P p

Plurals: pp. and pgs.

You know, there are only a few thousand natural languages in use by humans today, yet among these, there are a few in which the child's word for father is mama.

Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus in 1669 by isolating it from urine.

In Spanish, the mass noun fósforo means `phosphorus' (the substance, the element) and the singular count noun fósforo means `match' (the thing you light fires with).

Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate is subtitled A Novel in Monthly Installments with Recipes, Romances and Home Remedies. (Original Mexican edition copyright 1989; translation by Carol and Thomas Christensen copyright 1992.) Most months the recipes are for food, with quantities given in metric units. June (chapter 6), however, begins with a recipe for matches.

I suppose the ``conventional'' units reflect the fact that an American (a Dr. Brown) follows the recipe in the US. You know how it is with magical realism: you can have any big impossibility, but the trivial stuff must be strictly plausible.

``PREPARATION:

The gum arabic is dissolved in enough hot water to form a paste that is not too thick; when the paste is ready, the phosphorus is added and dissolved into it, and the same is done with the potassium nitrate. Then enough minium is added to color the mixture.''

Phew! For a second, there, I was afraid she actually meant to use the saffron. If all she needs is a golden-yellow colorant, gold might be cheaper.

Potassium nitrate is ``saltpeter'' (see .cl entry). It is used as an oxidant in gunpowder (specifically the old ``black powder'') as well.

As explained on this page, for example, the range of allowed separation vector (between the pitcher's feet and home plate) is an element of baseball regulation that has been adjusted a few times. In 1893, the former pitcher's box (like the batter's box still used today), having been shrunk and moved further back in earlier reforms, was replaced by a plate (now more commonly called the ``rubber''). Previous specifications had always been in round numbers of feet, and the story goes that in 1893, the plate was supposed to be placed a distance 60 feet from home, but that a groundskeeper misread the number and put it at 60 feet, 6 inches. That distance is specified in rule 1.07 of the (uh, current) official rules of baseball. Or is that rule 1.67? (Okay, just kidding -- it's 1.07.)

In Spring 2004, Boston stations were running an ad featuring Curt Shilling, in which he retailed the misreading legend. I suspect that these ads led, indirectly, to the revision of this entry. I also suspect that if there was any miscommunication, it did not involve a misreading by a groundskeeper, but an ambiguous specification by an official, of precisely which part of the pitcher's plate was to be at the given distance. In any case, a single groundskeeper's error would presumably have less effect than a single official's poorly-drafted notice; reading of the latter is more likely than measurement of the former to affect fields further afield.

• A number or variable giving a probability value (this is dimensionless).
• A probability-valued function of events selected from a discrete set. For example, P(A) might be the probability of event A. In a common notation, P(A|B) is the conditional probability of event A, given event B.
• A probability density. This can be thought of as the generalization of an ordinary probability function to the case where there are distinct events described by a continuous range of a variable.

His girlfriend called him Pooblioobly-oo. He hated when she would do that outside the senate.

In the NFL, punters, kickers, and quarterbacks all have jersey numbers in the range 1-18. Let's go to the histogram!

number	P count		K count		QB count
 0					X
 1	XXX		XX
 2	XXXXX		XXX		XXXXXX
 3	XX		XXXXXXXXXXXX	XXXXXXX
 4	XXXXXXX		XXXXXX		XXXXXXX
 5	XXXX		XXXXX		XXXXXXXXXXXX
 6	XXXX		XXXXX		XXXX
 7	XX		XXX		XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
 8	XXX		X		XXXXXXX
 9	XXXXXXXX	XXX		XXXXXXX
10	XX		XXXX		XXXXXXXXXXX
11					XXXXXXX
12					XXXXXXXXXXX
13					XXX
14					XXXXX
15	XX				XXX
16					XXXXX
17	X		X		XXX
18	X		X

I suppose it's no coincidence that 3 is the most popular jersey number for kickers and 7 the most popular for quarterbacks, though 6 and 8 would also be understandable. The greater popularity of 7 than 6 for QB's may reflect the attitude that PAT's are routine and usually successful, and may explain why 1 is not unusually popular for kickers. It also makes sense that no QB has the jersey number 2, since they're especially at risk for safeties. I suppose that it's also understandable that the most popular punter numbers are the relatively meaningless 4 and 9.

In 2007, it appears that the Palestinians may achieve not just one but two states. Hamas took over Gaza, and President Abbas (head of Fatah) dissolved the elected government, putting Fatah in control of the West Bank.

The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Pennsylvania state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.

Well, I can't find it now, but somewhere in this compendious reference work I should mention that Pennsylvania is known for having two seasons: Winter and Road Work. (I've been given to understand now that this climate is not unique to Pennsylvania.) It might have to do with the expansion of water on freezing. (Incidentally, I'm sure this isn't a stark distinction. It's more like NFL news coverage: from August to January, it's mostly part of the sports beat, and for the rest of the year it's mostly part of the crime beat.)

Benjamin Franklin was not the founder of Pennsylvania, but I think that answer gets partial credit. No, not Samuel Adams. Hint: the colony was once known as ``Penn's Woods.'' (See the entry for This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.)

Just to kill the frog, I'll point out that the ``accusatory'' above is a pun that depends on the well-known fact that a final m is typical for singular nouns in the accusative case in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit, and in Proto-Indo-European as generally reconstructed.

Once when I was working at Naval Research Labs and got a cold (or maybe it was something worse!), I remembered that I was on a military base that had an infirmary. So I went there and my case was worked up by someone who was not a physician. I don't know if he was a nurse or a PA or what, but he carried a Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary to help him write the report that the physician would see. I think I was expected to make an appointment to return later. At least I didn't go to Walter Reed. Cf. VA.

Invented by Carothers in 1930. The polymer, I mean. Candy is older than that.

Very well run, especially when compared to another P Authority.

In the US Congress, you can vote aye, nay, abstain, or present, but you can't vote absent. At least not so far. With modern technology, though, I don't see why not.

At an ATA departure in LA, we heard a somewhat articulated garble, so I went up to the counter and said, ``your message was almost completely unintelligible. Did you say something about flight 292?'' ``Yes, the PA system is terrible. We announced that it's not necessary to check in again.''

This might have been helpful. Until the lounge acoustics are improved, or until the geniuses who manage the airport master the technical challenge of medium-fidelity sound reproduction, it might be helpful if the ticket agents enunciated carefully. Pie in the sky, I know. I'm a dreamer.

After campaign reform laws have limited the amount that an individual may contribute to any campaign other than his or her own, PAC's became the largest source of campaign funding. Scandals involving foreign contributions to the Clinton reëlection campaign in 1996 have refueled the interest in further reform, and it seems all the major culprits have now endorsed campaign reforms being pushed by Sen. John McCain (R.-Ariz.).

However, this comes amid increasing uncertainty regarding the constitutional status of the original laws. The basic question regards the extent to which spending on political speech can be restricted without infringing the first amendment right of free speech. In an early test, the Supreme Court ruled that laws could not restrict the amount that individuals may spend on their own campaigns. [Hello, H. Ross. Hello, Steve Forbes.]

It was A. J. Liebling who long ago gave this formulation:

Freedom of the Press belongs to those who own one.

Anyway, that was the ruling of an earlier court that was rather more `liberal' in the current sense of the word. The current court has given indications that it may strike down or weaken spending restrictions generally. This comes in a time of increasing ``soft money'' use or abuse. ``Soft money'' is money spent for `political but not partisan' purposes, like get-out-the-vote campaigns, debates sponsored by an organization like the League of Women Voters (LWV). That was the original idea, anyway. However, even political parties can designate as ``soft money'' political spending that is not explicitly targeted for a particular individual race. In practice, these nontargeted ads can look pretty indistinguishable from ordinary campaign ads... Others have gotten into the business: in 1996, the AFL-CIO, under the aggressive leadership of the recently elected Sweeney, spent a few million bucks to unseat a small number of targeted first-term US representatives, all Republicans. This too was soft money. Most of the targets won reëlection, and most of those will have an increased interest in campaign reform.

I have wretchedly bad political intuition. I think that campaign reform will be successful this time!

In English, pace is as a compact way of acknowledging disagreement and pressing on with one's own argument or narrative. E.g., ``Life is precious and always worth preserving, pace Krevorkian, so....''

Pace in this sense should be pronounced in Latin. There are at least half a dozen Latin pronunciation. I approve the one in which pace sounds the same as if it were read in Spanish by a Latin American.

Obviously, packed BCD is twice as space-efficient, but unpacked BCD is more convenient and efficient for processing with byte-based operations and instructions.

A selection of papers from one meeting was published in the journal Arethusa (Fall 2003). Guest editors Cindy Benton and Trevor Fear wrote in their introduction (p. 267):

All the articles in this special issue were originally presented in oral form at the Pacific Rim Latin Literature conference ``Center and Periphery in the Roman World,'' held at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the summer of 2001. This startling relocation of the Pacific Rim to New York State provided the perfect forum for an examination of geographical and cultural disjunction.

