The conjunction is derived from the Latin et. In Iberia, at least, the t was lost early on. (In Italian, a consonant persisted in softened or reduced form: Classical Italian used ed for `and,' and ed is still used today to avoid hiatus before words beginning with an e sound and, very rarely, some other vowels.)
In Portuguese and Galician, et simply evolved into e. There are at least a couple of plausible theories of how the vowel was raised to an i sound in Spanish and Catalan, but there are problems with each.
To avoid hiatus in Spanish, the conjunction is replaced with e when it precedes a word that begins with the same sound (i.e., one whose spelling begins with i or hi, or with y in cases where that is pronounced as a vowel). Conversely, in Galician the usual e becomes i when the conjunction precedes a stressed e sound.
H H \ / C-----C // \\ // \\ H---C C---H benzene \ / \ _____ / C-----C / \ H H
H H \ / C-----C // \\ // \\ N C---H pyridine \ / \ _____ / C-----C / \ H H
The ``basically'' is a pun. Also for yucks, here's pyrimidine (py):
H H \ / C-----C // \\ // \\ N C---H pyrimidine \ / \ _____ / C-----N / H
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
BTW, Yosemite is pronounced ``yo SEM mitty'' (not ``YO z'mite'').
I still remember the first time someone called me ``sir,'' or maybe just the first time I noticed, but it was probably the first time over all, because it was a shock.
I've been reading recently that colleges are reinstituting supervision and rules and all that in loco parentis stuff. They claim that the parents and even many of the students are asking for it.
``asking for it''
Sure. Off-campus housing is cheaper anyway.
I've usually seen YA as a book classification in
libraries. There it means too stupid for words. I don't know when
``young adult'' became a common expression. Mark
Twain, criticizing the biblical commandment against adultery, based his
discussion on the following groups:
Children at birth.
Children in the cradle.
School children.
Youths and maidens.
Fresh adults.
Older ones.
Men and women of 40.
Of 50.
Of 60.
Of 70.
Of 80.
Of 90.
Of 100.
I estimate that by ``fresh adults'' he meant people who had reached the legal
age of majority (21) or consent (a bit younger). [It's hard to fix a date on
this text. Mark Twain died in 1910, and this appears in the eighth of
Letters from the Earth, compiled from his papers by Bernard DeVoto
between 1937 and 1939 (and finally allowed to be published by Twain's daughter
Clara Clemens in 1960).]
You'll never survive on staircase wit. Plan and practice your ad lib persiflage.
Some googling suggests that the eye dialect form yabbut is about twenty times as common as yabbit. Yeah, but the author of this entry prefers ``yabbit.''
Just now, I got 2770 Google hits for the for-Freedom group (hence YAFree) and 7580 for the Foundation (YAFound; I searched by full quoted names), but only 11 in common. On its homepage, the YAFree crows ``YAF Sponsored CPAC 2002 A Success!'' However, at CPAC's page of links to sponsors, YAFound is third among the four sponsors listed out of alphabetical order at the top, and (naturally) YAFree is last among the rest.
The YAFree homepage explains that ``CPAC was founded in 1974 by YAF and a couple other [sic] great conservative organizations. It is the largest gathering of conservatives in the world.'' CPAC's history page doesn't mention YAFree, but does have a link to the YAFound luncheon.
YAFound sponsors the National Journalism Center, founded 1977.
For a while, Toyota used this as its advertising slogan. Sounds equivocal to me. I guess they couldn't use BK's ``special orders don't upset us'' because when you buy a new Japanese car (in the US, at least) you can't order options or option packages or color schemes. You just tell the dealer what you want, and if they got it, you can take delivery (maybe). If they don't got it (or maybe for other reasons), they start calling you with a great deal on a more expensive model. What Toyota meant by ``you got it'' was that they paid attention to customer preferences in a general way. Presumably the implication was that other companies design cars to minimize the overlap with the preferences of their potential customer base (probably because that way, they don't have to build as many cars, expand production capacity and other laborious things). After a few weeks of the run-around, what I wanted to buy was second-hand. Sorry: I wanted to acquire a previously owned motorcar.
