D d

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in many other programming languages also lists many wonderful features of this language.

Defense in the sports sense is best regarded as a homograph of its etymological precursor (the noun with final accent). The verb to defense refers to all on-field or on-court actions comprising defense, and emphasizes the component of strategy. To defend is only a close synonym. It is generally possible to define what is being defended, and the person or object being defended can always be named as the direct object (in the active voice, or as the ``retained object'' of the passive voice). This makes sense in chess (``defending the king,'' ``the center squares are defended'') but leads to difficulty in some team sports. The earlier common use of defend in sports got around the difficulty by speaking of defending the end zone, or defending the middle yardage, but this was never quite right: the most important piece of substantive information to convey in the game context tended to be the offensive strategy or tactic against which defense was deployed. With the verb defend, this requires a prepositional phrase (against the run, the shotgun, the nickle, the four horsemen). The verb to defense streamlines communication by making the offense the default direct object of the verb. (Both verbs can be used intransitively.)

Defense is sometimes called Dee or Big Dee. There is no corresponding small dee, as there is in politics (vide D infra).

The word offense has undergone a sports-usage development parallel to defense, with stress shift and associated change in pronunciation of the initial vowel. Sports offense is not close in meaning to the ordinary sense of the word, but is instead simply the complement of defense. Offense is not called O because it might be confused with words O (introducing the vocative, as in ``O Romeo'') and Oh (the interjection). Offense is not often called Big O because Big O already means ``orgasm.''

North American football did not use separate defensive and offensive platoons until the forties, around the same time that the D party changed its name. I don't know when the American league adopted the designated hitter (DH) rule.

It was Grantland Rice who first dubbed the Notre Dame backfield of Knute Rockne ``the four horsemen.'' The phrase alludes to the four horsemen of the apocalypse mentioned in Revelations. Perhaps he was influenced by a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibánez that appeared in English with this title in 1918.

Coincidentally, or not, a (river) delta is the thing whose hieroglyphic or hieratic writing representation came to stand for the /d/ sound, and which thus gave rise to the letter. Delta remains the name of the corresponding letter in the Greek alphabet.

Personally, I prefer ``Dishwasher.''

The Democratic party evolved quickly in the early days of the republic, around Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and like-minded individuals who favored weak central government. (This led to ironies, but what political position doesn't?) It evolved from an unofficial government faction and from a number of independent local ``popular societies'' in the states, most active in 1790-1800. These societies called themselves ``Democratic Society [of Richmond, say],'' ``Democratic-Republican Society,'' and in one or two cases ``Republican Society.'' In public discussion, members typically described themselves as republicans. (Although after the early heady days of the French Revolution, the actual practice of French republicanism began to give the word republican a bad odor, and American ``Republicans'' of that era were at pains to distance themselves from it. According to this history offered by the DNC, it was the National Convention of 1844 that eventually simplified the Party's name to the Democratic Party. The Democrats' earliest opposition was the Federalists (John Adams, Alexander Hamilton), who never won an election after that of John Adams (see dynasty entry), and that party petered out to the point where, by 1820, US presidential elections were contested by different factions of the Democratic-Republican party.

The election of 1824, a four-way race among Democratic-Republicans, was decided in the House (each state delegation having one vote) when no candidate won a majority. Second-place finisher John Quincy Adams, who won 31% of the popular vote, became president when fourth-place finisher and House Speaker Henry Clay threw his support to him. That election polarized and eventually split the party along lines of loyalty or opposition to the candidate with a 41% popular-vote plurality in 1824, populist Andrew Jackson. In 1828, Andrew Jackson ran and won on the Democratic-Republican ticket against incumbent John Quincy Adams. Adams ran as a ``National Republican,'' member of a grouping that took in some of the former Federalists. The National Republican party evolved into the Whigs, which eventually went on to form a part (with Free-Soil and others) of the Republican party, whose first elected president was Abraham Lincoln.

Many Republican Party members use the name ``Democrat party,'' but I can find no evidence that Democrats ever used ``Democrat'' as the name or part of the name of their party. Some Republicans may regard this usage as a way of insisting that Republicans are democratic too (but they are also democrats too, so I don't see much force in the argument). Mostly, this usage is simply rude: nonstandard use of an attributive noun in place of an appropriate adjective is pejorative (e.g. ... I can't think of any examples I would be willing to put above my name).

In the book mentioned at this other entry (p. 20), Senator Sam Ervin is quoted thus:

I have been trying to reform Republicans all my life and have had virtually no success, but I would like for them to adopt good grammar and quit using the noun ``Democrat'' in lieu of the adjective ``Democratic.'' If I can teach the Republicans that much grammar, I will feel that my effort to educate them has not been entirely in vain.

Sam Ervin is also credited with this assessment (p. 23) of the mental health of voters:

The American people have a simplistic faith in law. Our great national delusion is based on the fact that we have a childlike faith that anything wrong in our civilization can be abolished by law and that all of life's problems lend themselves to legal solutions. It is doubtful whether many people who are in custody in institutions for the mentally ill in our land suffer under a greater delusion than that.

Pride of place in that book (pp. 1-5) is taken by some folksy antifeminism that will probably seem both hilarious and sage if you are a folksy antifeminist. Catharine A. MacKinnon is an unfolksy feminist, but there is common ground between her and Sam Ervin. A collection of her speeches [Feminism Unmodified : Discourses on Life and Law, Harvard U.P., 1987)] includes an edited version of her side of an ERA debate with Phyllis Schlafly. Much of it reads like a carefully crafted ad hominem attack on her opponent (in other words, like a typical debate), but it does include some substantive claims...
At page 26:

Now I want to consider with you the role of the law in the future of women's rights. The law alone cannot change our social condition. It can help. So far, it has helped remarkably little.

I am clear that everything women need will not be accomplished by the ERA, and not by law alone.

It must be conceded that MacKinnon had an ulterior motive for making modest claims: one of the greatest fears driving opposition to the ERA was that once it was constitutional law, the courts would interpret it ad libitum, with no end of mischief. The strongest precedent for this belief was civil rights juris(im)prudence that included affirmative action and busing.

In a perverse way, MacKinnon was right: although the ERA failed, the Supreme Court has interpreted other laws in an expansive way that obviates the need for an ERA.

The language used for the discussion of fibers is sloppy in practice, but if you simply regard ``fineness'' as a mass density and ignore any contradictory claims, you'll be okay. That's what I'll do moving forward (through this entry). [You also have to reinterpret some other quantities. For example, ``tensile strength,'' when stated in units such as gf/D, is really tensile strength divided by density. (Here gf is a common, alas, abbreviation of ``grams force.'')]

One denier is one gram per 9000 meters. Thus, for a mass density of 1 g/cc, a fineness described as 1 D represents an average cross-sectional area of (10/9) × 10^-6 cm², or a diameter of about 11.894 microns (yeah, wistful precision).

Oftentimes, the density will not be stated but both the fineness and diameter will. In that case, you can compute the mass density as f/a, where f and a are fineness and area, and D/μm² = (1000/9) g/cc.

Look, I know you can do this simple arithmetic, and maybe these are not your favorite units, but the only reason I'm writing this entry at all is that I'm trying to extract some information that's reported in these cussed units.

Even more convenient: density is (4/π) f/d, where d is diameter and 4D/πμm² = 141.47 g/cc.

Mass density is a useful thing to know, because it's a good clue to the identity of an unknown plastic. Here are some examples.

 Material    Density (g/cc)
Nylon-MXD6       1.22 
Nylon-6          1.13

Systems with six letter grades (A, B, C, D, E and F) existed at various times (like when I was in junior high school) and various places (Westfield, NJ, in this instance). My guess is that E disappeared because it might be mistaken for an abbreviation of Excellent (hope sprang eternal).

DeuterIDE is a ``mobile based programming text editor, compiler and IDE built for Android and Blackberry Playbook.'' It uses a D minus as its favicon. That's what I call a FAIL.

As you will no doubt have noticed, here on the grounds of the SBF, we're attempting to build links between all our entries. This ambitious task is a never-ending effort (because we procrastinate). But here, at last, is a connection between this entry and the Cameron BRIGHT subentry of the Nomenclature is destiny entry. Bright acted in a bio-sci-fi vampire superhero action movie called Ultraviolet. In the Entertainment Weekly issue of March 17, 2006, Scott Brown reviewed the movie in an item entitled ``Ultraviolet: Finding new ways to suck the blood from a sci-fi vampire flick (D-).''

``Another dee'' rhymes and sort of agrees metrically with ``surgery.'' (Limited rhyme like this is called ``masculine rhyme.'' There could be something to this terminology.)

For more very useful information, visit the FLAT TOPS ON THE WEB dictionary.

[But they're wrong about Wahl comb/guide attachments: all the comb sizes, #1 to #8, are in eighths of an inch (i.e., #5 puts the blade 5/8 in. high, etc.).]

Some men's hair potion years ago was advertised with the slogan, ``A little dab'll do ya.'' I can't remember which product. That's my favorite kind of ad campaign: you are entertained, and you blithely forget the product. That probably has something to do with DAB after all. (Mark refreshed my memory: it was Brylcreem. I'd like to hear their funky heavy metal sound. I had also misremembered the ad catch-phrase. But those were my big-hair days, a dab wouldn't've done me, and I wouldn't've wanted what it would've done me.)

Just one other comment: this work is all apparently being done in VHF and UHF bands, which means there is no reflection from the ionosphere, and consequently only line-of-sight transmission. This makes terrain a problem, which is addressed with ``gap-filler'' transmitters, even in a rather flat country like Holland. That's terrestrial DAB (TDAB). The alternative is satellite-based DAB (SDAB).

DAC's are used mostly in spectroscopic studies: the diamond has a large band gap, so spectroscopy can be done deep into the UV. Electronic transport studies, on the other hand, are rare or unknown, because of the difficulty in putting leads through the gasket.

Be
KIND to our WEB-footed FRIENDS / for a DUCK may be SOMEbody's MOTH-ER.

[Underground lyrics to ``Stars and Stripes Forever'' -- ``Three cheers for the red, white and blue ....'' The pause after FRIENDS functions as a strong caesura.]

Well, all right, the example above is what is called ``defective.'' That's not as bad as it sounds -- good poetry plays off deviations from metric purity. Still, it's probably not the best way to learn. Here's an attractive one-webpage introduction to dactylic hexameter. While there, you can hear the first line of Virgil's Aeneid croaked to the tune of the first two measures of ``Stars and Stripes Forever.''

#define A assist #define D direct

and then (with a custom uc definition) code

the primary Aant to the uc(Aant) uc(Dor) in providing leadership Dion to the Engineering uc(Dorate);

// This also improves readability.

In Highcastle (p. 5; bibl. details at the inanimate entry), Stanislaw Lem tells this story from his childhood:

... Craning my neck constantly was too tiring, so mainly I watched what passed my father at knee level. One time I noticed that he was not wearing his usual shoes with laces, but something entirely different, smooth shoes with no laces. His spats, which he always wore, were gone, too. Surprised, I asked, ``Where did you get those funny shoes?'' And a voice came down from above, ``What rudeness!'' It wasn't my father at all, but a complete stranger, to whom I had attached myself, I don't know how. My father was walking a dozen steps behind. I was terrified. This must have been an unusually unpleasant experience, for me to remember it so well.

I imagine this sort of thing must happen a lot, particularly to men. Men's clothing doesn't exhibit much variation at knee level. Many times, standing in a store aisle, I've felt the hand of a small stranger grab a piece of my pants leg.

Off Grape Road there's a guitar store called Hoosierdad's. Okay, we all recognize that ``Hoosier dad'' (literal meaning: Indiana father) can be worked into a tolerable joke (pun on ``who's yer dad''). But puns don't really age so well. On the up side, this is the store where I first saw a new semi-hollow Danelectric, after that model was ``reissued.''

1. The first artificer or inventor, a sculptor of Greek mythology. Imprisoned on the island of King Minos, he made wings so he and his son Icarus could escape. Icky didn't make it: he flew too high and melted down. But you knew that. Mr. D also killed a nephew who was apprenticed to him (tricked him into diving off a cliff) out of jealousy of the boy's inventiveness. (The boy invented the comb, or saw, or the compass [the drafting tool] or whatever. There are multiple versions of all the stories -- like Hollywood remakes. But I can't recall anyone ever getting credit for inventing the bag.) If I were a young male relative of Daedalus, I think I would have a very rational fear of heights. Maybe they should have called him Deadalus.
2. The title of a journal published by the AAAS, but you knew that too.
3. The family name of the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a Bildungsroman that James Joyce (1882-1941) published when he was a little past 30. Stephen Dedalus (oh yeah, it's a different spelling) is the artist, Simon is his dad. On June 16, 1904, Stephen finds a surrogate father figure in Leopold Bloom, but that's another story (Ulysses, published in 1922). Of course, you knew all that as well.

A young man wants to escape ... he wants answers to all those unanswerable questions (42) ... he tries wings. Consider Rasselas, a 1759 novel by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) and name of the novel's principal character. (Subtitle: The Prince of Abissinia.) The novel is a Bildungsroman after the fashion of Voltaire's Candide.

Rasselas is the fourth son of the king of what we now spell Abyssinia and call Ethiopia. He's twenty-six years old and dissatisfied with life in Happy Valley, where he and the other royal children are imprisoned but live in material luxury. (When this glossary has a Pleasant Valley entry, you'll be the first to know, I promise.) Rasselas escapes and seeks the secret of happiness. Where Candide eventually concludes that one must become a gardener, Rasselas eventually realizes that one ... but I'm already getting ahead of myself.

Look, this is rough, okay? I'm just putting this stuff in as context for a little excerpt. (Quotation style, spelling, etc., as in the original. Paragraph breaks are also as in the original, with the following exception: square-bracketed remarks have been interpolated within the body of some of the paragraphs, and separated with additional paragraph breaks. This has been done to confuse and irritate you personally. Also, I've reduced the font size of one slower-moving bit, so it'll be harder to read and you'll have to spend extra time reading it.)

Among the artists that had been allured into the happy valley, to labour for the accommodation and pleasure of its inhabitants, was a man eminent for his knowledge of the mechanick powers, who had contrived many engines both of use and recreation. By a wheel, which the stream turned, he

forced the water into a tower, whence it was distributed to all the apartments of the palace. He erected a pavillion in the garden, around which he kept the air always cool by artificial showers. One of the groves, appropriated to the ladies, was ventilated by fans, to which the rivulet that run through it gave a constant motion; and instruments of soft musick were placed at proper distances, of which some played by the impulse of the wind, and some by the power of the stream.

This artist was sometimes visited by Rasselas, who was pleased with every kind of knowledge, imagining that the time would come when all his acquisitions should be of use to him in the open world.

He came one day to amuse himself in his usual manner, and found the master busy in building a sailing chariot: he saw that the design was practicable upon a level surface, and with expressions of great esteem solicited its completion. The workman was pleased to find himself so much regarded by the prince, and resolved to gain yet higher honours. "Sir, said he, you have seen but a small part of what the mechanick sciences can perform. I have been long of opinion, that, instead of the tardy conveyance of ships and chariots, man might use the swifter migration of wings; that the fields of air are open to knowledge, and that only ignorance and idleness need crawl upon the ground."

This hint rekindled the prince's desire of passing the mountains;

and having seen what the mechanist had already performed, he was willing to fancy that he could do more; yet resolved to enquire further before he suffered hope to afflict him by disappointment. "I am afraid, said he to the artist, that your imagination prevails over your skill, and that you now tell me rather what you wish than what you know. Every animal has his element assigned him; the birds have the air, and man and beasts the earth." "So, replied the mechanist, fishes have the water, in which yet beasts can swim by nature, and men by art. He that can swim needs not despair to fly: to swim is to fly in a grosser fluid, and to fly is to swim in a subtler. We are only to proportion our power of resistance to the different density of the matter through which we are to pass. You will be necessarily upborn by the air, if you can renew any impulse upon it, faster than the air can recede from the pressure."

"But the exercise of swiming, said the prince, is very laborious; the strongest limbs are soon wearied; I am afraid the act of flying will be yet more violent, and wings will be of no great use,

unless we can fly further than we can swim."

"The labour of rising from the ground, said the artist, will be great, as we see it in the heavier domestick fowls; but, as we mount higher, the earth's attraction, and the body's gravity, will be gradually diminished, till we shall arrive at a region where the man will float in the air without any tendency to fall: no care will then be necessary, but to move forwards, which the gentlest impulse will effect.

You, Sir, whose curiosity is so extensive, will easily conceive with what pleasure a philosopher, furnished with wings, and hovering in the sky, would see the earth, and all its inhabitants, rolling beneath him, and presenting to him successively, by its diurnal motion, all the countries within the same parallel. How must it amuse the pendent spectator to see the moving scene of land and ocean, cities and desarts!

To survey with equal security the marts of trade, and the fields of battle; mountains infested by barbarians, and fruitful regions gladdened by plenty, and lulled by peace! How easily shall we then trace the Nile through all his passage; pass over to distant regions, and examine the face of nature from one extremity of the earth to the other!"

"All this, said the prince, is much to be desired, but I am afraid that no man will be able to breathe in these regions of speculation and tranquility. I have been told, that respiration is difficult upon lofty mountains, yet from these precipices, though so high as to produce great tenuity of the air, it is very easy to fall: and I suspect, that from any height, where life can be supported, there may be danger of too quick descent."

"Nothing, replied the artist, will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.

If you will favour my project I will try the first flight at my own hazard. I have considered the structure of all volant animals, and find the folding continuity of the bat's wings most easily accommodated to the human form. Upon this model I shall begin my task to morrow, and in a year expect to tower into the air beyond the malice or pursuit of man. But I will work only on this condition, that the art shall not be divulged, and that you shall not require me to make wings for any but ourselves."

"Why, said Rasselas, should you envy others so great an advantage? All skill ought to be exerted for universal good; every man has owed much to others, and ought to repay the kindness that he has received."

"If men were all virtuous, returned the artist, I should with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good, if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky? Against an army sailing through the clouds neither walls, nor mountains, nor seas, could afford any security. A flight of northern savages might hover in the wind, and light at once with irresistible violence upon the capital of a fruitful region that was rolling under them. Even this valley, the retreat of princes, the abode of happiness, might be violated by the sudden descent of some of the naked nations that swarm on the coast of the southern sea."

The prince promised secrecy, and waited for the performance, not wholly hopeless of success. He visited the work from time to time, observed its progress, and remarked the ingenious contrivances to facilitate motion, and unite levity with strength. The artist was every day more certain that he should leave vultures and eagles behind him, and the contagion of his confidence seized upon the prince.

In a year the wings were finished, and, on a morning appointed, the maker appeared furnished for flight on a little promontory: he waved his pinions a while to gather air, then leaped from his stand, and in an instant dropped into the lake. His wings, which were of no use in the air, sustained him in the water, and the prince drew him to land, half dead with terrour and vexation.

Warning, spoilers ahead.

...

The princess thought, that of all sublunary things, knowledge was the best: She desired first to learn all sciences, and then purposed to found a college of learned women, in which she would preside, that, by conversing with the old, and educating the young, she might divide her time between the acquisition and communication of wisdom, and raise up for the next age models of prudence, and patterns of piety.

The prince desired a little kingdom, in which he might administer justice in his own person, and see all the parts of government with his own eyes; but he could never fix the limits of his dominion, and was always adding to the number of his subjects.

...

Oh, brother.

During the German occupation of Greece, 1941-1944, various atrocities were committed by ordinary troops of the occupation forces, including the decimation of various villages in retaliation for partisan attacks. Sometimes whole villages were leveled, sometimes all adult males were murdered, etc. In the village of Distomo in Boeotia in June 1944, 214 civilian inhabitants, including women and children, were murdered. Since WWII there have been a number of conventions and treaties to settle German reparations for wartime murders, thefts, enslavement, etc. One that eventually covered the massacre at Distomo delayed settlement until the (then apparently distant) time when Germany was reunited. (That's according to one interpretation of the relevant treaties; the German government has a different interpretation, and believes that the Distomo claims were ettled by another, omnibus agreement.)

Germany was reunited the year after the Berlin Wall fell, in September 1990. About 300 relatives of the Distomo massacre victims subsequently brought a civil suit against the Federal Republic for punitive damages. The Greek government did not participate in the action, and was evidently chagrined about its effect on relations with the most powerful fellow member of the EU. The suit in the German court was dismissed, and the plaintiffs brought their grievance to a Greek trial court, which found for them in 1997. The decision was appealed, but upheld by Greece's Supreme Court in April 2000.

The German government refused to accept the verdict of the Greek courts, and plaintiffs sought seizure of German government assets within the jurisdiction of the court, in order to pay the penalty assessed (about $30 million). Three German assets in Athens were targeted: the German high school, the DAI building, and Goethe Haus. The latter two buildings were impounded in September 2001, just before I wrote this entry, to be auctioned later in the month. At the time, I wrote that I'd try to remember to get back to this entry after September 19, when there would be new developments. I guess I must have been distracted by other news. Anyway, before the auction could take place it was ruled that an auction of foreign assets would require Foreign Ministry approval, which the FM did not give and apparently could not be compelled to give. The dispute has dragged on in subsequent years, mostly in Greek courts, with new suits continuing to be filed by survivors from other villages where atrocities were committed.

There's a DAI in Rome as well: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Rom - Istituto Archeologico Germanico Roma.

After Argentina gained its independence from Spain in 1810, President Bernardino Rivadavia abolished the Inquisition. You know, under previous Argentine constitutions, the president had to be Roman Catholic (see article 74 of the 1860 constitution). In the constitution of 1994 that requirement was abolished, although article 2 still reads ``El Gobierno federal sostiene el culto católico apostólico romano.''

After WWII, Argentina had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. The Jewish population is still (in 2004) estimated at a quarter million. The population of Argentina is about 38 million, of whom about 14 million live in the province of Buenos Aires, where most of Jewish population is concentrated.

Ironically, after WWII Argentina was also a popular destination of Nazis fleeing justice. (Juan Perón, variously dictator and elected president from 1946 to 1955, was, well, less of a fascist than Hitler. Argentine sympathy in WWII lay with the Axis. This was attributed in large part to loyalty of Italian immigrants to their country of origin, and there was indeed a change in sympathies when Italy surrendered and became a partly German-occupied battleground.)

At one point during the war, my father worked as a radioman on a merchant ship that was going between the port of Buenos Aires and South Africa. Instead of heading directly out into the Atlantic after leaving the Plata, they hugged the coast northward for a while. The motive was to not leave territorial waters too close to where Axis-sympathizing ham radio operators might report their departure to German naval vessels.

After Adolf Eichmann was abducted by the Israeli Mossad in 1960, it was revealed that he had lived in Argentina under the false name of Ricardo Klement. Ricardo Klenent had at one time been a laborer in a factory where my father was a manager. (That had little directly to do with my family's decision to emigrate to the US, which we did early in 1963).

``Sure! The Star!'' Shuster exclaims, wheezing slightly. ``Not the Planet. That came later.

``I still remember drawing one of the earliest panels that showed the newspaper building. We needed a name, and I spontaneously remembered the Toronto Star. So that's the way I lettered it. I decided to do it that way on the spur of the moment, because The Star was such a great influence on my life.''