It turns out that the presentations are not always confined entirely to Latin literature as such. That special issue has an article by Saundra Schwartz entitled ``Rome in the Greek Novel? Images and Ideas of Empire in Chariton's Persia'' (pp. 375ff). (You know, titles with question marks are bad enough... and with a subtitle, catalogs usually insert a colon, yielding the trinary operator ?:.)

Schwartz begins:

Travel is a prominent feature of ancient fiction; despite this, Rome and the Romans are conspicuously absent from the fictional landscape of the five extant Greek novels, products of an era when the culture of the Greek east strove to assert its centrality in the culture and structure of the Roman empire. ... Although Rome is not on the map of the Greek novels, it loomed in the mental geography of their authors and audience. This can be seen in one Greek novel set in the classical age of the Greek cities: Chariton's Chaereas and Callirhoe, written some time in the first to early second centuries C.E. This article argues that Rome is, so to speak, present in its absence from Chariton's novel.

A couple of other meetings are conveniently mentioned at the MWSCAS entry.

We have a bit on one PacRim conference -- on Latin Literature.

As I recall, in France civil marriage and a religious ceremony are distinct and essentially independent things. If this doesn't date back to the Revolution, then it's probably an achievement of the old anticlerical alliance of the Third Republic.

A noteworthy feature of the noun acronym PACS is that it has been verbed and that this (possibly not the original acronym, which still tends to be capitalized) has been integrated into the language as an ordinary word. Hence pacsé, pacsée, pacser.

Here are some useful related links, snake:

• The Pre-Law Student Services page of the ILRG
• Prelaw esources (that might be intentional) of NAPLA.
• SWAPLA.

The way ``paddy wagon'' designates the relation of object and function is unusual. In the more normal case of a ladder truck, the same vehicle is called a ladder truck whether it races from the firehouse to help firemen extinguish a blaze or lumbers out to rescue a cat. It's not called a ``kitty truck'' in the second instance. In contrast, the same vehicle that is a paddy wagon on the day of the arrests is called the prison van or police van when it ferries prisoners to and from court, or out of prison.

Some multifunctional articles of clothing are named in this circumstantial way -- a silk scarf may double as a bandanna (a head scarf) or as a big colorful pocket handkerchief -- but this doesn't work with just any accessory. One day, I saw my claw hammer and thought: ``that's not a claw hammer, that's a fashion statement waiting to happen.'' So I carried it to breakfast at the Perkin's all-night restaurant on Maple. It didn't seem to bother the waitress to have a claw hammer next to the salt shaker, but then two cops came in for a long break, sitting between me and the door. So it's 3 AM and I've got a claw hammer in a restaurant, and it clashes with the rest of my ensemble. It's times like this when you remember that you're overdue to renew your auto registration. I didn't feel like waiting for break to end, so I paid, wrapped the hardware in my reading matter and walked out as nonchalantly as I could while remembering not to whistle. It wasn't a magazine -- it was camouflage.

Of course, people are described by a different sort of noun. Unless you're Santa Claus or some other celebrity, you can be off duty sometimes and not be defined by your employment. On the other hand, you can be defined by your employment. This is subject to regional variation. One time when I visited my cousin Victoria in Southern California, she told me that ``my boyfriend is a surfer.'' To an Easterner like me, only what you do for a living can normally define what you are: If your boyfriend has a piano hobby, then ``he plays piano.'' If he makes a living from playing the piano, then ``he is a piano player.'' (Victoria and the surfer are still together.)

(This is a problem for writers and artists of various sorts, who may write a long time before they start to make a living from it, if they ever do. One solution to that problem is to write about your day job. That's basically the story of Waiting. It could be worse. Ever since it began to be possible to make a living primarily as a writer, there've been writers with no significant non-writer-related experiences to write about. Book prices need to come down.)

You might suppose the trailer/motor-home distinction would parallel the paddy-wagon/prison-van distinction, but it clearly doesn't: motor home is just an aggrandizing euphemism for trailer, used whether it's on the road or on concrete blocks. It's a U and non-U thing.

During the campaign for the Republican nomination for US president in 2000, George W. Bush started out as the heavy favorite but was defeated in the first primary (New Hampshire, as always) by John McCain. The primary in South Carolina then took on immense importance, and was sharply contested. Bush won that primary, and shakily but steadily pulled away from McCain to win the nomination. A subsequent analysis of that crucial primary, published in TNR, suggested that the reason for W's triumph could be understood in terms of that motor-home/trailer distinction.

I should probably explain that, but I'd have to hunt down the article for the details, and TNR was a weekly then. Instead, I'm going to report some breaking news on the paddy wagon front. It's from an article in the June 19, 2003, Stockton Record. The police chief of Stockton, California, has ordered his officers to stop using the term ``paddy wagon'' to refer to a 1946 Ford bread truck that had been restored to look like a police wagon. It's not for official police business, but for show. It debuted for the town's Cinco de Mayo parade. The black-and-white vehicle has padded bench seats and carpeted walls. You might think the word paddy referred to the fact that the truck is essentially a padded cell, but apparently it doesn't. It's believed to be connected to the nickname that occurs as the entry above this one: ``Paddy'' for Patrick. From Patrick as a common given name for Irish boys came ``paddy'' as a derogatory term for Irishman. Paddy wagon is believed to be derived from that, either because the arrestees or (according to a conflicting theory) the policemen were predominantly Irish. (This dichotomy -- the large numbers of Irish immigrants who became policemen and who became police work -- was discussed by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan in one or another, and probably a few, of his books. His own immigrant-son experience informed his understanding of social dysfunction.)

One indication that the Irish connection with the paddy-wagon etymology is not fanciful comes from an alternative term: ``black maria.'' (I've only ever heard the second word of this compound pronounced like Mariah Carey's given name.) Joseph Clay Neal (1807-1847) wrote a short story called ``The Prison Van; or, the Black Maria.'' It appeared in Peter Ploddy and Other Oddities (1844), pp. 27-36, and the title was footnoted with the following:

In Philadelphia, the prisons are remote from the Courts of Justice, and carriages, which, for obvious reasons, are of a peculiar construction, are used to convey criminals to and fro. The popular voice applies the name of "Black Maria" to each of these melancholy vehicles, and, by general consent, this is their distinguishing title.

The following scrap of text has drifted so far from the text it originally referred to that I had to reread the entry from the top to remember what the point was. It refers to my claw-hammer fashion foray.

For another story about the compiler of this socially beneficial reference work not being arrested, see the ID entry.

Continental drift is like that, by the way: material rising from the magma pushes existing crustal material away. The clearest example of this phenomenon is along the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where new sea floor is being generated. The sea floor is spreading as the additional material pushes the Americas away from Africa and Europe. Another possibility is that an ocean plate will be pushed into a continental plate that refuses to give, or give fast enough. In that case the ocean plate can be pushed under the continental plate at the edge -- subducted. For a consequence of that, see the pluton entry.

You know, I feel sure that we've drifted off topic, but this entry began millions of years ago and I can't remember what it's about anymore. We're in the P's, so I guess it's about Perkins. As I already explained, I think, you can get breakfast there anytime (if they're open). Steven Wright claims he ``went into a restaurant and the sign said `Breakfast anytime,' so I ordered french toast during the Renaissance.'' Look, this makes no sense: ``Breakfast anytime'' means you can eat breakfast anytime. You can't order breakfast anytime. I mean, if you come in and order breakfast at six you can't eat it at nine. It's ridiculous -- the eggs will be cold! (We don't go for the small potatoes; we go for hash browns.) For more on the mysteries of breakfast time, view this image. (And if we ever figure it out, we'll be sure to add something here on déjeuner et petit déjeuner.)

Hmmm. Maybe this entry was about Presidential Campaigns. One of the highlights of the 2004 US presidential campaign came in early September, when Democratic candidate Kerry affirmed lucidly that the invasion of Iraq was ``the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.'' It's an interesting thought. If I had my druthers, I'd say fight the Boer war in the Bahamas in 1958. You benefit from the element of surprise and nice weather, and the enemy will never find you.

When running on hydrogen and oxygen, the two half-reactions are

oxidation (anode):        H2 --> 2H+ + 2e-

reduction (cathode):      O2 + 2H+ + 2e- --> H2

PAFC's operate around 200°C. This is good enough for space heating, but only marginally efficient for cogeneration; using a good catalyst (platinum), the waste heat has been used for reforming methane.

In the summer of 1996, it was announced that some meteor material, believed to have originated on Mars, contained traces of PAH's. This weak evidence, and the fact that with enough video ``enhancement,'' you could make out structures not inconsistent with cellular life, have sparked certainty among some that there was life on Mars a couple of billion years ago, before it had lost most of its atmosphere and become generally less hospitable to life. Historically, Mars has been an excellent source of things to see that aren't there.