R
facing the wrong way.
English: `Member of the Japanese Mafia.'
The ``sweet potato'' that is a sweet potato was first domesticated in South America, where it is usually called batata. The pulp of the sweet potato is white like an ordinary potato's.
(It's exam time again; the student bloopers are roaring in.)
There are more minimalist versions that leave out the apple-pie level, but these are told only by the humorless. Some others neglect the fork and some mention the ch'duh cheese. No competent version mentions both the fork and the ch'duh; humor requires balance.
There is a common sort of imprecision in the usual definition. For example, the statement ``in the US, a Yankee is someone from the North'' is understood to mean ``in the US but outside the North, a Yankee is somebody from the North.'' This form is obviously unusable for humor. The terms used to define Yankee more precisely are themselves also ambiguous. The ``North,'' for example, may be the US minus the 11 or 13 states that seceded from the Union, or that North excluding the West, or those states north of the Mason-Dixon line defining the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania, or on the generally northern side of ``the Mason-Dixon Line'' defined by borders of the slave states in 1860, or Labrador (in principle). Similarly, New England may comprise the six New England states, or the three (or four) northernmost New England states, or the region of derhoticized speech (which excludes not only Connecticut but also Martha's Vineyard). Some versions of the Yankee definition insert a ``someone from upper [or three-states] New England'' level. This is overdoing it.
White-tailed deer are also called white-tailed rats.
Sale, like many other nouns, has multiple acceptions. An adjective (possibly in the form of an attributive noun) that modifies such a noun frequently determines which acception is meant. For example, a ``yard sale,'' ``garage sale,'' ``library sale,'' or ``sidewalk sale'' is a sale in the sense of ``an event in which multiple items are offered for purchase,'' conducted either in a place of the sort named or in the driveway. ``Rummage sale'' uses the same acception of sale. The items placed for sale in the aforementioned sorts of sales are usually second-hand; that is, they have already been retailed once. I'm going mad. Long ago, when I still watched television, I saw a horrifying human-interest story about a fellow who was documenting all the mundane, quotidian details of his life. Every day he would document his day, typing out where he went and what he did, what he had cooked and eaten, perhaps eventually giving a stool count. Recording his day seemed to take up a large portion of his day. He hadn't given much thought yet to how this information might be used, but
[I have to insert a paragraph break every so often so as not to upset the editor] he expressed a hope that someone someday would be able to use it. I remember that Harry Golden mentions somewhere a fellow who put down on paper the entire contents of his mind. I thought that must be an exaggeration, but then again, someone who decided to do this might have a relatively empty head. Harry Golden thought it was wonderful that this fellow had done this, and I suppose I'd agree that it's handy for someone somewhere to have done it. (This was mentioned either in For Two Cents Plain or in Only in America.) I imagine that the records of that poor all-recording wretch could be of some scientific use, though they could never represent a typical case (in the usual acception of ``typical case,'' rather than the typical acception of ``case,'' I think).
Anyway, another acception of sale is ``an offering of items for sale with special purchase incentives [usually reduced price or otherwise sweetened terms]'' to move the goods faster. (Well, I didn't say ``ritual offering.'') This acception is signaled by the use of intensifiers to modify the noun sale, as in clearance sale, blow-out sale, and blow-out clearance sale! The word special in the acception definition indicates that the items for sale are items that are regularly sold under non-sale conditions by the same retailer offering the items for sale.
A third acception. Let me interrupt to repeat Dr. Johnson's definition of lexicographer: ``a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.'' A third acception, as I was writing, is similar to the previous, so read carefully: ``an offering of special items for sale.'' The implication is usually that the items are not special by dint of being inferior to the usual ones.
The preceding two acceptions of sale may be signaled by the use of adjectives that describe what is being sold. A ``tent sale'' is a sale in one of these senses, but it may be a sale of tents or a sales event held in a tent rather than in the retailer's usual sales space.