Technically, what he remembered in the 1930's was the Daily Star, which became the Toronto Star in the 1960's. Shuster's dad used to read him the comics in the Star when he was a little boy, and at age 9 Joe sold the Star on the streets of downtown Toronto. The family moved to Cleveland when he was 10. (No, they didn't leave him behind.) The Superman strip debuted in 1938. At one point (at least in Action Comics #2) the newspaper was called the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Until that point, in other words, they were using the real name of a real newspaper. The strip was quickly in national syndication, and in 1940 some editor in New York demanded a name change from Star, and that's when it became The Daily Planet. (In the books, the name was used from Action Comics #4 onwards.)

But remember the take-home: Dalmatians are a dog breed that takes its name from Dalmatia (and not from some bogus Latin dalmatio, -ionis). Thank you. Get it right or I'm going to have to start shooting down a hundred and one movie marquees.

[A similar instance is ``dimension.'' This is obviously a misspelling of Dementian -- a resident of Dementia, someone who is not all at that particular there, someone who listened to the Doctor Demento Show. Dementites, on the other hand, I'm not sure I can believe. Of course, what's really hard to believe is that the show is still on the air (and on satellite radio, etc.). By now Demento must be a geriatric pediatrician.]

Yeah, yeah, Dalmatians are not Croatians in every ethnic sense of the word. Dalmatians are Croatians the same way Texans are Americans -- legally the same nationality, but with an identifiable regional identity. I've got before me a book by Robert St. John. It's about Yugoslavia shortly after WWII, and it makes the break-up of Yugoslavia seem less surprising, if you were surprised. Then again, if you were surprised then lack of information might not be your problem. The book's chapters are collected in parts, many of them entitled ``These Are the Foobarians'' or ``This Is Metavariable City'' or somesuch. Part Four is entitled ``These Are the Dalmatians,'' and Part Six is ``These Are the Croatians.'' You're probably wondering what happened in between. ``These Are the Montenegrins.'' You may be thinking that the book is oddly organized. Part Thirteen is ``This Is Belgrade Again.''

Okay, I admit it: the book is not before me -- not exactly. It's off to the left. The mouse is on the right, etc. The book is The Silent People Speak, (NY: Doubleday, 1947). The real reason I mention it is the intriguing fact that the copyright page mentions

The lines from ``Thanks'' by Arthur Johnston & Sam Coslow are copyrighted, 1933, by Famous Music Corporation.

The reason it's intriguing is...

[I'll give you a minute to guess.]

Okay, time's up!

It's intriguing because of the coincidence of Silent and Johnston. William Johnston wrote a book entitled Silent Music: The Science of Meditation (New York: Harper & Rowe, Publ., 1974 [nudge]). Amazing, huh?

In principle, damita, as a regularly formed diminutive of dama, might be translated `little lady.' But the English expression ``little lady'' is an idiom; it's meaning involves conventions beyond those of its constituent words. In Spanish, damita is a rare, slightly stiff way to say `young lady,' and is really just un anglicismo.

In April 2004, a couple of months after el escándalo of the SB halftime-show ``wardrobe malfunction,'' Janet Jackson released a new album entitled ``Damita Jo.'' Perhaps this was meant to suggest something like ``little ol' me,'' since the English pronunciation of Jo approximates the pronunciation of Spanish yo (`I') in some places (Argentina and Puerto Rico, for example, and of course a few scattered parts of Andalucia). The title is either a lot cleverer than that, or stupid. I guess the latter, so I'm happy to report that sales have been disappointing.

I've now been informed that ``Damita Jo'' is what comes between ``Janet'' and ``Jackson'' in the entertainer's full name. How could I have been so ignorant!? She also had an album entitled ``janet. [sic]'' (``[sic]'' was not part of the title, just an indication to you, the sophisticated reader, that the word was written all lower-case and that the period was part of the title). Before that there was an album entitled ``Janet Jackson.'' These album titles show a systematic progression over time: each successive title presumes a greater familiarity with the artist, or imposes a greater difficulty of guessing the author from the title. Up next: the pet names her boyfriends gave to her body parts. Normally this would be a limited release.

And if you think three (so far) is the record for most self-titled albums, you don't know Diddley.

Countability is a grammatical distinction, and is to some degree arbitrary. For example, one normally counts ``facts'' (i.e., fact is ``a count noun'' or ``countable''), but not ``informations.''

I haven't finished writing this entry, but I have to get to work. Think about waters, monies, ``finding fact [or law]'' and ``statement of fact.''

``DAMAS is essentially an independent assessment according to the DAMAS Management System Specification, a set of criteria that ensure consistent quality and high standards. The assessment is carried out by an external Certification Body which will check that each member of [a dental laboratory's] staff complies with process checks throughout the manufacturing procedure. All DAMAS laboratories institute a quality policy, undertaking management reviews and internal audits to verify that the systems in place are working correctly.''

It's also the Spanish name of the board game called checkers in the US and draughts in the UK. Jugar a las damas means to `play checkers.' It looks like it could mean `play to the ladies,' but it doesn't work that way, because the particle to in ``play to'' isn't exactly the preposition to that might be translated as a. A pun is possible if jugar is part of the object: ver jugar a las damas means `to see the ladies play.'

Let this be a lesson to you: when you're playing Scrabble and the tiles on your rack suggest a proper noun, like Abbot, Al, Alan, Alaska, Alexander,^* Alley, Ally, Amber, Ampere, Ana, Angstrom, Anna, Apollo, Art, Bach, Barlow, Barb, Belle, Berlin, Bertha, Beth, Bill, Billie, Billy, Bob, Bozo, Brad, Brandy, Brasil, Brazil, Brent, Buck, Bud, Buddy, Bum (as in Oail Andrew ``Bum'' Phillips), Bush, Cab, Caesar, Cain, Candy, Cap, Carl, Carol, Carter, Carver, Charley or Charlie, Chad, Chastity, Chile, China, Chuck, Cicero (but not Tully), Clement, Colorado, Conner (but not Connor), Cooper, Coulomb, Crocket, Daisy, Dale, Dalton, Daphne, Davy, Dawn, Dean, Dick, Dolly, Don, Donna, Dot, Drew, Duke, Ed,^* Einstein, Erica, Fanny, Faraday, Fawn, Fermi, Flora, Ford, Frank, Fritz, Fuji, Garret, Gauss, Gene, Ginger, Gore, Grace, Grant, Gray, Grey, Guernsey, Guinea, Hamlet, Harry, Hector, Henry, Herb, Homer, Jade, Jake, Jane, Japan, Jean, Jenny, Jeroboam, Jerry, Jersey, Jess, Jesse, Jill, Jimmie,^* Jimmy, Jo, Job, Joe, Johannes, John, Johnnie, Johnny, Joey, Jones, Jordan, Joseph, Joule, Joy, Judas, Ken, Kid, Kip, Laurel, Lear, Lewis, Liana, Lily, Louis, Mac, Macadam, Madeleine,^* Madonna, Mae, Magdalen, Magdalene,^* Magenta, Marc, Marcel, Marge, Maria, Mark, Mars, Martin, Maryjane, Matt, Mavis, Mel, Mercury, Merl, Merlin, Mollie, Molly, Morris, Mort, Myrtle, Nancy, Nelson, Nestor, Newton, Nick, Nimrod, Nubia, Oersted, Ohm, Ole, Oxford, Paddy, Pam, Panama, Pascal, Pat, Patty, Pearl, Peg, Peer, Peter, Pierce, Polo (not Marco, though), Pops, Puck, Ralph, Red, Rex, Rich, Rick, Rip, Rob, Rock, Rod, Roger, Rose, Ruth, Sally, Saul, Schiller, Shawn, Sheila, Sherry, Siemens, Smith, Smokey, Smoky, Snoopy, Sol, Solon, Sonny, Spears, Spike, Stentor, Stew (sorry, not Stu), Sue, Sunny, Sweeny, Ted, Terry, Texas, Tod, Tom, Tommy, Tony, Trey, Tucker, Turkey, Tweed, Venus,^* Victor, Victoria, Violet, Wade, Wales, Wally, Warren, Watt, Weber, Will, Willy, Wilt, Wolf, or Woody, don't put it out of mind -- it might be a playable word also.

The names suggested above are all accepted by the two major tournament dictionaries, TWL and SOWPODS. I don't have my own copy of these and am relying on the online versions at <Scrabulous.com> (and earlier at at <Bingobinge.com>). Consequently, I can't give complete version information respecting TWL and SOWPODS. Specifically, I started entering names in this entry when the TWL version was TWL98, and during 2006 the version was updated to TWL2006. I haven't checked, but I assume that none of those I found in TWL98 was removed in TWL2006. (If there's any exception, it might be Moe, which is not in TWL2006 but which I thought was in TWL 98.)

^* All of the names above were also in the OSPD3, with the exception of those marked with an asterisk. Of those exceptions, Ed and Jimmie were added in the OSPD4. (If they were in the OSPD3, I assume they were in the OSPD4 also and haven't checked.)

Generally, SOWPODS is more inclusive. It accepts the following names not in TWL2006 or any OSPD. Abram, Albert, Alison, Ann, Barton, Canada, Chas, Darcy, Dan, Dino, Dob, Gunter, James, Jeff, Judy, Kant, Lana, Lew, Luke (Matthew is the odd gospel out, though Matt is in everywhere), Mary, Meg, Minnie, Moe, Moses, Niger, Norman, Oliver, Patrick, Paul, Poisson, Rubin, Russia, Sean, Steven (sorry, Steve and Stephen), Sweeney, Travis, Tyler, Willie, Yale, and York.

Don't overlook homophones like fillip, or adjectives based on proper nouns, like Chinese (SOWPODS only), Danish, Dutch, Egyptian, Fleming (SOWPODS only), Flemish, French, Gaussian (SOWPODS only), German, Germanic, Greek, Gypsy, Hessian, Italianate, Jew, Mongol, Mongoloid, Platonic, Scot, Scotch, Scotia, Sorb, Swede, Swiss, Turk, and Welsh (and apparent ones like argentine, colombine, pole, and polish, or even reb, sabra, and yank).

1789 is not one of them, officially. [The French Revolution had many fathers. This is odd, since failure is an orphan. I guess the mother died.]

In my high school we had some traditional gangs that got drunk and rode motorcycles (in that order, if there were any sober intervals). By ``traditional'' I mean they didn't use any modern intoxicants. In that way I suppose they were purists, sort of like civil-war reenactors. Nowadays they're responsible citizens with well-paying Wall Street jobs that don't require them to know the stuff they didn't learn in high school. When they were young hoodlums, though, the local police tried to make them go straight by having them join the junior police. I guess that would be sort of like police acolytes or novices, I don't know. They got kicked off for being drunk on duty. Even though they weren't that interested in being junior cops, they resented the injustice that the junior police who were stoned on pot weren't kicked off.

When I was in elementary school, Lieutenant Catalon would come around to our school every semester or so and scold us about traffic safety, teaching us to ride legally on the right side of the road so we couldn't see who was going to hit us. Later on I learned that many years before, he and a couple of other officers got caught doing something bad-coppish, or maybe they just came under strong suspicion, and they ended up on permanent traffic duty with no chance of promotion.

How many people go into police work so they can spend their days talking to fifth-graders? The DARE workbook is distributed to 26 million schoolchildren in 75% of US schools according to an April 16, 2001 article in The Courier News. (That was The Plainfield Courier in my day.) That doesn't make any sense. Not about what happened to the paper after it joined the ``Gannett family'' -- I mean about the 26 million schoolchildren. That's like 10% of the US population. If the population is constant and most people live to about the same old age of 65, then only 1/65 of the population is in fifth grade each year. If you count fifth graders in only 75% of schools, no matter which 75% you choose it's probably under 1%. Granted the population is growing, still, 26 million? That's the trouble with public-issue statistics: they're meant to be taken in emotionally, not understood. I'll get back to this after I visit an almanac.

Vide WIMP and MACHO.

In college I had a next-door-neighbor named Daras. She was studying to be a pharmacist, but she never brought us any free samples of recreational chemistry. I guess you didn't really need to know that. I apologize for wasting valuable time that you could be spending on a talk.politics.extreme.* newsgroup.

In 1959 Dartmouth College bought an LGP-30. Two researchers there, John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, used it to develop a programming language appropriate for the average undergraduate. FORTRAN and full-strength ALGOL apparently did not qualify.

Kemeny and Kurtz made a number of tries, with names such as these:

• ALGOL 30,
• DARSIMCO (you peeked -- I know you did!),
• DART,
• DOPE, and
• SCALP.

I figured you might enjoy trying to guess what these stood for. The expansions are at the links. (Who am I kidding? I only set it up this way to inflate my headword count. Okay, okay: ``Whom am I kidding, question mark.'' That's really what I said, you just didn't listen carefully. What a bunch of captious glossary readers!)

None of these languages became a widespread success or frankly even a narrowspread success, but they provided excellent preparation for the main event: BASIC.

``As part of the U.S. National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program (NTHMP), the Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) Project is an ongoing effort to maintain and improve the capability for the early detection and real-time reporting of tsunamis in the open ocean. Developed by NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) and operated by NOAA's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC), DART is essential to fulfilling NOAA's national responsibility for tsunami hazard mitigation and warnings.

Traditionally, a military unit's disaster assistance role is making it happen for the enemy.

Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back--that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.

The word dast certainly raises the register of his speech; if one doesn't feel that takes it too much over the top, that it's a bit out of Charley's character, then one may say that it works. The word sounds like an archaism, but its a neologism. There doesn't seem to be any evidence of the word's ever having been used before Miller put it in his play. It doesn't even look like third-person singular form, since it's missing the final ess; it looks like a thou conjugation. I suppose one could take it as a subjunctive, which is appropriate here, but given the third-person uses of ``don't,'' that might be over-reading.

Death of a Salesman is standard high-school reading in the US, and ``dast blame'' has come into widespread use. The champion creator of faux anachronisms must be Thomas Hardy, many of whose neologisms have come to be recorded in dictionaries solely on the evidence of his novels, but I'm not aware of any that came into common use as a result.

In many Indo-European and other languages, the dative case is the grammatical category of nouns denoting the indirect object of a verb's action, or the more remote of different objects. The indirect object is typically glossed as the object to or for which the action of the verb is performed. (For example, if I write you an entry, I write the entry for you. So the entry is the direct object of my writing, and you are the possibly unwilling indirect object.)

There are never enough different cases, so the dative case is usually used in a variety of ways. German, for example, has only four cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative), and the objects of prepositions and postpositions are in either the accusative or dative case. The prepositions aus, bei, mit, nach, von, zu, seit all take the dative, as do the postpositions nach and weder. Many prepositions take either the accusative or dative depending on whether the sense is, roughly, ablative or locative, respectively. A characteristic example: ins Kino, using the accusative (standard contraction of in das Kino) means `to [or into] the movie theater'; im Kino, using the dative (standard contraction of in dem Kino) means `at [or inside] the movie theater.' As the example suggests, case distinctions are usually not apparent from noun morphology, but may often be inferred from an article or adjective.

	H N: + BCl  -->  H NBCl   .
         3        3       3    3

(The colon represents a lone pair. In this case it occupies an sp³ orbital of nitrogen.)

``Dative bond'' seems to be one of those terms left over from the time when scientists were burdened with liberal education, grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and similar rot. Probably the various forms of ``coordinate bond'' are collectively more common. To confirm this, I just (on data updated to October 22, 2005) did simple searches on SCI (1975-2005) for a few alternative terms. (The total number of documents searched was 23,562,336; I'm glad I didn't have to do this by hand.)

dative bond             184     dative bond*            329
co-ordinate bond          5     co-ordinate bond*         7
coordinate bond         100     coordinate bond*        243
co*rdinate bond         100     co*rdinate bond*        243

Ummm, yes, now that you mention it -- it does seems that the last two lines returned the same hits. So it seems that ``dative bond'' (speaking merely in quantitative terms, you understand) has been the more common term, over the past 30 years. Hmmm. But probably it's going out of use. Therefore, I have computed the ratio h(dative bond)/(h(co*rdinate bond) + h(co-ordinate bond)), where h(phrase) is the number of hits for a search on ``phrase'' in a particular period. Dividing the 30 complete years of data into three decades, one finds:

1975-1984       0.17
1985-1994       1.45
1995-2004       1.36

There, see? It peaked. (Only the last digit in each line is not significant, by the standard rules.) I also found no accusative, ablative, allative, genitive, inessive, instructive, locative, nominative, partitive, or vocative bond. I was surprised to find just a smattering of ``associative bond'' and similar terms, used in a few specialized senses, usually defined ad hoc. And I did encounter the phrase ``The power and the wide applicability of Fourier-transform spectroscopy unite these fields with a common mathematical and instrumental bond.''

Some languages have a terminal case. Basque, for one. In Basque, cases are indicated by suffixes. (The suffix goes on the noun if there's no adjective. Adjectives follow the noun, and the ending goes on the last adjective.) The precise form of the suffix depends on a kind of gender: i.e., whether the noun is animate or inanimate. (There is also a male-female distinction in second-person familiar verb forms.) Another matter determining the suffix form is whether or not a specific entity is meant (i.e., definite declension or indefinite declension). Furthermore, in the definite declension the suffix indicates number (though the form of a suffix may depend on whether the verb is transitive). In the indefinite declension, there is no distinction between singular and plural nouns or adjectives. Not having to choose a grammatical number when one speaks in generalities could be a convenient thing in science. (Incidentally, I got a lot of SCI hits on ``terminal bond*'' -- with the meanings you'd expect.) But Basque is not a major world language of science, unless you count the science of not getting your head knocked off in jai alai. Anyway, just to keep things complicated on the indefinite side (in the absence of grammatical number), the indefinite-declension suffixes depend on whether the root noun ends in a consonant or not. (Interestingly, given names are declined like indefinite nouns.) Also, you can use the separate indefinite article bat following the noun, and this, alas, has plural forms (batzu, batzuk). (In jai alai, one doesn't use a bat but a wicker basket called a cesta. It's strapped to the wrist and it's not big enough to cover your head, so you have to use it to catch and launch the projectile.)

That should be enough general context, so finally we come to the terminal case, which Basque indicates with suffixes that end in -aino. Most nouns in Basque have natural gender, so you will not be surprised to learn that the word etxe, for `house,' has inanimate gender. (I'd be curious to know about haunted houses.) With the (definite, inanimate, singular) terminal ending -raino, this becomes etxeraino, meaning `up to the house' or `as far as the house.' The plural etxeetaraino means `up to the houses' or `as far as the houses.' Comparing the singular and plural forms just given, it is interesting to note that eta is a Basque word for `and.' (The other standard word is ta, and in French they use et. I have no idea how significant any of this is.) A lot of the indefinite inanimate plural suffixes are constructed by slapping an -eta- on the front of the corresponding singular form. (I'm trying to save you some memorization here!) Thus (by the way, I assume you realize that x is pronounced like English sh or French ch, and tx like English and Spanish ch), etxeruntz is `toward the house' and etxeetaruntz is `toward the houses.' You can guess the singular forms that correspond to the ablative form etxeetatik (`from the houses'), allative etxeetara (`to the houses'), and locative etxeetako (`of the houses').

``Locative'' in Basque indicates what is called the nonpersonal possessive, something like `corresponding to,' and there is no locative form for animate nouns. The semantic range of this case may be better understood by considering that there is also a genitive case and an inessive case (the case name is from the Latin inesse, `to be in [or at].' Now that we all understand what the locative case means, we are intrigued to recall that the singular suffix for destination, -rako (etxerako is `for the house'), looks like it's constructed by combining the locative -ko and allative -ra that you were supposed to figure out above. The plural form is -etarako. (This allative-plus-locative analysis doesn't work in the indefinite declension, and is of course impossible for animate gender.)

This destination case is not to be confused with the dative (as in etxeari, `to the house'; etxeei, `to the houses'), used for indirect objects. The dative -- it's like coming home! Screw the animates and indefinites and let's have a beer. I'll just leave you with gizonarenganaino, meaning `up to the man' (from gizon, `man'). (Oh yeah -- exceptions to natural gender: mahai, `table,' is considered animate. Great for seances in a haunted house (etxe mamuztatu). Let's dance the mamushka! On the other hand, body parts are inanimate. Hmmm.)

Okay, here's some higher-quality information on Dax from Mark. Mark is a real person. He's really an alien too, except when he's in Canada. You know, Shatner was that way too, although there's this: In ``Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,'' there's a scene with Kirk in a restaurant with the 1985 marine biologist. The Captain is telling her about his work. She is incredulous.

Biologist: So you're telling me you're from outer space?
Kirk: No, I'm from Iowa. I only work in outer space.

Now about Dax: the Star Trek character -- to be exact, that's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9) -- is (or was, or will possibly have been) a composite of two intelligent beings: the humanoid host, female, whom you see, and a ``symbiont'' living in her abdomen that looks like a giant slug or something. The humanoid depicted is named Jadzia; the symbiont is named Dax. It is the custom for the host's original surname to be replaced by the symbiont's name when they are joined, so her whole name is Jadzia Dax.

Mark also has a last name, but I tend not to give those in this glossary. At least he gets his first name. Madeleine is usually just described as the SBF banjo specialist (alpha chapter).

Anyway, Jadzia was murdered at the end of the 1997-98 season. The symbiont survived the attack and was joined to a new host, Ezri (its ninth or thereabouts -- symbionts are long-lived). Whereas Jadzia Dax looked like the human Terry Farrell with a bad peripheral case of alien eczema, Ezri Dax looks like the human Nicole deBoer with a bad peripheral case of alien eczema. I could probably find a picture of Ezri Dax and/or Nicole deBoer on the web somewhere. It's on the to-do list. Okay, here's a picture of Nicole deBoer at the DS9 Series Wrap Party on April 22, 1999.

There's a link from UB, served by someone at Buff' State (it's intentionally made confusing for out-of-towners). Here's another unofficial homepage for DAYS, with links to yet more. Another.

1. The Eagles song ``In The City,'' released in early 1979 on their album The Long Run. It ends with a lone electric guitar slowly beginning the first eight notes of Day Tripper. (Note that there are a number of songs entitled ``In The City.'' The Eagles song includes the line ``I know there must be something better.'')
2. April Wine's ``I Like To Rock'' (from the album Harder Faster, 1980, named after lines delivered by Marilyn Chambers in the movie ``Behind The Green Door'' and mixed into their version of ``Twenty-first Century Man''). Brian Greenaway, who had recently joined the band, explains the origin of the meshed licks in an interview with Classic Rock Revisited:

   At the end of ``I Like To Rock'' the band takes advantage of their 3-guitar attack as [the group's leader and main songwriter Myles] Goodwyn plays the main melody while Greenway and Gary Moffit pump out the main riffs to both ``Satisfaction'' and ``Day Tripper.'' The result was magical and people around the world loved it. The dueling guitar part was just one of many tricks the band used. Greenway gets credit for the idea, ``When I was in a band called All The Young Dudes we used to fool around playing two songs at one time as we had 2 drummers. I brought it from there. How we started doing it in April Wine I forget but it must have been Gary and myself doing it as joke in rehearsal for the album.''

   (Of course, ``All The Young Dudes'' is itself a musical reference -- it's the title of a David Bowie song. That song includes the phrase ``Bugaloo dudes,'' which I believe and also hope is unconnected with Juggalo.)

Sugarloaf's ``Don't Call Us, We'll Call You'' (1974) integrates an instrumental riff from the Beatles' ``I Feel Fine'' (1964) (sweetened to mark the contrast with the Sugarloaf's darker metal style). The riff follows the line ``Yeah -- it sounds like, eh, John-Paul-and-George.''

Incidentally, I heard the other day that Aerosmith is opening for Kiss, and blowing them away. Is this really the twenty-first century?

