Mantra Films Inc., owned by Joseph R. Francis). Repeat 84,000 times: ``What is informed consent?'' Informed consent apparently consists of a sign posted in the video shooting area that says ``By entering, you consent to the use of such film [sic, possibly misreported] and your image in a commercial film product.'' Court records in a civil suit brought in Louisiana, settled on July 21, 2004, indicate that some of the apparently drunk naked girls are not of legal age to drink.

The videos are advertised on late-night television and sold by mail-order and also what might be called mail-disorder. Also in July 2004, Mantra Films agreed to pay nearly $1.1 million to settle FTC claims that the company shipped video tapes or DVD's to people who had not ordered them, then billed these ``customers.'' (It's a lot like sample issues, free!)

As part of the settlement, the company pays more than $548,000 to people who received the materials and returned them but were not reimbursed for shipping costs. Money is due at least 84,000 victims. Mantra has gotten off too easily so far; there should be triple indemnity for fraud, and damages for harassment and emotional distress. As a society, we are sometimes not nearly litigious enough. As of August 2004, racketeering and other charges are pending against Francis in Florida.

Bob BROWN

The founder of Australia's Green Party, and currently (2008) its leader. (To be precise, what he founded in 1972 -- with a first meeting in his living room -- was the United Tasmania Group, which is described as ``Australia's first `green' party.'' The official name of the party is now the Australian Greens.) This party is widely described as the ``world's first `Green' party.'' I guess that means it was either the first political party in the world to make environmental issues the central part of its platform, or the first to be founded with the intention of making environmental issues the central part of its platform. This may be, but by the time Bob Brown first assumed elective office in 1983, as a member of the Tasmania state parliament, many other issues were in the mix. In his first term, he introduced a variety of private member initiatives, including bills for a freedom-of-information act, ``Death with Dignity,'' a lowering of parliamentary salaries, ``gay rights legislation, banning of the battery-hen industry, whatever that is, and a ``nuclear free Tasmania.'' I guess the last two count as green in a strict sense.

Cleveland BROWNS

In the seventh and eighth games of the 2001 season, this NFL team was beaten in overtime on plays by opposing players named Brown. On November 4 in Chicago, Bears safety Mike Brown returned an interception for a TD that beat Cleveland 27-21. On November 11, the traditional Veterans' Day, Pittsburgh kicker Kris Brown scored a field goal in OT to lift the Steelers to a 15-12 win.

After the 1945 season, the NFL-champion Cleveland Rams became the first pro football team to move to the west coast, becoming the LA Rams for 1946. Also in 1946, one of the most successful competitors of the NFL was created in the AAFC.

Paul Brown was already a college coaching legend when Art ``Mickey'' McBride, founder of the AAFC Cleveland team, hired him to be the first coach and named the team after him. Paul Brown was a great innovator, and one relatively innovative thing he did in 1946 was to hire a couple of brown-eyed players.

``Brown-eyed'' is a coy way of saying dark-skinned. I think this is clear enough in Murray McLauchlin's ``Brown-Eyed Man'' and in Chuck Berry's ``Brown Eyed Handsome Man.'' It might count as something like an in-joke, since I don't think I've ever heard any white people use it, unless Van Morrison counts. He was quoted in books published in 1996 and 2006 to the effect that the title was originally meant to be ``Brown-Skinned Girl'' (reflecting the fact that it was ``a kind of Jamaican song'') and that he absentmindedly changed the title to ``Brown Eyed Girl,'' not noticing he had done so until after recording it. He apparently didn't explain how he happened to change the chorus to match the mistaken title. The explanations are a bit confusing. The 1996 book is entitled Inarticulate Speech of the Heart. Look, I like the song, and I think the word ``eyed'' works better musically, but songs associated with Jamaica seem to induce linguistic lapses. For another example, see the ``Louie, Louie'' material under Mojo Risin, Mr.

(I can't think of any convincing evidence for my claim at the beginning of the previous paragraph, so I guess it's time to switch the subject with an irrelevant personal anecdote. When I was filling out the application for my first driver's license, I asked a guy filling out his own form next to me what color my eyes were and he said ``hazel.'' Eventually I had a look at my eyes in the mirror and decided that they were brown. Well, they are mostly white, but the iris is brown. When people say ``eye color'' they normally mean iris color, unless they're talking about jaundice or bloodshot eyes or something. Also, when people name colors, there's a certain amount of context. To the guy I asked, who was black, ``brown'' was probably the color of his own eyes, while mine, being lighter, required some other term -- hence ``hazel.'' But they're not as light as those that I would call hazel, so I think of them as brown, and I changed that. I also remeasured myself and raised my height a half an inch the last time I renewed, and I think somewhere along the line I may have changed my middle initial. Someday when I go to renew my license I'll probably be arrested for stealing my own identity.)

Paul Brown coached the Cleveland Browns from its first season in 1946 to 1962, when the third owner (also an Art M. -- television executive Arthur B. Modell) fired him at the end of the season. One of greatest running backs of all time, fullback Jim Brown, played his entire career (1957-1965) at Cleveland. Paul and Jim were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967 and 1971, resp.

Paul Brown later went on to be majority owner and first coach (1968 to 1975) of the Cincinnati Bengals, whose home field today is in ``Paul Brown Stadium.''

David M. BROWNSTONE

Coauthor, with Irene M. Franck, of The VNR Real Estate Dictionary (Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1981).