Spicy food works the same way. There are four major nerve ganglia conducting taste information to the brain (not counting olfactory information, which has a rather tight connection to the bottom of the brain). The information that food is spicy is detected by the same nerves that, and carried by the same nerves that, detect tissue damage. In other words, the taste for spicy hot things is the taste for pain.

Good spicy food and good exercise both make you sweat.

I was going to write ``a good work-out'' in the previous line, but after I missed the indefinite article before good, I decided to use an uncountable noun to avoid editing what I had written before. You know, the delete key is way over in the corner of the keyboard, and my arms ache.

I think ``good exercise'' worked out, but only time will tell.

The name Pakistan is fortuitous acronym, created out of a recherché selection of initials by Choudhry (also Chaudhary) Rahmat Ali. To be more precise, it was divinely inspired. To quote the inspiree:

I observed chillahs and prayed for Allah's guidance. ...I carried on till, at last, in His dispensation Allah showed me the light, and led me to the name ``Pakistan'' and to the Pak Plan....

According to a 1971 interview with his generally admiring former secretary, Miss Frost, he was led to the name while riding on the top of a London bus. It was evidently no pedestrian epiphany.

The word first appeared in a four-page leaflet entitled Now or Never, published January 28, 1933. The leaflet was signed by Rahmat Ali and three fellow students at Cambridge University. That leaflet used the form Pakstan (no letter i) and implied an expansion:

At this solemn hour in the history of India, when British and Indian statesmen are laying the foundations of a Federal Constitution for that land, we address this appeal to you, in the name of our common heritage, on behalf of our thirty million Muslim brethren who live in PAKSTAN - by which we mean the five Northern units of India, Viz: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan - for your sympathy and support in our grim and fateful struggle against political crucifixion and complete annihilation.

In 1947, Rahmat Ali published Pakistan the Fatherland of the Pak Nation (London: The Pak National Liberation Movement). On page 225 of the later work, BACK LATER! UNEXPECTED SYSTEM SHUTDOWN!

Well, we survived! I bet that glitch was the work of a saboteur from a large country on the Indian subcontinent, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. We must remain vigilant and preserve military parity!

As I was writing, on page 225 of the latter work, Rahmat Ali made the etymological testament quoted earlier, and gave the following detailed explanation and expansion:

`Pakistan' is both a Persian and an Urdu word. It is composed of letters taken from the names of our homelands--`Indian' and `Asian'. That is Punjab, Afghania (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Iran, Sindh (including Kachch and Kathiawar), Tukharistan, Afghanistan and BalochistaN. It means the lands of the Paks--the spiritually pure and clean. It symbolizes the religious beliefs and the ethnical stocks of our people; and it stands for all the territorial constituents of our original Fatherland. It has no other origin and no other meaning; and it does not admit of any other interpretation.

Oh well, a little bit of inconsistency to spice the pot.

I haven't yet been able to get my hands on the cited source. The above is cribbed from Khalid B. Sayeed: Pakistan : The Formative Phase : 1857-1948 (London: Oxford Univ. Pr., 1968), p. 105. [The quoted material also appears in a first edition published in 1960 at Karachi by Pakistan Publishing House. That edition covered the longer period 1857-1960, but the later version has added material.]

To clarify some of the statements, let me note that pak means `pure' in both Urdu and Persian. For Urdu I cite William E. Alli: Basic Urdu and English Wordbook (1975). (The Urdu there is written in LRU script, q.v., to my relief.) For Persian I have the authority of A. de Biberstein Kazimirski: Dictionnaire Français-Persan (Beyrouth: Librairie du Liban, 1975), where it is the second translation offered for pur.

A more compendious source is F. Steingass: A Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1970). Given its repeated appearance, I'll mention that according to its colophon, Librairie du Liban was founded in 1944. (Librairie is a faux ami.) The volume cited is a reimpression of Steingass's 1892 first edition. According to the title page, this work is itself ``Johnson and Richardson's Persian, Arabic, and English Dictionary Revised, Enlarged, and Entirely Reconstructed.'' This practice of building progressively larger and hopefully better bilingual dictionaries on the basis of individual earlier ones is common. Often the revision will skip among different ``familiar'' or similar languages. One example is the DGE, a Greek-Spanish dictionary under construction at the turn of the twenty-first century, based on (but considerably improving upon) the LSJ, an early twentieth-century revision of a nineteenth-century Greek-English dictionary, which in turn was based on the Greek-German lexicon of Franz Passow (first edition 1819), based in turn on the Greek-German lexicon of Johann Gottlob Schneider (first edition 1797-1798).

Anyway, the point of bringing up this dictionary here is that on page 281 it gives a pretty good sense of the semantic range of pak in Persian. It can be translated `pure, chaste, innocent, clean, neat; perfect, full, complete; all, entire; downright' in various contexts.

The suffix -stan is productive in Persian and many nearby languages that Persian has influenced (some of these languages are Indo-European like Persian, and some are not); a vowel is often inserted to avoid uncomfortable consonant clusters. A related fact of some relevance: most Semitic alphabets do not normally indicate vowels, although the optional use of certain consonants [particularly the glottal stops like aleph (Hebrew) or alif (Arabic), a soft aitch (hei), and the yod] implies the presence of certain vowels. In Semitic languages, this sort of matres lectionis is generally enough to disambiguate the pronunciation, since the languages are built up out of consonantal roots with vowels determined grammatically and therefore usually inferable semantically. (And you thought English was crazy. Imagine if every spelling were as ambiguous as read or read, and most of the letters looked alike.) Persian manages using an Arabic script with the addition of four consonants for sounds not present in Arabic. Baluchi or Balochi was considered a dialect of Persian (i.e., Farsi) in 1933. Urdu is also written in Arabic characters. It was reasonable for Rahmat Ali to regard Urdu as the common language of Muslims in the region then called India (see AIML entry). However, the 1947 partition left the largest number of subcontinent Muslims, and particularly of Urdu speakers, in the new country of India. Today, the greatest number -- about half -- of Pakistanis are Punjabi speakers. Urdu is a distant third or so. As it happens, the i in Pakistan is not indicated in the usual Arabic-script spelling.

The partition also left a few millions of people dead, and Rahmat Ali's ancestral estate out of his control, and Rahmat Ali himself destitute. He was forced to leave Pakistan in 1948, returned to Cambridge and died there of influenza and a medically undiagnosed broken heart on February 3, 1951.

A distant (Polish) cognate of the suffix -stan is exampled in the AHD4 online entry for the word Pakistan at <Bartleby.com>.

Just as I did before at the mondegreen entry, I will now pat myself loudly on the back for thoroughness and accuracy. Now we'll make some invidious comparisons, but we won't call them that. Instead we'll just say that this is an informative measure of how far short of accuracy and perfection some other reference works may stop.

1. The American Heritage Dictionary, 4/e, as noted, explains the -stan suffix (very) extensively, and gives the year the name was coined, but it does not mention the `purity' sense or give any information about the originator of the term. Furthermore, it gives the limited expansion Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and BaluchISTAN, which Rahmat Ali would surely have deemed incorrect both in 1933 and 1947.
2. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't like to explain proper nouns. It has an entry for Pakistani, indicating a terminus ante quem of 1941 for first use of that word.
3. The Encyclopedia Britannica (vol. 21, p. 107, in the edition of 2002) explains ``In 1933 a group of Cambridge Muslim students, led by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, proposed that the only acceptable solution to Muslim India's internal conflicts and problems would be the birth of a Muslim ``fatherland,'' to be called Pakistan (Persian: ``Land of the Pure''), out of the Muslim-majority northwestern and northeastern provinces,'' but does not mention the acronym expansion. As the expansion makes clear, only northwestern provinces and neighboring states are mentioned. Rahmat Ali coined the name Pakistan to refer only to what was initially West Pakistan, and what has been Pakistan only since the secession of East Pakistan (to become Bangladesh) at the end of 1971. Rahmat Ali published a map of the subcontinent showing three allied but independent Muslim nations: Pakistan in the Northwest, Bang-i-Islam composed of Bengal and Assam in the Northeast (corresponding to Bangladesh plus some part of the current Indian states of Assam and Bengol), and Usmanistan in the South (Hyderabad).

None of these gives you the bonus information that in the Persian language, the adjective parsa means `pure, chaste, devout, pious, holy, religious, abstinent, continent, above reproach; legitimate, lawfully born; clever, skillful, adroit in business' as well as `Persian.'

Do not conflate Choudhry Rahmat Ali with Chaudhri (or Chowdri, or various other Romanizations, including Choudhry) Mohammed Ali, who served as Prime Minister of Pakistan in the mid-fifties. This website on freeserve.co.uk has extensive information on Rahmat Ali (1897-1951), who read law at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. This other one was put together by Dr. Tom (Taufiq) Shelley, who conducted the interview with Miss Frost quoted above.