Pronunciation Sidebar

Another example of anomalous unit abbreviation pronunciation is the ``mil'' pronunciation of the milliliter (ml) unit (but follow latter link for a surprise). Significantly, a milliliter is a fluid measure exactly equal in volume to a cubic centimeter. A dimensional resonance effect in phonological linguistics? The study of this and similar important issues in connection with unit names constructed by shortening the name of a hemieponymous honoree (amp from Ampere, torr from Torricelli, volt from Volta, etc.) could probably supply a few grad students with PhD dissertation topics.

Modern audio hardware typically references volume levels to a maximum, so most audio API's represent volume by a nonpositive number: a logarithmic attenuation factor. In the DirectSound, for example, volume ranges from -10000 to 0, in units of a hundredth of a decibel. I guess that ought to be millibels (mB). Note that when sound is digitized in 16 bits, the ratio of highest to lowest amplitude is 65536:1, or 320 log₁₀2 dB (about 96 dB). Cf. CD.

Strength is more important in defensive linemen than in other defensive positions; speed is more important in DB's, DE's, and safeties than in DL's. That ``speed,'' however, is primarily sprint speed. The nonfootball stat that is the significant figure of merit for DL's is time in the 40-yard dash. No one is interested in their 1000-meter or marathon times.

Those sorts of facts were called immediately to mind by football news reported by the AP for Thursday, April 3, 2008. Around 11:30 AM, there was a disturbance in the parking lot of the police station, no less, in Pearland, Texas (about 15 mi. south of Houston). When officers approached to investigate, Kenny Wright, a DB with the Cleveland Browns, took off running. Police said he led them on a quarter-mile foot race, but no precise times were reported. Sgt. Roy Castillo said in a statement that ``we had people on scene pretty fast and I believe because of our quick response time and the mental and physical toughness of our officers to catch offenders, we were able to get him in custody quickly and safely.''

The defensive back was eventually tackled at a nearby subdivision. That's fair: he had possession -- at least of marijuana in his car, allegedly. And if he didn't have possession maybe he was going for it, so you could say he was intercepted. He was held in the Pearland City Jail that night on various misdemeanor charges, pending a bond hearing Friday. Wright attended Northwestern State in Louisiana. He graduated magna cum laude... oh wait, that must be someone else. He went to the Minnesota Vikings in the fourth round of the 1999 draft. The nine-year veteran has also played for Houston, Jacksonville, and Washington. He has seven career interceptions of his own. He had a disappointing season in 2007, and he was released by the Browns in July 2008.

For another kind of Dial box, see the BOGO entry.

On my most recent trip itinerary (the one printed out on the green computer cards) I was surprised to see the actual name of the regional feeder that code-shares with ATA (the airline I took), followed by ``DBA ATA Express.''

As you will have noticed, this glossary is so up-to-the-CPU-cycle that you see the new entries in the jumbled form they take as the news is breaking. You also see the old entries that way. We strive for the genuine appearance of authenticity.

I can remember when those heavy oversize citation and periodical indices would lie heavy in my lap, as I used pencil-and-paper technology to record which articles I needed while my legs fell asleep on the library carpeting. So I don't complain about a few inappropriate extra hits on my search (beta error). Not too long after I learn what it is, we'll have an entry for the guitar nebula, too.

At some point, the organization evidently came to feel that the term was too narrow. As of early 2010, DBfK's webpage explains that the DBfK ``ist die Interessenvertretung von Beschäftigten und Selbständigen der Gesundheits- und Krankenpflege, der Gesundheits- und Kinderkrankenpflege und der Altenpflege.'' Roughly, it `is the group representing the interests of those employed and self-employed in health care and nursing, children's health care and nursing, and old-age care.' I am grateful that they phrased this using Pflege rather than Pflegerinnen und Pfleger (`female and male nurses').

The first compound noun in the name is Berufsverband. Beruf is `profession.' (A bit more literally, it's `calling.' You profess what you are called to.) As Krankenpflege was evidently deemed to make the earlier name too narrow, the name was changed to Der Deutsche Berufsverband für Pflegeberufe. The last word means `nursing professions' or even `caring professions,' if you like that sort of term. The acronym was then sealed, and in the usual way the organization styles itself along the lines of ``DBfK -- Deutscher Berufsverband für Pflegeberufe.'' (The DBfK itself seems to prefer the lower-case-f form of the acronym, but the all-caps form seems to dominate.)

See also DBI's sister institution SCSPP.

DBS has been been proposed and tried for a variety of other ailments, including depression, OCD, and Tourette's syndrome. In each case, a different set of brain regions is targeted.

Batteries included! Implanted in your chest, typically, with wires running subcutaneously along the side of the neck and up to the brain. Nowadays these batteries are usually rechargeable, so surgery to replace them is infrequent. There are many different designs and implementations. Some alternative approaches involve an external battery driving a radio transmitter, and a receiving-antenna coil over the site of the brain implant.

When an implanted power supply is used, however, there may be antennas also: pulse generation, which has to be adjusted to the patient's response, is often controlled via radio communication with an external programmer or controller. (Pulse generation also has to be turned on. The surgery to implant the electrodes may provide about a month's worth of stimulation; normally, pulse generation isn't turned on until that initial stimulatory effect has worn off.)

By FCC dictamination, DBS satellites broadcasting in the same band are (in geostationary orbit -- GEO) spaced 9 degrees of longitude apart rather than the conventional 2°, in order to allow small dishes (say 16" or 18") to pick up the signal without interference.

DBS is one of the two classes of ``consumer satellites.'' The other is Medium-Powered Satellite (MPS).

Current usage makes DBS synonymous with any satellites used for direct-to-home (DTH) transmission. That is, DBS as defined by the FCC is conflated with satellite TV delivered to end-users via ordinary satellites on the regular bands. This typically requires 36-40" dishes.

However, on VU meters and other audio indicators, the label ``0 dB'' indicates where a particular amplifier and typical tape head driver start saturating the amp. Record below 0 to avoid distortion (and conversely).

Originally, bc was a preprocessor for dc. But we haven't figured out what bc stands for, so we can't tell you anything about it. Except that it's practically a baby-C-like calculator programming language. Maybe it stands for Big Honkin' Calculator? Nope -- no aitch.

The fact is that nowadays, dc, DC, etc., always stand for the adjective. If you want to express the substantive ``direct current'' in fewer than thirteen characters, you can use the AAP pleonasm ``DC current.''

You needed to know this. If you want to know something, uh, substantive about direct current in electronics, you should see the Alternating Current entry.

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for DC. USACityLink.com has a page of District links.

The federal district for the US capital. ``Washington, D.C.,'' is all of the D.C. there is; there's no ``Foobar, D.C.'' where Foobar has any value other than Washington. Once upon a time, however, Washington was the name for only one section of the district.

Cf. D.F.

``If you're going through some difficult financial times right now, don't give up. Being deep in debt is not fun. It's scary and frightening but you can survive. The panic attacks, waking up in the middle of the night, and constant stress will begin to vanish once you take a positive step towards getting out of debt. There is hope, we can help.''

Since its establishment, chiropractic has tried and succeeded somewhat in cleaning up its act -- toning down its more preposterous claims, scrounging up some scientifically sound clinical research support for its claims of efficacy. A couple of people I know regularly visit chiropractors.

Chiropractic is a lot like a major religion: at first, it won converts at least partly on the basis of a salvific wish-fulfillment fantasy so preposterous it could only be accepted on faith. (As Augustine the Saint wrote, he believed because it was absurd.) Once it had a number of regular communicants, it amended the message. If people were rational, the jettison of initially central claims might lead them to question the epistemic basis of the remaining rationalizations. People are not rational, and they go on believing. ``Judge the tree by its fruit,'' they say. One of my friends who goes to a chiropractor told him to ``stop doing the neck'' after that professional did a number on it.

By the way, you shouldn't take this the wrong way: when I make fun of religion, I'm making fun of someone else's religion. Your religion is very reasonable.

Man, you'd be surprised at all the resentment seething under the calm urbane surface of your ordinary classicist.

The DCB-CD version 2 (the one that's sold out) contains 248,399 bibliographical records from sixteen volumes of APh (vols. 45-60 covering 1974-1989). It comes equipped with its own retrieval software for both Windows and Macintosh platforms, with user-selectable English or French interfaces.

Classicists lean disproportionately toward Macs rather than Windows machines (though I don't think Classics is majority-Mac any more). This probably had something to do with the early character-set flexibility of the Macs, while PC's still had nothing but ``IBM Character Set.'' Among the humanistic disciplines, Classics was an early adopter of computer technology.

The corresponding Democratic Senate group is DSCC. The Republican House group analogous to the DCCC is the NRCC (National Republican Congressional Committee).

Fast-forward to 2001. Funny how things turn out.

Not the Denver Center for the Performing Arts (DCPA) Electron Spectroscopy (ES).

DD is part of the Unix children's alphabet poem (alternate locations: 1, 2, 3, 4).

.
.
.
C is for CC, as hackers recall, while
D is for DD, the command that does all.

E is for Emacs, which rebinds your keys, and
F is for Fsck, which rebuilds your trees.
.
.
.

By some metric that weights opacity and frequency multiplicatively, the worst statement in IBM JCL is //SYSIN DD *. The // means that a JCL statement follows, SYSIN is a system logical name (all DD statements begin with such a statement label, which identifies just which data are being defined. The * means that control cards follow. To the tune of ``Camp-town Races,'' the approved way to read this card is ``Slash Slash Sysin Dee-Dee Star, Doo-dah, Doo-dah.''

In fall 1998, the dean of Harvard Divinity School was forced to resign after thousands of pornographic images were found on his Harvard-owned personal computer. (This was only revealed the following May; so he could find another job, maybe?)

The pornographic material was found on the office computer at his Harvard-owned residence at Jewett House. The discovery was made after Thiemann requested more disk space for one of his Harvard-owned machines, which was full, according to university sources. He actually asked the computer department to transfer the pornographic files to the new disk drive, according to sources that should probably be admired for not breaking up laughing.

Cf. mv, tar, JPEG.

Normally, when a head term has two or more entries, I try to order the entries by alphabetical order of definitions or expansions, but not this time. I mean really, if you know the where to look for the definition, you probably already know the definition anyway, and you're just reading this glossary for your own perverted purposes, like sordid entertainment, and slowing down the server for people who need it for serious research. Shame!

DD 3.5 diskettes hold only about 800Kbytes of data apiece. If you have an old computer that expects DD, you can still insert HD diskettes and they should work. DD diskettes are recognizable from the single notch (on extreme left corner of illustration at right) with a sliding cover (open or missing cover for write protection, closed to enable writing; if you lost the slide, cover with opaque tape). If you have a drive that recognizes HD diskettes, but have written at DD on another machine, or want to write in DD format to be read by another machine, then cover the extra hole (no sliding cover) on the other side.

<DT>DD<A NAME="DDhtml"> </A>
<DD><A HREF="H.html#HTML">HTML</A> mark-up tag
(in angle brackets: &lt;DD&gt;) for the
definition part of a definition-list entry.  Hence, for example,
the mark-up for this entry reads:
<P>
<PRE>
&lt;DT&gt;DD&lt;A NAME=&quot;DDhtml&quot;&gt; &lt;/A&gt;
&lt;DD&gt;&lt;A HREF=&quot;H.html#HTML&quot;&gt;HTML&lt;/A&gt; mark-up tag
(in angle brackets: &amp;lt;DD&amp;gt;) for the
definition part of a definition-list entry.  Hence, for example,
the mark-up for this entry reads:
&lt;P&gt;
</PRE>

1. Dial backup (or dial back-up): Automatic reestablishment of connectivity by an alternate path when there is a disruption in the primary connection (modem or DSU/CSU failure, mice eating the insulation, etc.). ``Dial'' is used loosely here: the connection may be over various kinds of network.
2. Dynamic bandwidth: Use of the dial backup techniques to add bandwidth as needed. Need is usually determined by simple algorithm: exceeding a high bandwidth-utilization level for a predetermined minimum time triggers bandwidth expansion, falling below a low bandwidth-utilization level for a given time triggers scale-back.

Cf. DDR.

In a series of romantic comedy trifles in the fifties and sixties, she was often cast with a central-casting prune as a best friend, to establish contrast. It's been pointed out that in her films that she never had trouble finding a parking space, but is that so odd? If a character in a movie is going to have difficulty finding a parking space, it has to be written into the screenplay, and it ought to advance the story.

Cf. Dee Day.

The Dewey system defines fewer than a thousand ``general fields of knowledge'' between 000 and 999, with decimal-fraction subdivisions. One of the striking things about Dewey's system is that all of English prose fiction is subsumed under a one or two of those ``general fields.'' I can't recall, but let's say it's 823. (If there are two then one is for American and one for other English-language prose fiction; I'll look into it.) If you look in a library that uses the Dewey system, you won't find many books there, even though (or rather because) very roughly half of the books in a public library are prose fiction. Most libraries that use the Dewey system split the collection into fiction and ``nonfiction'' (whatever isn't prose fiction, or prose fiction in English); they catalogue and shelve nonfiction according to Dewey, and fiction alphabetically (perhaps by Cutter numbers). Poetry is typically shelved with ``nonfiction.''

There are various other systems, though there is a trend toward standardization. Computerization of library catalogs has obviously facilitated this, and mobility has probably also reduced the tolerance of library patrons for idiosyncratic local systems. The change-over can be a problem, however. When I used the Princeton University libraries in the 1970's and 1980's, many books were still catalogued using the local Richardson Classification scheme. For most major subject categories in the Fine Hall Library (Physics and Math), there were newer books under LC numbers and older books under the Richardson numbers. This webpage of the OCLC lists 30 ``other'' classification schemes. Perhaps the most widely used decimal scheme on a global basis is the UDC, q.v. Another decimal scheme is the Dutch SISO.

Edition 22 of the Dewey system was rolled out in mid-2003 on a gurney. Well, it was stretched out, anyway. Four volumes; I hope they're shelved together. By the way, new editions don't just add more digits and subcategories, you know -- they sometimes reshelve books to different parts of the library. For example, 647.94 of Edition 21 (hotel directories -- ``interdisciplinary and descriptive'') became 910.46 in Edition 22. ``We anticipate this will be a welcome relocation because the descriptive literature on lodging (in contrast to the literature directed toward people maintaining the lodging) is almost exclusively of interest to travelers. Materials on household management in the hospitality industry, bed and breakfast establishments, hostels, hotels, inns, motels, resorts will remain at 647.94. Other relocations include interdisciplinary and descriptive works on resorts relocated to 910.462; on bed and breakfast establishments relocated to 910.464; on hostels relocated to 910.466; and on campsites relocated to 910.468. Interdisciplinary works on the hospitality industry have been relocated to 338.4791, and on tourism to 910. Facilities for travelers and lodging for travelers (including hotels, motels, etc.) in specific areas have been relocated from 647.943-647.949 to 913-919 together with the new notation 06 in the add table at 913-919.

Stay tuned for further exciting developments.

The ``traces'' are found in five groups:

1. Gods mentioned by name (as gods).
      ``Obvious examples include Asherah, Baal, El, Hermes, Zeus, and others. ... In some instances the names are found only in the Septuagint and not in the corresponding section of the Masoretic text.'' The example given in Jeremiah 46:15, which is ``éphugen ho Apis'' in the LXX (`[Why] has Apis fled?') where the Masoretic text has the single verb (I don't know the vowels) NSHP (`[Why] was it swept away?'). It's not especially clear what's going on here, but as usual (and not entirely without justification) the contrast is described as ``valuable'' information. Anyone could valuate it.


2. Gods whose names are etymons of theophoric anthroponyms and toponyms (that's personal and place names, okay?).
      It is conscientiously animadverted that the people of Anathoth cannot be assumed to worship Anat, and that Tychicus may not worship Tyche, etc., ``[y]et such names reflect a certain familiarity with the deities in question, if not of the inhabitants of the town or the bearer of the name, then at least of their ancestors or their surroundings.'' Well, yes, and they can call that ``part of the religious milieu of the Bible,'' but often I can call it insignificant.


3. ``Demythologized deities.''
      The common-noun category corresponding to the previous group of names. An interesting though trivial example: tirosh, the Hebrew word for `new wine,' is ``etymologically the equivalent of the Mesopotamian deity Sirish and the Canaanite god Tirash. Further, ``[o]ne of the Hebrew words for the moon used in the Bible is yareah; this is the etymological equivalent of Yarikh, the moon-god known from Ugaritic texts.'' Alas poor Yarikh. I'll spare you their extenuation for including notice of these words. They're being thorough, and I approve that.
      One may wonder, in cases like Yarikh, whether what is found is not a reversion to or a continuation of a nonreligious tradition. That is, that the originally nonmythological moon's name, for example, was drafted into mythological service. The goddess of the dawn is Eos in Greek and Aurora in Latin. It is clear that these are not separate developments from a common goddess name, but separate uses of different word for dawn for a goddess. Surely the same can happen even when the nonmythological names have a common etymology, and sometimes it must happen in only some of the languages with shared etymology. In fact, the authors of this work are not foolish about this. Here is the first part of the entry for mouth: ``The mouth or utterance of a god--the two notions are often expressed with the same word [Sumerian ka, Akkadian pû]--is sometimes made into an independent deity in Mesopotamia. The etymological equivalent in Hebrew (peh) does not seem to have enjoyed a comparable divine status.''


4. Questionable gods.
      Basically editorial creativity, ``correcting'' the text in some way to discover god names. Some of this comes from altering lexical material absent in the original texts. (Word spacing was absent in the original Greek; vowels, indicated by pointing in the Masoretic text, were not indicated in the original Hebrew.) Some comes from changing similar-sounding or similar-appearing letters that might have been incorrectly transmitted. Example of the former reinterpretation: The Hebrew word ra, `evil,' may be reinterpreted as the name of the Egyptian sun god. Some of these questionable gods are imaginary in multiple ways.


5. Divinized human figures.
      Primarily Jesus, but taking a loose standard of ``god,'' also Mary, Enoch, Moses, and Elijah.

``Bible'' is understood by the editors in a fairly comprehensive way: as the Bible of the Orthodox Churches. This consists of the completest canon of the Septuagint (including all of what some traditions call the Apocrypha, even to 3 and 4 Maccabees), plus the Greek New Testament. The Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible is used as a parallel source. ``Though many articles pay attention to the subsequent development of notions and concepts in the Pseudepigrapha, the latter have not been used as an independent quarry of theonyms.'' Authors also rely on rabbinic literature, but I assume they don't use Talmud as a source of theonyms either.

The abbreviation is also used for a couple of dichlorodiphenyl dichloroethenes.

Newfoundland's independence was recognized by the UK in the Statute of Westminster (1932), but two years later it went broke and resumed the status of a colony until 1949. During WWII, Newfoundland followed Britain's lead in adopting DDST, but there was great resistance to DDST outside St. John's.

In 1988, the Canadian province of Newfoundland tried a DDST experiment in 1988. The shift occurred in Spring, substituting a two-hour ``spring forward'' for the usual one. That (let's call it ``simple shift'') might be the only instance in which DDST was implemented as a full two-hour shift. There were the usual drawbacks, and coordination problems with the rest of Canada were, oh, I'd say about twice as bad as with regular DST. (No, a factor of 2 doesn't make sense when you think about it. So don't think about it.) The response to DDST was positive, but DDST was dropped in subsequent years because there was not a majority for a single shift calendar. (Favoring the use of both DST and DDST, or of shifting to DDST on other than the dates that neighboring parts of Canada shift to DST, is support for DDST in principle, but these more complicated options are less preferable than ordinary DST for others who favor simple-shift DDST. Hence, there was not an effective majority for DDST. Similar issues arise in elections with three or more candidates.)

In July 1941, FDR proposed legislation that would have given him power to establish DST with time advances as large as two hours. We're getting off the subject of DDST now, but I'm sure you want to know that this and other DST bills languished until after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The following January, legislation was passed that established year-round one-hour DST for the duration [more precisely, until six months after the cessation of hostilities], and gave the president no discretion in the matter. At the end of the war, further legislation rescinded federally-mandated DST earlier than the date originally set, and War Time ended on Sunday, September 30.

In 2006, the WHO announced that it would encourage the use of DDT to fight malaria. The decision comes only decades too late for millions of dead.

The mnemonic to remember DDT's structure is

        A mosquito was heard to complain,
        That the chemists had poisoned his brain,
                The cause of his sorrow,
                Was para-dichloro-
        Di-phenyl Trichloroethane!

Developed by Paul H. Müller who received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ``for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.'' (I'm not sure exactly when this work was done, but it was ca. 1936. You could look it up.)

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Delaware. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Delaware city and town links.

The Saxony entry at SN explains a couple of the names of Germany, but remember that etymology is not an exact science. Italian Tedesco and various forms of Dutch or deutsch come from Old High German diutisc, `national' used to distinguish the national (i.e., local ethnic language and people from the international or catholic Latin). The Aleman- names come from a tribe known to Julius Caesar as the Alemanni, from cognates of our words all + men.

The US government's Country Studies website has a page of links (``Germany Country Studies'') amounting to the online version of its Germany book. Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.

Here's some general information online from the Chemistry Department at the Free University of Berlin. A Center for Information Services at the FU Berlin serves a geographically organized list of German WWW servers. Marcus Berndt serves a page of German press links. There's a German FAQ.

The international telephone calling code for all of Germany is 49.

Some German search engines:

Deutscher Branchenindex

DINO (Deutsches InterNet-Organisationssystem)

web.de

Here's the German page of an X.500 directory located in Germany.

We have a bit more information at FRG.

For a review of ``DEAD chemistry'' in general, see E. Fahr, H. Lind article in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. vol. 5, 4 (1966). For Diels-Alder reactions of DEAD with dienes, see B.T. Gillis, P.E. Beck, J. Org. Chem. vol. 27, 1947 (1962) and vol. 28, 3177 (1963); B.J. Franzus, J. Org. Chem. vol. 28, 2954 (1963).

A typical old implementation of a dead man's handle in railed vehicles is a brake bar that applies the brakes when released. In the electric trams in San Francisco, the main brake is set up this way. A driver there once explained to me how he used the brake bar to steer (switch tracks) as well. I don't know if this was a design feature, but I imagine you're bound to come up with this sort of trick anyway if you stand for hours all day doing mostly nothing but handling the brake (see manual transmission). A lot of the drivers in the electric busses develop a patter and compete for best-driver of the month, often actively encouraging their passengers to mail in votes. If professors are frustrated actors, then these drivers are frustrated stand-up comedians.

There used to be a comic strip about a crime investigator (I think) named Modesty Blaise, back in the sixties. (Since then, people have been reading newspapers less regularly, making it more difficult to sustain a plot. One adjustment has been to repeat plot developments so that anyone reading three or four strips a week can follow, but that has slowed the stories down. Anyway, the comic strip, illustrated by Neville Colvin, is no more.) A series of books, by writer Peter O'Donnell, was spawned by the comic-strip series, and one of those books was Dead Man's Handle. Has a nice ring, doesn't it?

The old-style dead man's handle on British trains is a DSD.

Many dictators have delusions of grandeur. Dear Leader has delusions of taste. That's not so rare either.

In many older words the prefix has a more geometric sense. The best-recognized geometric sense is `down,' as in depress (press down), depend (< Latin dependere, `to hang down'), descend (< L. descendere, `to climb down'), and devour (< L. devorare, `gulp down').

The sense of de- in debar is `away from.' So to debar is to bar away from, as to denude is to strip away from, etc.