Charles BULLION

In 1640, Richelieu forbade local mints from issuing any but low-denomination coins, and simultaneously introduced a standard gold coin, the Louis d'or. (Cardinal Richelieu was from 1624 until his death the chief minister of French king Louis XIII's government. He was famously successful at this job.) Charles Bullion was the long-time finance minister under Richelieu and hosted the new coin's introduction. [For another French finance minister, see the eponymous Silhouette.]

Don't confuse Charles Bullion with the powerful and more interesting Duke of Bouillon. The duke and his duchy straddled the border of the Bourbon-Habsburg battlefield. In 1642, as the Cardinal was slowly dying, Bouillon took part in the treason organized by the marquis de Cinq Mars. It failed, and Bouillon was in the soup. After negotiations with Richelieu, he ended up ceding the fortress capital of Sedan to the crown, more-or-less in exchange for his own life. [For another pair of names involving oui and non, and for the example set by a renowned mathematical physicist of how one should deal with those odious sniveling cretins who conflate them, see the Liouville entry.]

But perhaps I should mention that Sedan was of some broad military and consequently political significance later on. On September 1, 1870, German armies (of the Second Reich) under Bismarck's leadership broke through French defenses at Sedan, forcing the capitulation of Emperor Napoleon III. This led to the overthrow of the ``Second Empire'' (the Second French Empire, by a counting that not too unreasonably excludes Charlemagne's) and its replacement by the Third Republic in 1876. The German victory in the Franco-Prussian war established the new European order that would prevail until WWI.

On May 15, 1940, German armies (Third Reich this time) broke through the French defenses of the Meuse and surrounded Sedan. Once the full extent of the defeat became clear, it was simply a matter of time until France sought an armistice. Hitler dictated the terms, which became known on June 20 and were signed on June 22. In after years it became popular to claim that Marshal Pétain staged a coup that overthrew the Third Republic, but it is more accurate to say that the National Assembly ratified its own suspension and the end of the republic on July 10, 1940.

The Fifth Republic was created in 1958 as a constitutional republican government of, for, and by Charles de Gaulle, but has progressed into a benevolent dictatorship of the bureaucrats, all eager to become Eurocrats. If the Fifth Republic lasts until 2033, it will surpass the Third Republic as France's longest-lasting experiment in democracy. I write this in 2003. A lot may happen in 30 years, and a lot may not.

Bill BURDEN

A lawyer who has represented Canada 3000. Details at the John GROUND subentry.

Millar BURROWS

An archaeologist. See the 1QIs^a entry for an example of his important work in caves. Not to be confused with Fergus Millar, the Roman Historian. What is it with this ``Millar'' business, anyway?

David M. BUSS

A professor of psychology at the University of Texas, his books include Sex, Power, Conflict (1996), The Dangerous Passion (2000), and The Evolution of Desire (4/e, 2003). His studies show, among other things, that women prefer to marry up and are happier if they do. You don't say! Men who surf the web probably have better marriage prospects than those who don't. You may now kiss the bride.

Ron G. BUTTERY

A US Agricultural Research Service scientist who specialized in flavor chemistry. Co-editor, with Roy Teranishi and Fereidoon Shahidi, of Flavor Chemistry: Trends and Developments (ACS, 1989). (And other stuff, I'm sure, but that was what came to hand.)

John CAGE

A composer who escaped the confines of traditional music. We have a bit about him at the copyright entry.

Roger W. CAVES

Editor of Encyclopedia of the City (London and New York: Routledge, 2005).

CHESHIRE CAlhoun

On the opening day of CSWIP 2005 (the conference website seems to have vanished), Cheshire Calhoun was scheduled to deliver the plenary address, entitled ``Losing One's Self.'' I'm afraid I missed it, myself -- I mean the lecture -- but I imagine everything went off as planned.

``How do you know I'm mad?'' said Alice.

``You must be,'' said the Cat, ``or you wouldn't have come here.''

Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on ``And how do you know that you're mad?''

``To begin with,'' said the Cat, ``a dog's not mad. You grant that?''

``I suppose so,'' said Alice.

``Well, then,'' the Cat went on, ``you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.''

``I call it purring, not growling,'' said Alice.

``Call it what you like,'' said the Cat. ``Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?''

``I should like it very much,'' said Alice, ``but I haven't been invited yet.''

``You'll see me there,'' said the Cat, and vanished.

W.F. CARABINE

Mr. Carabine was the Chief Classification Officer, Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario. (He had a contribution to the section on Utilization and Coordination of Treatment Facilities in Prison in the 1957 conference mentioned at the binding entry.) His contribution starts on page 128 of the English Proceedings and one ``F.F. Carabine'' has a contribution to the companion French Rapport. I guess I never appreciated the magnitude of the French animus against W. The English side gets in its digs by dropping the hyphens in J.-C. LaFerrière and the like. I bet you never realized how much orthographic inside baseball is played in these meetings.)

Anyway, I thought it interesting that someone named Carabine should have gotten into the corrections business. Carabine is an alternate English spelling, and the standard French spelling, of carbine (i.e. carbine rifle).

George Washington CARVER

He chose to make his career at Tuskegee Institute, where he spent a lot of time contemplating peanuts. Had he chosen Buffalo, the destiny of jelly composite sandwiches would have been quite different.