PAL was first developed in Germany as an improvement of the American (NTSC) system. The main difference is indicated by the acronym expansion, which is meant to imply that the method for encoding hue is reversed between lines. Thus, if some error causes the even-numbered lines to be too cyan, the same error will cause odd-numbered lines to be too magenta. The human eye averages the lines together and one sees accurate hues in spite of the error. Hence the colloquial expansion of PAL: ``Perfection At Last.'' Another colloquial expansion is ``Pay A Lot.'' The European version of PAL uses a 4.43 MHz subcarrier to multiplex color information.

More information, particularly on different alphabetically named flavors of PAL, at the video encoding entry.

• Jim Kalb's Palindrome Connection is a venerable (by web standards) and quite comprehensive resource.
• One site offers long lists of single-word and sentence palindromes [Wortpalindrome (look carefully: it is a long list, it just has a mark-up glitch) and Satzpalindrome] in German as well Latin.
• Why is it that palindrome aficionados so often resort to pseudonyms? Neil/Fred's site [that used to be called Neil's (Fred's)] hosts a list that is no longer being updated, but maybe it's long enow yet: about 500, mostly in English, but a few in other languages, including a self-replicating palindromic C program.
• A print magazine called The Palindromist has a website with a discussion forum and other stuff.

Jerome K. Jerome's middle name was Klapka, in honor of Hungarian general George (I guess that's Györgi or something) who was staying with the Jeromes when he was born in 1859.

A broomstick is a ``palo de escoba.'' Polo sticks, golf clubs, and baseball bats are all palos.

Outside the Iberian peninsula, palo (and its Portuguese cognate pau) are used for various trees and bushes.

The most common diminutive forms of palo are palito and palillo. The word palillo occurs in the list item for limpiadientes in the limpia entry.

I figured Fielding for a kindred spirit, and didn't bother to read the parodies at first. Instead, I read his Tom Jones. That worked out for the best, because I'm not sure whether we are kindred spirits after all. When I finally got around to reading Shamela, I discovered that his parody turns Pamela into a floozie who is constantly trying to seduce the rake. The next paragraph is a SPOILER for Pamela:

In Pamela, the heroine goes to work for a young, rich, and attractive rake, on his estate (the story is told in her letters back home). He tries to seduce and then rape her, but she resists and he fails, and eventually he falls in love with her and marries her. What offended me was that she was happy to marry a man who tried to rape her (never mind that he was even a failure at that). If I had lived in that time, I would also have been offended that she was willing to marry a man who had tried to seduce her. In Rick Santelli's famous words, it's ``rewarding bad behavior!'' In an accurate version of the subtitle, it is ``Viciousness Rewarded.'' There's a somewhat relevant Spanish proverb here: ``Contra el vicio de pedir hay la virtud de no dar.'' [`Against the vice of asking there is the virtue of refusing.']

Well, it seems we don't have a Pamela Anderson entry, so this will have to do. I need a place to mention that in 2003, she sent a letter to David Novak, chairman and CEO of Yum! Brands, the parent company of KFC. It included the following wonderful declaration of incomprehension:

``I can't understand why a company that claims to care about animal welfare would continue to allow chickens to be bred and drugged to be so top-heavy they can barely walk.

At least they don't do it surgically.

The PAN was founded in 1939, part of the reaction to the leftist presidency of Cárdenas (a bit on him at the PRI entry). Mexico was essentially a single-party state, however, and it was not until 1989, fifty years later, that PAN won -- or was allowed to win, as they say -- its first governorship (Baja California).

In 2000, PAN candidate Vicente Fox Quesada won the presidential election, bringing to an end over seventy years of PRI government. (Don't ask me what PRI stands for! If you weren't so lazy, you would have followed the link in the last paragraph and found out. Besides, at the time Cárdenas took control of the party, it wasn't called Partido Revolucionario Institucional yet.) Among major Mexican parties, the PAN is and always has been politically to the right of the PRI, which is to the right of the PRD.

There's an informative PAN entry in the Macrogalleria.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep.
That's deep enough. What do you want--an adorable pancreas?

The pancreas is a longish gland that lies sort of behind and under the stomach. It contains little regions called islets of Langerhans, which contain beta cells. Beta cells produce insulin.

The name pancreas was constructed from Greek pan + kréas, `all flesh.' (The compound word was spelled págkreas in Greek. To understand where the n went, see this ng entry.) The name means `sweetbread.' The Greeks called those organs `all flesh' because if you would eat that you'd eat anything, yuck! That's my hypothesis, anyway.

In the Platonic dialogue Theaetetus, at 185e, this character Socrates says the following {tr. Harold North Fowler}:

Why, you are beautiful, Theaetetus, and not, as Theodorus said, ugly; for he who speaks beautifully is beautiful and good.

Oh yeah, that Socko -- such a sweetheart.

(Jean Kerr, best known for writing Please Don't Eat the Daisies, was born 1923.07.10 and died 2003.1.5. She was married to Walter Kerr, drama critic for the New York Times. This meant that she got to attend the first night of every Broadway show for free, and if she got a headache that evening the show would probably close in a week.)

I'm trying to come up with a joke about extinction here, but I haven't yet.

0. Absent
1. Minimal
2. Mild
3. Moderate
4. Moderately severe
5. Severe
6. Extreme

The positive (P) and negative (N) scales attempt to measure symptoms positively and negatively correlated (respectively) with schizophrenia, and the general scale (G) is intended to provide a kind of baseline or background measure of psychopathology. Items in the P scale include evidence of delusions (P1), grandiosity (P5), and hostility (P7); N scale items include blunted affect (N1) and stereotyped thinking (N7). The G scale includes [inappropriate] somatic concern (G1), anxiety (G2), guilt feelings (G3), depression (G6), disorientation (G10), and active social avoidance (G16). The scores are based on patient responses to an interview, which should take 30-40 minutes. It seems that most of my favorite people have no psychopathology but are totally schizophrenic.

(BTW: a majority of webpages describing the seven-point scale describe level 4 by the term ``moderate severe.'' This probably reflects the fact that the test was originally developed by German-speakers. In German, the adverb/adjective distinction is indicated, if at all, by number/gender/case inflection of the adjective -- inflection that does not occur in English. Many published articles and webpages also renumber the scale to run from 1 to 7.)

(Papar probably is related to the English word pap. However, there are a large number of similar-sounding Germanic and Romance words with closely related meanings, and their interrelationships are unclear. Because of the first Germanic sound shift, IE roots that yielded Latin words beginning in p would have yielded Germanic terms beginning in f, so these separate sources probably don't correspond to a IE common root. It could also simply be imitative.)

Mosca, of course, means `fly' -- the insect, not the action. One of the first articles in the Journal of Irreproducible Results was an analysis some centuries hence of texts uncovered at the archaelogical site called Tel-el-New-York. The texts dated back to the early twentieth century, and reported mysterious doings that were very difficult to understand. Focusing on the terms ``pop fly,'' ``sacrifice fly,'' and ``bat,'' the future anthropologist proposed that ``fly'' was probably not the small and insignificant insect (Latin name musca; see also Mus), but instead a bird, and that the texts described rituals of flying-animal sacrifice. Hey -- ornithology or orthography, it's all good.

Coincidentally, a few days ago, early in the twenty-first century and late in the second game of the ALDS, a swarm of flies afflicted the New York Yankees as the rival Indians were behind and at bat. The Indians went ahead in that inning and went on to win. It looked very suspiciously like unscrupulous divine powers had placed some heavy bets on Cleveland. Following Augustine, I believe because it is absurd.

[Incidentally, the JIR article stuff is from memory, so some details are likely to be off. The article was reprinted in one of the many collections of selected articles from JIR -- articles in this genre age well -- but it's not in the one I have to hand, which is The Best of the Journal of Irreproducible Results: ``Improbable Investigations & Unfounded Findings'' (New York: Workman Publishing, 1983).]

Pulling all of this together, or even pulling just a little bit of it together, and leaving the rest in a pile to the side for later investigation, you see that papar moscas means `to eat flies like pap.' Obviously, the phrase is not usually meant literally, else the phrase wouldn't be any more common than the equally useful ``churning the thumbtacks.'' What it is understood to mean is `to be idle, with one's mouth agape.'

I thought of this phrase and decided to add an entry for it to the glossary when I saw yet another person sitting in front of a terminal with her mouth open. I suspect that the widespread prejudice against people whose mouths are habitually agape (or even those who are frequently slack-jawed) and the belief that they are stupid, arise from the fact that they are stupid. I'd estimate 20 IQ points, at least, separate the average intelligence of the habitually slack-jawed and the habitually closed-jawed. It should be a consolation to people suffering from TMJ.

Look, if your nose is stuffed, take a decongestant. The least you can do is pout seductively, with your lips sensually parted. Of course, you're probably not the sort of person who read all the way down to this paragraph.