The fine distinctions made above may be ignored, or may not fit. A local book discounter (Bargain Books) sells new and used books, and most of its new books are damaged goods or (most often) are consigned there after failing to sell at higher-priced regular outlets. They have a permanent banner outside that says ``Giant Book Sale.'' Fair enough.
A fourth acception of sale is ``the transfer of a property (or obligation) in exchange for money.'' In other words, it's a purchase; but since the verbs sell and purchase have complementary senses, a sale is a purchase as seen by a seller rather than a buyer. The customer makes a buy or a purchase; the salesperson makes a sale.
A sale in the preceding acception is the individual event that the other sorts of sale are supposed to encourage en masse. The plural of this sale can function as an uncountable noun (``same-store sales,'' etc.) but is generally construed plural. The word sales, construed singular, refers to business aspects of retailing.
If this were a serious dictionary, the above paragraphs would be numbered definitions under a sales entry. We don't do that. All we're really doing is putting off the day when we explain the Yarkovsky effect.
A neologism attributed to Liam Quin.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The City That Knows How but not when. Took 30 years to get things off the ground and it isn't finished yet, but we are all proud, are we not? We tore down a lot of affordable housing and rousted a small army of old drunks, but it was worth it. The old drunks plus their young lawyers delayed Yerba Buena (''Good Herb'') for years. What got their dander up was the late Justin Herman, Robert Moses-like czar of redevelopment, saying that ''I'm not gonna let a bunch of old drunks get in my way.'' When they heard that, the old drunks sobered up and got a steely glint in their eyes, just like the pioneers.
In the LION database, I can find six instances of yclepe in poetry published since 1477, with a cluster early in the 19th century, but no instances in prose. The past participle form yclept carried on. Following are the most recent prose instances that I can find of yclept, that were published on paper. (The first number is the year of publication.)
W--- gave her young men liberally; company after company was equipped, furnished with ample funds by the munificence of citizens who remained, and sent forward to Virginia, to make their breasts a shield for the proud old ``Mother of Presidents.'' The battle of Bethel was regarded as part of an overture to the opera of Blood, yclept ``Subjugation,'' and people watched in silence for the crimson curtain to rise upon the banks of the Potomac.
Yet there is certainly something to interest us in the examination of that cheerless damp closet, whose painted wooden walls no furniture or company can make habitable, wherein our friend is to spend so many vapid days and restless nights. The sight of these apartments, yclept state-rooms, --- Heaven knows why, except it be from their want of cosiness, --- is full of keen reminiscences to most Californians who have not outgrown the memories of that dreary interval when, in obedience to nature's wise compensations, homesickness was blotted out by sea-sickness, and both at last resolved into a chaotic and distempered dream, whose details we now recognize.
It is indisputable that, in quantum at least, the purveyors of women's fashions gave the final boost to American literature. The history of that originally sui generis enchiridion, yclept the ``fashion magazine,'' is as entertaining as it is amazing.
Inoffensive data on Yemen is found in the factbook entry from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook
More at the aa entry, really.
The test has two parts: written and oral. It is offered regularly in the greater Toronto area (the York Université/University area), and by arrangement elsewhere.
Something that many Japanese have mentioned to me is that the Japanese monetary unit is really the ``en'' and not ``yen.'' Sometimes they express puzzlement that it is called yen in English. It's not really very puzzling. Foreign visitors to Japan have often transcribed the language they heard there using their native phonetic systems, and their records make clear that a palatal glide before the /e/ was a common, though not universal feature of Japanese. This occurred initially as in en/yen and also in the name of the city of Edo or Yedo. I'm not sure if the Yedo pronunciation was actually used by Edo (or Yedo) people. (It might be like ``New Joy-zee,'' a New York-accented pronunciation of New Jersey that many people think is a characteristically New Jersey pronunciation.) The question is interesting as Edo became the new national capital of Tokyo (actually with quantitative ``long'' vowels: Tôkyô), and in the post-WWII period television has made the Tokyo dialect dominant throughout Japan. The Tokyo dialect today certainly does not have a palatal glide before the e, but other dialects still do. For example, the word êga (`movies') is pronounced something like ``yegwa'' in Kyûshû and the Ryûkyûs.