Vocabulary word for this lesson: arachibutyrophobia. (Meaning: `fear of having spiders get into your butter,' I think, but be sure to check at the granola entry.)

I guess that when I wrote this subentry, I must have thought that there couldn't not be some ironic connection between his name and some aspect of his research into peanut products. I still feel that way, but I haven't discovered it yet (unless you count the fact that of all the peanut products he came up with, none was peanut butter). That's how it is sometimes.

Stacey CASE

A tee-shirt printer and musician in Toronto, who came up with the idea for the Pillow Fight League (PFL). PFL contestants or participants or athletes or whatever fight in costume.

Stacey is a guy. On New Year's Eve 2005, his band played a bar in Toronto. The act that followed his was a mock pillow fight put on by a local burlesque troupe. Women from the audience came forward hoping to participate. An idea was born.

Johnny CASH

What can you say? It was his real (i.e., birth) surname, but it didn't do his father a lot of good. More information s.v. KFC. See also the Johnny PAYCHECK item below.

James A. CASHIN, M.B.A., CPA

A professor of accounting at Hofstra University, and Editor-in-Chief of Handbook for Auditors (McGraw-Hill, 1971, reissued 1982), which finally, finally, was published as Cashin's Handbook for Auditors (McGraw-Hill, 1986), a revised edition co-edited with Paul D. Neuwirth and John F. Levy.

For a number of Schaum's outlines in accounting, Cashin collaborated with Joel L. Lerner, M.S., P.D., once chairman of Faculty of Business at Sullivan County Community College. [One that is ready to hand is Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Accounting II, (McGraw-Hill, 1974). There were subsequent editions in 1981, 1989 (by which time he was retired), 1994, and 1999, not counting translations into Spanish, French, and Chinese, so you might say he cashed in, or amortized the original investment of effort. Not to mention Principles of Accounting, (McGraw-Hill, 2001) ``based on Schaum's Principles of Accounting I.'']

JOHN CAVANAUGH

Two presidents of the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame du Lac -- the one in Indiana). The first was Rev. Fr. John W. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., president 1905-1919. The second, Rev. Fr. John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., was president 1946-1952. They weren't genetically related in any known way, but the junior one worked as a secretary for the senior one when he was university president. When John W. retired from the presidency, he gave John J. a parting gift of a full scholarship to Notre Dame.

P.C. Cheng

A former colleague of mine in the Electrical Engineering Department at UB. His name came up in connection with some research at the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve one lunch, and I remember Jack saying something like ``he's an electrical engineer and you call him `P.C.,' and you don't think that's funny?'' No.

FORREST CHURCH

The author of Father and Son: A Biography of Senator Frank Church
The Devil and Dr. Church
Entertaining Angels
Everyday Miracles
The Seven Deadly Virtues
A Chosen Faith (with John Buehrens)
God and Other Famous Liberals
Life Lines: Holding On and Letting Go
Lifecraft: The Art of Living for the Everyday
The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence
Bringing God Home: A Spiritual Guidebook for the Journey of Your Life
Freedom from Fear: Finding the Courage to Love, Act, and Be
So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and State and editor of Continuities and Discontinuities in Church History
The Essential Tillich [Paul Tillich was a famous theologian]
The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Prayers
The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Hymns
The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Meditations
One Prayer at a Time
Without Apology: Writings of A. Powell Davies
The Jefferson Bible
Restoring Faith: American Religious Leaders Answer Terror With Hope
The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders. So he's destroyed veritable forests in the process of writing various church-related (and Church-related) books. I cribbed most of this list from the also-by page in So Help Me God, so help me God, and that's what inspired me to center the titles. If I hadn't chosen to pun on his given name, it would have been a much shorter entry.

J. Bradford CHURCHILL

Of the University of Colorado, Boulder, presented Sed Sine Nominibus Res Notavit: The Stylistics of Military Campaign Narrative in Latin Historiography at the 1997 APA meeting.

Jerry COATS

A US Air Force captain from Meridian, Mississippi. In the Summer of 1990, Coats volunteered for a posting as a NORAD quality-control evaluator at the DEW Line, on the outskirts of Tuktoyaktuk (``Tuk''), a village of 800 Eskimos in the Northwest Territories of Canada, on the Arctic coast. His commanding officer told him: ``For 20 years I've been threatening to send lieutenants to the DEW line. You're the first guy I've known who has asked for it.'' Coats considered it the least among evils, since he had to fulfill a career requirement of at least one ``remote posting.'' Tuktoyaktuk is 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the ``banana belt'' (as opposed to the eastern Arctic, which is really cold). It's ``an unseasonably [is that the right word?] warm day'' (above freezing) in the Summer of 1991 when a reporter for the Washington Post interviews him, but Captain Coats is wearing a (single) parka. ``You'd have to be crazy to come here for the weather,'' he notes.

Henry COCKERAM

Author of The English Dictionarie, or an Interpreter of Hard English Words, first published in 1623. This would be unexceptionable, except that the OED2, instead of defining the verb irrumate, gives only a quote from Cockeram's dictionary (and he defines it, um, backwards).

Marilyn COLON

The way CMUD explained it, it was all the result of people in neighboring houses pouring grease down their drains. It sounds innocent enough, but it built up over time and clogged the sewer line. Evidently, this closed space accumulated flammable and even explosive substances (methane, I imagine). Finally, one very bad day in February 2006, ``[w]e heard a thump,'' said Marilyn Colon. There was apparently a discernible moment's pause before her toilet exploded. ``Feces, urine, oil...it went all through the house,'' said Colon.