``Baby Driver'' is track seven of Simon and Garfunkel's 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Waters. I wonder how your engines feel.

The original Greek spelling of the word has epsilon and iota following lambda, so that the head term (or paráleipsis) is the standard direct transliteration into English. It happens that the formal diphthong epsilon-iota was regularly rendered as i in Latin transliteration. Thus, for example, the Greek name Aristeídês became Aristides in Latin, Eukleídês became Euclides, and Herákleitos Heraclitus. Likewise with common words like peiratês, pirata in Latin (and also Spanish), whence pirate in French and English.

The reason that Latin did not simply reproduce the diphthong is that ``ei'' pronounced in Latin would have had a pronunciation like a ``long a'' in Modern English, whereas, by the third century BCE, epsilon-iota in Greek (at least in Attic Greek, and in emerging Koine) was a long (in vowel quantity) monophthong that worked out to correspond more closely to Latin i than to other Latin monophthongs. (The earlier pronunciation of epsilon-iota, even restricting the question to the Attic dialect, is a little bit muddled and may include both monophthong and diphthong pronunciations that merged. Eventually, this and a number of other vowels converged on the sound of iota.) It should be noted that the word paraleipsis was not used in Latin until the post-classical period. After all, there was preterition.

Interestingly, there was a common Greek word parálêpsis, with meanings related to `taking over, receipt.' This was apparently never borrowed by Latin, but if it had been, then the eta would very probably have been transliterated as an e, to give paralepsis. However, I doubt that confusion between these two Greek words explains the occurrence of the -lepsis spelling in English for the word discussed above (paraleipsis). My guess, based on inadequate research, is that paralipsis became paralepsis in medieval Latin and was borrowed in the latter form into English. (Cf. classical Latin verecundia, with accusative verecundiam. Medieval logicians gave us argumentum ad vericundiam -- note the i -- as the name of a standard type of fallacious argument, and theirs is still the much more common spelling.) The seventeenth century saw the beginning of a conscious and widespread effort to return to a ``purer,'' more classical Latin (except, of course, in pronunciation, which has remained ever a botch). In some cases, the medieval forms had become entrenched, as in the case of the ad vericundiam fallacy, or the ecclesiastical baculus (`staff,' classical baculum). In the case of paralepsis, the reversion to paralipsis was evidently much more successful. The direct transliteration from Greek (paraleipsis) must also have been part of the more general movement away from indirect borrowing through Latin transliterations. This movement gained strength through the second half of the nineteenth century, and the relative prevalence of the paraleipsis spelling appears to reflect that.

The Greek word paráleipsis was constructed from the verb paraleípein and the nominalizing ending -sis. (Of course, in the compound, the second pi in the root combines with first sigma in the suffix so together they are represented by a single letter psi.) Paraleípein is `to leave' in various senses of the English word (except `depart'), including `to leave aside' and `to leave unsaid.' Hence, paráleipsis is a noun meaning `neglect, disregard, ommission.' Do I really have to finish this long entry? No! I pronounce myself done. For a considered usage suggestion, see our entry for the synonymous preterition.

Many faithful readers of the glossary have written in to ask why we don't also mention that guidance on choosing the best synonym to use can be found at the preterition. There's no reason -- we just don't, that's all.

  An horizon is a great circle separating the things seen from those that are out of sight, as one half of the heavens is always plainly visible while another half is always hid. So it seems to us by reason of the great distance of the starry sphere; yet the difference is in the ratio of the earth's semi-diameter to the semi-diameter of the starry heavens--a difference not perceived by the senses. ...

Every month has about a chance in seven of having a Friday the 13th. (Over the long term, it would be exactly one seventh if the Gregorian calendar didn't have a periodicity that is an integer number of weeks. It might still be exactly one seventh, but I can't be bothered to compute it, and it's doubtless pretty close.)

It is unknown when the superstition arose that Friday the 13th is an ill-omened day. One explanation is that it is that Pope Clement V and King Phillip the Fair of France (or their bailiff or somebody) arrested Templar Jacques de Molay on Friday, October 13, 1307. If you'd believe that, you would believe that... okay, let's not go there. Somehow, out of all the calamitous events of the fourteenth century, this does not seem quite momentous or portentious enough to be the origin.

I think what probably happened is that someone stubbed his toe some Friday the thirteenth, and invented the story that this day was unlucky so he could show off that he could count that high. It sounded like useful information to some people who heard the story -- sort of a poor-man's astrology: no need for complicated star-charts and expensive sooth-sayers. It wasn't immediately refutable, so the story spread quickly and became a widely accepted truth -- perhaps occasionally a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Eventually it got back to the originator, who thought ``Gee, I guess I was on to something after all.'')

More at the entry for the number 13.

What's that? You say you want to know what the heck it means, already? Oh sure, check out the asyndeton entry.

According to Hanks and Hodges (1988), this is a Spanish and Portuguese nickname for someone with tawny hair, from pardo, meaning `dusky, brown, dark grey.' So far, so good. They derive the surname Pardal from the Portuguese word pardal, meaning `sparrow,' and claim that this word is derived from pardo. They go on to claim that pardo is derived from the Latin pardus, meaning `leopard,' and that in Late Latin the word was joined to the more familiar leo, `lion,' to yield leopardus (source of other surnames) and that then ``the second element, -pardus, was taken to be a distinguishing adj. referring to the dark spots and so acquired the status of an independent vocab. element.''

Corominas y Pascual, in their Spanish etymological dictionary, have a more nuanced and careful view and (between pardal and pardo) a couple of dense pages of supporting detail. They argue that the Spanish adjective pardo was derived directly either from the Latin pardus (from the Greek párdos), meaning `leopard,' or from the Greek párdalos, which designated either a sparrow or a very similar bird (thence pardal). The similarity of the Greek words apparently reflects the similarity of the two animals' colors. (The more common Spanish word for sparrow is now gorrión; the dictionary of the Real Academia gives pardo specifically as the color of the head of the sparrow common in Spain, with the neck chestnut.) Corominas y Pascual acknowledge the possibility that for the unlearned, the false analysis based on leo pardus is natural, but the evidence is at least equally consistent with direct local survival of the sparrow or cat name, or both.

Mary McCarthy disliked giving interviews. She gave great talking head, though, because she was compulsively honest. At one time, she called Paris ``a city of notaries and concierges'' where ``love and youth are as short-lived as the mating season of birds.'' In 1971 when she was asked yet again how she liked living in Paris, she answered that ``Everybody gets on each other's nerves. They're in a permanent state of irascibility.'' (These assessments are collected at pp. x-xi of Conversations with Mary McCarthy, ed. Carol Gelderman.)

    Seeing Jane's beauty and appreciating the charm that her exquisitely husky voice lent to the most trite utterances, I could hardly wonder at his [the Duke of Merton's] capitulation. But one can get used to perfect beauty and an intoxicating voice! It crossed my mind that perhaps even now a ray of common-sense was dissipating the mists of intoxicated love. It was a chance remark--a rather humiliating gaffe on Jane's part that gave me that impression.
    Somebody--I forget who--had uttered the phrase ``judgment of Paris,'' and straight away Jane's delightful voice was uplifted.
    ``Paris?'' she said. ``Why, Paris doesn't cut any ice nowadays. It's London and New York that count.''
    As sometimes happens, the words fell in a momentary lull of conversation. It was an awkward moment. On my right I heard Donald Ross draw in his breath sharply. Mrs. Widburn began to talk violently about Russian opera. Everyone hastily said something to somebody else. Jane alone looked serenely up and down the table without the least consciousness of having said anything amiss.
    It was then I noticed the Duke. His lips were drawn tightly together, he had flushed, and it seemed to me as though he drew slightly away from Jane. He must have had a foretaste of the fact that for a man of his position to marry a Jane Wilkinson might lead to some awkward contretemps.

(Hyphen, long dashes, and periods sic, incidentally.)

Parking, like park (which is Polish for `park' of the arboreal sort), is slang for `cemetery.' This shows that it's good to look things up even if you have good reason to think you know what they mean.

The special no-parking language of Notre Dame (Latin motto: Footballisus) bears such a close resemblance to English that you may not realize when it is being used. This can cause confusion. For example, on the Friday night before the first home game of the 2008 season, I asked the guard at the east gate where I could park on campus overnight, and he suggested that I use my regular lot, ``but make sure you get out by 6 am.'' In plain English, of course, what he was saying was `get out by 5:30 am if you don't want your car towed.'