Many names that begin with E in English have Russian forms that begin with Ye. For example, Yelena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov's widow) has the given name equivalent to Elena. Elizabeth is Yelizabeta, etc. The Cyrillic character that represents the palatalized e looks like the Latin E, and often the change is not marked in transliteration. For example, in French newspapers, ``Yeltsin'' and ``Eltsin'' appear to be about equally common transliterations of the former Russian president's name.
The situation with Russian ye is not quite the same as that with the Japanese ye. In Japanese, ye represents an alternative pronunciation of e. In Russian, there is a phonemic distinction between ye and e. The latter sound has a distinct symbol. (It looks like a backwards-facing lower-case epsilon. No -- it doesn't look so much like a three: use the other epsilon glyph. Actually, the character looks like the symbol that mathematicians use for `such that,' but without the dots.)
Judging from dictionary pages, the nonpalatalized e is about three times more common word-initially than the ye. Many of the initial-ye words are cognates or loans of words that had an initial epsilon-upsilon in Greek and that typically (Eugene, Europe, eunuch) but not always (evangelic) became palatalized in English. Most of the rest seem to come from the old Slavic word stock. I'm sure that a ye- development from Indo-European e- is a common Slavic phenomenon. I recall that conjugations of the copula in which one expects e- from Latin often have je- in some Slavic languages. In Czech, je is `is.' If there is a main pattern in ye/e, it might be that recent loans preserve unpalatalized e-. Please don't ask me about noninitial ye/e. I don't know these languages; I just look stuff up in dictionaries.
One way to learn about this subject might be to visit the USGA Museum. It was founded in January 1936, about a year before the National Baseball Hall of Fame was established in Cooperstown, N.Y. It was the first museum in the country dedicated solely to a sport, if we stipulate that golf is a sport. By 2008, it had accumulated ``more than 42,000 artifacts, a library of more than 20,000 volumes, more than half a million photographic images, and several thousands [of] hours of historic film, video, and audio recordings. Together, the museum's collections present a comprehensive history of the game's development in the United States over the course of nearly 250 years. They are also the finest collection of golf memorabilia in the world.'' (I'm cribbing from here.) On June 3, 2008, the USGA opened a new facility -- the Arnold Palmer Center for Golf History. More than 2,000 artifacts are on display, twice as many as before. ``Among notable treasures, visitors [can] see the golf clubs, golf ball, and scorecard used by Francis Ouimet during his stunning victory in the 1913 U.S. Open, a remarkable moment in American sports history recently immortalized in the Disney film, `The Greatest Game Ever Played.' ... Visitors will learn that all but two American Presidents of the 20th century were avid golfers as evidenced by clubs and balls used by several chief executives throughout the exhibitions.'' What exhibitions?
The Museum and the Palmer Center, as well as some golf equipment testing laboratories, are all located together on a woodsy campus in New Jersey. To get there, just get off I-78 at exit 33 and follow the brown signs. That's what I did, as I happened to be driving through on Superbowl Sunday in 2009. It was open (it's closed only Mondays and major holidays), but the museum closes at 5pm and I got there at 4:30 and admission is ``$7 for adults, $5 for USGA Members,'' etc. [I like that wording.] I explained my mission to the docents (``to learn about old golf clubs like mashies and niblicks'') and one of them explained to me that although they had some vintage clubs, there wasn't much in the way of explanatory material. He suggested that I look on the Internet if I wanted to find out about it. So there you are.
In addition, the Japanese language has politeness words and forms (keigo) that have no parallels in English. The absence of these makes some inexperienced Japanese speakers of English uncomfortable.