Alex COMFORT

Published The Joy of Sex in 1972. Wished people remembered all of his other very important work, research, political activity and poetry and stuff.

In 1974 he published More Joy of Sex and in 1991 The New Joy of Sex. Similar titles coming soon to a glossary entry near you.

Captain James COOK

On Sunday, February 14, 1779, he and four of his men were killed in a confrontation with Hawaiian natives at Kealakekua Bay. Their bodies were left on the beach and taken away by the Hawaiians. The next week, when the explorers (and invaders -- stress according to your political, uh, tastes) attempted to retrieve at least the captain's remains, they were informed by native priests that he had been given a chief's disposal; his bones had been burned and were kept by the Hawaiian King. The priests denied that he had been eaten. Most of the large bones were eventually returned, with burn marks and great solemnity, and a known hand injury was regarded by the ships' officers as positive identification. (It did turn out that some of the bones had apparently been distributed elsewhere.) The ribs and vertebrae were never returned. Some arm bones said to be of one of the marines were also returned. The Europeans early on received seven or eight pounds of rotting (deboned) thigh said to be Cook's, but they were also later informed that the flesh of his deboned body (which was not returned) had been salted and preserved. Apart from the thigh meat, no other flesh was recovered.

The preceding summary is based mostly on The Voyages of Captain James Cook, copyright 1999 by Richard P. Aulie. Part of this is available online from the Captain Cook Society (CCS). What really happened is controversial, which probably means that if I read something else I'll only get confused.

Don Hernán CORTÉS

The conqueror of Mexico, born in 1485 in Medellín, in the Spanish province of Extremadura. His parents were both of noble descent (that don means `sir'), but his family was in reduced circumstances. A weak and sickly child (okay, I admit this isn't relevant), he was packed off at age 14 to Salamanca. [This implicitly means to the great university at Salamanca. Salamanca's fame was such that it became an antonomasia for higher education. There was even a saying, still recalled today in its archaic expression -- Lo que Natura non da, Salamanca non presta. (`What nature does not give, Salamanca does not lend.' More loosely: Human garbage in, human garbage out.) Anyway, back to our story.] The intent was for young Hernando to study law, but after two years he returned home without the university having bestowed the slightest mark of recognition of accomplishment. (``[S]in ... el mas pequeño lauro universitario,'' as the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada puts it.) [You know, I was about to characterize Salamanca as the great medieval Spanish university. As it happens, the modern era began precisely in 1500, so Hernando just got in under the wire. Renaissance? What Renaissance?]

Not to keep you in suspense any longer, the reason that Cortés is listed here is that he came from a noble family and studied law, and his name means `courts' ... almost. Actually, his name means `courteous'; courts would be cortes (no accent; accentual stress on penult instead of ult). In Spanish as in English, the words for courtesy (or courtly behavior) and courtesan were derived from the word for court. The enciclopedia has listings for some individuals with the surname Cortés and somewhat fewer with surname Cortes. And I've seen the name of this particular conquistador written every which way, final ess or final zee, accent either way. Look, we're going to stick to the court angle; I really don't want to get into what happened in Mexico. There was both diplomacy and mayhem involved.

Incidentally (or ``BTW'' as we net-savvy cool people say), the names Hernán and Hernando are versions of Fernando (in Spanish) and Ferdinand (English). One of the major sound shifts in Spanish was for eff to become aitch. More about that at some other entry, maybe Spanish. For stuff about the similar-sounding name Herman, see SN.

Margaret Smith COURT

The dominant women's tennis player of the 1960's, although she was Margaret Smith until 1966. At some point she was successfully courted by a Mr. Barry Court. She must have liked the name. She retired in 1966, married and started a family. With Barry's encouragement, she came back in 1970 and immediately won the Grand Slam (singles titles at Wimbledon plus the U.S., French, and Australian Open tournaments) all in that year.

Regina CREAMER

On June 24, 1999, Ms. Creamer was working as a clerk at Bird World Pet Shop (of Panama City, Florida), which also sells other animals than birds. A coworker noticed that the top was off one of the snake cages, and a man standing nearby was acting strangely. The man, James Lawrence Collison, eventually got a chance to tell police his side of the story. According to the report, ``he saw the snakes loose in the store and caught them and placed them into his pocket for safekeeping until he could find an employee.'' Each of the snakes was about three or four feet long.

The coworker saw a boa constrictor's head pop out from under Collison's shirt and called Ms. Creamer. Speaking to reporters later, she said ``it was hilarious. He kept saying he wasn't taking anything, but those snakes were just moving around and one was under his shirt, and he was doing all kinds of strange things and trying to keep it in there.'' Then the snake in his trousers poked out of his pocket. It was a milk snake. Ms. Creamer called 911.

John Dominic CROSSan

Active in Historical Jesus (HJ) research and a prominent member of the Jesus Seminar. Author (among many other books) of The Cross that Spoke, in which he reconstructed a ``Cross Gospel,'' supposed to have preceded the passion narrative (PN) found in Mk 14-16. He argued that this Cross gospel was later incorporated into the canonical gospels and the noncanonical gospel of Peter.