• AFA
• APDA
• CEDA
• CUSID
• debating
• IDEA
• IPDA
• NDT
• NFA
• NPDA
• SUCDI
• WDCA

Decadence and degeneration have little in common: one refines corruption and the other corrupts refinement. [Whether that's true or not, it certainly sounds like having a lot in common.] The decadent, at least, maintains a standard of decline, while the degenerate lets those standards slip. In this book, I have tried to measure up to the level of decadence achieved by my models and mentors, friends and colleagues. [I can imagine their pleasure at this acknowledgment.] But in decadence as in other matters, nothing fails like success: those who are truly decadent do not do.

(No, what it is that the truly decadent do not do is not elaborated upon. I'm not sure if I'm decayed about this or degenerated.) I'm afraid that Chapter 1 (``The Definition of Decadence'') bored before it enlightened me. Possibly this counts as a negative success, a consequence of the author's ``negative culpability.''

(And decadence and degeneration are subtly important, sure, but let's not neglect degradation.)

What, you read all the way through the entry? Congratulations! You've won our Grand Prize! Just call during business hours and mention this entry. (Offer expires December 21, 2005.)

These attitudes distinguish people who have their heads on straight from people who do deconstruction. Deconstructionism is a religion which preaches the irrelevance of the personal motives of the author, and seeks perversely to find in every ``text'' the meaning that is the opposite of that intended. While even the texts that espouse this viewpoint can be and indeed have been deconstructed, there is a bias in the selection of texts: Until recently, Marxist and other texts to which deconstructionists had some political attachment were less likely to undergo this destructive analysis. It appears that even deconstructionists hold some meanings to be somehow more worthwhile in some way, for reasons which are not contained in deconstructionism itself. Whitman was not contained between his hat and his boots, but that's completely irrelevant.

It is difficult to regard as intellectually honest an enterprise that questions the possibility of meaning.

This just in! In response to an email barrage from thousands of ordinary Americans outraged by my calumny of deconstruction and my controversial opinions about the possibility of meaning, I find I must issue a complete and abject retraction. (Well, not thousands actually. Two. Well, actually, somebody looked at me funny today. Must have read the deconstruction entry. It's important to be sensitive to reader response, because there's so little of it.)

I leave my original comments above, as a silent self-indictment of my ignorance. It is obvious that no one takes me seriously as a critic of criticism, despite my credentials. (Hey, everyone's a critic!) I therefore refer the gentle reader and ordinary American to the newsweakly People. The results of a scientific, 100%-biased survey revealed for 18 September 1995 include the following progress in the field of Lori Petty studies:

``The man-tailored garb ... worn in Manhattan last [F]all inspires Denise Wingate to theorize,

`She's going for the European deconstructionist look, but it's sloppy.' ''

Finally, one may say that deconstruction is third-person self-abnegation. This is a shareware definition: If you use it you owe me a nickel. If you understand it you owe me a dime. If you think a truth value can be meaningfully assigned to it, call me, I have a bridge for sale cheap.

I was going to write about Kierkegaard here, and how he tried to submerge the author of his own books by using various transparent pseudonyms, and about other stuff, but I was deflated to learn that Plato was also a deconstructionist, so somehow it doesn't seem so novel anymore.

Jacques Derrière is a famous deconstructionist. [If it is past 5pm October 8, then dissing Derrida is passé and the preceding statement is inoperative.] [I should probably note that -- okay, I am eager to point out that -- I wrote the preceding many years before Jacques Derrida's death on the night of October 8, 2004. Wow, I've got ESP!]

Those with a penchant for the bizarre and a desire to hear clear enunciation of the lyrics of ``Lucy in the Sky'' and a strong stomach will want to pick up Volume IV in the Rhino Records ``Golden Throats'' CD series, composed of covers of Beatles songs by other artists better known for other achievements (or, better said, activities). William Shatner's cover of Lucy, spoken as if in alarmed supplication before a highly advanced alien life-form (his approximation of psychodelia), is worth the price of replacing your CD player, which will have to be taken away for environmentally safe disposal.

The misheard lyrics at the beginning of this entry are examples of mondegreens.

Just to be a little serious here... Postmodernism (``po-mo''), poststructuralism, deconstruction, and theory (just ``theory,'' as if there were no other) are all terms used very roughly interchangeably for a category of literary criticism that literary critics on the other side regard as perverse at best and cynically dishonest at worst. Putative explanations of these approaches (and of whether and how they differ) are generally either incoherent or deep, and over time I and many others who were willing to listen have gradually concluded that they are not deep. The same ideas, or lack of ideas, or cynical rhetorical cons, have also been used in other humanities disciplines than literature.

Among those interested in po-mo are a small number that I respect on independent grounds, and their participation in this fraud or madness is puzzling. My best and most generous guess is that these honest scholars find a few isolated bits of theory, usually general perspectives or sympathies rather than specific claims, that they only interpret in ways that offer some insight.

I may come back later and try to be a little less circumstantial. For now I want to mention an interesting feature of this battle of the po-mo's and traditionalists (the battle was joined in the 1960's). Both sides feel or claim to feel besieged: the sides protest either that their approaches have gone out of fashion and can't get published or taught (traditionalists) or are under political attack and now in decline (po-mo's). To a small extent both sets of claims are true, because the situation is different in the various humanities disciplines and universities. But it looks suspicious. I recently ran across a comment that presented one historian's impression of the pressure of fashion (not just the po-mo fashion). As a start, I'll transcribe a bit:

To the [charge of the work being aggressively unfashionable as history] I must still plead guilty: the history in this book covers a broad sweep of time; it does not refer to localities, draws on only one oral source, and is neither ethnographic nor deconstructionist. My only consolation here can be that fashions change.

(This is from p. xi, in the Preface of David Blaazer's The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity, 1884-1939. (Cambridge U.P., 1992).

See also Acknowledgments. In fact, see book dedications for at least one more dedication. I've decided that aggregation of book dedication content will continue only at that entry, because I (as well as my editor) had forgotten that this one even existed.

Maybe I'll dedicate the dedications entry to material on non-book dedications. Ralph Bass and Lowman Pauling wrote a song called ``Dedicated to the One I Love.'' The Shirelles took it to #3 in 1961, and the Mamas and the Papas cover went to #2 in 1967. It's probably not the only song that contains the lyric ``This is [title of song],'' but it's still pretty cute. It reminds me of ``This Song Has No Title'' [Bernie Taupin (lyrics) and Elton John (music)]. Those precise words do not occur in the song, however. The fourth line of the chorus is ``Oh, this song's got no title, just words and a tune.'' So ``This Song Has No Title'' is just the title. ``This song's got no title'' is the hook, I'd say.

Cf. D-Day.

More precisely: N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide. It's also called chigger wash and skeeter skat. (Did I mention that it's a powerful insect repellent? Also, partly by design and partly because separating isomers is a hassle, the commercial product is mix. The names that don't look very IUPAC tend to refer to the mixes.) Most of the other names are boring, though. (Pyrocide Intermediate 5734 is the dirtiest mix and the sexiest name, but ``detamide,'' ``delphene,'' CAS 134-62-3? Please people -- a little more whimsical imagination!) See also 6-12.

In Jeremiah 9:21 it is written:

New meanings: kill the window manager process; throw out the Windows; terminate Bill Gates.

The October 2, 2005, edition of Arab News (Saudi Arabia's principal English-language daily) quoted Saudi authorities to the effect that 92% of the 2.2 million Internet users in the kingdom wish to access forbidden or indecent material. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they wish to access sites that happen to contain such material (as defined by Saudi censors). Maybe they're the sort of people who read Playboy for the fiction. Maybe it's computer viruses calling home. This doesn't much concern me or probably you either, but Walter Laqueur mentions the report in The Last Days of Europe (2007), trying to make a point about the nature of religious commitment among young Muslim men. I don't see this as especially significant. (And I remember that some other young Saudi men, three of the 9/11 hijackers, went out to a Daytona strip club on 9/10.) The reason I mention it here is that on page 211, still discussing access to pornography (mostly), he writes the following in parenthesis:

What I want to observe is that in some versions of the quote, windows should be capitalized. Also, an aside on Laqueur's latest, subtitled ``Epitaph for an Old Continent'': what makes it most readable, and almost heartening, is that he makes a surprisingly slippery and weak argument. Better news: Mark Falcoff, resident scholar emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, reviews the book in the July-August 2007 issue of Commentary and writes, ``perhaps never before have [the main themes of the book] been laid out in such a detailed (and lugubrious) fashion.'' If this comment be even remotely correct, which I doubt, then no book on the subject is really detailed at all.

Rudolf II, king of Bohemia (1576-1612), was, as you surely remember, one of the greatest monarchs of all time. Well, more on that later. I mean, he funded Kepler.

1. Keep an eye peeled for Smokey.
2. There is safety in numbers. Follow Benjamin Franklin's advice -- be neither first nor last. Recognize that the vehicles around you are running radar interference. (I think Franklin put his advice in his AUTObiography, written in the eighteenth century. That just goes to show you how far he was ahead of his time, and how little he followed his own advice.)
3. Test your radar detectors regularly.
4. Implement a NASA-style redundancy reconciliation system for your radar awareness environment.
5. Collect license plates from exotic places with bad or slow motor vehicle information systems.
6. Repaint your car frequently.

Of course, in 1998, the Federal Budget is in surplus for the first time in ages, just in time for the coming depression. Maybe we can all be Keynesians again. Please?

[An exception to the exception is that Macedonian and Bulgarian have postfixed definite articles. These languages, like Arabic and Hebrew, don't have indefinite articles. Romanian and the North Germanic (i.e., Scandinavian) languages use postfix definite articles. The exceptional Scandinavian language of Iceland, as well as Albanian and the famously isolated Basque language, are like Macedonian and Bulgarian: postfix definite article only, no indefinite article.]

Proto-Indo-European, the origin of most of the European languages, did not have definite articles. Latin (and Sanskrit) did not have them, although classical Greek did.

In Chile, it is also common to prepend a definite article to a person's name. Not just ``el tío Enrique'' (`uncle Henry'), but even ``el Enrique'' (`Henry'). Something similar occurs in Modern Greek.

Some of the pages expand Defra as ``Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs.'' Part of that is thought food, and the other part makes me think of Lady Chatterly's gardener.

A partial list only. Check the TV guide for local listings.
1. ``Celebrity Boxing.'' An hour-long Fox TV special on the ides of March, 2002. Three bouts are on the card, each scheduled for three two-minute rounds using ``weighted gloves.'' The headliner is Tonya Harding against Amy Fisher.
   Harding was the first American woman figure-skater to land a triple axel, but she achieved ``celebrity'' in January 1994, when her Olympic figure-skating rival Nancy Kerrigan's knee was injured in a crowbar attack by a man who was hired by Harding's then-husband (he later tried to change his name to escape notoriety, but people who had the name he wanted objected; I forget how that turned out). She eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of hindering prosecution in the case, but served no time; she was stripped of her national title and banned from the USFSA, which bars her from any kind of official participation in USFSA-sanctioned events. She was sentenced to do community service and three days in the Clark County jail in 2000, for assaulting her then-boyfriend with a hubcap. She seems to favor blunt metal weapons. Amy should insist on metal detectors. About a month before Fox announced its shameless exploitation, Harding's landlord sued her for back rent.
   As an eighteen-year-old in 1992, Amy Fisher became known as ``the Long Island Lolita'' after she shot the wife of auto mechanic Joey Buttafuoco, a man with whom she had had an affair. Tonya should insist on metal detectors. Amy did almost seven years in prison, and was released after a hearing in which the thick-skulled woman she tried to murder testified on her behalf.
   According to Fox's alternative-programming chief Mike Darnell, quoted Feb. 27 in the Gannett rag USA Today, ``This is legitimate. We'll have a real referee, a real doctor, real announcers. To all the world this will be a real boxing match.''
   Amy's parole board forbade her to participate, but Paula Jones was available. Paula Jones is the woman who was afraid that Arkansas state troopers' stories about former governor Bill Clinton and an anonymous woman would ruin her reputation, and who therefore revealed that she was the anonymous woman.
   Every few months Tonya gets in a little minor trouble with the law and it makes national news, and we all get to find out ``whatever happened to....'' Paula Jones cowered and Tonya won handily. Whew -- I was worried that Tonya would have to guard her newly installed (2001) XL boob enhancements. Read the latest on our girl at the CHL entry.
   The XFL folded; there's hope.
   But maybe not quite yet....
2. ``The Girl Next Door: The Search for a Playboy Centerfold.'' A two-hour Fox-TV special investigation/pictorial, scheduled to air during the May sweeps in 2002. Hmm -- Fox. Why does that name ring a bell?
   Scott Grogin, a Fox flack, said ``We respect all of our viewers' rights to their opinions. If this is a show they don't like or feel is appropriate, please don't watch.'' I don't understand: just because ``all of [their] viewers'' don't feel a show is appropriate, why shouldn't I watch it?
3. ``The Anna Nicole Show,'' an unreality show on E! Entertainment Television (a cable network), was renewed for a second season to air in early 2003. It is said to be, eh, modeled on MTV's ``The Osbournes.'' Oh, did I forget to mention the Osbournes? And the Isaac Stern show on E!? Oh fiddlesticks -- make that the Howard Stern show.
   
   You know, I've heard that the Jerry Springer, oh wait, the Jerry Seinfeld show was about nothing. So maybe the Nicole show is really a knock-off of the Seinfeld show, except that it's stupid, crass, somewhat more explicitly sex-obsessed, and not funny. Second opinion: it's effortlessly hilarious. Sobering thought: spin-offs. Tremble.
4. Getting back to the Stern show -- this is really high concept: it's basically a show about women visiting a radio broadcast studio and exposing their breasts, but their breasts are blurred out on TV. I mean, shows with some parts bleeped or obscured are nothing new, but making the nonbroadcastable element the main focus of the show -- that's shrewd. Or something. Maybe they plan to market an uncensored version, a ``director's cut.'' ``Direct to video.'' The mind boggles; trepanate and apply Drano. Okay, update 2004: uplink to satellite.

5. In 2003, National Geographic Magazine will have its first swimsuit issue. Perhaps they'll just use selections from the Miss World or Miss Universe swimsuit competition. Somehow I'm not expecting central African women with river blindness doing laundry the old-fashioned way. So when did Fox buy National Geographic?
6. As of April 15, 2003, colleges where you can earn a Bachelor of Hair in just six months (something like that) can have their own .edu domain, just so you know what prestigious and serious institutions of learning they are. Hair: it's all about the brain.
7. Okay, more from Fox: a seven-episode ``reality TV'' series debuted April 21, 2003, entitled ``Mr. Personality.'' In it, a female contestant must select one from a number of masked suitors. Their looks are kept hidden from her but not the studio audience, so she must choose on the basis of ``personality.'' Nothing any more wrong with that than with ``The Dating Game,'' really, but the host and moderator is Monica Lewinsky. The show placed second in the ratings for its time slot (12.2 million viewers estimated by Nielsen Media Research, trailing an estimated 13.8 million for back-to-back episodes of ``Everybody Loves Raymond'' (who?) on CBS). Mr. Personality won decisively with the lucrative 18-to-49-year-old demographic, however.
8. I've been told that I should include something about a show called ``The Bachelor,'' but believe me, no one ever explains enough about it to make it comprehensible to anyone who hasn't seen it.
9. Presumably, you're aware of the Jerry Springer show, and I needn't say more. In Britain the subtitles are said to come in handy. (``Jerry Springer -- The Opera'' premiered in London in 2003 and has been a popular and critical hit. US productions began in 2008. There's also a domestic British approximation of the TV show called ``Trisha,'' mornings on ITV. In Australia, broadcast of The Jerry Springer Show is traditionally followed by an episode of Judge Judy. In Belgium, Jerry's show is broadcast dubbed, but I don't know into which language or languages. (It reminds me of watching ``The Jeffersons'' on Italian TV many years ago. Italian is the natural language for that show, and it deserves the opera treatment. A lot of sopranos also have the perfect body style to fit into the capacious Mrs. Jefferson role. For more on the Italian-English moving-pictures nexus, see the silent movie entry.)
10. The ``Girls Gone Wild'' degradation is discussed under Calvin Broadus.
11. For the 2004 Superbowl, CBS/Viacom/etc. put on a half-time show to give Fox a run for its money. I mention a detail or two at the SB entry (for comedic context, see Uncle Miltie). But the Australians soon came roaring back, showing that no one can outFox them when it comes to gratuitous sexual exploitation in sports. (See Heidi United S.C.)
12. On January 22, 2004, a news conference was held in New York to announce a match between a human (heavyweight champion Lenox Lewis) and an animal (rapist, anthropophage, and former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson).

At the end of 2003, in a column for Fox News, Eric Burns complained about foul language on radio. (He had already dealt with foul language on TV in earlier essays.) I'm not saying his sentiments are entirely wrong or anything.

I don't know for a fact certain that this exists, but I probably just don't read enough of my spam.

It seems to me that the phrase abbreviated by DEGT, understood in the sense of ``it's better not to broach that subject'' or ``better not to start thinking along those lines,'' first popular in the early 1990's. In ordinary speech and even in unabbreviated writing, it seems that first-person jussive forms like ``let's not [even] go there'' are more common than the strictly imperative second-person corresponding to DEGT, but LNGT is at best rare and LNEGT looks too much like length misspelled. Not that there's anything surprising in that.

Let's play. There's a conference with the title ``Dehegemonization: The US and Transnational Democracy.'' It's scheduled for Wednesday, April 5, 2006, but I'm writing the entry now because I'm a good guy and want you to know about this in time to attend. I only just heard about it myself today (Tuesday, March 28, 2006). The conference will take place at George Mason University. As you know, just two days ago in the NCAA Men's Basketball Finals, the eleventh-seeded GMU Patriots dehegemonized first-seeded UConn (pronounced ``you con'') to advance to the Final Four. I mean -- how appropriate is that? Can you say sin-crow-nisity? Can I spell it? Maybe you read that sports report too quickly. ``Final Four'' has at least three syllables. You should say it slowly, as if you were pronouncing a word like Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool in one of the fanático-de-fútbol dialects (that's all dialects) of Spanish. Notice that the vowel represented by ``ou'' in ``four'' is a nominal monophthong with r-coloring, which is noticeable in the lowered pitch of the third formant in the final seconds before the liquid begins (I mean the letter r).

Notice also that the Patriots were among the last five at-large teams selected for the tournament, and that during the regular season they were unranked except for one week when they were bottom-ranked (#25). (The #11 seeding was just within their regional bracket, one of four.) Notice that the UConn team they dispatched was not just first-seeded in the bracket, but second-ranked nationally going into March Madness, and favored to win it all -- as it had in 2004. Notice that just to reach the Elite Eight and face UConn, the Patriots had to defeat Michigan State (NCAA champions in 2000) without their own second-leading scorer, and then beat North Carolina (champs in 2005).

di + gli = degli
di + i = dei
di + il = del
di + l' = dell'
di + la = della
di + le = delle
di + lo = dello

(There's a similar set of contractions with a.) The forms vary to indicate grammatical gender and number, and to coordinate with the initial sound of the following word. (Usually a noun or a quantifier; in the following, we'll call it a noun.)

For female nouns beginning in consonants, la and le are the singular and plural endings, resp. This is easy to remember because -a is the most typical ending for female nouns in the singular, and those nouns normally take plurals in -e. For nouns beginning in a vowel, l' is substituted for la (le is the common plural form).

Il and its plural i are used for male nouns beginning in a consonant, unless they begin with x, z, gn, pn, ps, or a consonant cluster beginning in s. For those exceptions, lo (sing.) and gli (pl.) are used. Before male nouns beginning in a vowel, the same plural form gli is used, but the singular article is contracted to l'.

Notice that unless a noun is singular and begins in a vowel, its gender is obvious from its article.

1. English pronunciation of déjà vu
2. French: `You, already.'

Dekes who have served most recently as US presidents are George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Gerald R. Ford. F.D.R. joined what had been the Deke chapter at Harvard shortly after it had been expelled for dual affiliation with Alpha Delta Phi. If FDR is counted as a Deke, then he was the only Democrat among the six Deke US Presidents.

Satisfy the customers, and profits will follow naturally. In fact, why not give the product away? That'll really satisfy them.

I hope you're taking notes. Next lesson: PDCA.

A political demonstration, placards and chants and all that, I haven't ever heard called a ``demo,'' but somebody might. In Spanish, a political demonstration is called a manifestación. (A strike, in the sense of work stoppage, is a huelga.)

A demo version of a software program is something of a balancing act: it has to be good enough to motivate a purchase, but not so good that it obviates the need for a purchase. Typical strategies in demo design are disabling a crucial final function (such as saving or printing the document output by the demo program), or having the program expire. Since games don't have much in the way of useful output, and since there are approximately a million very similar games available for free, coercing purchase is hard.

Many games have a demo mode in which they play themselves. That's not for people too lazy to play their own games; it's for people to see how the game is played.

A homonym of the native word demo is the gairaigo for `demonstration' (only in the public-protest sense, afaik) and also `democracy' (though this shorter word is also borrowed as demokurasî. The verb demoru, of course, means `participate in a demonstration.'

The German word jetzt, which now means `now,' looks like a cognate of the English word yet, but probably isn't. Yet is clearly related to words in Frisian languages, but not to any word in other Germanic languages. The English word has many uses, as an adverb and conjunction, but its principal sense underwent an almost subtle transformation during the twentieth century. Yet used to mean what still still means: roughly, ``now as until now.'' That is its sense in Francis Scott Key's words ``Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave....'' He was born in 1779 and was inspired to write the poem, as you recall, by the resistance of Fort McHenry to a British attack in September 1814. (Note that there is an element of continuity or implicit progression in this sense of the word. One could not define it as ``now as before,'' because that includes a meaning like again. Yet was occasionally used in that sense long ago.)

Some people still use yet in the sense of still. (You want an example? Okay, I'll give you an example: Steve's mom. Yes, the very same Steve who's mentioned at the ARMA, job, RPI, and yes entries. Small world, huh? No, not the Steve at the S1S entry.)

Despite the exceptions, however, it is no longer common in American English to use yet in affirmative statements. Instead, in declarative statements it occurs in the phrase not yet, meaning ``still not.'' One could probably argue that this serves a useful purpose. In questions, yet means about the same thing as already.

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.

-- François de La Rochefoucauld
Maxims.

(See also UNCF.)

According to A Dictionary of Surnames, by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges (OUP, 1988), this surname arose from an Old French oath: par Dieu (`by God,' ultimately from the Late Latin de parte Dei, `for God's sake'). The name is supposed to have arisen as a nickname for people who used that oath frequently. Cognate French surnames are Pa(r)dieu and Depardé. English cognates: Pardoe, Pardew, Pard(e)y, Perdue. Cf. Purdue, pardo.

Wheel control. -- Instead of the control stick just described, a control wheel as in an automobile, called a Dep. or Deperdussin control, is frequently used; the wheel is turned to the left to depress the left side of the machine and to the right to depress the right side. A control wheel is shown, in diagram, at the left of Fig. 91. (As in the case of the rudder, ailerons are sometimes connected so as to be operated by a motion opposite to the one described.)

[My italics. You're missing little by my not reproducing the figure. The almost schematic figure shows wires from either wheel control or stick control pulling wing-flap ailerons in opposite directions.]

The paragraph block-quoted above is from page 182 of The Airplane: A Practical Discussion of the Principles of Airplane Flight, by Frederick Bedell, Ph.D. (originally published in 1920), rewritten and enlarged with the assistance of Theodore E. Thompson, M.E. (D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1930).

