L l
Eleven Blue Men and Other Narratives of Medical Detection, by Berton Roueché (published in Boston, of all places: Little, Brown and Co., 1947) is stories mostly describing 1940's cases dealt with by the New York City Health Department. Sort of an epidemiological Dragnet. The contents of the book originally appeared in The New Yorker. The title story is about eleven old winos who live in flop-houses or in the street, and who all come down one day with something that turns them blue. (Technically, they are diagnosed with cyanosis.) The action quickly focuses on the somewhat aptly named Eclipse Cafeteria. The Health Department's Dr. Ottavio Pellitteri described this as ``[s]trictly a horse market, and dirtier than most. The sort of place where you can get a full meal for fifteen cents. There was a grind house on one side, a cigar store on the other, and the `L' overhead. Incidentally, the Eclipse went out of business a year or so after I was there, but that had nothing to do with us.''
You probably don't care, but that's on page 93 of my edition (11th printing, and looking to be about the seventh edition, 1953).
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
There was an old rec.humor.funny file of stupid behaviors that should be avoided by characters in horror movies that included the following advice:
``If your children speak to you in Latin or any other language which they do not know, or if they speak to you using a voice which is other than their own, shoot them immediately. It will save you a lot of grief in the long run. NOTE: It will probably take several rounds to kill them, so be prepared.''
(You can easily find variously corrupted versions of this on the web, though I can't find any variant at <www.netfunny.com/rhf>. However, you can actually learn a bit of Latin from the first of the rhf oracularities archived at this page.)
Why don't you visit William Harris's The Intelligent Person's Guide to the Latin Language? It's part of a larger site with Latin and Latin-related information.
Other people (?) might be interested in the old favorite Allen and Greenough Latin grammar, available on-line.
The online Weather Underground (discussed at weather) is available in Latin.
A woman I know teaches Latin at a real university that I will not name. (I don't have to, it's already got a name.) A survey she conducts at the first class meeting of the first semester (what, you haven't done your homework?) includes the question ``Why Did You Choose to Take Latin?'' (It's fill-in-the-blank.) One answer: ``I am a big T.S. Eliot fan and thought it would be cool to actually understand what he meant when he makes Latin references.'' Whatever turns you on.
For more Latin-study resources, see the Latin entry.
Obviously, an alternative is needed. The unanimous recommendation of the Stammtisch, which I will reveal to spontaneous cheers in a surprise announcement to the Stammtisch tomorrow at noon, is Limbo-stick.
It is important to keep in mind the distinction between a chemical in its liquid state and a chemical in aqueous solution, indicated by (aq) instead of (l). For example, H2SO4 (l) is liquid hydrogen sulphate, a strong oxidizing agent, while H2SO4 (aq) is sulfuric acid.
The liquid state, it should be noted, is not always distinguished from the gaseous state: for a single-component system above the critical temperature, there is just one fluid phase which increases continuously in density as pressure increases. The (l) and (g) notation wasn't designed to deal with those complications.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Most people in LA also speak English, so you're not terribly handicapped if you don't speak Spanish or one of the other local languages.
Los Angeles is a city and a county. Unlike San Francisco, however, the city is a proper subset of the county. An oddly-shaped, multiply-connected subset. Have a look at a map.
Since Los Angeles is often called ``the city of Angels,'' and you just know that can't refer to the movie stars, I imagine it is well known that Los Angeles is Spanish for `the angels.' A longer form of the toponym is El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, La Reina de Los Angeles. This is often translated as `The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels.' This is close enough, but pueblo is `town.' (Metropolis has the same meaning in Spanish as in English; ciudad is `city'; aldea, the slightly pejorative/affectionate pueblucho, and the slightly informal and totally unnecessary pueblito could all be translated `village.' You can claim that semantic fields needn't overlap between languages, and there may be some small cities that are called pueblos rather than ciudades, but to most bilinguals, `city' here is a mistranslation obviously based on an anachronism.)
The original name of the settlement is actually a bit longer: El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, La Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciúncula. In order to parse this, it might be best to proceed in chronological order. Early in the thirteenth century, one Francisco Bernardone, son of a wealthy cloth merchant of Assisi, went god-crazy and founded a religious order. (A number of the legends about his life involve his losing all his clothes. Details? You need more details? See the article in the Catholic Encyclopedia. His mom's name was Pica!) He was eventually canonized, and anyway he renounced his family, so he is generally referred to as St. Francis of Assisi (San Francesco d'Assisi in Italian). BTW, this is the same San Francisco that the settlement in northern California was named after. Even people who don't believe in sainthood call him Saint Francis, the same way a lot of people use expressions like A.D. Now look, stop distracting me.
This stuff didn't happen all at once. The trouble started one day when St. Francis heard a voice which told him (in Italian, I think) ``Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin.'' Being a somewhat literal-minded chap, he thought this was an order to physically repair some church buildings. To do this, he alienated his rich father and ended up collecting stones and doing the work with his own hands. Smart going. So he rebuilt some derelict old chapels in the area, including one called Santa Maria degli Angeli (Italian for `Saint Mary of the Angels'). One day while he was praying there, the voice tried again, giving him rather more detailed instructions. Nobody really knows what day this happened, so let's just say that it almost certainly happened on February 24, 1208. So he went off and started to collect disciples. By some miracle, he eventually gained approval for his new religious order from Pope Innocent III, who seems otherwise to have been preoccupied mostly with excommunicating people. He was able to leverage this spiritual venture capital: the Benedictines let him have Santa Maria degli Angeli. It reminds me of The Jackie Robinson Story (1950).
Jackie Robinson was the first black baseball player to (fill in the blank; among other things, the first to enter the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown). He grew up in the Los Angeles area and attended the University of California at Los Angeles, but that's not what I had in mind. In the movie about his life, as a little nappy-headed boy, he is given a baseball glove by a white man. But it is, you must excuse the word, a niggardly gift: the leather is broken and the man who gives it to him first pokes the padding back into the opening, so his parsimony won't be immediately obvious.
Well okay, maybe it's not such a great analogy, but the chapel the Benedictines gave Francis was no generous gift. It was on a little bit of land called porziuncula or porziuncola, meaning `little portion.' That term might as easily have described the little chapel. In fact, it did. (Also, as the place was built up over the years into a basilica and a monastery, a village grew up nearby. That place is generally known as Portiuncula, although its official name is Santa Maria degli Angeli.)
Francis eventually spent the greatest part of his life hanging out at this place. For this and reasons one may deduce from the preceding story, the place is very important to the order he founded. One of the most important dates associated with the place is August 2. I'm not going to try to explain why. It's technical, and it has something to do with canceling all your sins. No wait -- only the guilt from all your sins. Whatever, there's always a catch. Anyway, it's kind of like ethical bankruptcy: all your old moral debts are liquidated and you get a fresh start, or something like that.
In 1769, Father Juan Crespi, a Franciscan priest, was tagging along on the first European land expedition through California (led by Captain Fernando Rivera y Moncado). On August 2 that year, they came across what Crespi described in his journal as a beautiful river from the northwest. On account of the date, the river was named Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles de la Porciúncula. The settlement made on that river in 1781 was named after the river. I have read that it ``came to be known as'' El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de los Angeles de la Porciúncula. I guess they had time to burn in those days (and heretics to spare), and could play out their toponyms to the linguistic horizon. I don't know how the queen business snuck in there, either. Anyway, the ``official'' name is supposed to have been merely El Pueblo de la Reina de los Angeles.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Louisiana. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
``I will make it a felony to drink small beer.''
In one election year some years back, columnist Dave Barry's presidential platform included search and destroy operations on the light-beer manufacturing infrastructure. Okay, light beer isn't LA beer. Light beer is beer with reduced carbohydrates-other-than-alcohol. Yick, as the bard would no doubt have said.
There is an aura or aroma or something about-- You know, I'm reminded of the time the gang was over at the brew pub on Main, and Adly thought his beer smelled odd. I had to ask him to remove his hand (from the mug! don't be so bloody-minded) so I could smell the beer instead of it.
Anyway, there's an atmosphere or aura of ridiculousness about small beer, a notion that it's beneath notice. In Othello, by way of expressing the ultimate in profitless activity, Iago gives ``to suckle fools and chronicle small beer.''
Saint Mary's Women in Labor
Actually, the phrase I heard growing up was usually día hábil, which has the same meaning. There are some indications that the phrase with laborable might be a bit more common in Spain, but I'm too lazy to research this important question. Judging from ghits, the hábil phrase is about 27% more common than the laborable phrase. Interestingly, the plural form días hábiles occurs on 3.25 times as many pages as its singular, while días laborables occurs on only 2.62 times as many pages as its corresponding singular. This suggests that there might be some semantic difference, but it isn't one that people seem to be conscious of. The phrase día útil (literally `useful day') and its plural each have ghits roughly equal to about 1% of those for the common phrases. It seems to have become the common term in Peru. If you don't filter for language, you get a lot of hits for dia útil, which is the standard Portuguese phrase. (Google is not fastidious about accents, which would make a sharp language distinction. Sometimes this is an inconvenience. In determining general usage, however, it's probably best to ignore accents, since a lot of writers are unfastidious as well.) In Spanish, día[s] de semana corresponds to `weekday[s].'
``The Los Angeles Council of Engineers and Scientists (LACES) and/or its antecedents was founded in 1930.'' They couldn't be more specific? ``It is a coordinating organization of technical societies and associations in the greater Los Angeles area.''
``The specific and primary purpose for which the Council is formed is to operate for educational and charitable purposes by promoting the advancement of engineering and science.''
Specifically, ``an evaluation program designed to examine the process and outcomes of the alcohol and other drug (AOD) programs in Los Angeles.''
Relax, two, three, four,
Relax, two, three, four,
Relax, two, three, four...
The Ladino tradition seems to have been particularly strong in Turkey. Between 1910 and 1948, nineteen Ladino-language newspapers were published in the US by the Turkish-Jewish immigrant community. My source for this is (indirectly) an essay by Aviva Ben-Ur in Part I of Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (NYU Pr., 1998).
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were nearly 400 Ladino newspapers in Turkey. I'm not sure how many were simultaneous, or how name changes are taken into account. My source for this is (indirectly) the essay of Stanford professor Aron Rodrigue, ``The Ottoman Diaspora,'' in Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Biale.)
Ladino newspapers are treated as some sort of distant historical phenomenon, but I know that in Israel you could still buy a Ladino newspaper off the newsstand in the late 1970's. My source for this is my parents, who brought back a copy. Traditionally, Ladino was written in Hebrew characters, but this paper was printed in Roman characters. I suspect that this was a side-effect of Kemal Ataturk's reforms. The main systematic difference between the orthography of that Roman-character Ladino and that of ordinary Spanish was the use of the letter k where Spanish normally uses qu or c. There was serialized romance novel on the inside pages, and I don't remember much else. The language isn't much harder to understand than that of Cervantes. In Jerusalem in 1989 I chatted in Spanish with a Ladino-speaking bus driver. In 1987, when I attended the Hot Electrons Conference in Boston, a woman outside the conference hotel asked me for directions (people always ask disoriented visitors for directions). At first I didn't realize she was speaking Spanish, and even after I realized it her speech was a challenge. When I went back into the hotel I told Bob ``man, that woman's Spanish was strange!'' He replied that maybe my Spanish sounded just as strange to her. Bob obviously didn't speak Spanish, but perhaps this expressed a certain sympathetic perspective. A couple of years later he married a Hispanic woman. Anyway, Ladino isn't as strange as some Mexican dialects.
Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of the most effective majority leaders in the history of the US Senate, married a woman known as Lady Bird. She was actually born Claudia Alta Taylor, but her nurse's comment that she was as ``purty as a ladybird'' led to her being called ``Lady Bird,'' ``Lady'' and ``Bird.'' She used ``Bird'' on her marriage license, but eventually she, her husband, and their children (daughters Lynda and Lucy) all had the initials LBJ. Lyndon was presidential candidate John Kennedy's running mate in the 1960 elections, the ticket won, and now I'm finally done writing the well-known and due-diligence stuff.
The only reason I put this entry here was so that I could draw attention to some relevant comments of Jessica Mitford. She was born in England on September 11, 1917, and emigrated to the US in 1939 with her first husband. The comments are in an article that by now is surely obscure. [Details about the article (``You-All and Non-You-All'') can be found in the U and non-U entry.] The most relevant information is that the article was written for and published in the American magazine Esquire in May 1962.
The prejudice Northerners feel towards Southerners is roughly parallel to that felt by English people towards Americans, and is compounded of many of the same ingredients--a thoroughgoing dislike of their public policies, contempt for their level of education and culture, and a sort of instinctive recoil at the sound of the accent--larded in both cases, it must be said, with a thick layer of that particular form of snobbishness that sneers at the provincial. It is distasteful to the Northerner that a human being should have the given name of Lady Bird; it grates on the Northern ear to hear an educated person say ``sumpn'' and ``prolly,'' or speak of a ``mess of fried chicken'' pronounced ``maiss of [sic] frad chickn.''
For more about names associated with Jessica Mitford, see the Jessica Mitford entry.
L1 through L3 are in the same straight line with the Sun and the planet, the order being L2 - planet - L1 - sun - L3. L3 through L5 are in the same circular orbit as the planet; they form an equilateral triangle with each other, and L4 and L5 each form an equilateral triangle with Sun and planet. Only L4 and L5 are stable against perturbations by other bodies; several asteroids, called the Trojan asteroids, orbit near the Sun-Jupiter L4 and L5 points, and Saturn has small satellites at its L4 and L5 points with some of its larger satellites.
- L1: The Sun-Earth L1 point is about 1,000,000 miles from
the Earth in the direction toward the Sun. A
halo orbit around this point is useful for
space probes.
- L2: The Sun-Earth L2 point is about 1,000,000 miles from the Earth in the direction away from the Sun.
- L3: The Sun-Earth L3 point is in the Earth's orbit exactly halfway around. A useful place if you have a spaceship that you want to keep hidden a mere 185 million miles from Earth. A few science fiction movies have been based on the idea of a Doppelgänger of the earth being hidden at the L3 point. Such a body would not satisfy the requirement of being much less massive than the earth, but it is evident by symmetry that there would be a stable orbit there. Alternatively, one can reason that the requirement is only that the third body exert a negligible force on the second, and in the case of L3 this is satisfied by the distance. Currently, of course, we can compute the celestial mechanics of the solar system to sufficient accuracy that any body approaching the mass of the earth would have been detected from its effect on the orbits of Venus (or Mars) as it passed (or was passed) by it.
- L4: The Sun-Earth L4 point is in the Earth's orbit, moving ahead of the Earth, one-sixth of the way around.
- L5: The Sun-Earth L5 point is in the Earth's orbit, moving behind the Earth, one-sixth of the way around. The Earth-Moon L5 point has been proposed as a location for a colony in space.
- L2: The Sun-Earth L2 point is about 1,000,000 miles from the Earth in the direction away from the Sun.
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
All I want to know is, was this dreamed up before the dance?
The mailing list classicslgb was superseded in fall 2000 by a mailing list also called lambdacc. ``[L]ambdacc is an e-mail discussion group for those interested in the interaction between queer studies/theory, gender studies/theory, and Classics. Only subscribers can post, and the list of subscribers is kept confidential.'' You can browse its hypertext archives or subscribe by writing to majordomo@runner.utsa.edu with the message "subscribe lambdacc" in the body (no quotation marks). To contribute, send a message to <lambdacc@runner.utsa.edu>. Subscribers who wish to remain anonymous should write to: <lambanon@lonestar.utsa.edu>.
October is also National Disability Employment Awareness Month and National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the US. One almost has the flattering sense that one's attention is being competed for. To celebrate (if that's the term) these months (or is it month?), many local organizations organize ``awareness luncheons'' -- usually early in the month(s?), sometimes coinciding with Columbus Days. It's been going on for years, although I'd never been awa-- I mean, I hadn't noticed. But I noticed this year. This morning a radio host interviewed a couple of organizers for the local annual Disability Awareness Luncheon. I wanted to call in and advise, ``Don't wear your Sunday best!'' Later this morning, I saw a bumper sticker that said ``Children Are A Gift From God.'' I happen to know some parents of teenagers and of two-year-olds who would disagree. (I mean the parents would disagree. The others would be disagreeable as a matter of course.) But that wasn't what I thought when I saw the bumper sticker. I thought: ``If children are a gift from God, why does He give these gifts to so many people who violate His sacred laws against fornication, eh? What's the logic here, some kind of reverse psychology? I'm not sure I `get' the parable of the workers in the field either.'' Alas, the bumper sticker didn't bear further analysis. (I mean, there wasn't any further analysis included on it. Okay, maybe I mean it the other way too.)
And this year (2006), Columbus Day is observed on Monday, October 9. In the US. In Canada, that day is Thanksgiving. You know, I could be doing something useful with my time. Not this.
BTW, I just googled ``Language Infelicity Awareness Month,'' and it seems to be something I invented myself. I figured you'd want to know.
A propos of nothing, the editor writes
If you aspire to greater LAN's, you can become an MCNE.
Sure, I'll do that tomorrow afternoon.