For both of the above reasons, or at least one, or maybe neither (hey, it's just hypothesis) it happens (this is not hypothesis) that inexperienced Japanese speakers of English tend to hold up their end of conversations in English with a lot of ``yes'' spoken in an ambiguous, half-questioning tone. You couldn't do half as well in Japanese, so you're a one to complain. Anyway, after a bit of this, what typically happens is that you end up asking a question, and you get back a ``yes'' that you think might be an answer or might be ``uh-huh.'' So you rephrase the question as a negative, and you still get a ``yes,'' but you're still not sure what's happened to the conversation. For those moments, you can use the following phrase. Commit it to memory, it's almost as useful as Watashi-wa nihongo-o dekimasen. (`I can't do Japanese.')
Ima `yes'-to iwareimashita-ga, sore-wa watashi-no shitsumon ni taitsudu kotae des ka? Soretomo tanaru aizüchi des ka?(This isn't even split up properly into words, but never mind -- just say it slowly and pronounce every syllable.) What this asks, and not very politely, is whether the ``yes'' you're getting is an answer or just back-channeling. In the next lesson, you will learn how to interpret the answer. Until then, at least you got all that frustration off your chest.
That Japanese yessing business can be a hard habit to break. One day I had dinner with my cousin Vicky at Steve's wife's Chinese restaurant in Santa Barbara, and our waiter replied to the first order with hai. So I ordered in Japanese. (You know, like watashi-wa `kung pao chicken'-o onegaishimasu. The first time I assimilated the object marker -o into onegai, and he didn't understand. Jeez, ya gotta make allowances for the California accent! Yeah, yeah -- you don't look so Japanese yourself.)
You know, people think the US is just a bilingual society (English and Spanish), but it's not. Yesterday I went to the info desk at the Mishawaka Barnes and Noble to ask after a title. I told the clerk I preferred the German rather than the translation, and he continued our conversation in accented but serviceable German.
The YES Competition for students is open to high school juniors and seniors who apply epidemiological principles to a specified area of health. Student awards will total up to $456,000 each year, including $50,000 college scholarships for two national winners. The deadline for the 2003-04 Student Competition is February 6, 2004.
The YES Competition for teachers invites high school teachers from a variety of disciplines to submit models for innovative classroom curricula that incorporate epidemiological methods. Each year as many as 18 teachers or teaching teams are selected as regional winners, and each receives a $5,000 award. Of these, up to six are selected annually as national winners, and each receives an additional $15,000 award. Winning curricula will be posted to the YES Web site and will be widely available to teachers. The deadline for the Teacher Competition is December 1, 2003
``Both the paper and on-line versions of YFCY include space for your campus to ask up to 30 optional questions of local relevance and allows institutions to indicate up to 190 various student subgroups [sic] on the survey.'' Can we say ``fragmented''? Sure we can! (But compare SRTE.)
Large numbers of Jews first began to speak Germanic around 1250, when Jews migrated from northern Italy and northern France into Lotharingia. Those immigrants spoke languages referred to as Judeo-French and Judeo-Italian, what they themselves referred to as Laaz. This is an extension of the meaning of the Hebrew La'az, which designated a foreign-language gloss, in Hebrew transliteration, of a Bible passage. The assumption behind this specialized term was evidently that the Jewish reader who had trouble understanding the Hebrew words of a passage would know the foreign language by sound and would of course also be able to read Hebrew. La'az came to be identified in medieval Europe with Latin, duh. Or with what people continued to think of as Latin, even after it had become Romance. Laaz is the source of a few Romance loans in Yiddish, just as Knaanic (a Slavic Jewish language) is the source of a few Slavic loans. Most of the Slavic loans were picked up directly by Yiddish-speakers living (as most eventually did) in Slavic-speaking regions. I imagine that most Romance cognates in Yiddish came in through Germanic.
Examples? Oy! Examples from Laaz, he wants! I don't have anything authoritative. In fact, I'm not sure a decent etymological dictionary of Yiddish exists; I certainly have none good or bad. However, one very common word I can think of is the Yiddish verb pronounced benchn, meaning `to bless' (usually referring to prayers recited after a meal). This is evidently cognate with German benedeien, which has the same meaning. Both are evidently derived from the Latin benedicere. The standard German word was benedien in Middle High German, borrowed from the Italian benedire (the German etymology is according to the Deutsches Wörterbuch of Hermann Paul). This looks sufficiently different that it looks like the Yiddish has a separate etymology. (It doesn't seem to have a Slavic cognate -- at least not Polish or Russian.)