The guard was evidently a fluent speaker of Notre Dame no-parking English, as was the towing crew which I encountered in the parking lot the next morning at 5:45 AM and that efficiently unloaded my car from the flatbed. The guard had probably supposed, quite innocently, that I too was fluent in no-parking. After all, it's the same language that's used in the parking regulations brochure that you get with your sticker or hang tag. (Oh, I suppose one might consider the possibility that the guard was not fluent in no-parking, and that he was unwittingly repeating what he had read in a brochure or on a no-parking sign as if it had been written in English -- mispronouncing it, so to speak. However, that would require not only that (1) he have assumed that the sign or whatever was written in English, but furthermore that (2) I was a fluent English speaker, (3) just like himself. That all seems like too much of a coincidence, requiring the stars to line up just right and all, so it was probably just my mistake. Either that or ND is in a very special time zone.)

See also NO Football Parking, $6.

Interesting that R lamps and PAR lamps both use parabolic reflector back surfaces, and in R lamps they are often aluminized. The important difference between R and PAR lamps is that PAR lamps use heavy-duty glass. It can be seen that illumination engineers are not very bright.

Comparing this definition with that of oxytone, you notice that grave accent isn't mentioned. That's because a grave accent only appears on the ultima, replacing an acute accent when another word follows immediately (i.e., when there is no punctuation mark following the word to be modified), unless it's in a quote or, Zeus help you, in the dangerous vicinity of an enclitic. You are not the first person to wonder what great utility there is in this. Modern Greek is ``monotonic,'' meaning that it only uses one accent mark.

Cf. also proparoxytone.

As you probably have guessed, the word paroxysm was invented to describe the reaction of students to so-called ``explanations'' (apologies, it should be) for Greek accents.

The term was reportedly coined by Timothy B. Schmit, who toured with Buffett's band in 1983, 1984, and 1985, so perhaps that places it. The Wikipedia entry (browsed 2008.09.22) for Parotheads explains that ``at a Jimmy Buffett concert at the Timberwolf Amphitheater outside Cincinnati, Ohio,... Gwen commented about everyone wearing Hawaiian shirts and parrot hats and how they kept coming back to see his shows, just like Deadheads'' and that Schmit coined this in response. That may be so, but another thought occurs to me . The drug culture associated with rock music gives rise to many double entendres, sometimes quite subtle (e.g., ``Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds''). Buffett's band, which Schmit toured as a part of, is called the Coral Reefer Band. The word head means addict, and may be regarded as occurring merely metaphorically in the sense of fan in Dead Head and Parrot Head. So I think the fact that Parrot contains Pot might not be accidental. (I tried and failed to figure out who ``Gwen'' is.)

1. Party with the ability to withstand droughts and late frosts.
2. Chatese for ``party hearty.''

• PAS,
• PAS,
• Peoria Botanical Society (PBS?),
• Entomology Section,
• Geology Section, and
• Herpetology Section.

The Illinois city of Peoria is best known as a byword for, or antonomasia of, ordinariness. To question whether a new idea would be accepted by the American mainstream, one could ask

In a domestic context, the noun pasa usually means `raisin,' but pasa de Corinto, literally `raisin of Corinth,' is a currant. To be clear, you could specify pasa de uva (`grape raisin'), but that particular phrase seems to be common only in Argentina. Even there, where the expression has been common since at least the 1950's, most people mostly say just pasa. I don't think currants were or are especially popular there, and other dried fruit are called just that (fruta seca).

A plum is a ciruela, and throughout the Spanish-speaking world a prune is called a ciruela pasa, which one could interpret as a `raisin plum' or possibly better yet not interpret at all. I've also seen the noun phrase uva pasa, which at first suggested that pasa was being construed as a general attributive noun meaning `dried fruit' (so uva pasa is a `dried grape' and ciruela pasa is part of a general pattern). I've only seen this on manufacturer or distributor product labels at the local hispanic grocery, which serves a mostly Mexican-American clientele (and mainly Mexican and US brands). Earlier in the millennium, when I searched for webpages with this usage, the only national domain under which I saw it was <.mx;>. Just now (Summer 2006), I see it on some Argentine pages as well.

[When I first saw it, and because it seemed rather rare, I guessed that this expression was an error for uva pasada. The adjective pasado (pasada in female gender) means `past [time].' In the food context, this normally means `spoiled.' (You can use the word podrido for `rotten,' but if it's just started to get soft, or it smells just slightly off, then it's certainly pasado but possibly not podrido.) So an uva pasada is normally a `rotten grape.' It turns out, according to Hamel's little Bilingual Dictionary of Mexican Spanish/Diccionario Bilingüe de Mexicanismos, that in reference to fruit, pasado in Mexico means seco (`dry'). Considering the climate, this is perhaps not entirely surprising.]

(I didn't want to get too far off on a tangent, but I would point out that forms of the verb pasar in reflexive construction can also occur in connection with food to indicate overcooked. For example, se me pasó el mate means effectively `I forgot to take the mate kettle off the stove.' It's easy to construct phrases that use the past participle pasado, but here pasado is not an adjective modifying a food noun.)

Getting back to the pasa de uva thing, I might as well point out that Argentina is unusual, if not quite unique, in retaining the vos conjugations of Spanish. These are very similar to the tu conjugations (nowadays they are both ``familiar'' forms), except for the imperative forms. Thus, in most of the Spanish-speaking world, pasa is a command meaning `pass,' but in Argentina and in Central America (extending south and east as far as western Colombia), the command is pronounced pasá. Of course, you'd normally say something more detailed, like pasamelo [tú] or pasámelo [vos] (`[you] hand it to me'). (There might be more about that either at, or linked from, the Usted entry, eventualmente.) BTW, if you think the situation in Spanish is confused, have a look at the plum pudding entry.

From the verb, one has uses of pasa as a noun meaning `passage,' `[nautical] channel,' or `flight [of birds].' In their 1970 release Bridge Over Troubled Water (their last complete album of original music together), Simon and Garfunkel included a song entitled ``El Condor Pasa (If I Could).'' (El cóndor pasa is Spanish for `the condor passes.' Never would've guessed that one, eh?)

That song has a very native South American sound, and the arrangement evidently included the flute characteristic of that music. It has a characteristically breathy vibrato. I mentioned this to my mother, forgetting that she practiced recorder for a couple of decades. It's a recorder-like flute called a quena. She dug a couple of quenas out of the dining-room hutch and played the authentic one (noting that it's not supposed to be gaily painted -- but you know what sells). It turns out that the vibrato is not in the instrument. It's a style of play: you can play the quena without the vibrato if you choose, but that just happens not to be the style of native music. (Follow this link to Andreas Sumerauer's audio sample, playing a rather Western melody.)

Another thing about the song ``El Condor Pasa (If I Could)'': it includes the lyrics ``I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail. Yes I would! If I only cou - ou -ould, I surely wou - ou -ould.'' The terrible thing about Simon and Garfunkel lyrics is that they're sung so clearly you can understand (in a phonetic sense) and remember them. So four decades later, when you finally emerge from the haze, you can appreciate just how stoned you must have been. Even if the lyrics really were written in the nineteenth century.

There's a lot of contradictory information about that S&G hit on the web, so it follows that there's a lot of mistaken ``information'' about it on the web. The following account is based in part on what I could glean from gazing intently at the cover of a Bridge Over Troubled Waters CD at the local B&N. (I'm away from my own collection. You think I'm going to buy another copy to write this entry?) Actually, ``following'' in the preceding sentence should be understood chronologically. I have to stop somewhere or I'll never get this glossary page posted.

Oh, you wanted useful information about Pascal? Why didn't you say so? Check out the good Pascal entry at FOLDOC, which quotes from Brian Kernighan's famous paper, ``Why Pascal is Not My Favourite Programming Language.'' (Only the title is understated.)

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes Hello World programs in a couple of Pascal versions.

Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering (Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., 2002) had an article entitled ``Pascal and its Successors'' (pp. 108-119) by Wirth, who by then was a professor emeritus at ETH Zürich. Here's the abstract:

The programming language Pascal was designed in 1969 in the spirit of Algol 60 with a concisely defined syntax representing the paradigm of structured programming. Seven years later, with the advent of the micro-computer, it became widely known and was adopted in many schools and universities. In 1979 it was followed by Modula-2 which catered to the needs of modular programming in teams. This was achieved by the module construct and the separate compilation facility. In an effort to reduce language complexity, and to accommodate object-oriented programming, Oberon was designed in 1988. Here we present some aspects of the evolution of this family of programming languages.

This document offers a guide to enhance the quality of Michigan social studies teaching. The document draws on two sources, ``A Vision of Powerful Teaching and Learning in the Social Studies'' (National Council for the Social Studies) and ``A Guide to Authentic Instruction and Assessment: Vision, Standards and Scoring'' (Newmann, Secada, and Wehlage) to create six standards that blend the elements of both powerful and authentic social studies instruction.

A similar word, reasonably transliterated as passim, occurs in Biblical Hebrew and is discussed at the entry for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

(I suppose this entry would work as well with sequitur correctly spelled.)

There is no need for any comment delimiter or token: comments are simply placed on unreachable program lines. Nor is it necessary to keep track of which curly bracket goes with which, or to choose a bracket alignment convention that might later prove unaesthetic, because there are no blocks -- just good, honest assignment and goto statements.