- (v. tr.) When the course of a race is a number of traversals (``laps'') of a closed circuit (``track''), one racer is said to lap another when he, she, or it passes the other by completing a whole number of extra laps more than the other.
- (v.) To wash over in waves. Ocean waves and kelp lap the shore. Similarly, in semiconductor fabrication, lapping is the very gentle polishing that consists of washing in a mildly abrasive solution or suspension. Lapping compounds are described on this page.
- (v.) To lick the liquid from a wet surface.
Okay, if you've read this far, you've got too much time, so I'll just blather on. My old laptop died and needs to be replaced. Technically, perhaps, maybe it only failed to resurrect. I had developed a number of increasingly bizarre resuscitation tricks to keep it going for 7 or 8 months after the computer repair place charged me $40 to report that they couldn't even get it started. When these tricks finally stopped working I opened it up and didn't find the mechanical or heat-sink problem I hoped was the trouble, and I never reassembled it. It's kind of weird, like doing an autopsy to make certain the patient is dead. If a patient dies on the operating table, do they always sew him (or her, or perhaps it's ``the operand'') up? Do they stuff the organs back in haphazardly? I suppose if I'd closed up the laptop it might have worked again. Machinery often exhibits that kind of magic: open it, look inside, poke around, give it a good scare, close it, and it works. But it was such a tricky hassle to open it that I had to balance the possibility of a miraculous recovery after a tedious and exacting reassembly against the prospect of having to open it up again to retrieve the hard drive. Gary had a similar experience. You wonder if making the laptop cases unnecessarily intricate to open isn't part of the marketing strategy, something like programmed obsolescence. Considering that the profit in printers is in the ink-cartridge refills, or that Kodak used to sell its cameras at a loss to profit on film development (so I've heard), the idea doesn't seem impossibly devious.)
Reportedly a ``huge logistical hassle'' for the dungeon master.
You know, this idea could be extended to many activities that are now experienced virtually. For example, addictive computer solitaire games could be played in nonvirtual space (a whole universe parallel to the internet; quaintly and incorrectly known as ``the real world''). This is a bit impractical, but it could be done with perseverance and playing pieces made of card. Some of the computer interactivity could be simulated by changing the rules and installing analog devices known as other people. Just a thought.
Read Don Quixote first; it explains everything.
``The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest professional Association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America. With over 4,800 members, twenty-five percent of whom reside outside the United States, LASA is the one Association that brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors, across the globe.''
Here's something unusual: a LASA International Congress is held every eighteen months. It's not so they can hold it in the same season in alternating hemispheres, though. Recent meetings:
- Washington, DC -- Spring 1991 (April 4-6)
- Los Angeles, CA -- fall 1992
- Atlanta, GA -- Spring 1994 (March 10-12)
- Washington, DC -- fall 1995 (September 29-October 1)
- Guadalajara, Mexico -- Spring 1997 (April 17-19)
- Chicago, IL -- fall 1998 (September 24-26)
- Miami, FL -- Spring 2000 (March 16-18)
It is something between a pie and a mélange; there are membranes but they are permeable, the layers must maintain their integrity and yet they exist in an exciting dialectic tension to the molten oozy cheesy oily juices which they separate, the goo must almost but not completely successfully threaten the always-discernible-yet-imperiled imposed order.
The speech was published as the essay on pretentiousness, in Taking Liberties: Gay Men's Essays on Politics, Culture and Sex, ed. Michael Bronski (NYC: Richard Kasak Bks., 1996).
I bought Heavenly Bodies: Remembering Hollywood and Fashion's Favorite AIDS Benefit off the dollar table, figuring it would at least have some revealing décolletage, some sexy cleavage. But no, the entire book was one big bust. A decade of shows; ten chapters for ten featured designers, more or less. Chapter 7 was ``Calvin Klein -- Beige, Booze, Babes, and Boys in the Bowl.'' The facing page shows models looking more unattractive than you could have imagined it possible for beautiful women to look in transparent fashions. A kind of negative achievement. They also look appropriately somber, which I guess is one of the things you have to get down pat before you can graduate with a Bachelorette of Modeling (that's what you earn at beauty college, right?). The picture bears the following CK quote:
It's important that we use only arugula lettuce in the salad and no tomatoes! The salad has to match the chicken, the pasta, and the table linens!
I don't know about you, but I think I see the outlines of an aesthetic philosophy emerging here, and it's not to my taste. Chapter 8 is ``Isaac Mizrahi -- Le Miz at the Chinese Theater.'' If the author's French wasn't any better than mine, then perhaps ``Le Miz'' was supposed to be pronounced like ``lay me'' in English. If so the pun was doubtless inadvertent, since it is tasteless. Instead, the pun is on Les Mis, popular abbreviation for Les Misérables, a hit musical based on Victor Hugo's novel of the same name. Anyway, the designer quotes in that chapter of the miserable Heavenly Bodies book begin with this:
Fashion is about women not wanting to look like cows -- although cows are kind of charming, aren't they?
Why buy the cow when you can get the mozarella at a reasonable price?
This was a link to related instructional material from Virginia Tech, but now it's gone 404 and we'll never know. (Virginia Tech's Chemistry Department developed some nice introductory materials for optics and spectroscopy, which it made available on-line in the 1990's. These were eventually removed from the VT site, with forwarding links to SciMedia (now autoforwarding to SciMedia, Ltd.), which has scaled back on positive externalities. They now feature links to things they sell, with English pages badly or very incompletely translated.)
Argos, a resource for the ancient and medieval worlds which went online on October 3, 1996, billed itself as ``the first peer-reviewed, limited area search engine (LASE) on the World-Wide Web.'' Effective February 6th, 2003, Argos was taken offline. Insufficient funding for regular upkeep and maintenance was cited as the cause. Some of the people who contributed reviews were mighty nonplussed not to have been informed of the service suspension.
Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech. Here's Laser Focus World.
For in a liter he lay, laser at Rome
This describes Vespasian, who lay in a litter at Rome, suffering from an infestation of wasps (wasp is vespa in Latin) in his nose. The word laser, though it clearly means `leisure,' seems like a bit of a semantic stretch in this particular instance, but this is one of the classics of alliterative poetry, and the unknown author wanted a word beginning in el. The poem dates from the late fourteenth century and has been argued to be of ``extreme West Yorkshire provenance.'' (I'm not sure whether extreme here modifies West, but FWIW, West Yorkshire is the area of Leeds in northern England, a few counties south of Scotland.) Because this is Middle English, it is well likely that some manuscripts used different spellings of the word in question. I haven't looked at a scholarly edition, so I don't know what other spellings were used.
The OED2 lists laser as 14-16th century Scottish spelling, and examples John Barbour's The Bruce, dating from 1375 or a little bit later. It's another romance, a nonchalant fraud in simple masculine rhyme (The Archedene off Abbyrdene / In Brwyss his Buk has gert be sene), and it could suffer no better-deserved fate than to be butchered for television. At xx. 234 it reads
Gif God will me gif Laser and space so lange till liff.
(No, I don't know what was to be done or by whom, if God gave him time and space. Do yer ain reseerch.)
The German word Leser means `reader' (from the verb lesen, `to read'). A letter to the editor is a Leserbrief (lit. `reader letter'). Leser is pronounced like the English word laser, except that the final arr is audible more to the mind than the ear (roughly: ``layz-ah,'' but that ``ah'' is between English ah and eh). Also, the first vowel is a lengthened (I mean extended-duration) short e (/e:/) rather than the ``long a'' diphthong of English. (Look, if you have any trouble with this, just imagine California Governator Ahnuld Shvahtsenaygah saying ``laser.'')
The word laser has been borrowed from English into German, and as is typical with such loans in German, one is simply supposed to recognize the word as foreign and pronounce it in an approximation of the original English pronunciation. That approximation is in fact the German pronunciation of the German word Leser. However, some ignorant persons know no better and pronounce laser according to the standard rules of German orthography, so it comes out roughly as ``lahz-ah.'' The Duden Deutsches Universalwörterbuch actually offers this as an alternate pronunciation. When Wolf left Austria 20 years ago, this alternate pronunciation was ignorant and decidedly incorrect, but who knows now?
The procedure consists of cutting a flap in the epithelium (protective outer covering of the cornea) with a fine knife called a microkeratome, then reshaping the interior of the cornea by ablating the exposed surface with an excimer laser. The released flap rebonds and heals quickly after the operation. (One of the failure modes of the procedure is if the flap doesn't flip back into the right position and heals off-center. A rarer failure mode is that it doesn't heal.)
Lasik is a development from photorefractive keratectomy (PRK), in which the epithelium was removed and healed, but painfully. That in turn was an improvement on radial keratotomy (RK), which used mechanical surgery. In principle, LASIK should be better than PRK. For a variety of practical reasons, it's still a tough call between PRK and LASIK.
Excimer lasers specialized for eye surgery were developed by Summit Technology. This company and VISX are the dominant suppliers of lasers for eye-surgery applications in the US.
Most websites on lasik are those of individual practitioners or ophthalmology practices. Visit PRK and LASIK Today instead.
Even today, many papers are written in Latinate.
I can't seem to decide what entry to favor with information. Check out the L. and Latin entries.
There are a lot of Latin learning materials on the web. See, for example, ``Latin Teaching Materials at Saint Louis University.''
Latinteach is an email discussion group for Latin teachers. The website has a variety of resources for teachers and students. There's also a Latinteach WebRing.
I've noticed that girls named Virginia are at a substantially increased risk of growing up to become Latin teachers.
The words tène (`shallow') and ténevière (`submerged hillock') are colloquial terms used by the fishermen of Lake Neuchâtel. Eduoard Desor, in his Les Palafittes: ou, Constructions Lacustres du Lac de Neuchâtel (1865), p. 77, derives them (sans doute) from the Latin tenuis. This is plausible and even probable, but he triggers a thought by noting that the German word is dünn. The German word and its English cognate thin are generally regarded as independent derivations from Indo-European; it seems possible that tène has an old west Germanic derivation.
Contemporary Greek and Roman writers referred to La Tène culture as Celtic or (equivalently) Gaulish. We have no direct evidence for their language, and modern writers like to stress that language, culture, and descent may not be correlated.
George Mason University (GMU) is developing a hypertext library of Latin texts.
There are a number of ongoing on-line Latin study groups. One with a very good reputation is LatinStudy. The GROUP LATIN STUDY list keeps track of the activities of all the on-line Latin study groups. For subscription and other information, see the Group Latin Study List FAQ kept by Diane Cooper.
There seems to be a burgeoning interest in Latin in the schools, and a corresponding shortage of Latin teachers.
For beginners, we give a flavor of Latin declensions at the A.M. entry. For the more advanced, we serve a Latin crossword puzzle here.
You can read the news in Latin from Finland.
Of course, if you really know no Latin at all, the place where you want to start, and which will give you an idea of the power, imagination, and utility of the Roman tongue, is this limited sampling of Latin dirty words.
Here are the last two paragraphs (pp. 36-37) of chapter II, ``South of the
Border'':
However, it is in the field of music that we take the cake. Cuba's ``Peanut Vender'' [sic] precipitated the avalanche. The United States has been simply swept off its feet by the tempo and melody of our popular music. Rumbas, congas, and sambas have tended to displace the long popular American jazz. From tango through rumba to conga, Latin America has conquered the United States. The delicate Mexican songs have completed this subtle annexation of our powerful industrial neighbor. Mexican songs have been so warmly received that they are in danger [heaven forfend!] of becoming naturalized. [Talk radio will save us!] Not only sentimental old-timers like ``La Golondrina,'' ``La Paloma,'' ``Cielito Lindo,'' ``Borrachita,'' ``Estrellita,'' and ``Sobre las Olas'' (Over the Waves), but also the more spirited ``Cucaracha,'' ``Rancho Grande,'' ``Perfidia,'' ``Frenesí,'' ``Cuatro Vidas,'' and a dozen other popular ``hits'' can be heard at almost any hour in the U.S.A. at the turn of a radio dial.''
Gringos knew they had hands and legs and brains. They were quite efficient at expressing their feelings with their feet--e.g., tap dancing--but there was one thing they ignored until the devilish maracas and sonajas started beating their jungle rhythm: and that was the flexibility of the hips and their magic power of expression. And all this fundamental change in the ``American way of moving'' has occurred only after dancing tangos, congas, and rumbas. Amigos gringos! Wait until you become acquainted with the pericón of Argentina and Uruguay, the Chilean cuecas, the marinera of Peru, the bambuco of Colombia.
I'm reminded that in 1963, when my mother started working as a research librarian at Allied Chemical, she was criticized by her library colleagues for the provocative, exaggerated way she swayed her hips when she walked. (We had just emigrated from Argentina, home of the tango -- which, if I may say so, does not really emphasize hip movement.)
In the block quote above, the only deviation from the italicization of the original is the emphasis I added to ``fundamental.'' Back around 1988, Carlo Jacoboni told me a story about a paper his group (in Modena, Italy) had submitted to an American or other English-language scientific journal. With the reviewer report came a suggestion that they look up the word fundament (which they had used) in a dictionary. It turns out that an important sense of the word -- the principal sense, to some people -- is, as the 1913 Webster's puts it, ``[t]he part of the body on which one sits; the buttocks; specifically (Anat.), the anus.''
- But first, let's get this one over with:
``Semper ubi sub ubi'' is a timeworn Latin students' joke (the joke, not necessarily the student telling it, is timeworn). - When the College of Cardinals met to elect a successor to Pope John
Paul II, Father Reginald Foster got a lot of press coverage. ``Father
Foster'' already sounds like a punch line, but I'm not planning to give
him a nomen est omen
subentry. Father Foster is a Latin teacher at ``the Greg'' or, as all those unhip reporters called
it, ``Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.''
Forty years earlier, in 1965, the Second Vatican Council had decided to switch the language of mass from the traditional Latin to the local vernacular. Latin is no longer the local vernacular anywhere, so that was mostly the end of Latin mass. [Actually, upon request a number of congregations have been authorized to use the old Tridentine mass, but not that many when you consider that it was once catholic, errr, universal. During the papacy of John Paul II, the rate at which such authorizations were granted ticked up a notch. In addition, a number of independent churches or groups of churches separated from the Roman Catholic mainstream because they opposed one or more of the Vatican II innovations. (The same thing happened after the first Vatican Council in 1870.) Probably most of these schismatic churches continue to use the Latin mass.]
Despite the change, however, the age of all but the youngest cardinals meant that for years they had said Latin prayers at daily mass. Apparently that wasn't enough to develop conversational ability. Father Foster clucked to the press: ``I joke with cardinals in Latin ... and most don't laugh.'' (Maybe his jokes aren't really all that funny.) ``Some say they have no idea what I'm saying.'' (Maybe it's his accent?) Foster did mention that Cardinal Joe Ratzinger (yeah, yeah -- baptizatus Ioseph Aloisius Ratzinger) was one of the few who really knew his Latin. In the event, Joe got elected Pope, taking the name Benedictus XVI. - Henry Beard (Henricus Barbatus) is the author of Latin
for All Occasions: Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus (1990) and
its sequel X-treme Latin (2004). I particularly enjoyed
```Syntaxis Utilis,'' which illustrated some of the less
straightforward verb conjugations, basing its paradigm on the reflexive
of ``f***.'' (We are family-friendly here, but for a moment we will be
family unfriendly in German and Serbo-Croatian. The reflexive form in
those languages would be sich ficken and jegidse.) Of
course, compared to Catullus, this is pretty mild stuff.
Most of the humor in Beard's books is, so to speak, what is gained in translation. The gravitas of Latin lends an air of absurdity to statements that are not funny in English. A similar if milder effect can be achieved in English by using an inappropriate linguistic register. (E.g.:``I would be simply delighted to irrumate you brutally.'')
Henry Beard was the invited speaker at a CAAS meeting I attended in April 2001. The reception was warm, but his jokes didn't draw big laughs. It occurred to me eventually that for Latin teachers, his mots lacked the entertaining alien-ness that Latin has for others. - Rose Williams has written a number of little books in a spirit similar to those of Beard: The Labors of Aeneas: What a Pain It Was to Found the Roman Race (2003) is her faithful but light-hearted retelling of Virgil's Aeneid. It follows Once upon the Tiber: An Offbeat History of Rome (2002). Her Going to Hades Is Easy: Facilis Descensus Averno (2000) has the subsubtitle Witty Latin Sayings by Wise Romans. Williams's Latin Quips at Your Fingertips (2001) is a collection of 200 quotes of ancient Romans, with translations. In 1999 she and Lesley O'Mara co-edited Which Way to the Vomitorium: Vernacular Latin for All Occasions. (I wonder if it's a coincidence that the Facilis Descensus book is currently in paperback from a small press called Michael O'Mara Books.) Rose Williams has also written books in a more serious and sometimes inspirational tone, such as Cicero the Patriot (2005). Alright! Enough already! Write something long and don't come back for another six months at least!
- I think it was Eugene Ehrlich who kicked off the genre cultivated by Rose Williams and Henry Beard with a couple of books of common (well, once common) and useful Latin phrases called Amo, Amas, Amat and More (1990 or earlier, with an introduction by WFB) and Veni, Vidi, Vici: Conquer Your Enemies, Impress Your Friends with Everyday Latin.