Rose Marie CUTTING

Author of Anaïs Nin: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., n.d.). Nin (1903-1977) was an unimportant scribbler who was held in extremely high regard by enough people to be something of a nuisance. She was best known for a preposterously long diary that she published in six volumes after vast yet inadequate cutting.

GRAY Davis

Governor of California, 1999 to 2003. Long-time Democratic-party apparatchik. In the haze of history, he was Gov. Jerry Brown's chief of staff. In Time magazine's Viewpoint column (August 11, 2003 issue), Joe Klein wrote

The standing joke about Davis is that his personality reflects his name, but Gray is darker than that.

Joe Klein doubtless realized that the point of that ``standing joke'' is not about saturation level (in the color sense), but about being ``colorless.'' Joe Klein was the anonymous author of a best-selling book about a much more colorful politician, entitled Primary Colors. I guess that was a pun, too. Coincidentally or not, it was in the 2002 primary that Gray Davis was darkest, spending a reported ten million dollars in the Republican primary to help defeat the person who would clearly have been the stronger candidate in the general election (LA mayor Richard Riordan).

Jefferson FINIS Davis

The tenth and last child of Jane Cook Davis and Samuel Davis. First and last president of the Confederate States of America (CSA). (He had a cousin named Jefferson C. Davis who played some less important role in Alabama history during that time. It seems the family wasn't very thoughtful about naming.) There was also a Jefferson Columbus Davis, not a relative, who during the Civil War rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army. I'm going to have to sort some of this out eventually.

For another terminal name, see ENDE.

It was not uncommon to give the name Finis to the last child in a family. Sometimes I imagine it was given by mistake. Sometimes the mother's death in childbirth certified the name. Jane Davis survived the birth of her son Jefferson in 1808 and lived until 1845. But she was born in 1760 some time, so the name was not unreasonably chosen. Jefferson Davis (named after Thomas Jefferson, of course) dropped the Finis in his twenties.

Dr. Kevin M. DE COCK

De Cock was Director of the HIV/AIDS department of the World Health Organization in December 2006, when exciting news about circumcision was announced. In studies being conducted in Kenya and Uganda, it was found that (male) circumcision cut new HIV infections in heterosexual men by about 50%, confirming an earlier South African study that found a 60% decrease. All three studies were cut short when it was decided that it would be unethical to deny the clear benefits of circumcision to the uncircumcised study participants (the control groups).

A specialist in infectious diseases, De Cock's professional publications had often concerned condoms to some degree. However, until news reports quoted him in connection with the circumcision studies (in a BBC item: results a ``significant scientific advance,'' but ``[m]en must not consider themselves protected'') he had never achieved public prominence that was ironic commentary on the entirety of his two-part surname.

Before his appointment to the WHO position, in March 2006, De Cock had severed, sorry, served for six years as Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Kenya. Thus, it may be that he has some professional connection with US NIH-sponsored studies in Kenya and Uganda. I just don't know yet. However, the nomen-est-omen significance of the results already obtained are so striking that we've decided to cut short further investigation and release this sub-entry now.

Charles DE GAULle

He had a lot of gaul, and he ruled Gaul. (Some, possibly even he, thought he liberated it.)

CECIL B. DeMille

As a given name in modern times, Cecil represents a transferred use of the surname of a noble family that rose to prominence in England during the sixteenth century. That Cecil is an Anglicization of the Welsh given name Scissylt, possibly a Celtic form of the Latin Sextilius, from the Sextus, `sixth.' (Back and forth between given and family names. Sextilius was a gentilicium: a family or clan name [see tria nomina]; Sextus was a name given to the sixth boy.) Sextilis, on the other hand, was the name of the month preceding September (Latin for `September,' in case you were wondering) until 27 BC, when it was renamed mensis Augustus in honor of Augustus by Augustus.

None of that is of any interest, which is why I wanted to get it out of the way first. Cecil was also occasionally used as a given name in the Middle Ages. In that time, it represented the English form of the Latin Caecilius, an old Roman gentilicium. The popularity of this name in Medieval Europe is probably due to the fact that it was borne by a minor saint of the third century, a friend of St. Cyprian.

More to the point, however, Caecilius was originally derived from the byname Caecus, meaning `blind.' Cecil B. DeMille was one of the most successful filmmakers of all time so far.

PETER DESIRA

A reporter with the Herald Sun newspaper of Melbourne, Australia. The Sun published his greatest scoop just two days before Valentine's Day 2004. But this part of the glossary is just bursting, so why don't you read all about it at the Heidelberg United entry?

Scott DIRECTOR

He has worked as an actor and as an ADR artist, and he is credited with composing the original music for Little Boy Blues, a 2005 short.

Stephen W. DIRECTOR

Engineering Dean at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (UMI) as of Fall 1996.

Rose Friedman, widow of Milton Friedman and a like-minded economist, is the former Rose Director.

Joe DIRT

See David SPADE.

Kent DOLLAR

An accountant, bank auditor for the Perry County Bank in Perryville, Ark. Participant in a Dec. 14, 1990 afternoon meeting at which he and the bank owner, Robert M. Hill, made an illegally large contribution to William J. Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign and urged (this is the point where most readers fall asleep) Clinton to appoint Hill's partner in the bank, Herby Branscum, Jr., to the Arkansas State Highway Commission. That appointment was made, and on July 2, 1996, Mr. Dollar was a witness in a trial of Mr. Hill and Mr. Branscum. They were not charged with bribery, but certain kinds of fraud and misappropriation. The defendants were acquitted of the most serious charges (conspiracy, misapplication of bank funds, and making false entries to bank records), and the jury hung on the rest. A mistrial was declared on the latter charges, and a retrial was not sought.