According to CONTACT! The Story of the Early Birds (pp. 118-119; bibliographic details at the Deperdussin entry):

Equally promising was the Antoinette-type monoplane of Armand Deperdussin, an enterprising and generous silk merchant who employed as his designer one of the truly great engineers of the aeronautical world, Louis Béchereau. The prototype of the Deperdussin was a four-bladed canard monoplane designed in 1909 for Christmas exhibition in a Paris department store. The first flying model, built in 1910, performed well from the start. Powered by a 40-hp, four-cylinder Clerget engine, it had a long fuselage with a very small cross section, two wheels with skids, and a sturdy tail skid. It was one of the first machines to employ the ``wheel'' control, as distinct from the ``stick'' control--an innovation sometimes referred to as the Dep control. While some early pilots complained that it had an irrepressible tendency to steer to the left--to ``chase its tail''--Béchereau's advanced construction was on the threshold of worldwide fame.

[The ``Equally'' at the beginning of the paragraph refers to monoplanes designed by Edouard de Niéport (eventually Nieuport) with very low-camber wings and very streamlined fuselage (``very'' compared with contemporary designs).]

I noticed an article in a 2008 issue of an IEEE Transactions journal (not camera-ready copy, in other words, and publication not rushed as in a Letters journal) that repeatedly used the -dant spelling for the adjective. Dependence is a rather common mathematical notion; the adjective (but not the noun) dependent appears very, very frequently. The world is going to hell in a handbasket with an escort of printers' devils. [Other highlights of the paper: ratio test used to determine convergence of a power series that happened to be an ordinary geometric series (yes, this involved explicitly taking the limit of a constant, although the operation was performed on the wrong constant); series derived by recursion from a formula that could have been rearranged to yield simple closed-form result; series left unsummed.]

It's amazing how convincing that sounds. The same argument works with chicken eggs, if chicken eggs should happen not to exist.

Some readers might be interested to know that a ``deque'' is intended to refer to a list that can be pushed or popped (extended or shortened) on both ends. You could do the same using a stack with a rotate feature (like an HP calculator). In fact, you could do the same and more with linked lists. You could even do it all in machine language. Come think of it, that's how it's ultimately done.

In C++, STL includes a template for deques.

Grammatically, the two words have different analyses. The French des is a contraction of the preposition de and the plural (common gender) definite article les. The German des is the singular genitive form of the definite article for masculine and neuter genders. Syntactically, however, they have a similar distribution: French prepositional phrases in des and German noun phrases in the genitive (unmediated by any preposition), both follow the nouns or noun phrases they modify.

Moreover, although des is followed by a plural noun in French and a singular noun in German, both nouns are likely to end in the letter s. In French, most plurals end in s, and in German the genitive form of a singular noun of masculine and neuter gender is usually declined with a final s. (German feminine nouns and plurals only get a final s in the possessive form, which is something slightly different.)

So des has similar distribution in German and French: following general nouns while preceding nouns that usually end in s (otherwise usually x or n). It remains only to observe that many French words have been borrowed by German and preserved with spellings identical or similar to their current French spellings, and both languages have borrowed words in common from another language such as English. Hence, one encounters coincidences like the following:

Original phrase             Language   English translation
---------------             --------   -------------------
garage des hôtels           French     garage of the hotels
Garage des Hotels           German     garage of the hotel

assistant des jobs          French     jobs assistant
Assistent des Jobs          German     job assistant

encyclopédie des pullovers  French     encyclopedia of sweaters
Enzyklopädie des Pullovers  German     encyclopedia of the sweater

caméras des touristes       French     video cameras of the tourists
Kameras des Touristen       German     cameras of the tourist

limonade des camarades      French     friends' lemonade
Limonade des Kameraden      German     friend's lemonade

To a small extent the older similarities were diminished during the 20th century by the German replacement of many spellings that had retained a c by spellings with z or k. Moreover, the 1996 spelling reform endorsed more rapid naturalization of foreign loans. (Setting some kind of precedent for the euro crisis that began in 2009, it seems.)

It continues to be used as a growth promoter in cattle. Recently, it's found some potential application in the treatment of AIDS.

The common noun descuento and the verb descontar in Spanish are usually accurately translated by the English `discount.' The verb takes a common stem change, and descuento means `I discount.' Descuentos is the plural of the noun descuento and is not a verb form.

In Spanish, as in English and many other languages, counting and telling are related concepts described by partially related sets of words. (I suppose this has to do with the notion and feeling of sequence.) The connection is obvious in the manifestly related words count and recount, as well as from raconteur, borrowed from French. As is somewhat typical, in English words of Germanic provenance the cognate relations are less obvious than in those of Romance, so one is less likely to notice the connection of talley with tale and tell. The connection is clearer among German cognates of these words: Zahl (`number') and erzählen (`tell'). (See

The Spanish word cuento means `story' (perhaps I should write `tale'). It also means `I count' and `I tell,' (forms of the verb contar) and can function as the count noun `count' (had to say that, sorry, it won't happen again, soon) although that is not its principal sense. The form cuentos is just the plural of the noun, but cuentas is `you count' and `you tell,' and the noun `bills' [in the sense of invoice]. (Singular cuenta, of course. One German word for this kind of bill is Konto, from the Italian conto. Another German word for bill is Rechnung, literally `calculation,' cognate with the English word `reckon.' That will come up again if I ever write comprehensively about ``Yes, We Have No Bananas.'')

So back to descuento. All the meanings that this word ordinarily takes have to do with quantities, and most are translatable by the English word `discount.' [The exception is in sports -- really only in soccer, that I'm aware of -- where officials can extend the duration of a match to compensate for interruptions during regulation. In English this is called ``overtime'' (North America) or extra time (RoW); in Spanish it's ``tiempo de descuento.'' It comports with the idea that one should discount (not count, ignore) clock time taken up by officials.] There are a number of books with ``Tiempo de Descuento'' as title, and for many of those it must be a pun.

English has a profusion of privative prefixes. Offhand, the following come to mind: a- (with an- to avoid hiatus; see this AA entry), in- (with forms il-, ir-, and im- assimilated to liquids and labials), non-, un-, de- dis-, dys-, and occasionally even des-, distributed not entirely unsystematically among parts of speech and etymological sources. (We also have an entry for anti-.) Spanish displays less variety. This is partly because the vocabulary is largely Latinate, so the Greek a- and dys- and the Germanic un- naturally occur less frequently. (The Latinate prefix non- in English occurs as the unbound morpheme no in Spanish.) The upshot is that the privative prefix des- has broader use than any single similar prefix in English.

To recap the main points: descuentos is a common word with meanings unrelated to cuentos, but des- is a productive prefix. The right context can force or at least suggest a reading in which descuentos is a nonce word coined from des- and cuentos with the evident meaning of `unstories,' `antistories,' or the like. This punnishing bit of drollery has been exploited (BTW, see the discussion of explotar at the miga entry), I am surprised to say, in fewer than a dozen book titles that I can find. Here are the fruits of my research:

• Milton Fornaro's book with the title Descuentos (Lecturas de verano) [`Unstories (Summer Reading)'] is out of print and inconvenient to obtain, so I can't exclude the possibility that this short-story writer has written a book about good deals for the summer of 1998. I haven't checked any of the others either, to be honest.
• Cuentos y descuentos (1986) by René Avilés Fabila. It's available new for $20.00, but through the good offices of Amazon, from some independent merchant, you can have it used for just $23.98. This seller seems to have some difficulty with the concept of descuento.
• Cuentos y des-Cuentos (2012) by Josué Santiago. This book is not available used. You can only recycle so many times before you have to just mulch.
• Cuentos y descuentos andaluces (1976) [`Andalusian Stories and Antistories'] by Sebastián Cuevas Navarro.
• Cuentas, cuentos y descuentos (1995) by Myriam Bustos Arratia. All the words in the title are defined earlier in the entry. You should have read the whole thing! (Of course, it's also possible that the first word, instead of meaning `bills,' `you count,' or `you tell,' is meant to be read as the female form of cuentos, very much as ``herstory'' was coined on the basis of a false analysis of history. The latter word comes from Greek meaning `investigation,' hence ``natural history.'' The single word historia in Spanish, and storia in Italian, means both `history' and `story' in each case.
• Recuentos: Más cuentas, cuentos y descuentos (1996) [`Recounts: more...'] by Myriam Bustos Arratia.
• Des-cuentos & texto-clips (Colección de narradores uruguayos Santa Maria) (1993) by Gustavo Gabriel Aguilera.
• La furia del alfabeto (des-cuentos) (2011) by Melba Guaruglia Zás.
• Descuentos (1986) by Leopoldo Alas.

As a noun:
1. Plural of desert -- lifeless, typically dry, stereotypically sandy place(s). Stress on the first syllable.
2. That which is deserved. A noun derived from the verb deserve. Stress on the second syllable. The word now occurs mostly in the expression ``just deserts.'' (Just here is related to justice, it is not to be interpreted as mere. ``Just deserts'' are appropriate rewards or, more usually, punishments.) NOTICE THE SINGLE ESS. This has nothing to do with postprandial repasts!
As a verb:
1. 3rd pers. sing. present of the verb to desert.

• aspect
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According to Jancis Robinson's book, by (not further-specified) law in the US, grape wine is designated dessert wine if its alcohol content is between 14% and 24% (alcoholic strength entry) or fortified (dessert wine entry). These are inequivalent though approximately consistent definitions. The microbes that convert sugar into alcohol die off at alcohol concentrations above 15-18% (they are effectively poisoned by their own excrement), so higher alcohol concentrations require either distillation (and then the distillate is usually called by some other name than [distilled] wine, such as brandy) or fortification. Fortification is the admixture of some fluid with higher alcohol content. (Some fortified wines are port, sherry, madeira, and Wonder Bread. Oops, not Wonder Bread; that's differently fortified. Better go easy on that stuff -- it's making me dizzy!)

In nonmilitary usage, the transitive verb destacar is figuratively `to emphasize,' or more precisely `to throw into relief or high contrast, to make salient.' (The thing destacado is typically the merits or qualities of some person or thing.) The word is also taken literally in this figurative sense: to increase the contrast or salience of some feature in a painting, particularly in chiaroscuro (that's claroscuro in Spanish). Intransitively, destacar is `to stick out or become (literally) unglued.'

In mathematics, the determinant is a scalar function of a square matrix. For an n×n matrix M with elements M_i,j, it is the sum of n! terms. Each of the n! terms corresponds to a different permutation s of the numbers 1 to n. Each term is the signed product of n matrix elements M_i,s(i) for i from 1 to n. The ``signed product'' is just the stated product multiplied by -1 if the permutation s is odd. For a 2×2 matrix, the determinant is M_1,1M_2,2 - M_1,2M_1,2. For matrices of order 4 or higher, it is convenient to evaluate by the method of minors.

A system of n linear equations in n variables is described by a square, nth-order matrix of variable coefficients and also, if the system is inhomogeneous, by an n-component vector of constants. Kramer's method expresses the solution of the inhomogeneous system in terms of determinants. Each variable has the value that is a quotient of determinants. The denominator in each case is the determinant of the square matrix of coefficients, and the numerator is constructed from the same square matrix by substituting the (column or row) vector of constants for the appropriate column or row of the coefficient matrix. If the determinant of the coefficient matrix is zero, then a solution is possible only for constant vectors that make all the numerator determinants zero. If the system is homogeneous (equivalent to a constants vector with all components zero), then a nontrivial solution (one in which the variables are not all zero) is possible only if the denominator (determinant of coefficient matrix) is zero. In other words, depending on the situation, what the determinant determines is the existence of solutions: whether solutions can exist for all constant vectors in the inhomogeneous case, or whether nontrivial solutions can exist in the homogeneous case.

Kramer's method is not a practical way to solve systems of linear equations (much quicker and less pathological is some use of Gaussian elimination that puts things in triangular form or tridiagonal form, like LU decomposition), but it does demonstrate the significance of the determinant.

There's no reason why you should believe this except that I would hardly make it up, but the only reason I wrote anything past the first paragraph of this entry is that I came back later looking for a lost puppy. But now I'm tired of all this, so information on degenerate versus nondegenerate conic sections will have to wait for another serendipitous visit. Oh yeah, and a determinant in linguistics is a word like the or a word or morpheme that fulfills a similar function.

Detroit, which was a pleasant, elm-shaded little city of 250,000 when the auto came out [in 1886].

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, as Jay Gatsby is finally showing Dolly around his mansion, he receives a call.

... I can't talk now, old sport. ... I said a small town. ... He must know what a small town is. ... He's no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town.

As of 2005, Detroit is the 11th-largest city in the US. Its population has fallen along with the fortunes of the domestic car manufacturers, from 1.8 million in 1950 to 900 thousand in 2000.

(Just to kill the frog: the pun in the preceding sentence is a compound antanaclasis.)

He systematically collected and rearticulated most of the general statements about education that are both obvious and approximately true. Most people who regarded themselves as thoughtful agreed with his useless platitudes and ignored the stuff that would have required them to think, while a few foolish people, thinking that those stupid things he wrote might be influential, opposed him. These facts were later misinterpreted: Dewey was thought to have convinced the educational, eh, elite of his new ideas, and thus made his opponents look foolish. This is the source of the myth that Dewey was influential.

Dewey is called a philosopher on the same principle that dead politicians are called statesmen. (Or is that ``statespersons'' now? ``Statespeople''? Ugh. All the more reason to keep calling them politicians.) Coincidentally, Dewey was a philosopher. And he was famous. So it is possible to say, with a relatively clear conscience, that he was a famous philosopher. Of course, John Dewey was a famous philosopher in the same way that Anne Boleyn was a famous chess player. They are famous, but not for philosophy or chess. Still, John Dewey did fumble with philosophical concepts in his writing, sometimes amusingly, in the mistaken belief that deeper mud makes a stronger foundation. This makes him quite useful to students of philosophy today. A Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy usually consists of pointing out some pesky little inconsistency in the work of a famous philosopher -- i.e., tapping a famous philosopher on the shoulder. Many philosophy graduate students simply can't reach that high, and end up pinching a famous philosopher on the ass. Fortunately for these students, Dewey is what you might call ``accessible.''

Indepthopaedia:

My introduction has piqued your interest, and you're still reading! You'll be sorrr-rrry! Here's a sample of John Dewey brilliance, from chapter 1 of his greatest work, Democracy and Education:

Society exists through a process of transmission quite as much as biological life. This transmission occurs by means of communication of habits of doing, thinking, and feeling from the older to the younger. Without this communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it, social life could not survive. If the members who compose a society lived on continuously, they might educate the new-born members, but it would be a task directed by personal interest rather than social need. Now it is a work of necessity.

In case you're wondering: yes, he did intend for this book to be read by adults. There's also a bit of Dewey content in a block quote at the Slightly to the Right entry.

It cost a fortune to build ($600 million; $1 billion including naval flanks; 26 dead due to flight accidents in generally terrible weather) and a larger fortune to maintain (a quarter billion dollars per year). Given the supersonic speeds of bombers of the time, it would have provided about one hour's warning of an attack against the lower 48. Two months after it went into operation, the USSR launched Sputnik. By 1963, ballistic missiles were considered to be the major threat, and in 1965 the Navy patrols on the Atlantic and Pacific flanks of the DEW Line were discontinued. BMEWS was added. An air-defense pact signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Canadian PM Brian Mulroney in March 1985 turned the DEW Line over to Canada in 1989. By that year, the North Warning System was in place. That required only 13 minimally-manned AN/FPS-117 long-range radar sites.

The Soviet Union fell apart for Christmas 1990. Over time, of course, various pieces of the early-warning system had been decommissioned as they had become redundant. Particularly since 2001, an attack over the Arctic has not seemed to be a major concern, and things like the DEW Line are of mainly historical interest (though North Korea is working hard at justifying missile defenses). A good place to learn about Cold-War-era early-warning systems is Dave Word's ``Early Warning Connection'' (with a links page).

The common writing directions are dextrograde, sinistrograde (leftward), boustrophedon (alternating), and vertical. In horizontal writing, it is normal (very normal) for successive lines in a block of text to be written below the ones preceding. Likewise, vertical writing is implicitly downward writing. Parallel lines of vertical writing may progress to the left or to the right.

Oh, look! Someone has already thought of it:

• Deep Foundations Institute ``An international network of heavy construction professionals dedicated to quality and economy in foundation design and construction.''
• Department of Financial Institutions of the State of Indiana (IN).
• Designs, Furniture & Installations, Inc. ``a full service dealer located in the D.C., Virginia Metro area, serving commercial and GSA customers across the United States and, the World.'' [I'm really grateful when a website gives some little idea as to its location, unless they say `` tristate area,'' which could be approximately anywhere.
• Diamond Flower International. Electronic instrument manufacturer.

I used to have a DTO entry defined as design-to-operability. I probably screwed up in transcription. Hope this is right.

``The Democratic Governors' Association ... was founded in 1983 to support the candidacy of Democratic Governors throughout the nation. [I'm sure that with a few sensible reforms, that sentence could achieve literally the significance intended by the original framers.] The DGA provides political and strategic assistance to Gubernatorial campaigns. In addition, the DGA plays an integral role in developing positions on key state and federal issues that effect the states through the Governors' Policy Forum Series.''

Cf. RGA.

In a few places I've seen DGAZ given incorrectly with ``German Association of Esthetic Dentistry'' as an English gloss. This is certainly an error, but not of translation; the error is that the German acronym DGÄZ (next entry) has been misspelled ``DGAZ.''

Please note: if you have any difficulty writing, typing, printing, or otherwise indicating the vowel ``Ä,'' you are strongly advised to substitute ``Ae.'' This is common practice. [Indeed, the diacritical mark on the Ä (called an Umlaut) arose as an abbreviated form of e: it represents the two vertical strokes used in writing e in the Fraktur scripts used for German until the middle of the twentieth century.] The letters ä and a represent rather different vowels. They're as different as e and a. In fact, they're almost precisely as different: ä represents the same sounds as e (except in some double-vowel combinations). To write ``DGAZ'' for DGÄZ is thus a spelling error. In a way, it's worse than writing ``DGEZ'' for DGÄZ, since ``esthetisch'' is a plausible borrowing from English, whereas it's hard to see how an ``asthetisch'' spelling could arise.

In summary: if you can't manage ``DGÄZ,'' just write DGAeZ. That's what the organization itself did, in choosing the domain name <dgaez.de>. ``DGAZ'' (entry above) is another organization altogether.

The DGB was founded in 1949. The same goes for a large fraction of German organizations.

The original intention was to provide a slightly improved version of the LSJ for the use of Spanish-speaking universitarios, supplemented by information from other useful references, but almost from the beginning, the project has suffered from mission creep. There was the desire to incorporate advances in the understanding of Indo-European that took place in the twentieth century, and advances in other branches of linguistics. The mission crept so far at the beginning of the project that the decision was made to completely redo the first volume even before the rest of the first edition was done. A number of important appendices to the dictionary have been published. One can certainly sympathize with and even admire the ambitiousness of the project, but the staff available to accomplish this great work is limited.

Volume V, whose last entry is dionychos, appeared in 1997. As of 1998, the schedule was for subsequent volumes to arrive every other year (vol. VI in 1999, ktl.), but in fact volumes VI and VII did not come out until 2002 and 2009 (yes, in that order). They're not even out of the xi's. At the present rate, all current participants will be buried before the DGE is finished. What they need is a new business model. They should make the primary medium of publication electronic, do a quick Spanish translation of the LSJ so they have a complete zeroth edition, and color-code the entries to reflect the degree of vetting and updating that has occurred. Then they can make regular updates to the online version, and issue annual or semi-annual patches to libraries (and individuals) that subscribe to any locally served version. (If you can't afford a digital connection, you can't afford the DGE, so a hardcopy edition is beside the point.) Fwiw, as of this writing (February 2014), the online version is about halfway through epsilon.

As it is, the main current output of the DGE effort is appendices (annejos). Appendix volumes I and II (published in 1985 and 1993) are a valuable dictionary of Mycenaean Greek. (Mycenaean Greek was written in Linear B, a syllabic script in which many of the symbols represent multiple similar syllables). Appendix Volume VI (a compilation of 25 articles written by various members of the project over the preceding 20 years) was published in 2005. The most recent indication I noticed, that the DGE effort has not been abandoned, is that Sabine Arnaud-Thuillier and Frederic Glorieux, of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas, Madrid, were scheduled for the Posters/Demos session of the DCA conference of April 2013, with ``Diccionario Griego -- Español'' as the title.

There was also a fiducial DLE effort, but it was slow off the mark. Ummm, relatively speaking, that is.

A list of others is kindly served by Wayne Garvin.

Unless you're rereading this entry, you probably haven't encountered the word ``terrariatology'' before. AFAIK, the word exists in English only for the purpose of translating the German word Terrarienkunde. On the Internet, as of early February, the only instance that I can find of the English word is in a 1986 essay by Eugene Garfield (yeah, the famous ISI guy) where the DGHT's name is given in translation.

The German word is quite common. Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache of Duden defines it as ``Lehre von der Haltung u. Zucht von Tieren im Terrarium.'' [`Knowledge of the care & breeding of animals in terraria.'] The big Langenscheidts Enzyklopädisches Wörterbuch (English to German and back in four volumes) dutifully offers `terrariatology' as a translation. Offhand, I can find neither this ostensible English word nor terrariology in any English monolingual dictionary such as the OED.

However, the German expressions elide a bit less. The English idiom can be thought of as abbreviating an expression like ``of the like kind,'' with ``of'' and ``kind'' understood. The German articles der and des are in the genitive case, so they are equivalent to ``of the.'' Also, adjectives in German nominalize in a way that they do not automatically do in English. Thus, from the German adjective klein, meaning `small,' one has ``der kleine'' meaning `the small one.'

• David Herbert. As in David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930).
• David Hilbert. As in David Hilbert (1862-1943), the great mathematician.

The nonelemental nature of didymium was demonstrated by Auer von Welsbach in 1885. The 1989 edition of the OED (the OED2), has this definition:

A rare metal, discovered by Mosander in 1841; found only in association with cerium and lanthanium. Symbol Di.

I suppose it's possible to give some weaselly defense of this, since they don't flat out say it's an element. But the entry is immensely deceptive, since the unsuspecting reader would probably draw the conclusion that didymium was a metallic chemical element. The dozen other dictionaries I've checked, including the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, are explicit that didymium is not an element. For example, Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) offers

A rare metallic substance usually associated with the metal cerium; -- hence its name. It was formerly supposed to be an element, but has since been found to consist of two simpler elementary substances, neodymium and praseodymium. See Neodymium, and Praseodymium.

(I'm not sure whether didymium was given its name as a twin of lanthanum, as the OED2 etymology asserts, or of cerium, or of both.)

The forty-year delay in separating the elemental components of the alloy didymium is due, of course, to the fact that that the rare earth elements are chemically and physically very similar, and separating them ultimately depends on small quantitative differences in the physical properties of their compounds amplified by chromatographic techniques. When the separation is so difficult, the mixed substance may be directly useful. Didymium is used as a light filter in safety glasses used by glass blowers and glass workers. The color centers formed by didymium in glass only add a slight tint to broad-spectrum light, but they absorb very efficiently the spectrum of light emitted by hot sodium glass. Another case of such a mix of elements used unseparated is mischmetal, described at the rare earth entry.