- There's something at the G & R entry, but it's not really amusing enough to be worth following the link.
- See the NFFNSNC entry for dead-language jokes about the dead.
- Peccavi.
- ``Use pure, clear, simple, concise Anglo-Saxon; avoid Latin derivatives'' is also a joke. Well, it's funny, anyway. Okay, how about ``gently amusing''?
We've been putting information about Latin textbooks and readers into the glossary in a haphazard but generally alphabetical manner. Following are the ones I have tracked down. The symbols [G] and [R] refer to grammar-intensive and readings-based approaches, respectively.
- Cambridge [England] Latin Course [R]. See CLC.
- Ecce Romani [R].
- Latin For Americans [G]. See LFA.
- Lingua Latina by Hans Oerberg [R]. See LL.
- Oxford Latin Course [R]. See OLC.
- Wheelock [G]. No entry yet, but see LFA.
In addition to these, there are various textbooks in something close to the original sense of the word: books of texts to be read (for practice more than, or at least as much as, content). These are especially useful to supplement the textbooks that focus on grammar. They generally fall into two categories: books of texts all appropriate for some given level of (sub-fluent) proficiency in the language, and graded readers. Graded readers have texts or stories that are progressively more demanding, and they are often keyed to some teaching text.
In no particular order:
- Thirty-Eight Latin Stories Designed to Accompany Frederic M. Wheelock's Latin, by Anne H. Groton. The fifth edition (whether this refers to the edition of Wheelock or of the reader, I don't know) is by A.H.G. and James M. May, and published by Bolchazy-Carducci. This is a graded text, and though obviously keyed to Wheelock's textbook, it includes a complete vocabulary and so can be used to accompany other texts.
- Fabulae Mirabiles, by Victor Barochas and Susan Schearer, published by Hippocrene. Familiar fairy tales (``Three Little Pigs'' ``Goldilocks,'' etc.) translated into elementary Latin (not graded).
- Fabulae Faciles: A First Latin Reader, by Francis Ritchie. Out of copyright and widely available on line. Four long stories (retellings of the myths of Perseus, Jason, Hercules, and Ulixes) of increasing difficulty. (Here's a vanilla Project Gutenberg version; Dale Grote serves a nicely formatted version here.)
- A Junior Latin Reader, by Frederick Warren Sanford and Harry Fletcher Scott (1919). At least some of this is on line as well (see here). At least one revised version (A Second-Year Latin Reader), with John Flagg Gummere as added co-author, is still in copyright.
- Latin Via Proverbs: 4000 Proverbs, Mottoes and Sayings for Students of Latin, edited by Laura Gibbs. It's ``a collection of 4000 Latin proverbs organized by grammatical categories. It can be used as a supplement for any first-year Latin textbook or as a systematic grammar review for intermediate Latin students.''
- Lectiones de Historia Romana and The Young Romans, both by Rose Williams. She writes (in late January 2007) that ``[t]hey begin with students with no Latin and go chronologically through Roman history as grammar and vocabulary gradually increase. They will be available from Bolchazy-Carducci [the new publisher] in February [2007].''
- The Labors of Aeneas, or, What a Pain it Was to Found the Roman Race, and Cicero the Patriot also both by Rose Williams. I don't know who publishes them, but they're in stock at <Amazon.com> and finer bookstores.
- Short Latin Stories by Philip Dunlop.
This reminds me of the Hebrew characters I saw stenciled on someone's laptop -- pn styyt. I figured it was Yiddish, particularly on account of the double yud. It turned out to be Hebrew for Penn State. (The guy told me it was Modern Hebrew, but that would seem to go without saying.)
Uvula? I'll look it up later.
Thomas Firth Jones's A Pair of Lawn Sleeves: A biography of William Smith (1727-1803) was published by the Chilton Book Company in 1972. It begins with this excerpt from the diary of John Adams (August 29, 1774):
A gentleman who returned into town with Mr. Paine and me in our coach undertook to caution us against two gentlemen particularly: one was Dr. Smith, the provost of the College, who is looking up to government for an American episcopate, and a pair of lawn sleeves.
In this entry I must note the following: In Spanish, a flexible tube used to pipe water, like a garden hose or a fire hose, is named after a different article of clothing than in English. Such a hose is mangera, from manga, meaning `sleeve.'
Wake up! Wake up!
You think you couldn't imagine a better natural alternative to Sominex, but in 1995 the Canadians took police action against a Spanish trawler to protect turbot stocks off their Atlantic coast.
It's scary: you think the dangers are downtown, and next moment your neighbors have a violent row.
And not just violence now, but sex too! According to research conducted in 1998 and released under Canada's Access to Information Act, the 10,000 employees at Department of Fisheries and Oceans (Ministère des Pêches et des Océans) paid an average of 70,000 visits per day to dating and pomography web sites. (Yes, that's an intentional typo, and sorry, I don't have more detailed statistics. Try this article in Salon.)
A friend of mine who worked at a major airline became just slightly concerned (so he put it) when he learned that the company's web fascist had surreptitiously compiled logs of the web sites visited by each employee. He needn't have worried (slightly) -- the general reaction was an overwhelming storm of slight concern, and the visit histories are reported to have been destroyed. Also, in 1999, the New York Times fired a number of employees at a northern Virginia facility, for exchanging non-PC and racy jokes and images. This was between consenting adults of various genders and a few races, you understand, but it was on company computers. The company kept a copy of every email that went through its system. I guess you're reading this glossary at home; now let's get back to the subject at hand, whatever it was.
Now, I recognize that some SBF Glossary users live in Canadian coastal fishing villages, and may even be or have been fishermen or fisherpersons, as the case may be. The following is for them; the rest of you go read something different.
Dear valued glossary user and former fishworker!
As you are aware, diminished Atlantic fish stocks have forced Fish Canada to
impose certain restrictions, limits, moratoria -- all with the goal of
replenishing stocks and ensuring the continued economic vitality of your
village. Temporarily, you are forbidden to catch more than two (2) fish
per month in season (January), but eventually, some of your descendants will
be able to return to employment in the sea. Your government has a very
sophisticated plan to preserve the economy of your village against that future
day. In layman's terms, this is the plan: everyone will take in each other's
washing. In order to implement this plan, many citizens who worked in the
fishing industry must find new jobs. Employment Canada are diligently
endeavouring to retrain you and your neighbours for satisfying work that
utilises some of the skills you developed in your previous career.
Lobstermen: have you considered a career in hair styling?!
Some of you who have just started your new careers may have a little difficulty adjusting initially. A day at Davey Jones's Locks or Ahab's Persistent Wave ("Durn-near `Permanent' ") waiting for a customer may seem more tedious than waiting for fish to bite. Until you become better adjusted, you may find it hard to put aside frustration and get to sleep. ``Law of the Sea'' may not be a soothing thought. What you need is the gold standard of soporific prose. Here it is:
The word lay is a part of two closely related verbs that became confused in the last third of the twentieth century. Because decadent usage has become so common, even intelligent people like you use nontraditional conjugation and sound stupid and unlettered.
The two verbs have infinitive forms lie (as in ``lie down'') and lay. The relationship between the two is similar to that between rise and raise (with the same vowels and related meanings, so it's mnemonic). To lie and to rise describe what a subject does with his own body. They are intransitive (take no direct object) because they are implicitly reflexive. To lay and to raise describe what a subject does to some other object. They are transitive -- the direct object is what is moved by the subject.
Here are some examples of correct traditional usage:
- I lie on the couch.
- I lay the antimacasar on the couch.
- As I Lay Dying.
- He was laid to rest.
- We have lain on the foundations.
- We have laid the foundations.
Wait, wait, I'm working.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
I would almost say that LBC is to British Judaism what the Hebrew Union College is to American Judaism: the rabbinical college of the Progressive movement. The relatively late creation of LBC probably reflects the small number of synagogues to be served in the UK. I suppose that until about 1933, British rabbinical students studied in Germany, much as a large fraction of serious American physics students would have done graduate study in Germany until then. One small difference between the US and UK situations is that there are two Progressive movements of comparable size in the UK, and only one (Reform) in the US. (The relatively small Reconstructionist movement in the US has its own rabbinical college.) Another interesting difference is that due to a certain degree of doctrinal tolerance in the UK, the Conservative movement got a very late start (1962) and remains small. LBC serves as the UK rabbinical college for that movement as well.
It can get particularly confusing if you create another entity and call it a centre too, like the Sternberg Centre, whatever that is. Apparently I was not the only one to find the hyphenated name slightly confusing. Sometime between 2000 and 2006, they apparently transitioned into using the shorter version exclusively, along with the correspondingly shortened domain name. As of 2006 you can still see vestiges of the old name links of related organizations. More substantive information about the college is at the LBC entry.
(I felt sure I'd already mentioned this somewhere in the glossary, but at this moment I can't find it.)
Chapter 9 of Debra Ginsberg's book Waiting is ``Food and Sex.'' She explains that it's ``almost too easy to identify the couples who will be headed to a beadroom [uh, I must have meant bedroom; I guess my mind wandered] as soon as dinner is over.... Waiters and waitresses train themselves to understand body language as carefully as the spoken word.'' The surefire sign is if she doesn't eat much of her dinner. ``There are also telling questions, like `Does it have a lot of bones?' Nobody wants to be seen picking apart a chicken if planning later to strip naked in front of a virtual stranger.'' I'm still thinking this one over, ruminating on it, chewing it over. For similar thoughts on salad, see NAVS.
A rock group called The Waitresses had their only hit with ``I Know What Boys Want.''
So back to this couple at Charlie Brown's on their first date. It was easy to see that they were going to go to bed... separately. He was talking about fishing gear and ``el bee eye,'' and she was making a superhuman effort to seem interested. This was not only their first date but their last date, though he apparently hadn't realized it yet.
Here, from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, is a similar situation.
Maria, with only Mr. Rushworth [her wealthy fiancé] to attend to her, and doomed to the repeated details of his day's sport, good or bad, his boast of his dogs, his jealousy of his neighbours, his doubts of their [hunting] qualifications, and his zeal after poachers, subjects which will not find their way to female feelings without some talent on one side, or some attachment on the other, had missed Mr. Crawford grievously...
There's an actress called Kim Kardashian who did a couple of movies in 2007, following some television work in 2006 and 2007. In 2003 she had appeared in an episode or two of ``The Simple Life,'' an unreality show starring Paris Hilton. Perhaps she was best known for being the girlfriend of football player Reggie Bush for a while and then in 2008 for her part in ``Dancing with the Stars.'' (I don't know if she played a star or ``I'm with him'' on that, but she made it to round 10 and seemed to be in the entertainment news a lot.) Most of her gigs have consisted of playing herself on TV. In 2008 she starred in that role, in a show called ``Keeping Up with the Kardashians.'' Her costars included her sisters Khloe Alexandra Kardashian and Kourtney Mary Kardashian. Kim is Kimberly Noel Kardashian. Not as ambitious for consistency as Lyndon Baines Johnson, but at least the Kardashian parents didn't name any of their daughters Kandy Kelly.
- L.C.A. -- assault
- L.C.I. -- infantry
- L.C.M. -- mechanized
- L.C.T. -- tank
International mail is divided into three general categories: LC, CP (parcel post), and AO (other things).
Um, um, there's this famous nineteenth-century novelist, um, ridiculously prolific, can't remember the name. Anthony Trollope! Anyway, in 1834 he began a distinguished career in the British Post Office. He quit in 1867, eight years before reaching the age of retirement, to devote himself to his writing career. His friend George Eliot feared at the time that it would lead him to ``excessive writing.'' She was right.
Trollope got his first position, as a minor clerk, through connections to the then-Secretary of the Post Office, Sir Francis Freeling. After a few years, Freeling was succeeded by an activist reformer, Rowland Hill. Trollope continued to be promoted within the post office, but as he rose he came to have an increasing number of conflicts with the Secretary. In 1861, he sought leave to visit North America -- the US Civil War would generate interest in a travel book and he could fulfill his ambition to follow in his mother's footsteps (she had written a famous and uncomplimentary North America book herself). Hill turned him down, but Trollope managed to get permission from the Postmaster General. Trollope found space in North America to praise Rowland Hill's ``wise audacity'' in campaigning (over twenty years before) for the ``penny post'' (uniform one-penny rate for all letters). (The penny-post scheme was accompanied by the introduction of gummed stamps for prepaying postage. In 1856, prepaid postage on letters was made mandatory. Prepaid postage stamps were adopted world wide, and since then stamp collectors have been keeping afloat the economies of small island nations that for all we know might be frauds upon the maps of oceans.) Incidentally, three of the 36 chapters in Trollope's North America were devoted to Canada, which is as close as one can come to the usual factor-of-ten rule, if you stick to a 36-chapter total. The two-volume work was a poorly organized, error-ridden success (on both sides of the pond), although Trollope didn't collect much in royalties from US distribution, since the US was something of an intellectual-property outlaw in those days. (And for a long time after. You could ask J.R.R. Tolkien about that, except that since he's dead, you might wait a long time for an answer.)
Trollope saw mail collection boxes of some sort in use in France in the 1830's. While working on special assignment in Jersey in the early 50's, he came up with the idea of cylindrical ``roadside letter boxes.'' The idea was adopted; Anthony Trollope is the father of the ``pillar box.''
Here's an introduction to Life Cycle Assessment from PRé Product Ecology Consultants.
![[See description at left]](images/18-5.gif)
The illustration at right is from NEC, which has a bit more information on-line.
Are you confused and at a loss? Good. Now remember: leadLESS.
The second level of subdivision (``subclasses'') is represented by a letter or by no letter. You know what I mean: QC for physics, QB for astronomy, QA for mathematics!?!?!, Q for ``Science (General).''
The next level of subdivision is a number greater than or equal to 1.
See also LCCS, DDC (Dewey), and UDC (not Dewey).
LC numbers begin with a one- or two-letter prefix. The first letter defines the primary class, and the second letter, if present, a subclass. Hey -- I already explained this!
It's interesting that the word science occurs in the designation of seven of the primary classes:
- Auxiliary sciences of history
- Social Sciences
- Political Science
- Science
- Military Science
- Naval Science
- Bibliography, Library Science, Information Resources (General)
This correctly indicates that many things are called by names that use the word science but are not science and that, in particular, social science is not science. Psychology is in class B: ``Philosophy, Psychology, Religion.'' Specifically, Psychology is subclass BF, sandwiched between BD (``Speculative philosophy'') and BH (``Aesthetics'').
In photovoltaic systems, a cycle is a day: metal parts (heat sinks for the PV cells, concentrators for the solar radiation, and particularly solder joints) expand during the daylight hours and shrink during the night. [Do not carp that this expansion is a ``strain'' rather than a stress. They're tied together too intricately, and everyone understands what would be tedious to explain: The heat causes high stress under rigid (zero-strain) conditions. The metal strains (expands) to relieve the stress. An assembly of parts with different thermal expansivities, or different temperatures, or both, is liable to be constrained so as not to be able to release the stress entirely.] A PV system typically has a planned life of 20 or 30 years, or well over 10000 diurnal cycles. In this context, ``low cycle'' means fewer than 10000 cycles.
The initials L. C. M. are familiar to most of your readers, appended as they have been to so many exquisite poems and stories, the revelation of a cultured mind and sympathetic heart...
L.C.M. appears in a widely circulated 1884 photograph of twelve ``Eminent Women'' of America (Louisa May Alcott, Julia Ward Howe, and Harriet Beecher Stowe are the women in the picture still well known today). Her poetry ``was considered among the finest in the second half of the century'' according to Susan Coultrap-McQuin, Doing Library Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: Un. of N. Car. Pr., 1990). Note that that particular half century included much of the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1891).
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Most of the information in this entry comes from A Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884: What a Bright, Educated, Witty, Lively, Snappy Young Woman Can Say on a Variety of Topics, ed. Anne Razey Gowdy (Knoxville: Un. of Tenn. Pr., 2000). Sherwood Bonner was always young; she died of cancer in 1883, age 34.
For those of you who were confused by the word missive above, it means `letter,' the kind normally comprising rather than composing a number of words. Here at SBF World Strategy Planning, we strive to eliminate all ambiguity. (Indeed, we're right on schedule to achieve perfect and permanent clarity on June 16, 2000.) If we had used the synonym missile instead of missive, some of you might have thought we meant the projectile sort of missile. If we had used the word letter, some of you might very reasonably have supposed that a newspaper correspondent might be paid ten dollars for each alphabetic character of prose in 1876. Confederate dollars, sure.
The LCS used to be a best-of-five, back when each league of Major League Baseball (MLB) consisted of two divisions (East and West). Then, it was played between the two division winners (the teams with the best regular-season records in their respective divisions).
In 1995 there was an expansion and reorganization into three divisions. Since then, each league champion has been determined in an playoff series that consists of two rounds. The first round, a best-of-five (the ``Division Series'' -- NLDS or ALDS) reduces a field of four to the two. The four teams are the division winners and a wild-card team -- the second-place team (in its division) with the best record (among all teams in its league). In this system, the second round is the LCS, now a best-of-seven series between the division series winners.