More later. I only put in this entry because I wanted to point out what is obvious to any German speaker but less obvious to an Anglophone: the word Yiddish is simply the adjective meaning `Jewish,' transliterated from Yiddish or German into English. The German spelling is jüdisch (yih is probably as close as English phonemes can get to German jü-). (And in case it isn't obvious, English was originally just the adjective form of Angle, as in Angles and Saxons. The shift from A to E is an instance of umlaut.
Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters. The Hebrew letter aleph, a ``silent'' stop consonant, is the first letter of the majority of words -- like Institut -- that begin in a vowel. The name of the character is written alef in the standard transliteration from Yiddish. So the question arises, why is the alef at the end of the acronym pronounced and transliterated as O. I'm not sure yet. I imagine it has to do with the fact that the acronym is written without ``pointing'' (the small marks around a consonantal character that indicate vowels). Hebrew is usually written without pointing; this doesn't work very well with the Germanic vocabulary of Yiddish, but there is evidently still a tendency to omit them in some situations. In general, the alef character may be silent, (``shtumer alef''), may have an ``a'' sound (``pasekh alef'' -- an alef with a pasekk underneath), or may have one of the sounds transcribed as ``o'' (``komets alef''). I'm not sure why the final alef in YIVO is interpreted as an o.
The standard English translation of ``Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut'' has always been `Yiddish Scientific Institute,' but technically the translation `Jewish Scientific Institute' is equally accurate. YIVO was founded in 1925 as a social-science research institute concerned with Ashkenazi Jewish culture (which was mostly Yiddish-speaking, until it was annihilated in WWII), and as a teaching institute with a focus on the Yiddish language. Thus, the translation with ``Jewish'' is too general, and the translation with ``Yiddish'' is technically too narrow, but probably better if understood loosely. In any case, during WWII YIVO moved to New York City. The acronym was sealed, and the organization is now known as the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. (In fact, the acronym appears to be sealed in Yiddish as well. The institute's logo, or at least its homepage, gives the name in Yiddish under the English, and in Yiddish it says Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut - YIVO.)
Most people have a working vocabulary of at least a few thousand words. Once I helpfully pointed out to my college roommate that by contrast, he had a vocabulary of a few hundred clichés. ``Thanks a lot, bub.''
More on clichés at the franchise entry.
It's there, just keep reading!
I haven't been able to find an acronym expansion for YLE, but it's probably something like ``Your Spinach Eat.'' Hmmm... spinach is pinaatti. Okay, well, something like that anyway. They also use an English initialism FBC, which is pronounced ``finish brawdkasting kumpanee'' in American. YLE written alone is uniformly capitalized, so it appears to be an acronym (y is vocalic in Finnish, so this is pronounceable). YLE is inflected like an ordinary word, yielding forms like YLEssä and YLen (but note that the adverb ylen means `extremely'), but in Finnish this does not indicate that the word is not an acronym or initialism (see USA). On the other hand, YLE resembles words beginning in the root yle with senses related to `general.' (Yleensä means `generally,' yleisö `public,' and yleis is an adjective meaning `general.') YLE uses a compound yleisradio that can evidently be understood as `public radio.' So YLE is either a clever acronym or something else, such as the abstraction of a root for use as a name. It reminds me of those irritating ING advertisements. YLE isn't in any of the five Finnish-to-Something dictionaries I've had a chance to check; I should probably just ask someone who knows.
In 2004, over 90% of YLE's funding came from television fees. At a shade under 200 euros, Finland's annual television fee is typical for Europe.
Description of one magazine website: ``a magazine dedicated to teen age [sic, and I'm gonna be sic again] women, has a contemporary flair and a youthful sense of style.'' Get a second epinion.
In some foreign languages, the acronym has been taken over as a word, so there is no alternative acronym. That appears to be the case at least for Italian.