(In retrospect, this looks like a possible instance of prosecutorial abuse. The case in which the charges were brought was one that prosecutors in the office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr stumbled across in 1994 while focused on other issues. It was always clear that charges were threatened and brought in order to put pressure on the defendants to cooperate with Starr's investigation; prosecutors were always eager for a plea bargain. Of course, investigators' guesses about facts they cannot prove are part of what they use to decide whether witnesses are cooperating.)

James H. DOOLITTLE

Led an April 18, 1942, air attack on Japanese home territory, bombing mostly Tokyo, with single-plane missions originally planned for Nagoya and Osaka. Here's a page on the raid, served by the US Naval Historical Center.

Residents of Tokyo, feeling secure from enemy attack, did not take seriously the air raid drill that coincidentally had been scheduled for that morning. The drill ended at noon, about the time that the Doolittle party arrived. From the ground, many assumed the planes were part of the drill, until the bombs exploded.

In terms of damage to military targets, the raid did indeed do little. In terms of morale on the Allied side, and fear and misjudgment on the enemy side, it did a great deal. Doolittle, decorated and promoted, went on to do a little acting in other theaters of the war.

The story of the raid is told in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by Capt. Ted W. Lawson (Random House, 1943). The first paragraph reads

I helped bomb Tokyo on the Doolittle raid of April 18, 1942. I crashed in the China Sea. I learned the meaning of the term ``United Nations'' from men and women whose language I couldn't speak. I watched a buddy of mine saw off my left leg. And finally I got home to my wife after being flown, shipped and carried around the world.

(For a similar contemporary use of ``United Nations,'' see the VOA entry.)

ROB D. DRAIN

Oh, alright -- he goes by Robert D. Drain. He's a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge. In his court in Lower Manhattan on October 11, 2005, proceedings began regarding the ``petition for relief'' of Michigan auto parts maker Delphi Corp. (spun off by GM a few years before) under Chapter 11 of federal bankruptcy laws. We have more on unusual judge names.

Raymond W. DULL

Wrote a very popular mathematics handbook; first edition 1926, second edition 1941. I have before me the third edition, 1951: 56 chapters, 1041 sections, xx+822 pp., revised and edited by Richard Dull, Raymond's son, partly based on material developed by his late father. The book is entitled Mathematics for Engineers. Here is the first paragraph of the first edition preface:

    This treatise on mathematics has been prepared primarily for engineers. In this we would include (1) engineers who want a quick and convenient reference, (2) engineers who have grown somewhat rusty in their mathematics, and (3) engineers who feel the need of a text for the study of mathematics.

Elizabeth C. ECONOMY

Economy is (as of this writing, Spring 2006) a Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the US Council on Foreign Relations, and has published on environmental and development issues.

Bob EGGelton

See the Nigel SUCKLING subentry.

ATOM EGOyan

I guess that Atom is more likely to be the Armenian form of Anthony than to have any relation to atom, from the Greek meaning uncuttable. (Atom Egoyan was born in Egypt to Armenian parents, and raised in Western Canada.) He is a director, scriptwriter, and actor, sometimes all three in the same movie. Like the early Woody Allen minus the jokes. Like the later Woody Allen. A lot of Egoyan's movies are autobiographical and feature his wife (sometimes playing his wife, as in ``Calendar''); ``A Portrait of Arshile'' features him, his wife, and his son. Some of his movies are entitled ``an Ego Production.'' Woody Allen's movies used to feature his current love interest, often as his on-screen love interest.

``The Sweet Hereafter'' (1997; director and scriptwriter): 112 minutes

Jean-Yves EMPEREUR

Archaeologist who found a necropolis in Alexandria. (Alternate site here.)

Michael ENDE

Author of a children's book entitled The Neverending Story. (In German, die Ende is `the end.')

Marginal case: see the fellow van den Ende (`of the end') in the He entry.

For another terminal name, see Davis.

Daniel ENGLAND

A spokesman for the Episcopal Church (the US member of the Anglican Communion).

Another name-appropriate church spokesman: GOODNESS.

Christopher ENGLISH

A professional translator who attended Oxford and Moscow Universities and has worked as a translator and teacher in the USSR, US, and Kenya. As of 1998 he was working in Zimbabwe. As a verb, the word English means to translate into English, as English did many of Gogol's works (including Dead Souls: A Poem, mentioned at the Russia entry).

FAIR PLAY, S. Car.

Home of Brenda Phenis. She and seven others were arrested on August 21, 2001, on charges of rigging a promotional game sponsored by McDonald's. The scam was organized by a security employee at the company that produced the tickets and game pieces for McDonald's. The conspiracy would recruit shills to pose as random winners and kick back most of their winnings to the organizers. McDonald's (which was involved only to the extent of cooperating with the FBI in catching the bad guys) ran various games over six years, with prizes ranging from a free drink or order of fries to cars, vacations, and ``a million dollars'' (over time) in cash. The games were a great success for McDonald's in a mature, saturated market (there may be something on this at the KFC entry), typically giving sales a temporary 5% fillip each time. The games were based on familiar themes such as the 1996 Summer Olympics, the TV program Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, and the board game Monopoly. ``Go To Jail.'' Eventually, at least 21 co-conspirators were charged, but they were scattered around the country to make things look legit, and I'm not aware that they came from places that were so aptly named.