See SW entry for related entries.
There is a related category called ``Critical Languages,'' which was invented during the Cold War to encompass languages that did not attract much attention for economic, literary, or whatever other reasons foreign languages might attract attention, but which were geopolitically important. In some schools, the imperative to teach ``critical languages,'' combined with the shortage of qualified instructors, has led to the use of unqualified instructors.
For example, LC50 for hydrofluoric acid is 456 ppm for mice inhaling the stuff for an hour. For rats inhaling for an hour, the LC50 is 1276 ppm. Three and four significant digits on numbers like these are completely fatuous. It's the kind of accuracy you might pretend to achieve if you massacred on the order of a million rats, to be sure the LC50 was 1276 and not 1277 ppm, even though you don't know two digits of accuracy on the HF (aq) molarity.
In the end, the thing you know best is the breed of rat you ordered to sacrifice on the altar of health science (Norway, or brown), and that HF is nasty stuff.
Others born on November 7 are singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, the evangelist Billy Graham, scientist Marie Curie, singers Joan Sutherland and Johnny Rivers, and ethologist Konrad Lorenz, but not in that order. The science of astrology allows us to see that all these people (as well as those born that day who did not achieve fame) were essentially the same, with some minor differences occasioned by the phase of the moon.
The regular DAP is not, TTBOMKAU, called ``Heavyweight Directory Access Protocol.''
Another problem is, some less developed countries got that way by not being developing countries in the first place.
During the autumn rioting in 2005, they took a courageous stand against police violence and the nasty language of the Interior Minister.
This overview page of nucleus models has a link to an extended technical description (dvi).
In upper-house elections on July 29, 2007, the LDP coalition (LDP and New Komeito) lost its majority for only the second time in history. There are 242 seats in the upper house, and half are contested in each election. The coalition entered the campaign defending 76 of its 132 seats, and as of the next morning appeared to have retained 46 -- LDP 37 and New Komeito 9. (In 1998 it won only 44 seats and the late Ryutaro Hashimoto, PM at the time, resigned.) The DPJ is projected to win 60 seats, well over the 55 it needed to gain an outright majority in the upper house. However, the LDP has a two-thirds majority in the lower house; in principle, that means it can override the constitutionally weak upper house.
At first, PM Shinzo Abe chose not to fall on his sword. (Okay, the traditional practice is slightly different in Japan. You get the idea.) And his party was okay with that, to the extent of there not being a public challenge to his leadership. He duly reshuffled his cabinet, but that was it. Then about a month later, on September 12, Abe, age 53 (the statement of his age is mildly disturbing at this point, isn't it?), announced that he would quit. The next day, he entered a hospital (see?) for unspecified stress-related abdominal complaints. (Sharp pains?) The LDP chose a new PM, Yasuo Fukuda, age 71 (it's okay this time), on September 25, and on the same day Abe emerged from the hospital to dissolve his Cabinet and formally resign.
The most important reason for the 2007 defeat was widespread anger over poor record-keeping in the national social security system: fifty million records lost. I don't understand how a problem can build to that scale before breaking. Claims (by the opposition) that many pension records had been lost only the news in late 2006, and were only confirmed in Spring 2007. (In summary reports in English, it is often reported that two ministers resigned and one committed suicide ``in the scandals.'' This gives the impression that the big pension scandal led to resignations and suicide, but so far it has not. A bit ironically, administrative reform minister Genichiro Sata resigned in December 2006 over charges of misusing of political funds. Agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide in May following allegations that he misused public funds; his successor in that ministry, Norihiko Akagi, got into similar scandals by early July. In June, defense minister Fumio Kyuma suggested the 1945 U.S. nuclear bombings of Japan were justified, and he resigned in the ensuing, uh, firestorm I think is what you'd call it.)
To say nothing of the millions who have received smaller pensions than they'd earned, the pension screw-up has required practically all Japanese adults to visit government offices to check that the records of their employment histories are complete and correct. The lines have been rock-concert-ticket-window bad, though not Notre-Dame-football-ticket-window bad. (This was before ND's historically bad 2007 season.)
A lot of men you meet on internet dating sites will reply to your note by saying that gee, you're a swell gal, it's too bad you live so far away. This means that your beauty lives too deep below your skin.
Oh wow, man! That pun was like, mind-blowing! Intense! I better sit down. What do you know -- I am sitting down! How cool is that?
You're not supposed to just throw it away when it deceases. Learn here what to do.
``We're waiting on some polling data,'' says one Senate Democratic leadership staffer, when approached about where her boss thought he might go the Alito front.
My Aunt Edith contributed a lot of money to the Democratic Party. She had a card to add to her wall with the president's autograph and a picture of the White House every Christmas season during Democratic administrations, although she took down Clinton after the Lewinsky affair (and she didn't remember the Democrats in her will). She also had certificates attesting to her status as a member of a Democratic ``Leadership Circle.'' It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon. The sexy young thing sitting at a table in the glitzy restaurant is saying ``Oh, I don't think of you as an old man at all! I think of you as a very, very rich old man!'' Something like that.
A cop I know, a fellow regular at a restaurant where I know all the table numbers, was holding forth at 23 the other day. He said that before he met his wife, he was looking for a rich woman, preferably a rich old woman.
Anyway, these leadershipish things have become pretty common, along with appeals for money that are thinly disguised as polls. At the time, though, it was new to me. I asked Aunt Edith about it and she replied modestly that ``oh, everybody sends those things.'' As a joke, I decided to take her somewhat literally and ask whether the Republicans sent her such certificates too. She gazed at me in horror (it wasn't mock horror; mock horror doesn't usually include tremors of fear) and asked ``You're not a Republican, are you?'' I reassured her (without explaining that I don't have much respect for people who can be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about any political person or party), and I wasn't cut out of the will, but for all I know it may have been the most expensive joke I ever told.
Teachers are encouraged to teach to the test, but they don't call it that. They want teachers to ``align'' the curriculum the test.
Here's a nice page on textual criticism.
The principle seems to work in many instances where the philological reasoning does not, as in the phrase ``play it again, Sam'' that does not occur in Casablanca (discussed at the As Time Goes By entry).
An equivalent expression is proclivi lectioni praestat ardua. According to L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson: Scribes and Scholars (Oxford, 2/e 1974), p. 248n, the ``principle of difficilior lectio seems to have been first expressly formulated as a criterion by Jean Le Clerc (Clericus) in his Ars Critica, vol. 2, Amsterdam, 1697, p. 389...''
The word Entwicklung, incidentally, is used in mathematics for what is usually called a series (or ``series expansion'') in English. I half-remember some German-speaking mathematician talking about ``developing'' an expansion in powers of some parameter or other.
Nowadays, with spell-checkers built into many kinds of text-processing software, the most common misspellings in commercial publications are homophone errors -- principle for principal or vice versa, likewise complementary for complimentary, etc. (Incidentally, I don't use an automatic spell-checker, so here you get to enjoy the traditional full panoply of orthographic absurdities and atrocities.) Ware won've uh pear of homophoans iz rellatively rer, it seems probable that the spelling of the more common word will be overused for that of the less common. For example, in a FOXNews.com story (``Sixth Human Foot Washes Ashore on Canada's Coast'') credited to the AP and dated Wednesday, June 18, 2008, ``the Straight of Georgia'' was mentioned (as well as the Strait of Georgia). A version from early the next morning managed to avoid that error, but quoted an RCMP spokeswoman as saying ``Too my knowledge, we have not encountered anything like this.'' This particular version contained a comment about spelling at the bottom:
By the end of the day Thursday, it turned out that the sixth foot was a hoax. Incidentally, I think the reason four out of the five genuine finds have been right feet is that most people are right-handed, and that right-handed people tend to be right-legged and right-footed as well. That probably makes the right foot slightly meatier and bigger, whereas the shoes are more closely equal in size. Hence, the right foot fits more snugly in the right shoe and is less likely to slip out. (This explanation depends on the hypothesis, which has been put forward repeatedly, that the reason only feet have appeared, and no other body parts, is that they were carried along by the buoyant athletic shoes they were found in.)
For over a century, newspapers were typeset with a ``hot lead'' process, in which a ``line-o'-type'' (hence the trademarked name Linotype for the first successful American invention of this kind) was created by pouring a molten lead alloy into a line of type molds. (There was at least one significant competitor, Monotype, but the Linotype brand was dominant in the English-speaking world and the word linotype is now in practice a generic term.) A linotype operator could create the line of molds directly from a keyboard -- the process was dramatically more efficient than setting type manually from a case of movable type. (For more on the keyboard, see etaoin shrdlu.) Since the typesetting was in ``lead,'' the same written word lead was used for extra lead inserted as spacing. Hence, the word lede had the advantages of distinguishing between what would otherwise have been a common pair of homographs in copy-editing, and of doing so with a word whose pronunciation (with a long e) was clear.
One irritating common error that I have seen even in the writing of otherwise observant highly intelligent people like me is the spelling ``lead'' for the past-tense verb form led. It's a sort of multiple homonym error: The uncountable noun lead is a homophone of the verb form led, but it happens to be a homograph of the verb form lead, making it look like a conjugation error instead. It produces a kind of egalitarianism: we have difficulty determining the tense of leading as well as of reading. See also leaders.
Linotype printing is called ``hot-lead'' or ``hot-metal'' printing, but the latter term is almost 20% more accurate (or say 20% more inclusive). The hot metal poured to make a line of type is normally an alloy of lead (84%), antimony (12%), and tin (4%). The particular composition chosen corresponds to a eutectic point. There's a reason for this, explained in the next two paragraphs.
Most alloys do not freeze at a single sharp temperature. Starting from a high-temperature melt and slowly cooling, one reaches a temperature where a solid phase begins to precipitate out. This solid has a composition different from the initial liquid, and as the solid phase grows, the composition of the remaining liquid shifts in a complementary fashion. (That is, whatever the solid has a relatively high concentration of is progressively depleted in the liquid.) The situation is further complicated because there may be as many coexisting phases as there are distinct elements in the alloy, and the composition of a phase in equilibrium changes as temperature decreases. (The newly-formed solid at any time is in equilibrium. Since the older solid does not remelt, its composition is essentially fixed and out of equilibrium.) The result once the last of the melt has solidified is a highly inhomogeneous solid.
On the other hand, if one starts with a eutectic composition, then like a pure element it remains entirely liquid until it reaches a freezing point, where it solidifies homogeneously. A eutectic alloy thus makes possible sharply controlled mechanical properties. Also, cooling requires the conduction only of the latent heat of fusion and only an infinitisimal heat flow to cool the melt through a range of melting temperatures, so a eutectic alloy can be cooled rapidly. (In fact, the only way to make bulk amorphous metal from liquid metal is to cool a eutectic alloy.) Also, for any given set of elemental components, the eutectic composition (if there is one) yields the lowest melting point. (That is, its single melting point is at or below the temperature at which any other composition begins to melt. For the standard linotype alloy, the melting point is an almost chilly 475°F. This alloy is also considerably harder than lead, though also more brittle.
In his little book Le Degré Zéro de L'écriture (1953), in the chapter ``Écriture et Révolution,'' Roland Barthes critiques and criticizes the French social-realist style. I quote here from the 1968 translation Writing Degree Four Seventy-Five (actually, that might be Writing Degree Zero; I'll let you know after I check) by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (p. 71):
Here are for instance a few lines of a novel by Garaudy: `... with torso bent, he launched himself at full speed on the keyboard of the linotype ... joy sang in his muscles, his fingers danced, light and powerful ... the poisoned vapor of antimony ... made his temples pulsate and his arteries hammer, fanning his strength, his anger and his mental exaltation.'
(Note that this scrap of translation is offered here without warranty or
representation of accuracy. Then again, the translation is not much worse than
the original. If you choose to bend your torso (rather than crouch or lean)
and launch your body at full speed at a six-by-six square of linotype keys to
achieve mental exaltation, well, all I want to know is if there's an
advance-purchase ticket discount. Barthes's original reads thus:
Voici par exemple quelques lignes d'un roman de Garaudy: « ... le
buste penché, lancé à corps perdu sur le clavier de la
linotype... la joie chantait dans ses muscles, ses doigts dansaient,
légers et puissants... la vapeur empoisonnée d'antimoine...
faisait battre ses tempes et cogner ses artères, rendant plus ardentes
sa force, sa colère et son exaltation. »)
[FWIW, in a search of medical literature databases I found no report associating antimony with any health effect in linotype operators. The characteristic occupational disability of linotype operators was deafness, because the machines were loud.]
Barthes does not identify the novel or give a full name for Garaudy, but evidently the person referred to is Roger Garaudy, a philosophy professor by profession. He is known to have published some novels and plays. If the sample above is any indication, then it's ``no coincidence,'' as a favored communist locution went, that I have been able to find no novel published by Garaudy in or out of print.
Garaudy was born in 1913 and has been a serial fanatical convert since shortly thereafter. At age 14 he converted to Protestantism. In 1933 he joined the Communist Party, eventually serving 28 years in leading positions as a member of the Executive Central Committee. Krushchev's famous ``secret speech'' denouncing Stalin (February 24, 1956, at the 20th Party Congress) shook Garaudy's faith, and he became increasingly critical of the USSR. He broke with the party after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and was expelled in 1970, following his publication of an article claiming that USSR was not a socialist state. (``Expelled'' from the party, not Czechoslovakia. I think that's right, but I'm not sure whether they tossed him out or slammed the door behind him.) As part of this pinball pilgrimage of his, he had begun to seek a reconciliation between the Catholic and communist faiths, in De l'anathème au dialogue (1966) and in A Christian-Communist Dialogue (1968), the latter co-written with Quentin Lauer, S.J. Then in 1982 he converted to Sunni Islam, taking the name Ragaa (i.e., ``Ragaa Garudi,'' so I understand, though his books seem to be published under the old name). In the 1990's he started writing antisemitic books, including one which earned him a conviction for holocaust denial in a French court.
I suppose speakers of Commonwealth English could call this group ``Led Zed'' for short. I don't recall ever having heard or seen that abbreviation, nor LZ (q.v.), but it did go by the name ``New Yardbirds.'' What happened was that the Yardbirds broke up in 1967, and still had some concert commitments in Scandinavia for 1968. Jimmy Page had joined the Yardbirds in June 1966 as bassist, and took over lead guitar in November when Jeff Beck left. Page put together a new band with John Paul Jones as bassist, Robert Plant lead vocals, and John Bonham, drummer from the original Yardbirds, and the ``New Yardbirds'' played out the remaining Yardbirds gigs. They performed as Led Zeppelin for the first time in their first show after returning to England, at Surrey University in October 1968.
The Who's drummer Keith Moon died of an accidental drug overdose in 1978. Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham (``Bonzo'') choked to death on his own vomit at Jimmy Page's house in 1980, after an all-day drunk. There was a lot of this stuff going around; overdoses were not a drummer specialty.
FOLDOC has a kinder, gentler explanation, but here we don't pull our punches. Except for our friends. Or for money. We got standards!
The rec.toys.lego newsgroup has extensive faq documentation compiled by Tom Pfeifer. (All together in one file here.)
LEGO blocks have plug-and-socket structures on top (squat plugs) and bottom (sockets) arranged in regular patterns (as dots on dominoes). A similar relief pattern can be seen on the bottoms of the metopes of ancient Greek temples -- they look like upside-down LEGO blocks. The characteristic was copied in neo-classical architecture and can be seen on many old public buildings in the US. I learned about this from Dr. J in Philadelphia. Have a look at Prof. Siegel's Illustrated Parthenon Lecture.
See R. K. Stamper: ``LEGOL: Modelling Legal Rules by Computer,'' Computer Science and Law, Bryan Niblett (ed.), (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge U.P., 1980).
The adjective leguminous generally has the meaning one would infer from the legume definition above. Legume is also used in the more general sense of edible vegetables. The noun vegetable could once refer to any plant or non-animal life. This is evident from the attributive (i.e., functionally adjectival) use in terms like vegetable matter (equivalent to plant matter). Vegetables were not necessarily edible. (Children still feel that way.) If one excludes figurative uses (primarily to describe people), however, the (adult) meaning of the word vegetable functioning as a noun has now become restricted to the sense of edible plant. With vegetable thus serving the semantic function that was once served by the compound edible vegetable, we now have the opportunity to sharpen up the meaning of legume to include only its pulse-related senses. Let's do it! (Recommendation subject to change once I think through grains and cereals.)
The LEM or LM was the lander -- the vehicle with two rocket engines that took the astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon and back. The thing with fenders was the LRV or Rover. I'll try to fix the rest of the preceding later.
Frank Zappa's daughter was named Moon Unit; she was born almost two years before the first LEM landed on the moon. More on that Moon Unit at this CCSU entry.
In Modern Greek, the word for lentil, phakos, also means `lens,' and lentils as food are usually referred to in the plural (phakê). Indeed, the singular English form lentil is used mostly as an attributive noun (i.e., adjective). Lentils are (and lentil is a) pulse.
In Spanish, the pulse is called lenteja and the optical element is called lente.