Two branches of the US government are in the business of calculating automobile gas mileage. The NHTSA computes CAFE. Completely independently, the EPA provides mileage estimates that appear on new-automobile stickers.
The United Federation of Planets will also use yeoman as a rank in its starships. Yeoman Rand will be cast as Captain Kirk's romantic interest, but then the script will diverge from original plans.
I'm sorry to say I didn't think of this acronym myself. The literal sense of the word yoga (i.e., as opposed to the transferred or metaphorical religious sense) is `path.' Yoga discussion in this glossary is still rather limited -- just the jaw-dropping and TM entries (no, not even that TM entry). Look, why don't you read about llamas instead?
(Of course, we also mention Yogi at the CX entry.)
We mention yogurt at entries for ICBY and TCBY, as well as FLF, iced cream (mmm-mmm! good entry!), KL and Medef. And now also TM.
There was an official European YoL in 2001. See EYL. I can't believe I've put in three entries just for this silly advertising gimmick.
``Please access your member benefits'' means `please click on the ad banners.'
In ``Give Me One Reason,'' Tracy Chapman sings
this youthful heart can love you ...followed by
but I'm too old to go chasing around, wasting my precious energy.
In the US, back when the phone company was a regulated monopoly (Ma Bell), the
yellow pages mostly referred to a volume produced by that monopoly. Everywhere
I've lived in the US since the 1980's, I've had at least two different,
competing yellow-pages volumes delivered to my home. In Britain, the ``Yellow
Pages'' trademark is so broad that
Sun Microsystems was forced to rename
its Unix software of that name to Network
Information Service. Come to think of it, I've been typing
nslookup
for so long, I don't remember when I first dealt with a
Unix that refused to recognize ``yp.''
Some readers are probably wondering Y I have placed this entry out of apparent alphabetical order. Y not?? I'm trying to take some of the pressure off C.html (Casual wear, Clothes make the man).
The word yrsel, `dizziness,' occurs in a Swedish economics joke on a Finnish page which I have the least trouble (and that's still enow) accessing from England.
I have never encountered the usage vertiginous nuclear state.
For more on spin, see english.
The name is pronounced wye-REEkuh, and was originally meant to be spelled Wyreka, but a clerk's error in Sacramento changed the name. The town of Yreka lies in the Shasta valley, and Mount Shasta comes into view soon after you head south out of town. Shasta is the name of a band of the Wintun tribe, and in Wintun, wai means `north' [see A. L. Kroeber, Handbook of the Indians of California (1925), p. 356]. It appears that Wyreka was the Shasta name for what we now call Mt. Shasta [Kroeber, p. 897], with the meaning `north mountain.'
Martin Gardner reported many years ago that there was a Yreka Bakery in Yreka (on West Miner St.). After the Yreka Bakery went out of business in the 1960's, a Yrella Gallery took its place. A new Yreka Bakery (a deli) has since opened on the same street.
The rock group Pep Squad recorded a CD called Yreka Bakery, distributed by the Tooth & Nail label. It's not like a vanity press or anything. They actually expect to make money doing this stuff. It's a big world.
There's a Noel Anna Leon in Los Angeles. I don't know for a fact that that was contrived by anyone other than the parents of a Noel Anna Leon. (I once sat on a plane to Oklahoma City next to a woman named Noël; she said everyone mispronounced it ``nole.'') Other, less exotic contrived-palindrome business names elsewhere include Lion Oil and Elite Tile. Across the US there are dozens of independent businesses named ``Nola's Salon'' and ``Nola Salon.''
Arizona's Anozira housing development and various of Canada's Adanac-named companies slip easily into palindromicity. There's an Atokad Park, known for its race track and fair grounds, in Dakota County, Nebraska, but that lends itself with dangerous ease to ``Atokad Parc.'' Adaven, Nevada is a ghost town. (If you want to learn a little more and risk having your computer hanged, by all means follow this link.)
Breaking news -- even before it happens, we're on top of the story!