Jonny FAIRPLAY

This is a television actor whose real name is Jon Dalton. He appeared in the 2003 CBS reality show ``Survivor: Pearl Islands.'' Casting actors in a ``reality show'' would not appear to be strictly according to Hoyle, but I guess it's okay because they're real actors (as opposed to ordinary people, who wouldn't be qualified to appear in a reality show because they're not real actors -- they're only acting like actors playing the role of ordinary people).

Fairplay earned his place in this glossary at the Fox Reality Channel's Really (yes, really) Awards on October 2, 2007. Danny Bonaduce (age 48) was on stage when Fairplay (33) walked on uninvited and made a ``derogatory statement,'' according to the police report. Fairplay jumped on Bonaduce and ``wrapped his arms and legs around the suspect and thrust his pelvis into the suspect's body'' while the audience booed. The ``suspect'' was Bonaduce, who threw Fairplay over his shoulders.

Fairplay was a survivor but he landed on his face, and he said later that he underwent 2½ hours of dental surgery. Poor baby! He said he had only given Bonaduce a hug, one of his signature moves as a performer. Moves in what kinds of movies, I wonder. The DA's office declined to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence of intent to injure, and the fact that Fairplay ``initiated contact and acted offensively.'' Bonaduce's ``actions fell within the realm of self-defense,'' according to Deputy DA Jeffrey Boxer, who needs another apposite turn in the public eye to earn a glossary subentry of his own. Why is the WWE sitting on its hands?

Bonaduce was a child star on ``The Partridge Family.'' In 2005 he starred in the reality show ``Breaking Bonaduce,'' but that's not how this one worked out.

Christopher FARAONE

Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. Faraone is Italian for `Pharaoh.' As of this date (2001.02.23), Christopher A. Faraone is chair of the Classics Department.

MIA FARROW

Stop me before I adopt again! Fourteen children, not counting Woody. (Mía is `mine' [belonging to me] in Spanish and, give or take an accent, in some other Romance languages as well.)

FAUX-PAS-BIDET

Here is something I read in The Red Orchestra: The Anatomy of the Most Successful Spy Ring of World War II, by Gilles Perrault {tr. Peter Wiles} (Simon & Schuster, 1969), p. 6.

By 1929 there were three thousand rabcors [workers operating as amateur press correspondents] in France, some of them employed in state arsenals or in factories where war materials were manufactured. The ostensible purpose of their contributions to the Communist press was to denounce the poor working conditions to which they were subjected, but they could hardly do so without supplying bits and pieces of information about the work itself. The more revealing articles were never published. They were passed to the Soviet embassy in Paris, which forwarded them to Moscow. If a given rabcor seemed well informed on a subject of really worthwhile interest, an agent would call and question him until a complete picture had been built up.

This highly profitable organization functioned with undisturbed efficiency for three whole years. In February, in 1932, a denunciation was laid before the French police. Despite this lucky break, it took the superintendent in charge of the case -- a man with the disquieting name of Faux-Pas-Bidet--more than six months to dismantle the network. His reports are unsparing in their praise of the spies he was endeavoring to track down. ...

Now, as the author of the French original well understood, Faux-Pas-Bidet is more than a merely disquieting name. An approximate English equivalent might be `Misstep-Chamberpot.' It is an exceedingly unlikely sort of name. Author Perrault seems to suggest that this is the person's real name, possibly his hyphenated last name. If he knew the real name and deliberately withheld it, that would be a bit disingenuous. If he didn't know the real name, then it probably means that his comments on the reports are second-hand. If he knew that this is the man's real name, then it's hard to square with what Trotsky wrote in his 1930 autobiography (Moia zhizn), recalling events of 1916 and 1918.

Here is an English translation by, umm, it's not clear. It was published by Pathfinder Press in 1970, and it has an introduction by Joseph Hansen -- an admiring reminiscence of his days on L. D. Trotsky's staff during the last years in exile in Coyoacán, Mexico, with a few little jabs at Trotsky's biographer Isaac Deutscher. Trotsky lived another eleven years after finishing his autobiography, and he had a secretariat that regularly translated his work in a sequence of multiple drafts critiqued in detail by Trotsky (see the obvious entry), so perhaps the translation was a team effort by his staff.

For much of his life, Trotsky was an inconvenient foreigner seeking safety and freedom away from a Russian dictatorial government (Tsarist, which he sought to overthrow, or Soviet, which he at one point had at least the second-greatest role in preserving). In 1916, Trotsky was dumped at the Spanish border by the French police. He traveled to Madrid, where he was soon arrested. One is struck by the bourgeois courtesy of the French and Spanish police that L.D. describes. Like a number of other communists who suffered at the hands of the GPU, he also used the old Tsarist secret police as a standard of incivility against which to castigate others by invidious comparison. On the way from Madrid to Cadiz, he asked the agents escorting him how they had come to capture him so quickly. They readily volunteered that a telegram from Paris had alerted them to a dangerous anarchist (sic) in their country. Trotsky writes

     In all this the chief of the so-called juridical police, Bidet-``Fauxpas,'' played an important part. He was the heart and soul of my shadowing and expulsion; he was distinguishable from his colleagues only by his exceptional rudeness and malice. He tried to speak to me in a tone that even the Czar's officers of the secret police never allowed themselves to assume. My conversations with him always ended in explosions. As I was leaving him, I would feel a look of hate behind my back. At the prison meeting with Gabier [a French socialist L.D. met while under house arrest in Madrid], I expressed my conviction that my arrest had been prearranged by Bidet-``Fauxpas,'' and the name, started by my lucky stroke, circulated through the Spanish press.