In the satellite industry, LEO basically is anything closer than geostationary. They pronounce it both ``Leo'' and ``el ee oh.''
Complimentary lapel pins are a popular item in that industry. I guess free samples are just not an option.
However light a particle may be, you might suppose it would make some qualitative difference whether its mass is zero or not. It does, but it's not the most important of differences. In some respects, it is more significant whether its mass is large or not. The leptons are ``light'' (i.e., not very massive) particles. As recently as the early 1990's, the electrically neutral leptons (the ``zero-charge leptons''), called neutrinos, were believed to be massless. Measurements of the solar neutrino flux now indicate that at least one kind of neutrino (and its antiparticle) must have nonzero mass, and it seems likely they all have mass.
(All references to nonzero particle mass in this entry are to rest mass: the mass as it would be measured by an observer in the rest frame of the particle. Not to put too fine a point on it, matter consists of massive particles -- particles with nonzero rest mass. Note, however, that the mass of matter is not just the sum of the rest masses of the constituent particles; one must also consider the kinetic and interaction energies. Zero-mass particles are exceptional, because zero-mass particles move at light speed, and time stands still for an observer boosted into such a particle's frame. There'll be more about this at the massless entry, when that is rolled out.)
At the current energy scale of the universe, there are four fundamental interactions, or ``forces,'' in nature: gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force. (In earlier, hotter epochs, these interactions were integrated into more symmetric interactions with equal coupling constants: electromagnetic with weak -- electroweak interaction, electroweak with strong -- GUT, and all forces together -- what superstring theory attempts to achieve. There are very slight experimental suggestions, and no theoretical ones, for other forces.)
(The weak and strong interactions were originally known only from nuclear phenomena, and so were called the weak and strong nuclear forces. In fact, the range of effects is more general, and the ``nuclear'' modifier is no longer used.)
The gravitational force affects and is affected by all particles, including ``massless'' ones (i.e., those with zero rest mass). The situation is actually pretty easy to describe: the distance between nearby events (the length of an infinitesimal separation in spacetime) is described by the metric tensor. The Ricci tensor, representing certain combinations of the metric tensor and its derivatives, describes the curvature of spacetime. [Aside: this is an intrinsic curvature, in the nontechnical sense. For a two-dimensional analogy, imagine you lived on the surface of a sphere (not a bad approximation) and light traveled in ``straight lines'' (great-circle trajectories) on that sphere. You would know that your space was curved because any macroscopic triangle (a spherical triangle) would have a sum of inside angles greater than 180 degrees. The same thing happens with spacetime. You should not imagine that the curvature of spacetime by thinking of it as embedded in a larger-dimensional flat space. Instead, you should think of the curvature as something detectable completely within the spacetime. When the Ricci tensor is nonzero, you can tell that spacetime isn't flat because Minkowski geometry doesn't work, just as Euclidean geometry doesn't work for curved space.] Anyway, getting back to particles: in the classical form of Einstein's General Relativity, the Ricci tensor is proportional to the stress-energy tensor (through an overall factor of eight pi times the gravitational constant, and various factors of c). The stress-energy tensor is a symmetric second-order tensor that generalizes to four-dimensional spacetime the stress tensor of three-dimensional space. The stress-energy tensor includes components for stress, energy density, and momentum density. Therefore, not just rest mass but all mass (i.e. energy), as well as momentum and forces, generate curvature in spacetime. The trajectories followed by particles are determined by the metric tensor (whose curvature is described by the Ricci tensor, remember?), so energy, momentum, and forces all affect motion gravitationally.
The electromagnetic interaction couples all particles with electric charge or a magnetic moment, which means in effect it couples all massive particles.
The electromagnetic and gravitational forces are the only long-range forces -- they are mediated by zero-mass bosons and in static situations the force between fundamental charges (masses in one case, electric monopoles -- conventional ``charges'' -- in the other). Electromagnetic forces and quantum mechanics essentially explain, in principle, all chemical reactions. The gravitational interaction, in dimensionless terms, is by far the weakest of the four interactions. However, there is no ``static negative charge'' for gravitation, no negative rest mass. Consequently, this long-range interaction cannot be screened like electromagnetism and is the dominant interaction observable on planetary and larger length scales.
The weak and strong forces are short-ranged: they cause interactions that fall off exponentially on a length scale corresponding to the deBroglie wavelengths of their mediating bosons. While all massive particles participate in the long-range interactions and the weak short-range interaction, not all particles participate in the strong interaction. The massive particles that do not participate in strong interactions are leptons. (Remember leptons?)
Note that the preceding discussion was essentially about the bare particles, which are really just idealizations of real particles. It's hard to ``turn off'' interactions in this situation. For example: an electron, as a lepton, does not participate in the strong interaction. However, the real electron is a bare electron ``dressed'' by a cloud of virtual particles. Through the weak interaction, it has a probability amplitude for transforming temporarily to a neutron, antiproton, and electron-neutrino (this is a rather less likely, high-order process, but it saves me introducing quarks). The virtual neutron and antiproton can interact strongly, so the real electron does. It's a tiny effect, but an effect of that general sort -- strong-interaction corrections to the electron gyromagnetic ratio -- began to be measured in 2001.
A post facto law. Making an act the precedent for a rule of conduct, instead of squaring conduct according to law.
I dunno. I read it in a quote at the beginning of a chapter of Megalith Science, and the term appears to refer to a physical instrument of some sort. At least no one claims it describes a feminist separatist's fantasy.
The winner: ``A common need was felt to leverage the synergy of the expertise Information technology expertise and domain specific knowledge amongst the founders to deliver relevant, cost-effective IT.'' [Notice the giveaway British spelling amongst. (In a British document, of course, British spelling wouldn't give anything away.)]
Nomenclature-is-destiny recognition: ``Regarding the merger, Vague said, `With the merger, a top priority will be to leverage the synergy's realized by the merger to drive growth and earnings.'' [No special bonus for run-of-the-mill (ROTM) apostrophe error.]
In a March 1999 web survey posted to the classics list, I reported that "leveraging the synergy" was significantly more common than "leverage the synergy" (44 versus 32 hits) while "leveraged the synergy" was unattested. It's a happening thing.
Boy was it ever. In a December 2009 survey, I found
"leveraging the synergy": 134,000 ghits)
("leveraging the synergy of": 127,000 ghits)
"leverages the synergy": 105,000
"leverage synergies": 50,000
"leveraged the synergy": 36,800
"leverage synergy": 14,000
"leverage a synergy": 10,600
"leveraging synergy": 3,880
"leverages synergy": 1,100
"leveraged synergy": 870
"leverage the synergy": 556
"leveraging a synergy": 8
"leverages a synergy": 1 (I didn't ``repeat the search with
the omitted results included.'')
There are two ghits for "trying to leverage some synergy", but
"leveraged a synergy" was unattested.
``The purpose of the conference, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Lisbon Earthquake, is to discuss the variety of historical implications of this event: social, political, economic, cultural, urban and architectural.''
The bare term line feed refers to related things that context distinguishes. As a button on a line printer, it means jerk the paper up. In various programming contexts, it may be an instruction to perform that action. (In some contexts, the abbreviation or code or token NL has also been used.) Within a character string, line feed simply refers to the value of a byte (or seven bits of a byte, ``lower ASCII''). (Don't ask me how things work with wchar_t.) Not every ASCII code has to represent a printable character, you know. But LF is kinda borderline. In practical programming languages that allow multiline character strings, it makes sense that the presence of the line-feed character within a string is interpreted as an end-of-line.
Within electronic text files, things may be a bit more complicated. See the discussion at the CR entry.
LFA traces its lineage to one of various competing Latin schoolbooks of the 1920's that were called Elementary Latin. (Another one was by M. L. Smith, 1920.) The Elementary Latin that became LFA was first published in 1923 (and hence is in the public domain). The original version is available in a one-pound, 391-page paperback reprint from Simon Publications. That 1923 book was originally written by B. L. Ullman, Charles Henderson, and Norman E. Henry.
LFA is later editions of the same work -- rewritten, expanded by the inclusion of readings and split into two volumes. At least by 1945, the publishers (Macmillan Company) were advertising LFA as by ``Ullman and Henry'' ($1.84 for the first year book, $2.40 for the second). Henderson was only mentioned in in the second book. (For all I know, this may have reflected his contributions.) I just noticed that I own a copy of the second book (© 1942, 1950; fifth printing 1953). This one lists B.L. Ullman as editor and also as author, along with ``the late Norman E. Henry.'' At this point Henderson gets no mention in the second book either.
The readings in LFA, particularly the simple early ones, are regarded by students and teachers alike as boring. (There are scattered exceptions like ``Anna et Rana.'') Nevertheless, it has been popular over the years among high-school teachers who favor an approach that emphasizes grammar, and teachers frequently supplement it with readings from some other sources. These readings are typically taken from other texts (and materials developed for and keyed to other texts) or stand-alone pedagogical materials: graded readers, and story collections that are not graded but at least simple. (A list of Latin texts discussed in this glossary can be found at the Latin school texts entry.)
Over the years, there have been various revisions and additions to LFA, including a third book, for which there are few dedicated ancillary materials published. Among the most important ancillary materials is a workbook (for the first two books) first created by Marcia Stille. Or maybe by Marcia Stille et al. It's hard to know now, because giving due credit is not a priority. The eighth edition of LFA, infamously error-ridden, was the last to list all three original authors (somewhere). The ninth edition credits only Ullman, dissing not only Henderson and Henry but various people who have revised subsequent editions for better and worse. The workbook no longer mentions Stille, to say nothing of the three or more others who did substantial work on it. ``Company policy,'' you understand. It's a similar story with other old Latin textbooks. You'd figure they might at least get a foreword (not forward) mention.
Works about proper language use are perennials. Just think of Strunk and White. Wheelock's Latin, which first appeared in 1956, is still in print, now in its sixth revised edition. (For this work, copyright is in the control of the original author's family. Prof. Richard A. LaFleur, at UGA, is current keeper of the flame.) Even when subsequent works are substantially or completely new, there is a marketing advantage in publishing a book as the latest version of a respected or beloved classic. The New ``Fowler's'' comes immediately and bitterly to mind.
The phenomenon is not restricted to books for English-speakers only. Here's an example sampled randomly using a convenient selection procedure I developed just before my trip to Poland: Polnische Grammatik (a compact German manual of Polish grammar) is volume ``942/942a'' of the collection Sammlung Gröschen. The 1967 version (specifically 942a, apparently) lists Dr. Norbert Damerau as author, but the copyright page acknowledges (precise degree of indebtedness unclear) the 1926 Polish grammar published by Dr. Meckelein.
Dictionaries have similarly long histories. Ordinary (one-language) dictionaries tend to flaunt their bloodlines, preserving a respected name in the title (think Webster). The same thing occurs to a lesser degree with bilingual dictionaries (read the LSJ entry up the Pakistan link), but there is also a great deal of indebtedness acknowledged only in the prefatory material that no one reads (follow that Pakistan link).
I infer, from queries and requests from revision authors of Latin primers, that scattered earlier versions of some such works may be hard to come by even when the work has been popular over time. With dictionaries, the earliest works are often forgotten and sometimes lost (see v.a.).
The -d added to just about any infinitive yields the present participle, but usually this doesn't function adjectivally nearly as prolifically as the English present participle (in -ing), to say nothing of functioning as a gerund (it doesn't).
Ló stands for horse; be is a postfix particle. That's about all I have to say about the semantics.
It's difficult to have a language that is agglutinative and that also maintains complete vowel harmony.
There are worse profanities in that language! Can you imagine?
In 2004, the British food company Warburtons commissioned the BBC to conduct a survey marking the launch of its new Cheese Flavour Crumpets. (The new Cheese Flavour Crumpets were introduced by Warburtons, not the BBC. The BBC doesn't do advertising.) The survey, which polled 2,000 British moviegoers, asked what were the cheesiest lines ever uttered in a movie. The winner, or anyway the top vote-getter, was a line uttered by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic. In a romantic scene with co-star Kate Winslet, he stands with arms outstretched at the bow of the sinking ship and shouts ``I'm the king of the world!'' Not long after, in a scene we don't get to enjoy, he dies. Cf. planetarch.
Last week I ate twice at ``Thailand Restaurant,'' a wonderful place on Central Avenue in Clark, New Jersey, occupying a location that used to be a 50's-style diner. The prices are reasonable and the food is tasty. I can't say from personal knowledge, but according to what I've read the food is quite authentic.
On the other hand, I've also read (again on various online restaurant-review sites) that the portions are modest and that ``mild, moderate'' and ``hot'' should be understood as `hot, spicy hot unbearable for an American palate,' and `guaranteed martyrdom.' In fact, the portions are generous and when I asked for something between ``moderate'' and ``hot,'' making clear that I had been adequately warned, my food was not noticeably spicy-hot at all. On the second visit, when I recounted my previous experience and asked for ``hot,'' I got something that was noticeably but not especially hot.
Perhaps it was a communication problem. Probably the most authentic aspect of the restaurant is the personnel. The restaurant has been in business for a decade or so, but the front-of-the-house staff all sound like they just came off the boat. They can understand a little English, but be sure to order by number. If you're trying to guess what has been said to you, definitely try replacing l's with r's and inserting r's at the end of long-duration vowels.
It reminds me of a famous putative exchange between the famous wit Mrs. Dorothy Parker (b. 1893) and the famous beauty Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce (b. 1903). The story goes that, as they approached a door somewhere, Mrs. Luce yielded with ``age before beauty,'' and Mrs. Parker went ahead while retorting ``pearls before swine.''
Mrs. Luce apparently denied that the incident occurred. I haven't tracked this down, though, and in principle she might have been presented with a particular version of the story and simply denied that that occurred. Celebrity gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who published the anecdote on October 14, 1938, in the Hartford Courant, claimed there that she heard it directly from Parker, but perhaps ``Dorothy Parker tells me'' is just a figure of gossip-column speech that could mean ``I read something like that in The Spectator.'' There doesn't seem to be any other direct comment or claimed comment on the story from Parker.
Graham's is the second publication of the anecdote that anyone seems to have found, and the first that mentions Luce. The earlier one, September 16 of that year in The Spectator of London, has it between ``Mrs. Parker and a snooty debutante.''
Apparently the only person ever to positively claim that she witnessed the exchange was Gertrude Benchley. The claim appears only in Robert Hendrickson's American Literary Anecdotes (New York, etc.: Facts on File, 1990), p. 174:
Recalled Mrs. Robert Benchley when she was 80 years old: ``I was right there, the time in the Algonquin, when some little chorus girl and Dottie were going into the dining room and the girl stepped back and said, `Age before beauty' and Dottie said very quickly, `Pearls before swine.' I was right there when she said it.''(Italics and quotes sic. Robert Benchley married Gertrude Darling in 1914 and died in 1945. Gertrude Benchley turned 80 in 1969 and died in 1980.)
[At least one webpage attributes this quote to ``Mrs. Robert Benchley's biography of her husband.'' There doesn't appear to be any such.]
Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley were star members of the famous Algonquin Round Table, which met daily at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until about 1929. (There are widely credited claims that they had an affair.) If Mrs. Benchley's recollection of the age...swine incident is accurate, it would likely to have occurred during the Round Table days. If so, then one could reasonably have expected the exchange to have been reported by FPA in ``The Conning Tower.'' [During that period, fwiw, Ann Clare Boothe was single and then married to (Aug. 23, 1923) and divorced from (1929) George Tuttle Brokaw. Tuttle remarried, and died in June 1935. Clare Boothe married magazine magnate Henry Luce in November 1935. Tuttle's widow married Henry Fonda. Henry seems to have been a successful name for second husbands.]
Here, from <quoteinvestigator.com>, is one detailed excavation of the anecdote. What doesn't get said enough in analyses of this sort is that Mrs. Luce (or Mrs. Brokaw or Miss Booth), a celebrated writer, was smart enough to guess that a dimwitticism like ``age before beauty'' would elicit a sharp retort from the likes of Mrs. Parker, and would at least have had a rejoinder ready for the expected retort, if she have been (I think that's the probably-contrary-to-fact subjunctive) foolish enough to launch the first verbal assault.
Identity groups in professional organizations often raise the same sort of question. In this case: is this a caucus of lesbian, gay and bisexual philologists, or is it a caucus of those who do philology related to the lesbians, gays and bisexuals of antiquity? I think the answer is sometimes and yes.
In regard to the first question: it is considered impolite to ask, but it is not considered impolite to say. It's probably even considered impolite to guess, but our visitors demand information, and we have to come up with answers somehow.
The LBGCC has cosponsored events with the Women's Classical Caucus (WCC) and the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups.
In 2000, the LBGCC changed its name to LambdaCC.
Some people like to have a lot of l.*ers. Some people like l.*ers of the same kind, some people like different l.*ers. Some people have felt they had the wrong kind of l.*ers and known that they wanted a different kind of l.*er since they were six. (The l-word, of course, is ``letters.'') Some people feel that four is enough for anyone. So LGBT may stand, as an example, for ``Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer and Questioning.'' I've seen that apparent expansion.