The vertical relationship is easily explained: elements in a single group (column) of the periodic table have the same number of outer shell electrons; these occupy similar orbitals and exhibit similar bonding patterns, and hence similar chemical properties in general. These similarities are greatest between adjacents elements (i.e., elements in the same group and adjacent periods), so various graphs of chemical and physical properties as a function of period exhibit approximately linear, or at least monotonic trends. In such graphs, the lowest-period element (the one at the top of the column) is often an exception to the general trend, but may participate in a diagonal relationship. Sometimes the diagonal relationship is not so obvious because of the way the table is laid out. That's the case with the well-established diagonal relationship between aluminum and beryllium.

Interestingly, in traditional (French-suited) playing cards, each king in the deck is supposed to represent a great king from history:

• Spades -- David
• Clubs -- Alexander (probably the Great)
• Hearts -- Charles (probably Charlemagne)
• Diamonds -- Julius Caesar

It also works if you rotate it 135 degrees, left or right! That's called (C4m) symmetry!

Pink Floyd have an excellent song entitled ``Shine On You Crazy Diamond.'' It originally appeared in the ``Wish You Were Here'' album. They put it in the 1995 album ``Pulse,'' since they'd run out of new ideas. (They also have an eight-CD box set called ``Shine On'' for about $150.)

Sky diamonds figure in an LSD song. See deconstruction entry.

Elvis Costello sings

Well it's a dog's life in a rope leash or a diamond collar
It's enough to make you think right now
But you don't bother

Most diamonds mined are not gem quality, and have value only in industrial applications. (Diamond is the ``hardest'' material--it defines the maximum, 10, on the Mohs scale of hardness. ``Hardest'' means that no other crystal can scratch it, but it can make a scratch in anything else. My next research project will be to discover how nature manages to put diamonds on cats' paws.)

Somewhere I should mention that diamond is pure carbon (C). It is the stable form of elemental carbon at the high pressures and temperatures that occur where it is formed, but graphite is the stable form at normal temperature and pressure.

Probably the biggest problem is doping. There are no good n-type dopants for diamond, so one is pretty much restricted to unipolar devices. The best p-type dopant is boron (B), and its acceptor level in the diamond bandgap is 360meV above the valence edge. This means that at room temperature, the acceptors are only a few percent ionized. Of course, you can heat the semiconductor up to increase the carrier density -- 360meV represents the activation energy for creating carriers. Unfortunately, this runs into the problem of temperature-dependent mobility: µ ~T^-a, where a is typically in excess of 2. In other words, you can't increase the conductivity by raising the temperature to increase carrier density, because the mobility goes down.

One of the great attractions of diamond semiconductor, relative to silicon (if you could get around diamond's other problems), is its stellar heat conductivity -- 20-30 W/K-cm.

``Hey, watch who you call `ancient' there, mortal!''

In music, a diastema an interval (i.e., a pitch difference), typically that between successive notes of a scale. The term is used primarily in the context of ancient Greek music. An obsolete alternative form (for the singular diastema only) is diastem, an accident of borrowing indirectly from the French (diastème).

In zoology and anatomy, a diastema is the space between successive teeth, or between two kinds of teeth. Man is unusual among mammals in having generally small diastema. The way diastema is usually understood, as a substantial natural space between teeth, man has none at all.

I thought the book whose title is the head term of this entry would be interesting. You know, like what sort of metaphor do the deaf sign when they mean ``my ears are tingling'' or something. The book is by Maxine T. Boatner and John E. Gates. Revised Edition Edited by Adam Makkai. Prepared for the National Association of the Deaf. It's part of Barron's Educational Series, Inc., Woodbury, New York. It was originally copyright 1966 by American School for the Deaf, West Hartford, Connecticut. Isn't Gary originally from West Hartford? My copy was discarded from the Grandview School Library in Alliance, Nebraska. I bought it at the used book store there when I made my pilgrimage to Carhenge.

Anyway, the ``for the Deaf'' in the title modifies ``Dictionary.'' It's just ordinary idioms of spoken English. That's the basic problem with reference works: they waste your time and never tell you what you actually want to know! What a disappointment.

291. Anon.: The Boke of Englysshe and Spanysshe (ca. 1554).
     English phrases followed by Spanish equivalents. (From the choice of phrases, it looks like it would be most useful to a preacher or missionary.)
200. Thomas Cooper: Thesaurus Linguae Romanae et Britannicae, tam accurate congestus, etc. (1565).
     Entries give Latin words followed by English translations.
231. Claude Desainliens: A Dictionarie of French and English (1593).
     (Enlarged edition of work published anonymously in 1571, almost certainly by the same author, a well-known teacher of French.) French words and idiomatic phrases followed by English translations.
330. Thomas Thomas [sic]: Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1587).
     Latin words defined in English.

The pattern is confirmed two-way bilingual dictionary is described on the title page as consisting of two parts: ``I. French and English'' and ``II. English and French.'' The heading of the first part is described as ``Containing the FRENCH before the English'' and ``Qui contient le FRANÇOIS devant l'ANGLOIS'' (not Anglais). It has French headwords followed by English definitions and explanations. The work:

285. Abel Boyer: The Royal Dictionary Abridged (1700).
     (Boyer first published his original Royal Dictionary in 1699. It was constantly revised and reprinted; the last edition was published in 1896. The abridged version added accentuation information for English words, and went through over 40 printings through 1860.)

The one exception to the pattern is the earliest comparably titled work in the series; it is tempting to speculate that the preposition in (rather than of) accounts for or must be coordinated with the difference:

180. William Salesbury: A Dictionary in English and Welsh (1547).
     Paired columns, Welsh words on the left and English translations on the right.

For the sake of completeness, I'll list the other (four, that I can find) bilingual dictionaries in the series; all involve Latin as source or target language or both.

108. ``Galfridus [or Galfredus] Grammaticus, OP'': Promptorium parvulorum (1499).
     (First compiled around 1440, the work was printed a number of times between 1499 and 1528. The work was also known by the title Medulla Grammatices.) English nouns and verbs with definitions in Latin. (Nouns and then verbs beginning in A, followed by nouns and then verbs beginning in B, etc. ``Nouns'' here (nomina) is to be understood to include both nouns adjective and nouns substantive.)
221. Thomas Elyot: The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (1538).
     Latin words with English translations.
208. Richard Huloet: Abecedarium Anglico-Latinum (1552).
     English words with Latin translations.
99. John Davies: Dictionarium duplex (1632).
    Welsh-Latin (Britannico-Latinum and (posterius) Latin-Welsh (Latino-Britannicum).

Judging from the first issue, I supposed that the articles were required to be in any of the common languages of classical philology publication -- English, French, German, Italian, maybe Spanish or Dutch. But the author instructions just say that ``[t]outes les propositions d'articles sont à rédiger dans la langue maternelle de leur auteur.'' Things could get interesting (if they can find reviewers).

Didactic poetry
Ain't what it used to be,
When Lucretius waxed poetic,
About theories atomic.
And Virgil for better or worse,
Gave farmers advice in verse.
Allit'rative verse was once stylish
For teaching the Bible in English,
But it's all over now.

The practice of writing didactic poems took a dive at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the only substantive one that we have in the entire glossary (I can't bring myself to call it ``good'') is a eulogy of iodine from the middle of the nineteenth century (see the I entry). We also have a paean to tar water (water in which pine tar has been washed). It was written by Bishop Berkeley and can be found at the entry for the IBS. I can't deny that it was intended to be didactic, but I'd prefer not to assert that it was informative.

Probably the only well-known didactic poet of the latter half of the twentieth century is Tom Lehrer. He was a roommate at Harvard of my thesis advisor, P.W. Anderson. (I recall that one day he [PWA] seemed pretty disgusted to discover that I, a physics graduate student, didn't know what a double-dactyl was.) Anderson won a Nobel prize in physics, but Lehrer won fame. On the other hand, Lehrer burned out. This webpage features a Flash animation of ``The Elements.'' A good source for (generally older) didactic poetry, including the lyrics of differential-geometry drinking songs and the like, is Gravitation (the big black paperback) by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

The main kinds of didactic poetry that have continued to be written are short: advertising jingles and pronunciation poems (the latter mostly for surnames). For good examples of the former, see the Pepsi-Cola and 43 beans entries. We give examples of didactic pronunciation verse at the homogeneous, Jowett, and Pepys entries. But for all of you who have simply printed out the glossary for leisure reading and have trouble following the links, here's another, this one written by Robert Baden-Powell.

Man, Nation, Maiden
Please call it Baden.
Further, for Powell
Rhyme it with Noël.

That boy'd've had to work a lot harder, if he ever wanted to earn the highly coveted Poetry Merit Badge. The way poetry went to hell in the last century, I suppose losing the didactic sort may have been a blessing in disguise.

Sociologists say it with Weltanschaung. Haben Sie alles gefunden? lfs already.

Dr. Nasser Saidi, Chief Economist of the DIFC, said in a speech on October 28, 2007, that the economies of GCC states should now be considered as asset-based ones rather than oil-based. It makes me think of vitamins. (Saidi's speech was the regulatory keynote address to the Sovereign Reserve Management, Pension and Institutional Funds Congress 2007, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the UAE somewhere.)

Chapter 5 of Atoms in the Family describes a Bébé Peugeot purchased by frugal Enrico Fermi in 1927, about a year before he married Laura (the future author of the book). Even then, and particularly in Italy, this was a noticeable car. (And probably Bébé wasn't the official model designation.)

It burned little more gas than a motorcycle and made the same amount of noise. Because it had no differential and its wheels were obliged to run at the same speed on curves, it moved like a power-propelled baby carriage, jumping and swerving at every turn. The particular Bébé Peugeot of which I am going to talk was a two-seat convertible the color of bright egg-yolk, with a leaky oilcloth roof and a rumble seat in the back. As it sped around at a top velocity of twenty miles per hour, it was always followed by a dense cloud of black smoke from the open exhaust.

(They don't make baby carriages like they used to either.)

With the simplest differentials, if one of the drive wheels is free (on ice, in mud, suspended off the driving surface, etc.) then it spins and little torque is transmitted to the other wheel, yielding little net traction. Limited-slip differentials were invented to prevent this from happening. Nowadays the function of limited-slip differentials is increasingly incorporated in electronic stability control (ESC) systems.

Many years later, on July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was exploded at ``Trinity.'' The test was postponed by weather from a scheduled 4am to 5:30 am. Local time was ``Mountain War Time,'' so the test occurred at 4:30 Mountain Standard Time, which was still before civil twilight. So it was dark outside, except during the test. A blind girl was reported to have seen it. The military told the press that an ammo dump had blown up. Enrico Fermi got back home to Los Alamos the evening of the 16th -- between the test and the inspections, he had pulled an all-nighter. The next morning ``all he had to say to the family was that for the first time in his life on coming back from Trinity he had felt it was not safe for him to drive. It had seemed to him as if the car were jumping from curve to curve, skipping the straight stretches in between. He had asked a friend to drive....''

I'll also have to mention the mission-statement slogan ``Working for people.'' Doubtless this is inspiring to people, but the question is: which people and how? Dot Wordsworth (is that a real person?) noticed this and mentioned it in her regular Spectator column (in the 25 May 2002 issue). It's the slogan of the (English, I guess) Muslim Aid charity.

Digi-Key reveals that once, Barry Goldwater purchased a digital clock kit from them.

The company name originates from founder Ronald A. Stordahl's original product, a digital electronic keyer kit for ham radio operators to send radio-telegraph code.

My father sold crystal radios when he was in school. That product has been discontinued as well.

Diglossia is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation.

I guess the coexistence of a standardized Hochdeutsch (``High German'') and various local German languages, particularly in Switzerland, would be among the best-known modern Western examples of diglossia. The term has become widely used since Ferguson introduced it, and in practice the definition is not so definite.

Okay, enough of that. Obviously, the term was constructed from the reek roots di- (compounding form of dis, `double, twice') and méros (`part, share'), patterned on polymer. Okay, that really should be Greek, and not reek, but I figured you'd be amused by the typo, so I left it. The English word dimer rhymes with nickel-and-dimer. Oh, it's too much! This entry is uproariously funny!

As usual, the term is used scientifically in a way that is more restrictive than etymology alone would suggest. Specifically, the two parts are chemically bonded and are chemically similar. The reason for this restriction is probably that it was patterned on the word polymer, and polymer was originally intended to refer to a chemically-bonded chain of similar units (which eventually were called monomers, or monomer units). Hence a dimer was the first step in the polymerization process.

Eventually, we'll have a paragraph or two here about what we mean by ``chemically similar.'' At minimum, we'll point out that for chemical purposes, different nuclear isotopes are almost always equivalent.

The simplest sort of dimer is a diatomic molecule of a single element, like H₂, N₂, O₂, F₂, Cl₂, etc. (As the preceding sentence implies, the word diatomic does not imply two atoms of the same element.) Other dimers include cyanogen (CN)₂, which is a dimer of cyanide. The word dimer is also applied to a pair of identical functional groups, already part of a single molecule, which bond directly to each other. An example is given in the excimer entry.

The term dimer is used primarily in chemistry, but various dimers, and dimerization (the formation of dimers) are of interest to condensed-matter physicists, particularly in the context of the Peierls instability. In biology, although the word dimer is not itself used (or at least not common), the words dimerous and dimery occur. Specifically, in botany a flower having two members in each whorl is dimerous, and the occurrence of this feature is dimery. In the biological context, the similarity of the two dimerous parts is not a strict requirement.

Parallel constructions in mono-, tri-, tetra-, penta-, etc. occur less commonly in chemistry, and in biology with -merous and -mery.

The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology uses what look like a running T. Rex and a T. Rex head (Albertosaurus head, actually) as logos, so you might expect them to have a good display. I think they do, but it's no longer very evident from their web pages. Now they want your money. I guess they don't want their institution to go down the toilet the way the Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue did (concerning which, gingerly inspect this TP entry). If you can't make it to Calgary (Drumheller, to be precise), they'll sell you a virtual tour on CD for $18.69 Canadian. (I think a lot of it was online back in 1995.)

Colors don't fossilize, exactly, so the colors of dinosaurs are unknown, technically speaking. Some interesting hypotheses have resulted.

Citizen Kane is Orson Welles's thinly disguised movie about the newspaperman William Randolph Hearst. A biography The Chief by historian David Nasaw (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2000) suggests that Charles Foster Kane was an unfair caricature of Hearst. Be that as it may, the movie has a more interesting inaccuracy: In a scene where Kane and his entourage set off for the beach from Xanadu, the background sky is a montage. It seems to show large birds flying in the distance, but the montage, borrowed from a science fiction movie to cut costs, actually shows pterodactyls.

(Hitachi once showcased its DIS technology with a dinosaur exhibit. They've dissed the dinosaurs; the exhibit is extinct.)

Semiconductor diodes in commercial application all have at least one pn junction. Vide

• Zener (a.k.a. breakdown) diode
• photodiode
• Schottky diode
• Esaki tunneling diode

See ``Molecular Rectifier,'' by A. S. Martin, J. R. Sambles, and G. J. Ashwell, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 70, #2, pp. 218-221 (11 January 1993). for more unusual diodes.

The webpage for this software is very slightly coy about the basis for the name choice. It quotes a work that used to be known as Lives of the Great Philosophers by a fellow who used to be known as Diogenes Laërtes (now still Diogenes, but the Latin Laertius is preferred). The quote is from book 6, sec. 41, however, which happens to be in the chapter on Diogenes of Sinope, and it is famous. The quote is

Preserving the syntax so far as possible, this is

This might well be the best-remembered use of an ancient word meaning `search.' Interestingly, the word hápsas, meaning `lit' in this context, is more literally `touched,' and the Greeks used it in the metaphorical way we do (or still do), to refer to someone whose sanity has been affected. It would not have been out of place to describe Diogenes of Sinope as touched. The word ánthropon here means `man' in the sense of person, male or female. (This is like homo in Latin, if that doesn't cause too much confusion. The homo of homosexual is the Greek root meaning `same.') Any person hearing Diogenes could reasonably infer that the person sought was not just any person. Perhaps it would be a low-contrast or camouflaged person, hence the lamp. Whatever. Other versions of the story have him searching for an honest person, and fwiw this particular line of text has come down to us in at least slightly corrupt form. (I don't think any extant manuscript of it includes the necessary qualifier, however.) As Aristotle remarked somewhere, he was a familiar figure in Athens.

In contrast, Gerard of Liverpool went to America as a young man and became a postdoc with Craig. He would go around during the day and ask ``are you really all daft?'' He felt like David Lister of Red Dwarf.

Diogenes made a great show of flouting conventional standards of propriety, hygiene, and other optional things -- he even lived in a tub. At that point in their evolutionary development, dogs apparently also lived in tubs, so people called Diogenes and the group around him and Antisthenes `dogs'. [Vide NDOPA.]

Gerard is also a bachelor (cf. zoology entry).

Actually, because Diogenes had not mastered Modern English, Athenians called him a `Greek dog,' or cynic.

Gerard is a Brit.

Think about it some more.

Oh, alright -- kunikós is Greek for `dog-like,' from kúôn, kunós, `dog,' cognate with the Latin canis. For further etymological connections, see the DLR entry.

When Alexander the Great asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him, Diogenes said ``just get out of my light, Alex'' or words to that effect. Many ancients were sun-worshippers.

Gerard has already figured out that it's not a lot easier to get a natural tan in South Bend than in Liverpool.

One bit of ancient wisdom that we all know today is: It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Back in ancient times, however, they were still working the bugs out of this wisdom, and Diogenes had to use a beta version, which said ``better to light a candle in the daytime, and curse the man who casts the biggest shadow.'' If Diogenes had only got some better pointers on his interviewing technique, he would not have had to live in a tub fit for a dog. He could have afforded a deluxe tub.

Gerard also likes to spit into the employment wind.

Alexander Great was not the kind of administrator who thought that the pen was mightier than the sword. (Of course, the ball-point pen had not yet been invented.) Alexander Great was the kind of boss who liked to solve knotty problems with a sword. To this day there is no satisfactory theory of why Diogenes survived his interview with Alexander. However, while on a cruise some time later, Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold into slavery.

Nothing even remotely reminiscent of this could happen in the US today, because the thirteenth amendment (ratified 6 Dec. 1865) to the US Constitution forbids slavery. Until recently, we even had a significant labor movement.

Someone asked Diogenes:

`Hey, Diogenes, tell us, what fate took you down to Hades?'
`A dog's bite took me.'

Much of this can be explained on the basis of Latin derivation. Even as word forms evolved, the grammatical male-female distinction was preserved. Thus female -io and -tas Latin nouns evolved into -ción and -dad nouns in Spanish but remained female. (These correspond to -tion/-sion and -ty nouns in English. For more on the latter, see the vanidad entry.) Actually, one might better say that the female-nonfemale distinction was preserved, since the three genders of Latin collapsed into two, the neuter usually coalescing with the male. In a typical case, Latin ovum (n.) became Spanish huevo (m.). (More on this at LONERS.)

There are some oddities, however, such as mar. The Latin mare was a neuter third-declension noun with sing. abl. forms mare and mari. In Spanish, it is used in both genders. Generally, it is masculine to landlubbers and feminine entre marinos. In addition, some figurative and technical expressions apparently originating with seamen use feminine mar.

The different noun forms that Latin used for different grammatical cases were collapsed into a single form (typically derived from the ablative; see disco). The large number of Latin first-declension nouns with singular ablative forms ending in -a yielded a large number of female nouns in Spanish that end in -a, and this was regularized into a reliable morphological rule (i.e., new nouns ending in -a are female). However, in words derived from Greek and Latin, etymology is normally still the controlling factor. Thus the exotic (fifth-declension male) noun dies evolved into Spanish día but stayed male. (For more, see the sp. entry.)

Most male first-declension nouns in Latin are borrowed from Greek. Among these, probably the largest class is that of words ending in -ista. These were derived from -istês nouns in Greek. The -ista ending generally carried over unchanged into Spanish. In French, the ending was regularly transformed to -iste, and this was a large source of -ist words in Middle English. In all three of these modern languages, the suffix is productive. As nouns, -ista words in Spanish have the same form for males and females. (The politically hypercorrect name for an association of dentists would have to be ``La Asociación de Las y Los Dentistas'' or something equally stupid.) Likewise, as adjectives the -ista words have common gender. (See SEDERI for an example, where male estudios is modified by renacistas.)

Most of the other examples I can think of, of male Spanish nouns ending in -a, are ultimately derived from Greek male nouns ending in -a (typically via the Latin first declension): drama, panorama, poema, poeta, programa, tema (the last is `theme'), etc.

Tequila (in origin the name of a Mexican town) is male; but then, so too was José Cuervo (`Joe Crow'), creator of the Jose Cuervo brand. (The brand name does not have a graphic accent over the e in José.)

That should be enough exceptions for final-a-female rule to cause confusion. The only exception I can think of for final d is the metric capacitance unit farad. It's at least conceivable to me that no -ción, -gión, -sión nouns are male. The usual exception of -ion number names doesn't occur in Spanish: million is millón, billion billón, etc.

In detail: Dryden used it in Essay on Dramatic Poetry, 65 (1668):

If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi.

[We] put on masques, and went on stage with the hoi polloi.

Here are some typical specs.

According to information recently confided to me, it turns out that the ``Dip'' in the head term stands for DIPlomat. Dipnote is a US State Department blog. A news story in November 2007 elicited this comment from one of the people who runs the blog:

In addition, as with all other entries on Dipnote, we will post comments regardless of the point of view. The only exceptions being profanity, hate speech, personal attacks and foreign language.

Given the suspect appearance of the word, and the pernicious elasticity of a weasel term like ``uncontrollable craving,'' in the twentieth century the word dipsomaniac came to be used as a winking or contemptious euphemism for any sot, or habitual drunk. The word dipsomaniac became obsolete in the second half of the twentieth century. One could say it was replaced by the word alcoholic, but the situation is slightly trickier.

The word dipsomaniac, despite its medical provenance, carried a certain moral valence. Its use implied or was associated with the attitude that individuals are strong or weak, and that dipsomania was a sign of moral weakness. It might be pitied or contemned, but it was not morally neutral. A contrast can be made between suffering from dipsomania and being struck down by a meteorite. The latter is a random misfortune that is not taken to reflect on the morals of the victim (except by a certain minority among those who take the phrase ``act of God'' rather literally).

The use of alcoholic as a noun referring to an alcohol addict dates back only to the beginning of the twentieth century. It might be tedious to prove, but this word seems to be associated with somewhat different attitudes than was dipsomaniac, if only because it became common later and was an alternative to the existing word. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 and probably had the greatest influence on the sense in which the term was understood. Although AA certainly has an understanding of alcoholism that is at its center moral and spiritual (in a carefully general, certainly nondenominational way), the way the word alcoholic is used has an interesting way of, so to speak, cleansing the moral stigma. Accepting that one is an alcoholic is seen as a positive act, and can come as an immense relief, turning shame upside-down. Moreover, AA does not speak of ``curing'' alcoholism, but rather of abstinence from alcohol and from alcohol-related behaviors. Because the ``recovering alcoholic'' is an admirable person, alcoholism is viewed as an affliction overcome by moral strength and moral support. Thus, interestingly, though AA does not promote a medical fix to alcohol addiction, it does promote an essentially medical, or morally neutral, view of the underlying problem.

1. In Britain, in the 1960's: a specialized bicycle for racing on oval cinder tracks. (The tracks were oval, not the cinder.) These bikes had knobby tires, cow-horn handlebars and no gears. No gears! This was before mountain bikes.
2. Today, in the UK and elsewhere: a motorbike for off-road speed. See, for example, <dirtbike.com>, <dirtbikedepot.com>, <dirtbikeposters.com>, and <dirtbikerider.co.uk>.