     Less than two years later, the fates willed me an entirely unexpected satisfaction at M. Bidet's expense. In the summer of 1918, a telephone call to the War Commissariat informed me that Bidet--the Thunderer, Bidet!--was under arrest in one of the Soviet prisons. I could not believe my ears. But it seemed that the French government had put him on the staff of the military mission to engage in spying and conspiracy in the Soviet republic, and he had been so careless as to get caught. One could hardly ask for a greater satisfaction from Nemesis, especially if one adds the fact that Malvy, the French minister of the Interior who signed the order for my expulsion, was himself soon after expelled from France by the Clémenceau government on a charge of pacifist intrigues. What a concurrence of circumstances, as if intended for a film plot!

     When Bidet was brought to me at the Commissariat, I could not recognize him at first. The Thunderer had become transformed into an ordinary mortal, and a seedy one at that. I looked at him in amazement.

     ``mais oui, monsieur,'' he said as he bowed his head, ``c'est moi.''

     Yes, it was Bidet. But how had it happened? I was genuinely astonished. Bidet spread out his hands philosophically, and with the assurance of a police stoic, remarked ``C'est la marche des évènements.'' Exactly--a magnificent formula! There floated before my eyes the figure of the dark fatalist who had conducted me to San Sebastian: ``There is no freedom of choice; everything is predetermined.''

     ``But, Monsieur Bidet, you were not very polite to me in Paris.''

     ``Alas, I must admit it, Mr. People's Commissary, sorry as I am. I have thought often of it as I sat in my cell. It does a man good sometimes,'' he added significantly, ``to get acquainted with prison from the inside. But I still hope my Paris behavior will not have any unpleasant consequences for me.''

     I reassured him.

     ``When I return to France, I will change my occupation.''

     ``Will you Monsieur Bidet? On revient toujours à ses premiers amours.'' (I have described this scene to my friends so often that I remember our dialogue as if it took place yesterday.) Later Bidet was allowed to go back to France as one of the exchange prisoners. I have no information as to his subsequent fate.

(At this point, L.D. returns to continue the story of his passage through Spain. I'll mention some of this at the Cuba entry, eventually.)

Cecil FIELDER

In his entire major-league career in the US, Cecil (pronounced with a short-e, as in Cecil B. DeMille) Fielder played first base in 905 games, third base in 7, and second base in 2. Well, I guess that at least counts as fielding. He was a designated hitter in 535 games, and he did play in the outfield in one game for Toronto. He left Toronto after four seasons to play the 1989 season with the Tigers of Hanshin in Japan's Central League. For the next few seasons he played with the Tigers of Detroit. Cecil's son Prince has been a first-baseman and occasional designated hitter in his own major-league career. (He's in the NL, so opportunities to be DH are limited.)

Blake Fielder-CIVIL

The husband of troubled singer (that's the standard description) Amy Winehouse. As of this writing (early February 2008) he is in jail awaiting trial. He was first charged with intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm on pub landlord James King, June 20, 2007. In November 2007 Fielder-Civil was arrested on a charge of trying to pervert the course of justice in that case. (He was alleged to have offered King money to drop the allegation against him and flee the country. Reports varied regarding whether King had accepted the bribe.) In the US, at least, it is often relatively easy to earn conviction on such ancillary charges, and the penalties can be more severe than those for the original crime). There were no charges against Fielder-Civil or against Winehouse arising from their alleged violent fights in August 2007, but there's been a lot of mawkish drama since.

Bruce FIELDS

Manager of Toledo farm team (triple-A) who was named hitting coach of the Detroit Tigers on Oct. 9, 2002.

Pontiac FIERO

A car sold in the 1984-88 model years. It was a mid-engine sports car with a lightweight, magnesium-alloy engine. The car had a famous tendency to catch fire. You would have thought that after the disaster that race cars had with lightweight magnesium-alloy wheels, that a lesson might have been learned.

David FIGMAN

A food inspector in NYC. An article on food inspection in the May 22, 1969, New York Times, on page 49, quoted Weems L. Clevenger, director of the New York district of the FDA, to the effect that 65% of all food imported by the US entered through the port of New York City. The article included a picture with this caption: ``Peter Giambalvo, holding jar, and David Figman, drawing samples from barrel, prepare to make test of olives newly imported from Spain.'' The scene is on a quay with rows of barrels on their sides; the men are wearing hardhats but no safety glasses. From the splatter on the side of their barrel, it seems part of the test was sqeezing the olives to bursting. (Well dammit, I'm sure on some other days he tests figs. I don't give a f... if you believe it or not!)

Dr. Bernard FISHER and Dr. Roger POISSON

According to a report in the New York Times, 4 April 1994, (page A12) Dr. Fisher is [was?] the world's authority