I'm with Mrs. Campbell -- just don't do it in the street and scare the horses. This isn't too theoretical. Since I've been in Indiana, I've never lived more than two miles from at least one horse stables. The nearest one to me now is across the road from the nudist colony. More about that at AANR.
Wait! This all seems to arbitrarily assume just two genders! This oppresses the multisexuals! Toss another dean on the flames.
It is supposed that the LHC will have enough energy to detect the Higgs boson. Elementary particles physicists are hoping for Higgs plus -- the Higgs boson plus some other particles. This would finally take the science into a domain of phenomena that are not already predicted by the Standard Model, which has been in place for decades. Personally, I'm rooting for Higgs minus.
The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field, and the Higgs field is a kludge. In order to have all the nice symmetry properties that explain the relationships among the known lighter particles, it is necessary for the fields of which those particles represent excitations to be massless -- that is, to give rise to particles that have zero rest mass. To explain the mass, Higgs posited the existence of a single scalar field (now called the Higgs field) which in its pristine (``uncoupled'') form would imply a single massive particle (the Higgs boson, or just ``the Higgs''). When there is a coupling between the fields, the number of kinds of elementary excitations -- i.e., the number of kinds of particles -- is preserved, but the properties of the particles can mix. This mixing gives rise to a nonzero rest mass of the other particles (and to interaction between the Higgs and other particles).
The Travel Library site lists useful mundane information for the places it describes, including driving side. For Texas, they report ``Driving side: N/A.'' Yeah, that'id be about raght. For Virginia, they seem pretty optimistic: ``Driving side: Drivers drive on the right-hand side of the road'' and ``Languages: English, Spanish, French, German.'' I suppose that refers to intervehicle communications (profanities and suggestions).
Leah was Jacob's first wife. Rachel was the one he wanted, but Jacob's uncle (brother of his mother Rebeccah), tricked him into marrying Leah. Always check under the veil.
Only about 10 per cent of the general population is left-handed, so LHP's are evidently disproportionately prevalent in the bigs. This is evidently because of their advantage over RH pitchers. Conversely, one would expect lefties to be less over-represented at other (hitting) positions, since their advantage is in hitting against the minority of pitchers who are lefties. I no longer have any idea what I meant when I wrote the last sentence. This either means that I'm getting stupider or smarter. Maybe they should be under-represented, all other things being equal, but probably they're not.
Until 2009, LHR was published by the University of Illinois Press. UIP's description of the journal was very similar to the current one (2010) quoted in the previous paragraph, with one easy-to-miss difference. LHR was previously said to encompass ``American, English, European, and ancient legal history'' (my emphasis). The omission is almost certainly reflects no change in editorial policy, for many reasons. For example, it would be awkward to study American law in a broad historical context while ignoring British precedents and antecedents. I don't know if the description change was an oversight or a conscious streamlining (perhaps by the new, English, publisher: Cambridge U.P.), but the omission is more significant than usually. ``Europe'' may include England or not, in different political usages of the term, but English law is a very different thing from continental European law. The general principles of law throughout western Europe are based on Roman law, with various important codifications. England (along with Wales) traces its laws to a traditional and virtually pre-historic ``Common Law.'' (Scotland's system is something else again, with Roman Catholic canon law an important component, but I don't know much about it.)
The journal used to be published in three editions per year (``Spring, Summer, and Fall''), but now there are apparently four. According to the journal's current adverising information, the copy dates are (12/18, 2/5, 5/7, and 8/6). [Isn't it sweet how they use the US date-ordering system?]
The UIP page used to state that the annual subscription fee included membership in the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). I'm not certain, but it seems that ASLH dues (which depend on income and job status) include a subscription to LHR.
In 1954, the Westfield (NJ) library was a room in someone's house. In the 1960's it took an expanding portion of the municipal building. In the 1970's they created a second floor where some of the high ceilings used to be. I was away for a while. Today it has a building of its own further up East Broad Street.
Thank you for letting me contribute. The ALA has lots of other round tables, like EMIERT and LRRT.
This expression is frequently used in referring to equations, as mathematics requires clear, efficient expressions, and ``l.h.s.'' uses one less alphabetic character than ``left.''
Cf. RHS.
I saw a Chrysler with the chrome letters LHS on the right rear fender.
In the bad old days, when earrings were uncommon on male landlubbers, the mnemonic for sexual orientation was ``left is right and right is wrong.''
It should be a buggy Unix command: not NO HangUPs, just Less HangUPs. (Of course, that should be fewer.)
The custom of drinking milk or consuming milk products into adulthood is not universal. It only began with the domestication of animals, and did not become universal even among agricultural societies. In crude approximation, one may say that milk is a Caucasian taste. (Mnemonic: white.) In the US, milk and milk products are used extensively in prepared foods and restaurant meals, which is okay for probably ninety percent of the population.
Back in 1977 or so, when Warren and I were in college, he came down with this persistent intestinal problem -- severe gas pains. He went to a bunch of doctors who failed to diagnose his problem, although in retrospect it was as obvious as the color of his skin. He eventually visited a doctor who happened to be black like him, and who diagnosed LI. When the lactose isn't broken down by the body's own enzymes, intestinal flora feast on it and release gas.
If you are in a food-service profession, or even if you just happen to be raising children in Alabama, you may find our Hold-the-cheese entry instructive.
L.I. = pH - pHs ,where pHs is the pH of a solution with the same concentration of Ca2+ at the point where it is just saturated with calcium.
The idea is to keep the L.I. high enough to prevent precipitation of calcium carbonate (formation of ``scale'' or ``sinter''), but not so high that one risks corroding metal pipes.
If vapor pressure were measured this way, its L.I. would be something like the difference between actual temperature and the dew point.
Here's the Liechtensteinian page of an X.500 directory.
According to the principality's government, ``[a]s an important part of its sovereignty, Liechtenstein pursues an independent and active foreign policy.'' In 1990, it even joined the UN.
Early in the twentieth century, lithium bromide (LiBr) was used as a sedating tranquilizer. This led to our use of the word ``bromide'' for a trite, not to say slumber-inducing, saying. Somebody (I forget who: probably Gelett Burgess, but maybe Don Marquis) wrote ``Are You a Bromide?''
It turns out, however, that the psychoactive element is lithium. This was discovered, quite accidentally, by John F. J. Cade in 1949. Unfortunately, by the 1940's, lithium was considered dangerous, because its use as a sodium substitute in cardiac patients led to some deaths. Cade found that lithium was effective against bipolar disorder (then called manic depression). That story is told at the alkali metals entry here and in Peter D. Kramer: Listening to Prozac. [It helps Kramer make one of his central points, which is, roughly, that a successful therapy can define a diagnosis. That's part of the idea of the title: listen to the successful therapy Prozac, it tells us something about what we might or should call emotional health. See also this ED entry.]
Because of the distrust of lithium, and because of Cade's obscurity, lithium therapy did not catch on again until the sixties. I remember, though, a lot of glossy lithium ads in my grandmother's Journal of the American Psychiatric Association from those days. The ads were glossy, not the lithium. By that time they were marketing it in the chloride.
The group Nirvana had a song called Lithium, 4:19 in the album version. Its first words, sung morosely by lead vocalist Kurt Cobain, are ``I'm so happy.'' KC eventually committed suicide.
Learn more about the chemical element lithium at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Lithium batteries are kind of unusual. Normally, a battery has
- a positive electrode coated with a chemical species to be reduced,
- a negative electrode coated with a chemical species to be oxidized,
and - an electrolyte to move ions around.
A simple example would be Ag2O [silver (I) oxide] to be reduced at the anode, and Zn [zinc] to be oxidized at the cathode, with a water electrolyte. Lithium, however, is just burning to be oxidized, so one doesn't need anything special at the positive electrode -- water electrolyte itself serves as the oxidizing agent, with hydrogen being reduced and hydrogen gas being evolved.
I have encountered the new English verb liaise. You shouldn't use this word, no matter how convenient or useful it is, because that would be an innovation.
It's a French word, and in French one of the things it refers to is the transition between two words. One well-known consequence of liaison occurs in the pronunciation of a word-final letter ess (or zee or ex). A final ess preceding a consonant is silent (as illustrated by a pun or two at the lasagna entry), but it is normally sounded when the following word begins with a vowel sound (i.e., begins with vowel, possibly preceded by a silent aitch).
(3) To describe a candidate with lackluster credentials: "All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly."
Although this division of school subjects dates from the middle ages, it is helpful to recognize, as Vico reminds us [ ftnt. 33 ] that the original sense of the root liber was `noble.' Unfortunately, though, he was wrong; liber, a cognate of Eng. leaf, is related to the Gk. elphtherios (`freedom'). The association with nobility probably developed later, from the unfortunate fact that it was mostly the noblemen who were free.
The Seven Liberal Arts are illustrated/personified/epitomized here.
Sigmund Freud adopted the term for his psychoanalytic theory, in which context it is defined or described as a psychic drive or energy. Since I'm not qualified to opine (or at least, since I know nothing about the subject), I can fatuously affirm that the great utility of Freud's concept is in its liquid or fungible aspect. Desire, in ordinary terms, is thought of as something fixated on an object. In Freud's understanding, this was a bit too rational. Libido in his theory is desire that can be transferred to a different object, or that can be an underlying drive. The term is particularly associated with sexual desire. Here we bump into a common irritation with Freud: from time to time, he issues disclaimers briefly but carefully explaining that it doesn't have to be about sex. Then he goes back to ignoring anything that isn't to do with sex. See LIBF for a more plausible theory.
The translation of library into another Western European language is usually a cognate of the French word bibliothèque (German Bibliothek, Spanish and Portuguese biblioteca; exception: Italian libreria). In French, librairie (librería in Spanish, llibreria in Catalan) means `bookstore.' For more of this sort of noncorrespondence of words and translations, see the faux ami entry. For online Spanish bookstores, see the links on this page (Librerías Españolas). (They're mostly small. The best database I could find of books in Spanish is the Consultas page at Librería Canaima. Casa del Libro offers to email you the results of a search if their search form doesn't return any results.)
I would mention the conventional ``free as in speech, not as in beer,'' but I won't, since it's not very original.
Vladimir M. Shalaev, Constantine Douketis and Martin Moskovits: ``Light-induced drift of electrons in metals,'' Physics Letters A, vol 169, pp. 205-210 (1992).
Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech.
R. Jayaraman, V. Rumennik, B. Singer, and E. H. Stupp, ``Comparison of High-Voltage Devices for Power Integrated Circuits,'' IEDM Technical Digest, 258-261 (1984).
``Light Brigade'' must have seemed a clever punning name, and it is unquestionably memorable, but it works because most people do not remember the true nature of the exploits of the famous ``Light Brigade.'' A famous poem by Tennyson immortalized the dramatic action of this brigade, able to make stunning rapid progress because it was light. Another consequence of its light armament, and also of its reckless rapid advance, was heavy casualties. The charge of the light brigade at Baklava on the Crimean peninsula, on October 25, 1854, was a pointless exercise in glorious suicide, as futile as Pickett's Charge a decade later. French General Bosquet commented ``C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.''
Very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness.I hope she can clear up my questions about gravity during her next in-depth interview. I also look forward to her cameo in ``SCUBA Diving Basics.'' She needs to do more work in a bathing suit or with something nonverbal in her mouth, so this will be perfect.
Milan Kundera is another blond public intellectual. (A silver blond, aetatis causa.) He also pondered lightness, but his thoughts were not highly profound, and he didn't do anything for oceanography either (see being).
- I pick up my guitar and I'm like... `gosh, why can't I just play something. I want to play it perfectly off the bat... instant gratification!'
- I think some people look at it like `Man, what am I gonna do when I'm 40?' And I'm like `Brother, I don't know.' I used to think that it would be a good think to have a job that you work from your early twenties and by the time you get to be 40, you're pretty well on your way.
- I went back there after I met Susan, at it was really weird. People there... the `alternative type' people that saw me when I came back were so excited that I had moved. And they were like `What's it like? What's it like?,' you know? And I'm like it's so easy. Just move there! You guys should go and get out of here!
- CL: The guy from Pavement came up to me, he's like, `You're so
brave.' I'm like, `Why?' He's like, `To cover a Bunnymen song,' he's
like, `I wouldn't have the nerve.' You know, and nobody, like, admits,
like, the Bunnymen were, like, the greatest band. Like in my marriage,
the compatibil... [sic] Like, at one point we were listening to KROQ,
and they were having one of their great, like, flashback weekends, and
Kurt was like,... and I was singing every word to, like, `The Killing
Moon,' and Kurt was like, `Man, this music you used to like is so...
ROMANTIC.' You know? I'm like, `Yeah, OK.'
[Glossarist's useful remark: in the early 90's sometime, Courtney Love and Hole played a club in Buffalo and she pronounced herself disappointed in the moral character of Buffalonians, although she phrased it differently.] - Ron English: I'm basically a billboard pirate. According to the law I'm the bad guy, but on a higher social plane I'm like the Robin Hood, I'm like the good guy.
When 2001: A Space Odyssey was in production, Arthur C. Clarke made a remark to the effect the MGM publicity department must have typewriters with a single key that would type ``Never before, in the history of motion pictures.'' 2001 was released in 1968. It's 2003. We still don't have colonies on the moon or manned interplanetary expeditions, but we have achieved keyboard shortcuts (and calmly uncooperative computers, but that is no news).
(Notice how the French version of the name is librairie corresponding to the English booksellers? More of that sort of situation is discussed at the libraries entry.)
Incidentally, sandpaper (or emery paper, etc.) is lija (of uncertain origin). To use sandpaper, of course, is lijar.
The English word file, for the tool mentioned here, is Germanic in origin, and unrelated to the English word file borrowed from the French fil and file. That's one can of worms, to be opened later.
The Lima in Ohio has ``City'' in its official name, but with a population of something over 40,000 it's hardly any bigger than the ``Town'' I grew up in, which no one ever called a city. Whether one uses a word like city or town depends on more than just population and zoning ordinances. A city tends to be regarded as a slightly exceptional thing. You can have a string of towns one right after the other, but people are not yet used to the idea that many cities could sit cheek by jowl. So Lima, surrounded by rural Ohio, is separate enough to be a city. Westfield, one of many similar-size bedroom communities along the rail line west from New York City, is a town.
The Lima in Indiana, incidentally, is not a municipality but a township. It's a rectangle about five miles wide and four miles high. (On the map, that is. I'm avoiding a more natural description while I reassess my capitalization convention on compass directions.) It's along the Michigan border in Lagrange County. Look, a picture is worth a thousand words. You want to know more, look in Township Atlas of the United States, published by Andriot Associates of McLean, Virginia, in 1979. Those are actually the associates of John L. Andriot, compiler and editor of this wonderful reference. Anyway, the radio stations in that part of Lagrange County, and people from around there, use the placename about as everyone else uses the name of a town. Elsewhere in Indiana, there's also a Peru.
Isabela Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942. She lived in Chile until the military coup that overthrew the president, her uncle Salvador Allende. She left. Smart move; I know less prominent people who stayed. She must be the most famous writer in Spanish now living in the US, though in recent years she has been writing novels in English.
Hey, it takes up an entire shelf and it's mostly in foreign languages!
Let the State of Florida tell you more about tropical and subtropical fruit.
Another interesting thing about the Florida Keys is that the US states that have prominent strings of islands are at the extreme geographic corners -- Alaska (Aleutian island chain), Florida (Florida Keys), and Hawaii (Hawaii). Then again, maybe it's not so interesting. You wouldn't expect Iowa to have a major island chain. A lot of Atlantic coast states have lines of what some are pleased to call barrier islands. See OBX.
The word Limey originally referred only to British sailors, but was later extended. (It was a reference to sailors' eating of citrus to prevent scurvy. The Germans pioneered the practice of vitamin-C supplementation with Sauerkraut. This was adopted by the British first; the switch to citrus came later.)
The word Limey ironically undercuts itself -- it's a weasel word to itself. It'd be downright postmodern, if it weren't so retrograde. Another class of words that may be regarded as self-denying, in a contrived sort of way, are heterological words like monosyllabic.
Well, that was based on what I learned long ago. Apparently though, the meaning has drifted. Now Limo and Limonade both mean `fizzy drink,' and if you mean lemonade you have to say Zitronen-Limonade (literally `citrus lemonade').
The same word, or string, let's say, also functions as the female form of the adjective `clean.' Note that the stress in limpia falls on the first syllable. This is considered the penult (the penultimate syllable) because the final ia is pronounced as an a with a palatalization of the preceding consonant. In Spanish words with two or more syllables, the default stress is on the penult if the final letter is s, n, or a vowel, and on the ultima (final syllable) otherwise. An explicit accent (acento gráfico), in the form of an acute accent on the vowel of the stressed syllable, is used to indicate deviations.
Finally, limpia serves as the familiar (tú) singular imperative. That is, ¡Límpialo! means `Clean it!' The explicit accent occurs because the enclitic pronoun lo doesn't change the location of the stress in the verb (such invariable stress is a general pattern in Spanish).
The word limpia also occurs as the first element in various compound nouns, in much the same way that cleaner (in English) occurs as the final element. Here are but a few examples:
- limpiabarros: `boot scraper.' From barro, `mud.' A doormat is a felpudo or estera, and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of messy semantic overlap.