There's an Aragain Products in Niagara Falls. If they start writing their name in palindrome form, we may be among the first to let you know!
Long-time information-seekers realize that I am loathe to obtrude my own personal opinions into this serious reference work, but a few, very rare occasions require a deviation from that strict policy. This is such an occasion.
<OPINION>
Taking the location name spelled backwards as your business or enterprise name is not classy or clever. It demonstrates profound lack of imagination. Change the name now, before it's too late!
</OPINION>
Reluctance is the inverse of inductance, and the unit of inductance is the henry, for Joseph Henry. (Joseph Henry and Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction independently and at about the same time.)
One henry is one joule per square ampere, or one ohm-second. The ohm is the unit of resistance, and the inverse of resistance is conductance. In like manner, the unit of conductance was the mho, so one yrneh was equal to one mho per second. Back then, any electrical engineer with taste had to gag several times a day. Eventually, the mho was renamed the siemens. There evidently wasn't a strongly felt need for a unit of reluctance, so yrneh didn't get a spiffy rebranding but was simply allowed to fade out of use. Anyway, they couldn't recruit the obvious name -- that of Faraday -- because that was taken for the unit of capacitance, the farad. (Yeah, someone -- Arthur Edwin Kennelly in 1936 -- did make the obvious proposal of the ``daraf'' as the unit of electrical elastance -- inverse capacitance. Mercifully, that caught on only as an oddity. It's evidence that there may be a God, though apparently One with a limited attention span.)
To add to your amusement, the inverse of permittivity is (or was -- I don't think anyone bothers any more) reluctivity. Permittivity is given in units of henry/meter, and reluctivity in yrneh-meter.
It is unlikely to be of any use to you, so I will mention the following. In the old system of cgs electromagnetic units, some of which are still in common and even standard use in magnet technology, a yrneh was equal to one millimicrogilbert per maxwell. Oh yeah, gotta love that.
Mission statement: ``YSAS will improve the health and well-being of young people affected by the use of alcohol and other drugs [decongestants?], through direct care, workforce development, and public policy advocacy.''
Shirley Temple Black was in Czechoslovakia in 1968, I'm not sure in what capacity (sometime in 1968 Nixon did appoint her as a US representative at the United Nations). Dubcek remembered her old movies. She was scheduled to dine with him on the day the tanks rolled in. The former prime minister and political prisoner eventually dined with the US ambassador to Czechoslovakia and former child actress in 1989.
An island in the Mozambique Channel, about one-half of the way from northern Madagascar to northern Mozambique. Administered by France and claimed by Comoros, it claims a 200 nautical-mile exclusive economic zone. In other words, they claim the entire sea between Comoros and Madagascar. Right.
Inoffensive data on Mayotte is found in the factbook entry from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook
Interestingly, the abbreviation used in political-geography hierarchical domain names is yk, as in <.yk.ca>.
Country information on what is identified as ``Serbia and Montenegro'' from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook
(I'm short on wye entries, so I waived the relevance requirement, okay? Lay off, already!) More Fussell content at the Tourism entry.
I remember that hunt, for before that time I had only killed a calf. I was thirteen years old and supposed to be a man, so I made up my mind I'd get a yearling. One of them went down a draw and I raced after him on my pony. My first shot did not seem to hurt him at all; but my pony kept right after him, and the second arrow went in half way. I think I hit his heart, for he began to wobble as he ran and blood came out of his nose. Hunters cried ``Yuhoo!'' once when they killed, but this was my first big bison, and I just kept on yelling ``Yuhoo!'' People must have thought I was killing a whole herd, the way I yelled. ...
If this weisenheimer analysis does not quench your thirst for knowledge about YWLS, see the interesting article ``The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools'' by Wendy Kaminer in the April 1998 Atlantic Monthly. Also, there was a report (meta-analysis of studies) and press release by the AAUW in March 1998, essentially saying that there was negligible evidence that sex segregation was of any use to HS girls. This from the organization that fanned the flames only a few years ago by issuing a report to the effect that girls were ill-served by coed schools.
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