Recently, however, I was talking with a friend of mine who has just returned to her apartment near Tokyo for the first time since the 9.0 quake that struck the Tôhoku (`northeast') region of Japan on March 11, 2011. Like most Japanese, she's used to minor quakes and normally ignores them, but the aftershocks of the Tohoku earthquake have been unusually strong (ominously so to seismologists, who offer short odds for the big one to hit central Japan soon). Anyway, she was taking a bath when a recent aftershock hit; she jumped out and dressed, as she explained, so she wouldn't be found naked. I asked her what mantissa of difference it would make, if she died and also happened to be found naked. She explained that she might be trapped and wouldn't want to be naked when she called out for rescue. Oh wow -- that's totally different! I hadn't thought of it. Now I get it!

After writing the two paragraphs above, I had a chat with a couple of hourly-wage employees in which I essentially repeated the story. It was a revelation to me. Two or more revelations, quantitatively speaking. Let me say that for statistical purposes, they (informants M and B below) represent an unbiased sample. That is, I didn't choose them based on any evidence or expectation that they would have a particular kind of information -- or any information -- regarding the topic of this entry. I chose them to chat with because I know them, or thought I knew them, and they were chewing the fat where I was passing by on my way to the candy machines. Also, I haven't biased the data by cherry-picking interviewees: my entire sample size so far, and preferrably forever, is 2.

Informant M is a female currently in her early-to-mid 50's. Informant M informed ME that oh yes, this is a big deal with her mother. M's father was a fireman, and M's mother would not just clean but iron his boxers, so if he died no one should think he died with dirty or unpressed underwear. Let's hope she didn't starch them. Upon prompting, M confirmed that the motivating fear was her father's possible at-work death, and not some nonfatal accident. M's mother is reportedly fastidious in other ways. Mismatched socks provoke horror.

Informant B, recently returned from extended medical leave, is a male also currently in his early-to-mid-50's, though he happens to look about 70. (If you lived on coffee and cigarettes, you could probably look older too. In fact, I understand that some adolescents take up smoking precisely so as to appear older. Also, if you look older it's easier to buy cigarettes, so there's some sort of positive feedback effect in there. I'll have to calculate it one day.) Anyway, B's mother must had a philosophy similar to M's, and he remarked that a few weeks ago, when he checked himself into the hospital, he ``felt bad because ....'' (The unstated implication was that he wore dirty underwear to the hospital, and not that he felt bad on account of whatever it was that sent him to the hospital. It takes the old saw ``when you gotta go, you gotta go'' to the next level... down.)

Wallpaper of Sound. (No, not Wall of Sound.)

In principle, and in many particular cases, Spanish nouns could be regarded as being derived from other (usually oblique) cases in Latin. This is particularly the case for second-declension nouns, which have identical dative and ablative forms. As a general rule, however, the best way to guess the eventual Spanish form of a Latin noun is to cast it into the ablative and then apply common (not always regular) sound shifts like u --> o.

It makes sense that the ablative forms should have been salient. The instrumental case found in some other highly inflected Indo-European languages is essentially collapsed into the Latin ablative, as are plural forms of the locative. Not only is the ablative very common, but its frequency was reinforced by the gradual replacement of the genitive case by de + abl. Now you're probably going to suggest that really, the accusative should have been more salient, since ordinary direct objects are more common than objects of prepositions and all those weird ablative-of-whatever forms. Okay, time for a dirty little secret: over time, final em's in Latin went silent... if you lop the final em off the singular accusative forms (and change u --> o), they mostly coincide with the ablative.

A related fact: The common-gender forms of Latin third declension have ablative singulars that end consistently in -e, and Spanish adjectives that end in -e have the same form when modifying male and female nouns.

I can see that you find this stuff fascinating. Read more at the D-ION-Z-A entry supra.

The word uninterested implies little about the matter in question other than that it is something about which there is something to know, and about which someone might possibly be curious. The word disinterested implies that the matter in question is one requiring judgment. The ideal judge (i.e., juror, judge, arbitrator, etc.) is interested, and thus attentive, yet disinterested, and thus fair.

Do you think maybe you're beginning to get the hang of this thing, after all your years of abject ignorance? The difference has to do with two different senses of the word interest. Someone said to have ``an interest'' may have a neutral observer's desire for information, or may possibly benefit or suffer depending on how certain a question is decided. (The latter kind of interest is the only kind that is ``vested.'') One can distinguish these two kinds of interest by using narrower terms like curiosity and stake.

(There are other kinds of interest, of course. There is interest you earn on a deposit, and there is interest that one has in activities. If you say you are interested in travel, you don't usually mean that you are interested in hearing about other people's travel, so much as you are interested in traveling yourself. The situation here is that ``interested in traveling'' really means ``wants or likes to travel'' or ``interested in learning about opportunities to travel.'' This is sometimes sloppy, but one might not want to be precise.)

The confusion between disinterested and uninterested goes bak a little ways. G.S. Fraser wrote this in his The Modern Writer and His World:

Disinterested curiosity -- to be disinterested is not to be uninterested -- is one of the noblest qualities of the human mind.

This was on page 12 of the third edition (Penguin, 1964). I don't know if it was in the earlier English edition (1953). In principle, the text may even be left over from the 1950 edition aimed at a Japanese audience. Whatever the case, the proleptic parenthetical is the earliest evidence I've happened across indicating that confusion between the two terms was a problem.

Kenneth Thompson is credited with discovering the first law of memory thermodynamics:

The steady state of disks is full.

See also RAM disk.

How tired? Thomas Carlyle introduced it as an epithet for political economics in an 1849 essay, ``Latter-Day Pamphlets, No.1. The Present Time.''

Economics is ultimately derived from the Greek word oikonómos, `manager of a household, steward,' composed from oîkos, `house,' and -nómos, nominal combining form of némein here meaning `to manage, control.' The words derived from oikonómos have taken a variety of meanings over time, including theological ones. Some of the meanings depended implicitly on a metaphorical understanding of `household' as a larger entity. L'économie politique came to refer to aspects of governance, and in the second half of the eighteenth century it and the English term modeled on it, political economy, came to have the specialized sense of ``the science [in a loose sense] of the wealth of nations.'' (``The Wealth of Nations,'' of course, was published by Adam Smith in 1776.) The word economics alone did not come into its current sense until late in the nineteenth century. For a detailed discourse on the evolution of this word, see the first chapter of Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy (Sather Classical Lectures, Vol. 43). He comments there that nem- is a ``semantically complex root.''

                 2H O (aq)   ---> 2H O(l) + O (g)
                   2 2              2        2

The oxygen in peroxides has an oxidation number of -1; in water and oxygen gas, it has oxidation numbers -2 and 0, respectively. (Hydrogen peroxide solutions sold as antiseptics typically contain a stabilizer such as acetanilide (C₆H₅NHCOCH₃).)

The charging of a lead-acid battery involves the disproportionation of the lead ion in lead (II) sulfate (PbSO₄). A general example of disproportionation reaction is the Cannizzaro reaction.

The reverse of disproportionation is called comproportionation or symproportionation. Discharge (i.e., ordinary use) of a lead-acid battery involves running a comproportionation reaction. All of the good -tionation words are used in chemistry. (The other one is fractionation.)

(The phrase quoted as the head of this entry is sourced at the books that could have benefitted from illustrations entry.)

Abandonment charges based on unwillingness to engage in sex are not always sustained, because adultery by one partner frees the other from any, em, obligations. It's the `condonation' defense.

• ``Dixie Chicken'' was a hit for Little Feat, a band that used to be pretty popular in the area around Silver Springs, Maryland (near Washington, DC). [Those old guys were still touring in 2002; I know because I saw a promo posted at Nick's Patio.] The song figures in our ragtop entry.
• The Dixie Chicks is a country band composed of three sisters from Texas. Around the beginning of the Iraq war of 2003, at a performance in England, lead singer Natalie Maines pleased the crowd by announcing that she was ashamed that the US president was from Texas. This didn't go over so well back home. (Additional information product, free, gratis, and at no added charge to you: the other two Dixie Chicks are actually sisters of each other.)
• Tyson Foods has chicken-processing factories in Arkansas.
• Chicken-fried steak is a southern specialty. It's beef steak prepared like fried chicken, in the usual fried-chicken batter. It looks and tastes surprisingly like fried chicken, but it's tougher.

Religious opposition to abortion is represented (by the ``pro-choice'' side) by a coat-hanger and the slogan ``Do It Thyself.''

In case of fire, click here.

It's not the destination; it's the trip.

You know, when I googled ``DIYZ,'' I was asked if perhaps I didn't mean ``DAYS.'' This is almost as insulting as that condescending paper clip ``help'' in MSWord.

Disraeli had a gift for spontaneous expression that has resulted in many fine mots being uncertainly attributed to him, either because he uttered them off the cuff, so to speak, rather than into a book, or else because his reputation made him a likely candidate when anyone was casting about for a likely or plausible source of a quote whose real author was unknown or forgotten.

One such is the quote about lies, damn lies, and statistics. More about that one later.

Another such quote is, ``When I want to read a novel, I write one.'' Many close variants are attributed to him. The earliest instance of this that I can find is in a volume of his biography that was first published in 1920. Following is the entire paragraph of context (boldface emphasis added).

  His mental processes were as unusual as his physical appearance was peculiar. He did not form his opinions by amassing facts, but by some intuitive process of imagination. And so dramatic was the quality of his mind that he seems never to have been conscious of an opinion or conviction without being simultaneously conscious of the effect which its expression would produce. Hence the epigrammatic character of his talk and writing; to which a cynical flavour was added owing to the mask which he seldom put off in public. Lothair and Endymion recapture and repeat his table-talk, which was uttered with deliberate and impressive sententiousness. The stories told of it were endless. People heard of the royal lady who, indignant at the hesitation shown by Ministers on the Eastern Question, asked him at dinner what he was waiting for, and was told, `For peas and potatoes, ma'am;' of the charming neighbour whose insidious attempts to wheedle political secrets out of him were met by a pressure of the hand and a whispered `You darling;' of the public dinner at which the food was poor and cold, and at which Disraeli, when he tried the champagne, remarked with fervour, `Thank God, I have at last got something warm;' of his grandiloquent excuse for inability to recommend a novel to a neighbour, `When I want to read a novel, I write one;' of his judgment on a leading politician, nearly as well known in Mayfair as in Parliament, `He has a fine presence, ancient descent, a ready wit, and no principles; he must succeed.' But silence and self-absorption grew upon Beaconsfield in society along with age and disease; so that [Sir William] Fraser [author of Disraeli and his Day] could jestingly maintain that he was, in reality, a corpse which only at intervals came to life.

I don't know much about the authors, but perhaps the following may be helpful. This paragraph is from the concluding chapter (17) of the final volume (6), of The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, published at London by John Murray between 1910 (vol. 1) and 1920 (vol. 6). The entire biography is typically listed as being by Monypenny and Buckle. To be precise, however, William Flavelle Monypenny was the sole credited author of volume 1 (covering the years 1804-1837) and volume 2 (1837-1846). The second volume was published in 1912, the year Monypenny died (rather young; he was born in 1866). The third volume (1846-1855), published in 1914, listed as coauthors Monypenny and George Earle Buckle (1854-1935), and the last three volumes gave the authorship as ``George Earle Buckle in succession to W.F. Monypenny.'' (A two-volume condensation ``by Monypenny and Buckle'' was published in 1929.)

I have also seen a claim that ``[w]hen I want to read a book I write one'' was attributed to Disraeli in a review of his novel Lothair (1870) in Blackwood's Magazine. Blackwood's had a rather nasty review of the novel in June 1870, pp. 773-793. (I'm not saying that it was or wasn't fair. Considering its length, to say nothing of the three-volume Lothair, I plan to putting off to the indefinite future having any such opinion on the subject.) The magazine published a ``Note to our review of `Lothair' '' in July (pp. 129-132), defending itself against criticism of its review. The alleged quote does not occur in this latter note, and probably does not occur in the review itself. For laughs, though, and for an indication of how someone might suppose, or misremember, that a quote of this sort was attributed to Disraeli in the review, here are the opening lines of the Lothair pan:

  This is the most elaborate jest which the sportive author has ever played off upon an amiable and confiding public. Addressing the novel-reading portion of that public in his own mind, he has evidently said: ``You have been this long while prating of purity of style, truth to nature, probability, and adherence to the rules of art. You have been condemning sensational novels, and false effects, and didactic prosings, and slipshod composition. Well, I will write something which shall be more extravagant than the romances of the `London Journal,' more inflated in expression and false in grammar than the exercises of an aspiring schoolboy of the fifth form, more foreign to life and reality than the hysteric fancies of a convent-bred girl, and, in point of art, on a level with the drop-scene of a provincial theatre. ...''

Possibly patterned on this is the, um, jocular usage ``desk jockey.'' As it happens, desk and disc are cognates, borrowed from Latin indirectly and then directly. For details see the fisk entry.

When B.J. Friedman's first novel was published, he ``was invited to come say hello to the staff at Simon & Schuster'' (his publisher). After being greeted by an old and befuddled Mr. Simon, he was surrounded by a group of young editors who had nice things to say about his jacket.

``Thank you,'' [said Bruce Jay Friedman]. ``My mother bought it for me at Saks. She was heartbroken that I hadn't become a theatrical press agent. She'd been told that they all have big homes in Rockaway. But she wanted me to be properly dressed all the same.''

[The article from which this text is lifted, and a copy of the cover, can be found here.]

These events occurred in the early 1960's, when it was still common for adult men to have their clothes bought for them by women. I think that's much less common today. Today, on the other hand, authors (including adult male authors, okay?) don't normally design or even have much say in choosing their book jackets. Sometimes the cover will depict characters from the book, and the depictions will be impossibly different from the descriptions in the book. I've also seen ``marital arts'' used evidently unironically (i.e., as an error for ``martial arts''). The artsy types who do covers are often somewhat weak at spelling.

It's also become quite standard for book jackets and even the hard covers of books to bear the words ``a novel.'' This is especially helpful at library book sales, where book sorting can be rather haphazard. (Most of the larger library book sales I've been to have not been mostly library-book sales, but sales mostly of donated books.)

The fault (if multiple spellings are a fault) is not just in the imprecision of English spelling. It also happens that different Arabic dialects do different things with the initial consonant.

The AHD4 has this as its first definition for the word Winter: ``The usually coldest season of the year, occurring between autumn and spring, extending in the Northern Hemisphere from the winter solstice to the vernal equinox, and popularly considered to be constituted by December, January, and February.''

That definition manages to confuse three things: ``meteorological Winter'' (DJF), ``astronomical Winter'' (an underhanded retronym for the solstice-to-equinox period, used by the kind of people who would use the term ``meteorological Winter''), and the coldest period, or coldest three months, of the year. Some future iteration of this entry will sort all that out. For now I just want to publish the glossary page. Cf. MAM, JJA, SON.

It's even worse with words that contain the letter dee, which is pronounced by having your epiglottis do the unvoiced watusi.

The situation of Danish with respect to Norwegian and Swedish is similar to that of Portuguese with respect to Spanish (Castillian). Educated readers of any Iberian Romance language can understand most of a text in any other Iberian Romance language, just as the Scandinavian languages are mutually understandable in writing. Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish fairly easily, but their language has a rich phonology that subverts a Spanish speaker's efforts to recognize cognates. Danes similarly can understand Norwegians and Swedes, while the latter generally need a couple of months' study to understand Danish. (Overall, I should say that the Iberian Romance languages are not as similar to each other as the North Germanic languages of Scandinavia are to each other.)

Niels Bohr, a national scientific hero in Denmark, was known for delivering scientific addresses in his own approximation of the local language. It was said that he didn't speak any foreign languages, just different dialects of Bohrish. He and his son Aage wrote a major text on nuclear physics (in English). Now there is a third Bohr generation of physicist at work.

Some of the sayings famously attributed to Niels Henrik David Bohr (Nicholas Baker), he himself attributed to his own father. One of these was the maxim that there are two sorts of truths -- ordinary truths, whose opposites are false, and profound ones whose opposites may also be profound truths.

Note that the opposite of a profound truth is explicitly excluded from being an ordinary truth. Without this exclusion, some profound truths would also be ordinary falsehoods. If Aristotle had known about this, he probably would have called it the axiom of half of the excluded middle.

One of Niels Bohr's favorite sayings was ``Never express yourself more clearly than you can think.'' Most people would have difficulty manifesting that problem; Bohr specialized in implementing the solution. It's no wonder he was a hero in Denmark.

Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links for Denmark. The territory of Denmark is basically the Jutland peninsula, and -- oh yeah, Greenland.

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

The noun Danish refers to any sweet pastry, preferably with white icing and cinnamon, and two to go, thanks. Cf. Evita entry.

(BTW, you know that famous mermaid statue? I think a bunch of years ago she was temporarily decapitated by vandals.)

In Spring 2002, the European Commission conducted the ``Eurobarometer 57'' survey, sampling at least 1,000 in each of its member countries (except in Luxembourg, where, probably to avoid sampling some people twice, only 600 people were surveyed). The main finding of Eurobaromometer 57 was that Europeans are a bunch of sourpusses. A key existential question was on ``overall life satisfaction'' (which I will abbreviate OLS here):

On the whole, are you very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied with the life you lead? Would you say you are very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied, or not at all satisfied?

The EU15 average percentage answering ``very satisfied'' was 21%. (Amazingly, it seems they actually went to the trouble of weighting it properly -- by population instead of raw sample.) Harris conducted a parallel US study, a telephone survey of 1010 adults, called between April 10 and April 15, 2003. The results were generally more positive on all questions, with 57% answering ``very satisfied'' to the OLS question. Of course, the European average hid a broad range of national variation. Exactly one of the EU15 countries scored higher than the US on OLS: Denmark, at 64%. (The next highest was Netherlands, 45%.)

Another Eurobarometer poll, conducted by phone between October 8 and 16, 2003, asked questions mostly regarding Iraq (500 sampled per country, results weighted by population). An EU15 average of 44% favored sending peacekeeping troops to Iraq. In Denmark the figure was 77%. (This probably exceeds the percentage of Americans who favored having US troops in Iraq by then.) A majority of Danes believed that the US-led invasion of Iraq was justified; in the other 14 members a majority believed it was unjustified (EU15 average 68%).

The practice of constructing given names from pairs of common nouns, or from a noun modified by an adjective, is apparent in Native American names, but seems to be a world-wide reflex. It was once the standard practice for constructing Indo-European names, but the words that formed the names evolved while the names tended to become fixed or to evolve independently, so people no longer recognize that Sigmund, say, means `defender of victory,' or Robert `bright fame.' As the examples suggest, however, the common names (at least those of whose etymologies I am aware) tend to be more positive. The Romans deviated from the usual practice of I-E peoples and even, in the cognomen innovation, from other Italic peoples. Their naming practices are discussed at the tria nomina entry.

I asked an Indian woman I know about this, and she mentioned someone she knows whose Indian name is ``Killing Water'' (this turns out to be a not-too-unusual name). I remarked that it is a somewhat ambiguous name, and she replied that he is a somewhat ambiguous person. So there you are.

I asked my mom, who fled Germany in 1938 (as a child, 71 years ago), if she recalled a motorcycle called das kleine Wunder. She didn't, but when I mentioned DKW -- ohh, that was a major company! Cars and mostly heavy vehicles like trucks. She thought it stood for ``deutsche Kraftwerk'' or perhaps just naturally assumed it. I'll try to investigate this further, if it doesn't require any work.

Here are my favorite top-tens from before 1996:

• ``Things Revealed in Newt Gingrich Exposé''
• ``Items on the Westinghouse "To Do" List''
• ``Signs of Sloppiness in the L.A.P.D. Crime Lab''
• ``Screw-ups in the O.J. Simpson Defense''
• ``Ways the World Would Be Different If it Were Covered With Water''
• ``Signs Judge Ito is Really, Really Mad''
• ``Ways to Beat the Heat''
• ``Dr. Kevorkian Tips for Summer'' Interestingly, #1 is about how -- I thought -- Bunsen (of burner fame) committed suicide. One morning he drank potassium cyanide and used a chaser of lemon juice to drive an acid-base reaction in his stomach. Or so I thought I read, long ago. I certainly didn't make it up, but now I can't find web corroboration and no longer have access to the book. Maybe I got Bunsen confused with his student and lab assistant Viktor Meyer, who in 1889 took over Bunsen's chair at the University of Heidelberg, and who committed suicide by taking cyanide in August 1897. Bunsen once almost died of arsenic poisoning, and a cacodyl explosion cost him the sight in one eye. (Cacodyl, which happens to be extremely toxic, also combusts spontaneously in dry air.) Bunsen died in 1899 at the age of 88.
• ``Signs You Have a Bad Airline Pilot''

Processes occurring at a surface, and utilizing a reactant or adsorbate brought to the surface by a fluid (as in oxidation of a Si surface and in vapor- and liquid-deposition) tend to operate in one of two asymptotic regimes: diffusion-limited and reaction-limited. If the deposition process at the growth surface is rapid, then the fluid phase adjacent to the growing surface becomes depleted of (at least one) reactant, and the growth rate is controlled by the rate at which the reactant is replenished by diffusion to the surface. This is DL growth. If the fluid is well stirred or if the deposition stage is slow, then depletion of reactants from the fluid near the surface is not important, and growth is reaction-limited.

• Players on the 15-day DL are taken off the active list but remain on the team roster (the 40-man roster).
• Players on the 60-day DL (a/k/a injured reserve) are not only deactivated but also taken off the 40-man roster, making room for a temporary replacement.

The Department of Classics at the University of Florida offers DL courses. One of their webpages explains (or doesn't explain) the following: ``The university requires proof of immunization of all students. Yes, even distance students. Don't ask why, just fill the form out asap or suffer grievously!''

Gephardt, the first leader of the DLC, joined in the middle of his own drift to the left. He had been pro-life as late as 1984, but by the time he began his first presidential campaign in 1987, he was pro-choice. Perhaps that is necessary for anyone who wants to win the Democratic primaries. But he ran on a protectionist platform in the 1988 primaries and stopped being identified with that ``new Democrat'' faction of the party. Four years later, however, the DLC had a candidate of superb political skills. With a little help from third-party odd-ball H. Ross Perot, Clinton won in 1992. Some missteps to the left were punished by a Republican takeover of the House in the midterm elections of 1994, and after that Clinton stayed ``new Democrat.'' During the second Clinton administration, I wrote the following completely ingenuous statement:

Of course, now every Democrat (incumbent), pretty much, is a ``new [i.e. centrist] Democrat.''

In the 106th Congress (the one that began in 1999) Gephardt was the senior House Democrat. Approaching the Y2K elections, he was one of the two obvious and leading contenders for the Democratic Presidential nomination (Vice President Al Gore, the eventual nominee, was the other). As the ranking House member of his party, he was the likely House Speaker if the Democrats took back the House in those elections. He apparently preferred those odds (a priori) and stayed out of the presidential race. At least he kept his job.

So Gore was the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2000 campaign. It's hard to criticize him as having been out of touch with the country's mood, given that he did in fact win a majority of the popular vote. But his campaign nevertheless represented something of a repudiation of what many had regarded as Clinton's policy legacy. Gore campaigned as a more leftist populist, moving the image of the Democratic party leftward.

To some extent, his campaign represented a reaction to problems imposed on him. During the primary season, Gore had faced opposition on his left from former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, and perhaps he moved left in reaction to that challenge. But no one is surprised, and few remember, if a candidate refashions his positions after the primaries to make them attractive to a broader range of voters. Still, a campaign needs a message (preferably one per news cycle).