- limpiabotas: `shoeshine.' That is, a person who shines shoes and boots (Spanish: botas). The term ``bootblack,'' has been used, but not by me. I really don't know what the proper term would be, these days, since the activity is considerably rarer. The last time I personally saw a manned shoeshine station was in 1985 or so, in a multistory mall in the Georgetown section of Washington. Back in the 70's, when a group of us went to film bits of a movie at the old Newark Airport (it was part of a book report for 10th-grade English), there were some shoeshine boys in the upper viewing deck who wanted to get into our movie, and they shone my shoes and Doug's sneakers (Norman was the cameraman, so his footwear didn't get shined). I mention this to point out that one mustn't take too straitlaced (love that word) a view of what a limpiabotas does. But don't let him polish your sandals.
- limpiadientes: `toothpick.' From dientes, `teeth.' ``Palillo de dientes'' is rather more common, though (palillo is a diminutive form of palo, `stick').
- limpiaparabrisas: `windshield wiper.' This one has its own entry, because it's an official ``queer Spanish word.''
It's obvious that the element limpia in the examples above is related to the lexeme limpiar, and it happens to coincide with three identical forms. If one had to choose one of those and say it occurs in the compound, the indicative form (meaning `it cleans') seems to make sense, but it's not necessary to make this choice.
Earlier I implied that the familiar second-person singular verb forms in Spanish are associated with tú (singular nominative `you'). That's true in most of Spanish-speaking world, but not in Argentina and Uruguay, and not in most of Central America and western Colombia. There the familiar forms are associated with a pronoun vos, and a different set of conjugations. The imperative form for vos is limpiá.
There's a lot more to the various second-person forms, but here I just want to round out the discussion of explicit accents in Spanish. As noted above, accentuation is used to indicate stress. The default rules make it unnecessary to indicate stress in the majority of words, and an acute accent is used to mark the default behavior. In addition, accents are used to make semantic distinctions among very common homophones. For example, tú means `you' (in the restricted sense detailed above) and tu means `your.' In the sentence ``Sí sé si se acentúa'' (meaning `yes I know if it is accented'), sí means `yes' and si `if,' while sé means `I know' and se is a reflexive pronoun used to construct a kind of passive voice (as discussed at the Ú. entry).
In the preceding examples of accents making a semantic distinction, the words distinguished were monosyllables, so there was no unstressed syllable to distinguish from the marked one. Semantic accent marking also occurs in multisyllable words. For example... wait a second: is it really possible I never explained this before? I think I'm going to hold off until I'm sure I haven't.
The Lindemann criterion is also applied -- as appropriate -- to the sublimation point rather than the melting point.
The wiring FAQ has some info on how delivered power (at least to distribution substations) is three-phase, and on voltages.
The reason for the switch from DC to AC was fairly well known, I thought: In order to have voltage supply at least approximately independent of the number of customers, customers must represent loads in parallel. If you think of the distribution system and users as parts of a voltage divider, you see that as you increase the number of loads in parallel, the largest fraction of the voltage is dropped by the distribution lines. The solution was thicker cables and more closely spaced dynamos. Edison and backers had all the patents free and clear, and were perfectly happy to continue in this approach.
The alternative was AC power, which could be transmitted at high voltage and stepped down by transformers. Edison tried valiantly to kill this technology, particularly by raising the safety issue. (Although as presented, the concern was deceptive, it was nevertheless true that in practice, transmission lines would carry very high voltages and be more dangerous.) The DC partisans brought their safety case to the New York state legislature at the time when a more-humane execution method was sought, and painted such a picture of instant death that the legislature bought the first electric chair (AC, of course). (A ghastly bungled horror, BTW; the condemned not only smoked, he also continued to gasp.)
A practical problem in AC distribution, however, was the absence of a good motor. Nikola Tesla, motivated at first by a desire to create a brushless motor, came up with the idea of an induction motor that ran on AC. His asynchronous design developed high torque even when starting; with this and his complete design for a polyphase power system, he revolutionized the industry. Westinghouse, who had made his money from the design of the air brake for trains (and an early evangelist for standardization) had already licensed some European designs for part of an AC distribution grid, and he soon bought Tesla's patents for a cool million. That brings us close to 1893.
In the days of DC, a few miles was "long distance." The first customer for Niagara Power, in 1895, was (what became) ALCOA, 22 miles away in Buffalo.
Those who deem the insertion of an initial el an insuperable problem generally assume that the French word (with a Romance origin) was adopted into English, and don't see the loss of the el as a problem in English. (I suppose lingot might have been misunderstood as l'ingot. Why does this sound familiar?) The leading etymon candidate on the French side is Latin lingua (`tongue'; a typical ingot looks vaguely like one, and when the mold first starts to fill, the metal looks like an extending tongue). There are some detailed technical problems with this, including (as I understand it) the fact that in the process of gaining a Romance -ot, the word would be expected also to have exchanged its i for an e or a. Alternative Romance derivations have their alternative technical problems. Similar sorts of problems have been adduced for the Anglo-Saxon derivation.
There is a synonym for linguist that does not, at least in principle, also have the sense of polyglot. That word is philologist, which deserves its own entry that I haven't written yet.
There is an Ethnologue Database of world languages.
Some translation and language information is available at ECHO.
There's a site associated with The Linguist List.
The most famous method was that of inversive geometry:
``We place a spherical cage in the desert, enter it, and lock it. We perform an inversion with respect to the cage. The lion is then in the interior of the cage, and we are outside.''It was published in American Mathematical Monthly. Readers were appreciative of the careful concern for such practical details as having hunters and hunted on different sides of the cage.
The name Pondiczery, spelling anglicized to Pondicherry, occurs as the name of a rich Indian prince in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. That's in chapter three. In chapter four, radical measures against chocolate-industrial espionage are described. How does Grandpa Joe know all this stuff?
What?
Louisville's Theorem.
``Louisville's Theorem''? I am not aware of any theorem by that name.
The Louisville Theorem. You just proved it during class!
I did?
Yeah. The one about how the volume of a phase space region is conserved under Hamiltonian evolution.
Oh! You mean Liouville's Theorem!
[In the preceding reconstruction of dialogue, the student's cogency has been enhanced for brevity.]
Less mild spelling correction is described at the Dr. entry. Anyone who came here from the Flourine entry might now, having read the above cautionary tale, wish to visit the F entry. And if you came from the Furrier Series entry, you're looking for Fourier Series. We don't have an entry for that yet, but in search engines, ``spelling counts.''
In practice, ``lipid'' is a catch-all term intended to include everything that isn't a protein or a carbohydrate. To define lipids more positively, if that is the term, one may say that most lipids are fats and oils. Fats and oils, as materials, consist overwhelmingly of chemicals called triglycerides. Other common lipids are fatty acids, steroids, some vitamins, and phosphoglycerides. The Hormel Institute studies lipids.
Lipids play an indirect rôle in the microelectronic device fabrication process, because without them there'd be no one alive to staff the fab line, see?
Georges Perec, who was circa aet. 3 when Wright's inspirational story of youth was published, undertook similar but longer project in French. La Disparition (1969) was written without any e (which is the most common letter in French, as it is in English, where only about one third of words are e-less). With these projects, the question one is bound to ask, and bound not to receive an adequate answer to, is ``Why?'' Well, he liked word games. The book grew out of his involvement with the famous experimental writers' group Oulipo. At least we can say definitively that Perec (1936-1982) survived the stunt. (FWIW, one of the many mildly interesting and largely pointless foibles of Oulipo is that published lists of its membership did not distinguish between living and dead members.)
Perec wrote another, less well-known lipogram: the short story ``Les Revenentes,'' which excludes all vowels other than e.
Perhaps the most heroic lipogram is the translation of a lipogram from another language. Gilbert Adair's lipogrammatic translation of La Disparition was published in October 1994 by HarperCollins (postdated to 1995). It couldn't be titled The Disappearance, of course; it was A Void. The title character is Anton Vowl, who goes missing. (In the original, the character is named Anton Voyl; voyelle is French for `vowel.')
a protein which is bonded to a lipid. This is the principal means of transporting lipids in the blood. Due to the great variety of lipoproteins, ordinary chromatographies and electrophoresis cannot determine precisely the lipoprotein content in blood samples -- chemical characterization is laborious. Instead, blood tests report back the fraction in different ``density'' ranges: sometimes VLDL, and LDL, HDL -- very low, low, and high ``density.''
It is now the common and intellectually slovenly practice of the medical profession to refer to the whole class of lipoproteins by the term cholesterol, which is the name of a completely different chemical which does not happen, itself, to be a lipoprotein. Imagine: premeds take a minimum of two years of college chemistry. Sheesh!
Usage: ``We won't feel comfortable until we get total cholesterol below 200.'' [Notice the use of the ``medical we,'' a first and second person singular personal pronoun in Hospitalese, construed plural.]
``LIRA-Lab is now located in Villa Bonino, a beautiful XVII century building with frescos and old slate portals, surrounded by a nice garden with palms and cherry trees.''
Through most of the post-WWII era, the lira had a value of roughly 0.1 cents of a US dollar. When I was there in 1989, you could still find a few coins in one- and five-cent (i.e. cents of a lira) denominations. If you needed a custom-made washer, I guess you could drill a hole through the center. Alas, where can one be a millionaire so easily any more? One way to find out is to read magazine covers. Archivos del Presente, an international-affairs door-stop published in Buenos Aires, lists its price in the various countries where it allegedly circulates. For Year 8, no. 30:
- Argentina $15
- Uruguay $200
- Brasil R$28
- Chile $7500
If you noticed that Queens is on Long Island and also, technically, if you insist, part of New York City, beware: noticing things like that is one of the seven warning signs of Captiousness. Treatment is available; send money and we may be able to help you.
Yes, they really spell Rail Road as two words, but it took Mark two emails to convince me.
1 chopin = 2 gills 1 pint = 2 chopins 1 quart = 2 pints 1 pottle = 2 quarts 1 gallon = 2 pottles 1 peck = 2 gallons 1 demibushel = 2 pecks 1 bushel = 2 demibushels 1 kilderkin = 2 bushels 1 barrel = 2 kilderkins (a barrel is a firkin) 1 hogshead = 2 barrels 1 pipe = 2 hogsheads 1 tun = 2 pipesNote that if a pint is a pound, then a tun, at 2048 pints, is about a ton. Note also that at 512 lb., the hogshead is perhaps optimistically defined.
Traditional French liquid measures, when still used in the seventeenth century, seem to have been about twice the size of the corresponding English measures (I think the weight measures were comparable): a chopine was 16 oz., or two English chopins. Half a chopine was a septier (8 oz.), and a quarter chopine was a posson or, confusingly, poisson. This according to Elizabeth David: Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices (Penguin, 1994), p. 102.
Try
- An Introduction to Common Lisp from Marty Hall
- ANSI Common Lisp from Jan de Leeuw
- The comp.lang.lisp newsgroup.
- Lisp faq from Mark Kantrowitz
- The Lisp language family
- Common Lisp: the language, second edition
- AutoLISP information at the CAD entry.
(As of Nov. 15, 1999, those numbers are 27,842 public lists out of 147,082 LISTSERV lists.)
For other mailing list indices and search tools, see the general mailing list entry.
As a matter of usage, although other software is common, ``listserv'' has become an alternative generic term for mailing list or mailing-list software.
Book I. The Middle Ages
Part I. The Old English Period ... pp. 3-105
(to 1100; by Kemp Malone)
Part II. The Middle English Period ... pp. 109-312
(1100-1500; by Albert C. Baugh)
Book II. The Renaissance ... pp. 315-696
(1485-1660; by Tucker Brooke)
Book III. The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century ... pp. 697-1108
(1660-1789; by George Sherburn)
Book IV. The Nineteenth Century and After ... pp. 1109-1605
(1789-1939; by Samuel C. Chew)
This describes the first edition (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948).
It was published the same year by Routledge & Kegan Paul of London, and
in a second US edition by Prentice-Hall of Englewood Cliffs, NJ, also in 1948.
The cutoff date of 1939 reflects the original intention of bringing the history near the present; publication was delayed by the war. A subsequent edition (1967) added authors and pages to books II-IV, but I probably won't cite that. The books were also published as separate volumes.
In its January 24, 2000 issue, the American Cynic reported that doctors in Taiwan operating on a 76-year-old woman found a twenty-gram lithopaedion from a miscarriage the woman suffered when she was 27. The Cynic reported that
It's an extremely rare event, recorded only three times before in medical history. ... The earliest recorded case of a lithopaedion dates to 1582, when a rocky fetus at least a quarter-century old was found in a French woman's abdomen.
Stone Baby is the name of Joolz Denby's maiden effort as a novelist. Every book is a labor of love.
This was intended to be a humorous entry, but I hadn't gotten around to finishing it. Until I do, I'll mention that in reality, and in contradiction of an enormous number of news reports, lithopaedia are not quite so rare, occurring in about 0.0045 percent of pregnancies.
Isn't it amazing how the use of abstraction and mathematical language can take all the interest out of a thing? I could have used the example of ``Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.'' Then I would have pointed out that this was not litotes if you regard Dorothy's statement as tentative, and definitely litotes if you think she really suspected that they were very far from Kansas. However, if I had used this example first instead of the boring example involving a and b, you might still be reading this entry. I guess I used the dry example to speed you on your way. Don't mention it! If Judy Garland had been listening to the background music, she'd have realized immediately that they were somewhere over the rainbow.
BTW, litotes is the singular form. The plural form is litotes. Don't get them mixed up! The original Greek term equivalent to litotes was apophasis (don't use it!) and it got mixed up with itself.
For more on being very far from someplace, see the I dunno entry.
Litz wire consists of many fine insulated conducting filaments intended to be not significantly larger in radius than the skin depth. If these filaments were parallel or merely twisted together, however, it would not solve the skin depth difficulty: in such a configuration, the magnetic field and Faraday effect of all the separate wires would add constructively, so that only the outer layer of filaments would conduct. Therefore, an additional aspect of Litz wire is a braiding which brings all filaments to the surface periodically and which reduces the vectorial B-field sum in any filament.
This has nothing to do with the chemical phenomenon of luminescence.
The fab four were Liverpudlian.
The liver is an organ with many functions, including the recovery of iron (vide Hb) from worn-out blood cells. Back in the days when bleeding or `leeching' a patient was among the lesser tortures performed by members of the medical profession (who were in fact often called leeches themselves), there was a need for large-scale leech production. This was done in large pools filled with leeches. Old horses not eaten or turned to glue were pushed (not led!) into these pools and quickly died by exsanguination. That's one way that large mammals brought down by hyenas die: the hyenas pack-attack and rip open the underbelly, and the animals go into shock as they're disemboweled. This is a nicer and probably a quicker way to go than being killed by a lion. Lions typically take the animal around the neck and wait for it to suffocate if they haven't broken its neck.
I know why I didn't go into biology.
I suppose none of this is etymologically relevant to the name of Liverpool, but so what?
In one of his books (The Periodic Table, maybe), Primo Levi described how paint left too long in the can forms a soft solid. The process is called `livering.'
And now, Shock! Indignation!. It turns out, as you may see for yourself, that the Liverpuddle neologism is not so neo.
Fine. In Latin, the word lividus meant
`black-and-blue.' That's what livid originally meant in English.
The word was used figuratively, in phrases like ``livid with anger' or loosely,
as in `livid [i.e., darkened but not in a blush] with fear.' As a
result, for various users of the language, livid came to mean
crimson (the imagined color of anger) or furious or ashen
or pale. As these meanings propagated, dictionaries came to list them.
On the facts as listed in the preceding paragraph there is general agreement, but beyond, the descriptivists and the prescriptivists part company. The descriptivists will argue that the lexicographers' work is descriptive and not normative. The prescriptivists say ``you blithering idiots! If your scruples prevent you from from reaching out the ink-stained hand of hope for the poor wretches floundering among dictionary pages in search of knowledge and guidance, how dare you tell the lexicographer his business!?'' A dictionary cannot help but be normative: it lists only the senses it can find in its source corpus, so it already uses a coarse measure of frequency to bias the meanings listed, and then confounds the process by inconsistent and inaccurate indications (obs., rare, arch.). And a dictionary is prescriptive by default -- it can't help but be: this is how people use it. The only question is not whether to be prescriptive, but what criteria to use.
As this balanced presentation clearly demonstrates, the prescriptivists have the full force of reason on their side. If you want further proof, however, consider this: among academics and all university humanities-type people, descriptivism is dominant and prescriptivism is considered discredited.
Now that you are completely convinced of the truth of the prescriptivist position, you want to know what criteria to use. Fortunately, I will tell you. It is not straightforward, however, but requires the application of considered judgement. Rome wasn't built in one glossary entry, you understand? You don't unnerstand? I mean SEND MONEY, dammit! The oaks of wisdom don't bloom in a freakin' desert, you know.