2. This also helps the preprocessor guess in what order the comments should be ignored.
1. Nevertheless, experienced programmers number their comments to make clear the order in which they should be read.
2. Comment numbers can be reused.

Function parameters are communicated using PASTA's unique pass-by-email mechanism. Exceptions are handled gracefully using the toss-in-the-air method (adopted from the PIZZA family of languages). PASTA is the language of choice for throwing exceptions. Facilities for catching exceptions are already under development.

``Sequential'' flow is guaranteed by the next-goto clause that is a required part of every statement. To improve readability, long statements can be continued anywhere using the continued@ operator, which specifies destination line number and column. PASTA programs exhibit very flexible topology.

PASTA IV introduced dynamic runtime line renumbering, which makes possible such features as ``peek-a-boo scoping.'' A version that is object-oriented, or objects-shoehorned-in, is based on data encapsulation in pierogis (methods are encapsulated separately in meat ravioli). A similar object-disoriented language for Apple machines is Macaroni.

In both US pro football and Canadian, there's a sort of TD encore attempt called a two-point conversion (US) or two-point convert (Canada). It's all about religion.

The expression ``patas para arriba'' and its contraction ``patas pa'rriba,'' literally mean `feet upward' (the idea might be better translated `feet in the air'). It is widely used as a slightly colorful way to say `upside down,' both literally upside down and figuratively (`upset, confused, topsy-turvy'). The contracted form (with pa') isn't very common in Spain, to judge by ghits. The contracted form is very common in my father's native Chile, where it is a charming old way to say `dead' or `broken beyond repair.' Think of the dead-horse-in-the-dean's office scene in Animal House.

Hmmm. Googling around, I see that the form without preposition (patas arriba) is the most common. I was prompted to check when I came across this cleverly crafted book title:

In the context created by the first noun clima, meaning `climate,' one inclines to translate cielo as `sky.' However, the word infierno means `hell,' so the subtitle ``infierno en el cielo'' almost demands the translation `hell in heaven.' The latter translation emphasizes the geometric sense of ``patas arriba'' as `upside down.' (Note that etymologically, infierno and related words ultimately just refer to `the place below.' The idea and the etymology are not very distant from those of inferior.)

On the other hand, the hot aspect of hell is much more salient in the Spanish word infierno, more like the words inferno and infernal than the word hell. (In Spanish, inferno/a is just a poetic alternative to the adjective infernal meaning `hellish.') The diminutive forms infernillo and infiernillo refer to a stove or heater.

The associations of infierno with heat make the allusion to global warming clear. Hence, one also wants to preserve the sense of ``patas arriba'' as `upset' or worse. About the best title translation I can come up with at the moment, insofar as preserving wordplay is concerned, is something like `The Climate on its Head: the Celestial Inferno.'

Of course, if you are a global-warming skeptic, you might quote Milton: ``The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, and a Hell of Heav'n.''

Of course, if you are not a global-warming skeptic, you might prefer the term ``climate-change denier.''

Incidentally, if I may be permitted a more scientific aside (just try and stop me!), the average temperature does not fall monotonically with increasing altitude. It is true that over the first few miles the temperature falls (through the troposphere up to the tropopause), but it rises through the stratosphere up to the stratopause (altitude roughly 50 km), where the temperature range overlaps that of the surface (-30°C to 20°C). The reason for this relatively high temperature is that a combination of reactions maintains a high concentration of ozone in the stratosphere. Depletion of the ozone layer actually causes cooling of this upper atmosphere.

(The temperature drops again through the mesosphere. Eventually, at altitudes of hundreds of kilometers, the temperature is determined primarily by solar activity, and the temperature ranges from 500 to 2000 K. Further out, where sunlight is just a perturbation, the temperature settles down to something below 3K.)

[Thomas Henry] Huxley's confidence in the power of science was once amusingly expressed in an after-dinner speech, in which he claimed to have had a dream of waking up after death in a vast and luxurious subterranean hall -- a warm hall. He had always expected to go to a warm place, but was somewhat surprised both by its luxury and by the fact that the fork-tailed waiters were serving drinks. He ordered a drink and, in view of the warmth, inquired whether it could possibly be iced. ``Certainly,'' said the waiter, and shortly returned with the order. Surprised by the rapid provision of the requested ice, Huxley made a query of the waiter: ``I suppose I am not wrong about where I have come to?'' ``No, Professor, this is Hell,'' he was assured. ``But surely there has been a good deal of change? This doesn't at all agree with what we used to be told of the place.'' ``Why, no, sir,'' the waiter explained. ``Hell isn't what it used to be. A great many of you scientific gents have been coming here recently, and they have turned the whole place upside down.''

The Saturday Review (a defunct middlebrowish literary magazine) used to run an occasional feature called ``The Phoenix Nest.'' In the edition of May 21, 1960, this was a contribution entitled ``The Achievement of H.T. Wensel.'' It was written by H. Allen Smith, and purported to pass along a calculation that an anonymous friend has received thirty years earlier from the almost equally anonymous Wensel, who had worked at the NBS (now NIST). Based on the Bible, the Stefan-Boltzmann law, and the boiling point of sulfur, it concluded that heaven is hotter than hell (525°C -- sounds like the thermosphere -- vs. at most 445°C). If he'd simply read Dante he'd have learned that the lowest circle of hell is burning cold.

Starting from the west, the PATCO line runs under Locust St., with stations between 15th and 16th Avenues, 12th and 13th, and 9th and 10th. Then it turns north and stops at the 8th and Market St. station, with connections to various SEPTA lines. Then it's across the Ben Franklin Bridge to Camden stops at City Hall and Broadway (with a connection to the NJT River Line at the latter), then further dormitory-community stops stretching east to the Lindenwold terminus, which has a connection to NJT's Atlantic City Rail Line. That's as of 2008, when there were public hearings on proposals to extend service northward and southward on the Philadelphia side of the Delaware.

Arthur Koestler has been quoted as having once remarked that to wish to meet an author personally because you have admired his work is as unwise as to want to meet a goose because you like pâté de foie gras.

Cf. coup de graisse.

Operated by the Port Authority (PA). Raise your hand if you guessed it. Okay, that's enough. Simmer down.

I notice that St. Joseph is still tasked with patronizing or whatever it's called the fighters against Communism. I realize you want to go with your best horse, but that operation seems to be winding down. Yet after the blessed events around 1989, things have stalled a bit. Possibly his attention is slipping, since he also has responsibility for much of northern North America (Canada; archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska; diocese of Cheyenne, Wyoming; diocese of Buffalo, New York, etc. and more etc.), as well as the partly overlapping categories of pregnant, dying, and married people, and yet more etc. The fact is that while these are all very important responsibilities, they are relatively well in hand. Most of these responsibilities are shared with other, less-well-known but adequately holy saints, many of them champing at the bit to show their miraculous stuff. There is a clear need to prioritize and delegate. Well, I see that after a slow start, Pope Benedict is finally seeing the Curian stables flushed out; I trust the Holy Father will give this his attention next.

For other practical saintly thoughts, see the entry for assassination, political. And just in case you want to return to this entry and forget to bookmark it, you ought to know that Saint Anthony of Padua is the patron saint of lost objects (and probably lost classes and structs, too). His feast day is June 13th, and I imagine he likes peanuts. Thai peanut sauce, mmmmm.

It's been suggested that the word is derived from the Italian pazzo, meaning `fool.' (Note that this is pronounced ``pah-tso.'') I am extremely grateful for this etymology, because political correctness is decimating the language and patsy looks like a word at risk.

The awards were first presented in 1951, when the emcee was Ronald Reagan. Ron (as Prof. Peter Boyd) costarred with another primate (named Bonzo) in Bedtime for Bonzo, which was released that year. Ron eventually went on to play the lead role in the US government.

The 1950's and 1960's were good years for performing animals, and the PATSY's were awarded annually until 1978. After a three-year hiatus, they were awarded again starting in 1982, with Bob Barker as host. Bob Barker resigned in protest in March 1987, complaining that training methods for animal performers were cruel. There were no PATSY awards that year. For a while there was talk of reviving the PATSY's again, but as of 2004 it hasn't happened.

The disagreement between the AHA and Barker continued and got very ugly. The AHA eventually sued him for libel and defamation. That suit was settled out of court in 1994. (A couple of weeks before resigning as PATSY host in 1987, Barker had also threatened to resign as host of the Miss USA and Miss Universe events, because animal furs were presented as prizes. Organizers told him fake furs would be used starting the next year, and he agreed to stay on. The next year organizers reneged, and he quit.)

Also ``Kleine Pauly.''

In Latin, pavo (genitive pavonis) means `peacock.' The constellation Pavo is not ancient, but was named by the German astronomer Johann Bayer (1572-1625). Nevertheless, there is an ancient myth explaining how the peacock got its eyes, explained by Chris Dolan at his page for the constellation Pavo. The mythical story, not surprisingly, has to do with sex. The widely accepted modern explanation is sexual selection (same thing with zebra stripes).