Clinton had involved Gore in actual government more than most presidents have involved their VP's, and Gore might have run on Clinton's record, wringing prosperity for all its considerable political value. But Clinton inspired widespread loathing, in large measure due to the sordid affair of the sexual exploitation of White House intern Monica Lewinsky. So promising more of Clinton-Gore was a problematical campaign approach; Gore chose as his running mate Connecticut's Senator Joe Lieberman, whose most prominent qualification was his early and forceful denunciation of Clinton's affair. (That is, Lieberman had been the first prominent officeholder in Clinton's own party to rebuke Clinton for acting like JFK and LBJ, in the pants department, although he expressed this somewhat differently.) At the Democratic convention, Gore staged a spontaneous I-really-really-love-my-wife-unlike-some-people-we-know event.

In 2000, Gore chose Senator Lieberman as his running mate in significant part to distance himself from Clinton. Granted this distance was not along a policy axis, yet it is ironic that by the time of the next presidential campaign, Lieberman was really the most faithful remaining representative of the centrist legacy of Bill Clinton, such as it was. Lieberman remained centrist even as 9/11 and the Iraq invasion (strongly supported by the DLC) polarized the country. In fall 2003, he was the only Democrat in the race for the presidential nomination who was willing to defend the invasion of Iraq (with reservations, of course). Gore, in the meantime, confirmed his shift and ended up endorsing Dean just before Dean's campaign peaked and floundered. Lieberman pulled out of the Iowa caucuses and never really contended. (Iowa Democrats are somewhat more leftist than those in the next few states selecting convention delegates, and caucuses reflect the more activist segment of a party, which in both Democratic and Republican cases leans further from center than the bulk of the party.) Lieberman's campaign never got traction and he dropped out. For more and later on Lieberman, see

• CT
• metaphor, reincarnated
• poppycock

There's a precedent of sorts for the DLC in something that was called the Democratic Advisory Council. After Dwight D. Eisenhower twice defeated Democratic candidate Adlai E. Stevenson (1952 and 1956), party chairman Paul M. Butler created the advisory council in defiance of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson (respectively Speaker of the House and Senate Majority leader in the Democrat-controlled Congress). The council was a group of ``wise men'' from the Roosevelt-Truman years, and some promising governors and junior legislators. They formulated the economic and social policies that became known as the New Frontier platform, which John F. Kennedy ran and won with in 1960.

Here's something interesting in 2005: Marshall Wittmann, a former aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), is serving as a fellow at the DLC.

It's September 2007, and I'm just popping back in at this entry to record the DLC's slide. Harold Ford, Jr., was a blue dog Democrat in the House representing the Memphis area (9th congressional district of Tennessee) in 2006 when he ran for an open Senate seat (Republican Bill Frist, a physician who was then Senate majority leader, was retiring; he still thought he was going to run for President in 2008). He lost the election (48% to Republican Bob Corker's 51%). The following January 25, he was named chairman of the DLC. At the DLC's annual meeting in Nashville on July 30, 2006, he said ``Some people say we've lost our standing, but if there ever was a time when the country needed the DLC... it's now.'' He may be right, but the leading Democratic candidates all skipped the DLC event to attend the second annual Kos thing.

I'm not sure what the exact title of the DLE was supposed to be. It could use either latín (language name) or latino (adjective).

Our library has part 1 of a Diccionario latino-español that is already available (formal title Dictionarium latino-hispanicum) by Elio Antonio de Nebrija, based on preliminary studies by Germán Colón y Amadeu-J. Soberanas. It's not an original edition, however. It's a 1979 reprint of the edition that was published at Salamanca in 1492. Yes, Colón is the Spanish version of Columbus (which is really just the Latin translation of the real name. For a tiny bit of information about the name Germá (apparently a transliterated version of the name Herman), see the SN. Yes really the SN entry. Run along now.

Back already? Okay, now read about Salamanca (see under Cortes).

Also called NDLF.

The Isle of Dogs is smaller than the Isle of Man. Donne wrote that no man is an island, but the Isle of Dogs is a peninsula in an oxbow of the Thames. (Actually, such a peninsula itself may also be called an oxbow. As the name here indicates, it is also sometimes called an isle or island. The way rivers evolve, naturally or with human assistance, oxbows often become islands and vice versa.) Because of the hydraulics of meander, the deepest part of a river is close to the inside of the oxbow. Hence docks (and quays).

``Docks'' sounds an awful lot like ``dogs'' -- the difference being that the first uses an unvoiced consonant pair /ks/ and the second uses voiced consonants /gz/. Hmmm. Well, no. The Isle of Dogs takes its name from the fact that the king's hounds used to be kept there. It was a peninsula then too.

The name of the Canary Islands comes from the Romans' name for the largest island -- Canaria. According to Pliny, who probably just read it somewhere else, it was named after large feral dogs the Romans found there (from the Latin canis, `dog'). Eventually, the name was applied to the entire group. In the local language, Guanche, the islands were called Tamaran, translated or interpreted as `land of the strong.' You know, tamar- and canar- are very similar -- the tee and cee are differently-articulated but similar-sounding stop consonants, and em and en are similar nasals -- perhaps.... Aaah, after the docks/dogs thing came to grief, I better leave the speculation to professionals like Plinius.

The Canary name also came to be applied to a species of small yellow finches found on the islands.

Île aux Chats, in the province of Québec, is the name of a settlement and an island on the Rivière du Nord, a couple of kilometers north of Carillon, about 30 km west of Montréal. An island renowned for cats and birds -- now that would be something.

DLS's ``sister school,'' Carondelet High School, also in Concord, was also founded in 1965, ``by the Sisters [see?] of St. Joseph of Carondelet at the request of [the aptly named] Bishop Floyd Begin, first Bishop of Oakland [Oakland was his see, see?]. In the tradition of their congregation, the Sisters responded to the needs of the Church by establishing the only Catholic secondary school for the young women of Contra Costa County.''

As it happened, the European economy picked up and a lot of countries did switch starting in 1999 (q.v.).

All forms of the disease involve some problem with insulin, which enables blood sugar (glucose) to enter cells. There are two principal types:

I -

or Juvenile-onset, or insulin-dependent diabetes (IDDM).

May first appear as early as the first month of infancy, and typically appears before or during adolescence. The current preferred name is IDDM, however, because onset may be delayed into the thirties, forties and beyond (albeit with decreasing likelihood).

In IDDM, the pancreas fails to produce insulin, or enough insulin. The disease is currently believed to be an autoimmune disorder: the body fails to recognize certain cell surface proteins in the pancreas as ``self,'' and destroys the insulin-producing cells (``beta cells'') found in regions of the pancreas called ``islets of Langerhans.''

[Alpha cells make and release glucagon; delta cells make the hormone somatostatin, believed to regulate the alpha and beta cells. The gamma cells just sit around and look busy, I guess.] Insulin-dependent diabetics require daily insulin injections to survive. Not just hyperglycemia but hypoglycemia becomes a problem (there's a fine region between too little and too much insulin). Moreover, after a few years there may be the additional difficulty that the overt initial reactions to low blood sugar become muted.

II -

or Adult-onset, or non-insulin-dependent diabetes (NIDDM).

This is by far the more common form of diabetes (95% of US cases -- 13 to 14 million). Usually appears after age forty. Onset is slow and often goes unnoticed for a long time. There is a significant heritability of this disease, or for the predisposition to the disease, but a number of other factors play a rôle.

Type-II diabetes does not result from destruction of beta cells or from underproduction of insulin. Instead it has to do with ``insulin resistance'' -- a problem with insulin consumers rather than producers. At the cellular level, for incompletely understood reasons, glucose transport becomes less efficient. Insulin levels are typically elevated, and appropriate treatment does not (initially) include insulin injections. However, after years of type-II diabetes, the ability of the pancreas to produce insulin can diminish and lead to type-I (insulin-dependent) diabetes.

GDM

- for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus

Elevated blood sugar in pregnant women, may occur during the second half of the pregnancy. Glucose levels return to normal post partum in 95% of cases, but GDM is an indication for type II.

The CDC has a ``Diabetes Public Health Resource.'' Diabetes.com would seem like another reasonable place to learn more. See also the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation International (JDF), ... Gee, this must be a pretty important disease.

The name diabetes mellitus comes via Latin from Greek: diabetes (`passing through') + mellitus (`honey'). Hippocrates stressed the careful noting of all symptoms that the technology of his time could detect; diabetics' urine tasted sweet. As we now understand, the sweetness comes from the high blood sugar (glucose), some of which is excreted instead of being properly metabolized in cells. A possible indicator of diabetes is excessive thirst (which I suppose arises from the extra workload on the kidneys, but I don't know). More along these lines can be found at the Be entry.

You know -- spawn of the devil, ruthless sociopaths.

In recent years, when you're home during the day, you seem to get a lot more calls where there's no one on the other end. The explanation is straightforward. In a little warren or a Texas jail, a bank of slaves, felons, or other menial employees call potential marks (sorry -- speak with prospective customers). Phone numbers are dialed for them automatically, many calls at a time. The reason many numbers are dialed at once is this: if each number dialed is allowed to ring five times before being hung up, then every not-at-home wastes half a minute of the slave wages. Simultaneously dialing many numbers saves pennies. It happens constantly that two or more calls will be picked up when there is only one slave available to make a pitch. In that case, one or more of the completed calls will be dropped. That is the source of your mysterious phantom calls. There are also wrong-number calls where the calling party realizes the error before speaking, and is too rude to apologize.

I guess this is occupational rehab. When they get out of jail, the ex-cons are ready to make an honest living.

Medicare imposes pricing and contract constraints on DME providers, such as requiring (on hospital-type beds) a rent-to-buy option with repair contract.

DMIS 3.0 was accepted by ANSI as ANSI/CAM-I 101-1995. Current work is focused on implementing an object technology, DOT.

A region of the semiconductor under the gate has not been doped. This drift region always works out to be lightly n-doped.

If this isn't enough, you could look up
H. J. Sigg, G. D. Vendelin, T. P. Cauge and J. Kocsis: ``D-MOS Transistor for Microwave Applications,'' IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, vol. ED-19, pp. 45-53 (January 1972).
Y. Tarui, et al.: ``Diffusion Self-Aligned MOST -- A New Approach for High Speed Devices,'' in Proceedings of the First Conf. Solid-State Devices, appearing as a Supplement to the Japanese Journal of [the Society of] Applied Physics, vol. 39, pp. 105-110 (1970).

Oh, wait, no -- it's not that at all! They explain:

The military organization, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, was created in 1947 to conduct nuclear weapon effects research and provide nuclear technical, logistical and training support for DoD. Renamed in 1959 as the Defense Atomic Support Agency and in 1971 as the Defense Nuclear Agency, the Agency became DSWA in 1996, as the result of a new charter and an expanded mission.

In Spanish, the acronym is ADN.

A little glossary of DNA terms as edited by Beverly Gaglione is available as one of the side-benefits of this decade's trial of the century. Patrick Carey has written a primer of some utility.

DNA has been proposed as a basis for computation.

If this seems wildly inappropriate to the context in which you heard it, then perhaps you heard the expression D'n'C (D and C).

During the campaign for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, Howard Dean came out of nowhere to be the presumptive nominee in January, then place second in the Iowa caucuses, and crash and burn. At the end of 2004, after the man who beat him in Iowa lost in the general election, Dean campaigned to replace Terry McAuliffe, whose term was ending, as chairman of the DNC. He won the post. A lot of people think that having a parodically anti-defense figure as chair is an unwise move for the DNC, but that's not why I bring up the subject. I just wanted to record here for convenient reference the details of some of the most memorably preposterous comments made at the time, mostly instances of blindly wishful thinking.

(That's what I wanted to do. I haven't actually done it yet.)

Entering the third century of the life of the party, Democrats are generally ``pro-choice.'' Nevertheless, no actual abortions are performed at the convention, unless you count some of the non-prime-time speeches. If the confusion that brought you to this glossary entry remains, you might want to visit the D'n'C (D and C) entry.

Folks extremely unhappy with DNSO have a website at <http://www.dnso.com/>.

Hispaniola in this set-up looks a lot like the island of New Guinea, where a North-South line (the 141E meridian) divides the eastern half (the main territory of Papua New Guinea) from Irian Jaya, a province of Indonesia. The western half has a bay that makes it look like a jaw opening west. Irian, the Indonesian (and originally Malay) name for the entire island of New Guinea, means `Cloud-covered.' Or else it is derived from a Biak phrase meaning `shimmering land.' Resolving this question is next on my to-do list after solving the Palestinian problem. The Indonesian part of the island was originally called Irian Barat, meaning West Irian. When the Dutch granted Indonesia independence in 1949, they gave nominal sovereignty of Dutch New Guinea to Indonesia, but retained control. Under ``Guided Democracy'' (dictatorial) rule, self-appointed Indonesian Prime Minister Sukarno announced a military campaign to take control of Irian Barat (Dec. 19, 1961). Military infiltration began in early 1962. Under heavy US pressure, the Dutch gave it up to the UN on August 15, 1962, which after a decent interval (about a year) turned it over to Indonesia, with an unenforceable and unspecific requirement to obtain West Irian consent for integration within five years. That consent was manufactured in Summer, 1969. At that time, it was renamed Irian Jaya. Jaya means `victory' or `glory.' (Jaya is about 1000 miles east of Java.)

The country's (i.e., the Dominican Republic's) name in Spanish is República Dominicana, abbreviated R.D.

The DOA acronym (strictly: initialism; it's pronounced ``dee oh ey,'' not ``dough-uh'' or anything) has been adopted in the shipping business also. There the expansions are ``damaged on arrival'' (blame the carrier) and ``defective on arrival'' (blame the shipper) but I doubt the correspondence of acronyms is entirely accidental (oops, sorry about that!).

In India, hospitals are said to declare a person ``brought dead.''

Here's a comment on brain death by the tyrant Macbeth (Act III, Sc. 4 of Shakespeare's report):

Blood hath been shed ere now, i' the olden time,
Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal;
Ay, and since too, murders have been perform'd
Too terrible for the ear: the times have been,
That, when the brains were out, the man would die,
And there an end; but now they rise again,
With twenty mortal murders on their crowns,
And push us from our stools: this is more strange
Than such a murder is.

In Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Michael Corleone is asked to confirm a hit. He says ``I saw his brains.''

This entry is taking a turn in a nasty direction, isn't it.

Phrase used by people who have no business writing a book, will not write a book, and who are ``shopping'' the book they should not and will not write with publishers. Eventually, their celebrity will get them a contract, and a writer who shouldn't be wasting life with pap will ghost the book because he or she needs the money.

I hope you're not too troubled by the shift in grammatical number.

There is another, rarer usage in an honorable context. Here's an example from Scepticism, Man, & God: Selections from the Major Writings of Sextus Empiricus (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U.P., 1964). The preface begins

      Years of frustration are the cause of this book. Writings of all sorts, including poems, plays, histories of philosophy, and even encyclopaedia articles on the Greek Sceptics have been so often wrong about and unreasonably antagonistic towards Classical Scepticism that I have finally felt compelled to do this book.

Okay, now back to celebrity authorship. Michiko Kakutani writes engagingly for the New York Times. She writes book criticism, and even her individual book reviews rate a column (``Critic's Notebook'') in the broadsheet section, instead of the NYTBR. She often parodies the style she is critiquing. Her column for October 23, 2003, is entitled ``To Stars, Writing Books Looks Like Child's Play.'' It tells the wonderful story of stars who write children's books.

Many [famous brand-name people] wrote books about children who sounded like themselves. Jerry, a comedian who made pots of gold with a television show and more pots of gold with commercials for a credit card, wrote a Halloween book about a greedy boy who wants to get his hands on lots and lots of brand-name candy. Madonna, a blond star, wrote about a pretty little blond girl who has no friends because everyone is jealous that she ``shines like a star.'' And Britney, a younger blond singer, wrote a book, with her mother, about a young blond girl who really, really wants to become a singer...

Other celebrity children's-book authors:

• Jimmy Buffet (of ``Margueritaville'' fame?),
• Bill Cosby,
• Sarah Ferguson (of the suckled toes?).
Also,
• Spike Lee,
• Keith Hernandez,
• Jesse Ventura,
• Maria Shriver,
• Katie Couric,
• Marlee Matlin,
• Bob Dylan,
• Bob Dylan??!!??
• Dr. Laura Schlessinger (I'd rather just go to my room without dinner),
• LeAnn Rimes,
• Jane Seymour,
• Harvey Fierstein,
• Della Reese,
• Michael Bolton,
• Cindy Crawford,
• Shaquille O'Neal,
• Debbie Allen, and
• Lynne Cheney.

Paris Hilton has done her first autobiography. It's titled Confessions of an Heiress and was written by Merle Ginsberg. It's selling well on the internet. It has lots and lots of pictures. (I'm sorry -- it's hard to shake off the effects of that children's-book section of the entry. But it really really has a lot of pictures! Ginsberg never had it so good.) Confessions is a natural companion volume to her porn video. I'm very excited about this book, and I plan to buy it as soon as it hits the dollar table. But I hope she invests in new boobs before the next autobiography.

Here's some further guidance on related wording -- specifically on the meaning of the preposition by in the context of such books. Marco Perella is an an actor too, and at the urging of his friend Molly Ivins, he wrote a book about his experiences. Her foreword to that book began thus:

Who wants to read another book by some rich, famous, successful actor? Especially when we can hear from Marco Perella instead. He's un-rich, unfamous and perfectly hilarious. Besides, he wrote this book himself.

More about the book, Adventures of a No Name Actor, can be found at our cybermuffin entry.

Bilitis was believed to be a poetess from the island Lesbos, one who was a contemporary and acquaintance of the famous Sappho. The cause of these beliefs is a hoax perpetrated by the French novelist Pierre Louÿs, who claimed he had discovered poems of this previously unknown person. In 1894, he published free-verse ``translations'' into French; a later edition included a bibliography of spurious related scholarship and related works on Bilitis. The poems provided relief to some for whom the surviving bits of Sappho are intolerably coy. Bilitis was well-known to be an invention long before 1951, but the poems continued to enjoy a certain censored vogue, and Bilitis also became a subject of paintings. (Bilitis in these came to be confused with Sappho, but given how little we know of the latter, and how entirely fanciful such paintings are, no harm done.) J.B. Hare speculates that DOB selected the name it did precisely because Bilitis was generally obscure. Louÿs shares writing credit for a 1977 French movie entitled Bilitis.

Dobro was a trade name, and it has not passed into the public domain. The trademark currently belongs to the Gibson Instrument Co., which is protecting it by insisting that only instruments manufactured under the Dobro trademark be called ``Dobros.'' Instead, people are supposed to use the generic term ``resophonic guitar.'' Gag.

As a way of needling the Gibson folks, a lot of people who own and play the instrument have taken a page from TAFKAP and taken to using the term TIFKAD -- ``The Instrument Formerly Known As Dobro.''

``And is that a real doctor or just a Ph.D.?''

It is possible to quantify the degree of ``reality'' of various ``Doctors'' along a straight line (specifically, the base of a triangle with apex at home plate): If the M.D. is in deep right field, then the Ph.D. is in shallow center, and the Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.) is in the parking area. (Sometimes Doctors of Osteopathy can be seen wandering into left field.)

For those who nay be imterested, the N.D. landed foul, on the grass!

The wise kangaroos
Prefer yellow shoes.

The only wise kangaroo I know of, who probably wears athletic shoes, is a coauthor on the Stuperspace article cited at the Acknowledgments entry.

The mnemonic has been credited to Gilbert Murray, an Australian.

Okay, a kangaroo sits down at a bar and says, ``I'll have a Foster's, mate!'' The bartender charges him ten bucks for the brew and says, ``you know, uh, we don't see a lot of kangaroos in here.'' He replies, ``well at these prices, you're not likely to see many more!''

We also have kangaroo information at the KMP entry.

(Actually, that singer was Otis Redding, and he wasn't available to do a corrected version. He died in a plane crash near Madison, Wisconsin, three days after recording ``(Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay.'')

In George Orwell's 1984, Oceania's DoD was called the Ministry of Love. In George Washington's first cabinet, it was called the Department of War. Here's how it evolved:

             1789_       War (army and navy)
                          |
             1798_      __|__ 
		       |     |
                     Navy   War (army)
                       |     |
		       .     .
		       .     .
		       .     .
                       |     |
              1947_    |     |____
                       |     |    |
                       |     |   Air Force
                       |     |    |
              1949_    |_____|____|
                            |
                         Defense
                            |
			    .
			    .
			    .

DoD is pronounced ``DEE-oh-DEE'' and never pronounced ``DEE-uh-DEE'' (like ``House o' Car Audio'').

As far as the US military itself is concerned, ``DoD'' is obsolete and has been replaced by ``DOD.'' I guess they just noticed that computer print-outs are in all-caps. Soon enough they'll notice that they aren't.

In 1798, the Department of War was split into Departments of War and the Navy. This use of war to refer only to military operations on land goes along with the traditional sense of military to refer only to the land component of what we think of as military. (For an example of this usage in British English, see the D. of I. (R) entry.) The word military comes from the Latin word milites meaning soldier. The division into separate Navy and War Departments continued until 1947, when the Air Force USAF was created as a separate department out of the earlier Army Air Corps (USAAC). The DOD was created by the National Security Act of 1949.

They were controlled by Italy for a while and transferred to Greece after WWII.

There have also been football teams called the Brooklyn Dodgers. For details, see the AAFC entry.

Here is something from an introduction by Christopher Jencks and Meredith Phillips to a volume of essays they co-edited:

The United States ought to be conducting large-scale experiments aimed at reducing uncertainty about the effects of schools' racial mix, class size, teacher selection systems, ability grouping, and many other policies. We do such experiments to determine the effects of different medical treatments, different job training programs, and many other social interventions. But the U.S. Department of Education, which should in principle be funding experiments from which every state and school district would benefit, has shown almost no interest in this approach to advancing knowledge about education. The most important piece of education research in the past generation, the Tennessee class-size experiment, was funded by the Tennessee legislature, not the U.S. Department of Education. Experimental assessments of other educational policies that have a major impact on school spending -- salary levels, teacher selection systems, education for the physically and mentally disabled, for example -- have been almost nonexistent.

If we did more experiments, we might eventually develop better theories. At present, theorizing about the causes of the black-white gap is largely a waste of time, because there is no way to resolve theoretical disagreements without data that all sides accept as valid. Most theories about human behavior start out as hunches, anecdotes, or ideological predispositions. Such theories improve only when they have to confront evidence that the theorist cannot control. In education, that seldom hapens.

The Black-White Test Score Gap
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998), p. 42.

I think the DoE was created (see HEW) early in the Carter Administration (say around 1978) and that abolishing it was a plank in Reagan's campaign platform (unfulfilled). The animus against the DoE was probably driven by the conviction that it was political payback to the (politically) liberal NEA for its support of Democrats, and by the expectation that the DoE would increase federal intervention in education, properly to be seen as a matter for states and localities. Then again, maybe not. You know, this stuff is history.

The word dog is an etymological mystery -- a foundling. Coming out of nowhere, it almost completely displaced the Germanic word hound (German cognate Hund). Sure, dog comes from Middle English dogge, and Old English docga, but before that, what?

For puns based on the dog-god metathesis, see the Dyslexic Theologian entry. There's also a lightly-forced double pun at JPO. There's no pun at woof that I can hear, but wolf may be pronounced with a ``dark ell.'' And the fire dog is not the Saint Bernard of hot California forests.