Okay, okay. Here's a light drizzle of the wisdom storm that will drench you when you subscribe. A major purpose of prescriptive semantics is efficiency, and one principle of efficiency resembles a statement of Occam's razor:
After further impartial and careful analysis too subtle to describe for free, the certain conclusions are drawn that
- Conventional expressions like ``livid with anger'' are to be retained for the use of the uncreative, but in these expressions, livid is not to be regarded as having an independent meaning. That is, ``livid with fear'' means about the same as ``ashen-pale from fear,'' but livid does not have a productive sense `ashen' that can be applied in new phrases.
- In certain restricted cases, livid can be used as if in the mistaken sense crimson, as an intentional malapropism, to suggest ignorance in an ironic way. This use requires a valid and current literary license.
- In all other cases, livid describes the bluish-black of recently bruised skin.
You're welcome. You can send the check blank, but don't forget to sign.
The application of water to solid mixtures, for the purpose of extracting the solid parts.
[Aside: Rigorously, a nonrelativistic treatment gives an asymptotic fall-off
of the van der Waals attractive potential as the inverse sixth power of
r, and this is generally used, although a relativistic treatment gives
a seventh-power fall-off. It's easy to estimate the validity of this: the van
der Waals interaction can be thought of classically as a correlation between
fluctuational dipoles. The dipole moment is associated with quantum
uncertainty, or virtual excitation of electrons in the highest-energy occupied
states into the lowest-energy unoccupied states. These states are at the
outer edges of the atomic cloud, defined by a screened Coulomb potential of the
nucleus that has an effective charge close to unity. The average speed of such
electrons is ![[alpha]](Gk/a.gif)
c, where
is the fine structure constant and c is the speed of light. Relativistic corrections
arise if the fluctuational dipole rotates appreciably in the time it takes
the information about the dipole orientation to be carried (at light speed
c) from one particle to the other. In other words, the transition
from inverse-sixth to inverse-seventh power law behavior occurs around the
place where the interatomic distance is larger than an atomic radius divided
by the fine structure constant, or very roughly for gases whose density is
less than a millionth of the solid density.]
The approximation of the short-range repulsive term as an inverse power law was introduced by Max Born in his work on ionic crystals. Values computed from compressibility data extrapolated to low temperature show values in the range of 6 to 12 (values of six or less do not imply instability for an ionic solid, which has electrostatic attraction in addition to van der Waals).
Sometimes people use ``LJ potential'' to mean a 6-12 potential: using an exponent of 12 for the repulsive term. This is mathematically convenient. You know, it's just an approximation.
For Lennard-Jones's own contributions, you might look at Proc. Roy. Soc., 106 441, 463, 709 (1924); 109, 476 (1925); 109 584 (1925).
- Other early-in-the-prospective-relationship code is ``let's keep in touch''
(but I can't honestly say I've seen it abbreviated LKIT). If the guy says this
at the end of the first date, it means he doesn't want
to hear from you again, okay? If he were interested, he'd be more specific.
- You may not want to be just friends. You may want revenge. ``The Last Word!'' offers resources
(they're developing a place to vent, and they sell tell-him-off cards) if you
feel that way. Its creator, reporter Karen Cumming, from Toronto, points out
that her cards are ``smart, hip, better than therapy, and cheaper too!'' Well,
they are cheaper than therapy, and they're too lame to merit a reply, so you
probably will have the last word. This glossary has more on Toronto girls. BTW, the
domain is <lastwordcards.com>, and
not <lastword.com>.
Of course, there are more extreme responses.
Oh, all right. Around 1953 some unusual Latin teaching materials were published by the Nature Method Language Institutes. THE REST OF THIS ENTRY IS INOPERATIVE, or at least suffers from diminished operativity. We'll be working to enhance its truthiness soon.
The Nature Method Language Institutes seem to have been be based pretty much everywhere (specificially, if that's the word, in Amstelodami, Bruxellis, Hauniae, Helsingii, Holmiae, Londinii, Mediolani, Monachii, Novi Eboraci, Osloae, Parisus, Turici, et Vindobonae, and no, I don't plan to convert those genitives back to nominatives). The front cover (of the first volume, which is all I've seen of the first edition) was full of the names of all of the important people who didn't actually write the book.
It's pretty distracting. Now where were we? The core materials are four textbooks by Ørberg. (See Oerberg regarding the usual English/ASCII spelling.) The unusual feature of the books is that they were written entirely in Latin. I suppose it would have been even more unusual if they had been entirely written in any other language. Anyway, the texts contain no translations, and except for a few proper nouns in the front matter, everything is in Latin, including the grammar explanations. This is typically called the ``direct method.'' It is so close to what happens naturally when a child learns a first language, or when one learns a language by immersion, that it is hard to say who, if anyone, ever invented the method.
On the other hand, a language program or even a textbook based entirely on the direct method is a rarity. It seems hard to construct something that is self-contained, and not enormous, that can implement the method. Ørberg pulls it off. Obviously, the initial vocabulary has to be pretty obvious (placenames, Roma est in Italia, that sort of thing, and much of the vocabulary is recognizable through cognates). The common title of the textbooks was originally Lingua Latin Secundum Naturae Rationem Explicata, which can be fairly back-translated as `the Latin language, explained according to the nature method.'
Arthur M. Jensen's is one of the names listed on that busy front cover I mentioned above. He developed and apparently named the nature method. I've seen no explanation or attempt at an explanation of why it wasn't called the ``natural method.'' Perhaps he felt that what is ``natural'' is for a teacher to explain a foreign language to a student in a language the student already knows. That's natural enough that it is the dominant method in schools. Possibly the name was chosen because, in applying the method to the teaching of English, he found it convenient to teach the word nature long before the corresponding adjective. Possibly it was a mistake. I don't know. I am pretty sure he wrote at least one EFL text on these principles, and there was apparently also a French-as-a-foreign-language text that he wrote or had a hand in, but these initiatives seem to have faded away. (On the other hand, it may be that the nature method has been implemented naturally. In East Asia, the English fever is so hot that there aren't enough local teachers to supply demand. Consequently, a lot of the English teachers are recruited from the ranks of educated native speakers of English who have minimal knowledge of the languages spoken in the countries where they teach.)
The first two volumes, at least, have continued to be published (2/e 1983, 3/e 1990, minor corrections 1998, 1999, reprinted 2001) under the title Lingua Latina per Se Illustrata (`the Latin language elucidated by itself'). (And just for completeness: Lingua was written in all-caps, and the capital u was now written V. Also, in the first edition Ørberg had been spelled Oerberg.) I haven't seen the earlier editions of the second volume, but judging from the supplemental materials, which I have seen, they had 53 chapters in the first two volumes, and three chapters were added to the second volume in the last edition.
Supplemental materials (saddle-stitched typescripts of from 30 up to 100 pages or so) include a teacher's manual for vols. 1 and 2, and separate student's guides for vol. 1 and vol. 2, all in English, copyright 1972, by the aptly named W.M. Read, professor of classics at the University of Washington. These were commissioned by the Nature Language Institute in Novum Eboracum. Perhaps Nature Language Institutes in other places produced materials in other languages. New York also commissioned another Teacher's Manual from Prof. Ian Thomson (Dept. of Classics, Indiana University) copyright 1975.
Ørberg also provided a set of Fabellae Latinae (typescript preliminary edition 1972) to go with chapters 1-12, a workbook (Exercitia Latin, typescript 1974) for chh. 1-20, and Colloquia Personarum to go with chh. 1-24 (published in Haunia in 1985). Haunia seems to be in Finland. The precise set of supplementary materials has evidently changed over time, and in particular, the numbers of text chapters that various materials are keyed to has changed. This is obvious by comparing what my library has accumulated over the years with a 1974 review Richard T. Scanlan: ``A Critical Survey of New [yes] Elementary and Intermediate Latin Textbooks, 1969-1973'' in Modern [yes] Language Journal.
Not mentioned by Scanlan, unless it's the ``Prospectus,'' is an undated ``Introduction'' (16-page typescript). There is also an early set of ``Instructions'' keyed to the first 53 chapters, evidently intended for student use, in three anonymous and undated typescripts. Read's two-volume guide probably superseded this.
There's a mailing-list-based discussion group for the Ørberg text. As of early February 2007, it has 227 subscribers.
![[Image of llamas strutting.]](images/Promenade.gif)
``They chase coyotes because it's a fun thing to do. The moment they sense fear, and think something will run from them, they chase it.''
In fact, this is not really news. [ Ftnt. 21 ] Llamas have been used for years in Texas to protect against coyote intrusions, and a good breeding llama can go for $10 000 (all llamas are mean, but not all llamas are equally mean to coyotes). [ Ftnt. 19 ] This information is courtesy of the Stammtisch banjo specialist. (Link may claim, heretically, that no such newsgroup exists; this merely indicates that your news server is deficient. Incidentally, that's the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve specialist in banjo. There is as yet no particular Stammtisch Beau Fleuve banjo, although this would not be difficult to arrange.)
Llamas have been bred for fur in Clarence, a rural area about 10 mi. east of UB. Llamas are very fastidious creatures [ Ftnt. 20 ], and they typically select a single place to defecate. If you keep them away from this area, they will explode (explotarán in Spanish; concerning which, see the miga entry).
The information above is courtesy of the Stammtisch U.E. specialist. ``You never know when this kind of information might come in handy,'' comments the Stammtisch specialist in decanal affairs.
Winston Churchill once described Charles de Gaulle as looking like a llama surprised in her bath. President and First Lady Jack and Jackie Kennedy, on a state visit to France, were impressed by the breeding of Charles de Gaulle, and his erudition. Young Billy Clinton was impressed and inspired by President Kennedy, whom he met personally in a `Boy's Nation' event. On December 13, 1995, the pugnacious former mayor of Buffalo, Jimmy Griffin, announced that he would challenge President Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, because he disagreed with him on, not to put too fine a point on it, everything. There were neither debates nor fisticuffs. In the primary, Jimmy placed seventh in a field of twenty Democratic party candidates, with about 200 votes out of the few tens of thousands cast. Jimmy decided to abandon his campaign. He probably ended up voting for that gentle old softie Pat, who was bred not in Clarence but near Texas.
Llamas are also used as golf caddies. (You can also check out a site with images that may eventually load.)
According to Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953), in More Beasts for Worse Children (1897) ``The Llama'':
The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat,
With an indolent expression and an undulating throat
Like an unsuccessful literary man.
More local (i.e., SBF) information on llamas at the kevlar entry. There is, of course, a central llama-alpaca site on the web... <llama.org>.
Llamas are native to the Andes, which can get cold. (But see another llama entry.) ``Native'' here is not quite right. The llama, like the puma, jaguar, and many of the other placental mammals that we think of as South American, originally evolved in Laurasia (see below) and later colonized South America from North America, often displacing (driving to extinction) species that had developed locally.
During the age of the dinosaurs, most of the earth's land mass was distributed in two large continents: Gondwanaland comprised land that became the modern continents of South America, Antarctica, and Australia, the Indian subcontinent, most of the current continent of Africa, and scattered bits and pieces of stuff like the island of Madagascar. Laurasia comprised the rest: North America, Greenland, Europe to the northern coast of Africa, and Asia excluding the Indian subcontinent.
About 100 million years ago, over thirty million years before the end of the era of dinosaurs, these large continents began to break up. At the time, mammals -- monotremes (egg-layers like the duck-billed platypus), marsupials and placentals -- were widely distributed but marginal, generally small nocturnal animals. After dinosaurs (or at least featherless dinosaurs) became extinct, mammals evolved to fill ecological niches they had occupied. This evolution took place independently on the separated continents, with marsupials dominating in Australia, placentals dominating in the northerly continents, and a mix of marsupials and placentals developing in the South American continent. Over most of this time the South and North American continents were separated. Placental mammals that evolved in South America (like the armadillo and sloth) are genetically quite distant from those that developed in North America and Europe, even though morphologically, animals that evolved to fill similar ecological niches exhibited uncanny convergence. North American marsupials like the possum generally developed in the southern continent and colonized the north.
Visit the ndl page and get your own glow-in-the-dark FONDL (Friends Of Naked Dancing Llama) tee shirt. For stuff about real llamas, try LlamaWeb.
Llamas don't have lanolin in their wool, so they can get drenched in the rain. Llamas, unlike many animals, seem to have no innate aversion to brother-sister incest.
It's nowhere near as bad as Chinese, but Spanish does have a lot of homographs. Since Spanish is quite phonetic, all homographs are homophones. However, orthography is many-to-one: if there were any word yama in Spanish, it would be a homophone (i.e., pronounced the same as llama).
English spelling, of course, is many-to-many. Among the clever little demonstrations of this apparently obscure fact is Ogden Nash's poem ``The Lama,'' first published in his collection Free Wheeling (1931):
The one-L lama,
He's a priest.
The two-L llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pyjama
There isn't any
Three-L lllama.
The standard reply in Brooklyn is ``theah shaw is -- it's a helluva fah-yu.''
There are cases, incidentally, where Spanish vocabulary makes a distinction that English does not. For example, English fire translates Spanish fuego (controlled fire, like a campfire) and incendio (uncontrolled fire, like a housefire).
My father's mother used to tell him, ``tres mudanzas equivalen un incendio.'' It's a proverb, sometimes attributed to Ben Jonson or others -- ``three moves equal one housefire.'' I hope to find a citation somewhere.
A more important instance of Spanish distinguishing what English does not is that Swiss Army knife of a verb, be, which serves primarily as copula, modal auxiliary, occasionally as an intransitive verb, and a few other things I'm not worrying about now.) In Spanish, when the copula takes a predicate nominative, it is a form of the verb ser. When it takes a predicate adjective or anything else, it is a form of estar. This seems to correspond fairly directly to the Latin verbs essere and stare. English also uses be as a modal to construct a progressive aspect, as in the phrase ``I am going.'' In Spanish, the ordinary present is used more generally, and a periphrastic progressive, with modal verb estar, is used primarily for emphasis (estoy llendo, ``I am going''). At the opposite extreme, a language that distinguishes the progressive aspect much more often than English is Russian. This is noticeable in the kinds of errors Russian-speakers make in English.
Spanish estar and Latin stare are cognate with German stehen and English stay. German stehen has a past tense formed from stand, and (in any tense) corresponds roughly in meaning to English stand. (Even in ``dead metaphor'' derivatives like verstehen, `understand.') English stay typically becomes bleiben in German translation.
In Russian, Ancient Greek and Hebrew, one typically does without a copulative verb. In Japanese, a neutral sort of copula is desu, but you can leave off almost anything you want except the case particles.
Another uncanny similarity between Russian and Hebrew is that verbs occur in different moods. Some Israelis don't even realize that the different moods are related forms of the same verb. That business of different forms of one verb evolving into different verbs evidently occurs in any language with nontrivial synthetic conjugation (like Old English or Hebrew).
German, which like English has a single be verb (sein), uses it as a modal equivalent to haben (have) in forming perfect conjugations. As a rough general rule, a form of haben is used in with most verbs, the exception being with sein and other stative verbs, and with intransitive verbs. It should be noted that in German, as in many languages, the distinction is eroding between preterite aspect (past action, possibly but not necessarily completed in the past) and present perfect aspect (action completed in the past). That is, the meanings of `I threw the ball' and `I have thrown the ball' (Ich warf den Ball, Ich habe den Ball geworfen) are not sharply distinguished. The present perfect form tends to be used. As you can imagine, the past perfect conjugation (I had thrown the ball) is rare.
In English historically, it seems there has been an occasional tendency to use be in place of have. You can see how it would happen, from the related meanings and similar forms of the following two syntactically quite distinct paradigm sentences:
I am gone.(Verb phrase is construed as copula + adjective, where the adjective is the past participle of go.)
I have gone.(Verb phrase is construed as modal + past participle, together forming present perfect.) I'm actually tripping here across a topic (the periphrastic perfect tenses) that has been extensively studied, particularly in Western European languages. It seems to have arisen simultaneously in Germanic and Romance, and it's been hard to locate the origin. The wobble among different choices of the modal verb is a general phenomenon too.
Getting back to the different translation of English be into Spanish, the English sentence there is water is translated hay agua, using a form (hay) of the verb haber. Now, the word haber is used as a modal to construct perfect tenses, just as haben and have are used in German and English. It is therefore tempting to guess that they are cognates, but they're not. The Germanic haben is cognate with Latin carpe, `hold.' That's just the way the sound transformations came down. You can see how having and holding could be confused. The Spanish word that translates the ordinary (nonmodal) meaning of English have is tener. The modal construction I have to ... (i.e. I must ...) corresponds to Spanish tengo que ... (tengo means `I have').
You know, we took off on this meandering tangent (it's a curved space) because this is the third llama entry. But just before we took off, we were discussing one or two three-ell lllamas. I'm not aware of any language with a word that begins with three consecutive ell's, but since the recent German spelling reform, German probably has a bunch of compound words with three consecutive ells in the middle. This is something new. German has a fair number of words that end in a double ell, and a fair number that begin with a single ell. Traditionally, German compounds have not used hyphens, but when simple concatenation led to three of any letter, the cluster was reduced to two of the letter. No more: clusters of three of the same are not to be reduced to two. As if German wasn't already a weird-looking language. On the other hand, hyphens are now encouraged. I'll keep an eye out.