In Spanish, the word pavo means `turkey,' and peacock is pavo real or pavón (future entry). There's an old (obsolete, in my experience) colloquial expression pelar la pava, literally `to peel the turkeyhen,' which means `to court' or `to serenade.'

In German, one word for turkey is Pute. It's onomatopeic, ``put, put'' (as pronounced in German) being a sound one makes to call fowl. I imagine this works better if you also have some feed. The word Pute usually refers to turkey as food, just as pork or ham in English refers to hog as food. [To refer to the animal as such, one can use Truthenne (`turkey hen') instead of Pute or Truthahn (`turkey cock') instead of Puter.] The word Pute is used in various transferred senses. Fowl, and particularly domestic fowl, are proverbially stupid, so it's unsurprising that Pute is used in the sense of `stupid woman.' The diminutive form puttel is used affectionately, as are double-diminutive forms like puttele and puttelchen. Well, to judge from ghits, these endearments are quite rare today. But as a little girl, my mother was called puttele, and my great aunt Edith always called her husband mein puttel (loosely, `my little silly one'). [Let me remind you, in case you forgot, that German diminutives have neuter grammatical gender, regardless of natural gender.]

One day, when she was still living in Buenos Aires, my grandmother bought a turkey at the market. She hadn't learned the Spanish word pavo yet, so she did what one usually does, and tried to naturalize into Spanish the (in this case German) word she did know. Returning home to the family tailor shop, she said ``me traje una puta.'' All the seamstresses laughed; she had said `I brought along a prostitute.' I guess I'll point out that traje is a Spanish noun meaning `dress, costume, outfit.' Of course, even in a tailor's shop, me traje was understood as `I brought.' I only mentioned the noun sense to confuse you. (It's hard to explain the precise valence of me in her phrase, so I won't. Should I explain that puta is Spanish for `whore' or `prostitute'? No, I shouldn't. For more and less, see these entries: ATC and PPP.)

You probably think I'm joking, and I am, but the language facts stated in the preceding paragraph are all true. The ways (pasas, incorrectly speaking) of Spanish are mysterious. (And yes, you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.)

Like most memoirs, it has no index. Let's have some badly-constructed index entries.

Djilas, Milovan, Vladimir Dedijer ostracized for refusing to break with ... p. 106; thumbnail sketch of the career of ... pp. 114-5 [see also our New Class entry]; son ostracized in nursery school ... p. can't-find-it-now, but I'm not making this up
lingua franca, observations informed by working at Belgrade's largest bookstore, in the Foreign Department, on ... p. 62

In that twilight era between the fall of the Habsburgs and the collapse of everything else, the German language still topped all others as the lingua franca of Eastern Europe, although the Serbian elite generally leaned toward French; as for the exotic idiom of Anglo-Saxons and shiftless emigrants, it was about as popular as Hindustani. The only English-speaker in Belgrade--English to the extent of not quite being Serbian--with whom I ever tried to commune in that language was my barber, deported from the States as a subversive alien after the First World War.

• Performing Animal Welfare Society
• Pet Adoption Web Site for the Greatrrr Phoenix, AZ area.
• Pets Are Worth Saving. ``[A] 501 (c)3, non-profit organization based in Effingham County, Ga. with volunteers throughout the Coastal Empire. PAWS is dedicated to saving animals and ensuring that they have a loving, healthy, happy place to live.''
• Progressive Animal Welfare Society. ``[T]he largest animal advocacy and direct care organization in the Pacific Northwest.''

Click here now to run a search on PAWS at <Animalconcerns.org>.

The Romans used the word pax in other senses, particularly in the sense of a `treaty' or `pact' (you understand: like ``Peace of Westfalia''). The English word pact is ultimately derived from the Latin verb pacere, `to agree,' and both pax and pacere appear to be derived from a common Indo-European root that also yielded the English words page, pawn, and propagate (via Latin) and pectic (via Greek via Latin).

Until we develop our own idiosyncratic treatment of this issue, you can visit this not-entirely-illiterate explanation.

Don't worry, we'll mention Vespasian here sooner or later, or else have a link to a urinals entry that mentions him.

Peanut butter, for those unfamiliar with it, is a kind of spackle paste. It takes a bit longer to dry than the usual stuff, however.

Atomic number 82. A dense metal and a heavy one. If you think that's redundant, then tell ZZ Top to stop singing ``a ton of lead'' as if that were any heavier than a ton of lumber. Lead is dense (11.34 g/cc). If you have a lot of it, it's heavy. Gold is denser (19.30 g/cc). If you have a lot of it, you're rich. Heavy is a matter of perspective and motivation. ``He ain't heavy, he's my brother'' and all that. From the perspective of nuclear or atomic beam physics, lead is heavier than gold (atomic number 79) because the most common isotopes have higher mass (atomic mass 207.2 vs. 196.97). Gold is denser because it has a smaller molar volume. Transition metals tend to have small molar volumes, and in consequence, the densest naturally occurring elements are osmium (Z=76, 22.61 g/cc) and iridium (Z=77, 22.65 g/cc).

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

The electronic image archives at Washington University at St. Louis had a jpeg of an old postcard of Leadville, Colorado. Look around, it's probably out there somewhere on the web still.

Local 90 is the one in Westfield, New Jersey.

PBA spokesfolk are quick to assert that the PBA is not a union.

There: three one-sentence paragraphs in a row -- and you thought that was illegal!

Five.

I had a look at the 1944 and 1947 editions of The New Encyclopedia of Sports, by Frank G. Menke, to get some authoritative confirmation. Sure enow, it lists Bowling. It also lists birling, which is the sport form of the business of log rolling. A birling tournament is a roleo.

Similarly, a birding tournament is a rodeo. Well, okay, it isn't. But it should be. After all, the longest-running competitive birding tournament in the US is held in Texas.

Menke also lists corn husking. In the years 1924 to 1941, the three contests with the lowest winning net bushels husked (in eighty minutes) were the years with the most inclement race conditions (snow and ice in 1927! -- only 15.47 bu.). There were no contests in 1942-1946, but they were set to resume in 1947.

PBGC is meant to take over the operation of a corporate pension whenever the corporation fails. Corporations that run pensions are required by law to have pension funds that can't be looted by the company to make up business shortfalls. (It's not like the Social Security Administration, whose funds consist of the federal government's promise to pay back the money it took from FICA contributions.)

When the PBGC takes over a pension, it takes over the pension fund's assets but not, by law, its entire obligations. It's like federal deposit insurance, which protects deposits up to a certain amount, but determining the coverage is much more complicated. So the PBGC typically covers some of the shortfall from its own budget, but much of the shortfall is made up simply by reducing benefits.

Who gives up how much is a complicated calculation based on a variety of rules. The rules generally favor older workers. As of 2009, for example, the maximum benefit is $54,000 for a retiree aged 65 or over, $42,660 for a 62-year-old, and $24,300 for a 55-year-old. One doesn't automatically receive the maximum if one's defined benefit under the defunct pension exceeded it. The rules contain ``tripwires'' and cut-offs that can leave workers with similar work histories at the same company receiving very different benefits.

According to an article in the January 16, 2001, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, PBS is trying to broaden its audience base. PBS president Pat Mitchell said the member stations were worried about the aging PBS audience. The average age of the PBS viewer was 56. I suspect that distribution is bimodal: a majority of the top ten children's programs are on PBS, and they start to lose those viewers around age six. When you subtract out the audience for Sesame Street and such, the average age was more like 65. Okay, more precision: according to Ron Santora, director of programming for Buffalo's Channel 17, the average age was 56.4 (quoted in the hometown paper that March).

Actually, PBS is used to this sort of audience. What worries them is that they used to pick up viewers as they aged, but they're not pulling in successive generations as they used to. Still, from the few publicly available figures, it looks like they made big progress in 2001. According to data gathered during the Nielsen sweeps in November 2001, the median age of PBS viewers was all the way down to 55. I'm not really sure how comparable this number is with the previous one, since it wasn't clear where the earlier one came from. It ought to be comparable with the other Nielsen numbers, however: 51 for CBS, 46 for NBC, 45 for ABC and 39 for Fox.

In Spring 2002, Maryland Public Television had an unseemly public separation from 69-year-old Louis Rukeyser, the long-time host of its program Wall $treet Week (he quit and then was fired, if I understood correctly). During the dispute, MPT noted that the average age of the Fortune reader was 49, while most of the show's viewers were over 60.

It is a fine irony that PBS might be choosing the least opportune moment to condescend in age. Since PBS was created, it has seen its mission as providing ``diversity'' in programming. Yes, they were using that very word -- before it was fashionable, even before the Bakke decision. PBS tried to serve various small audiences, such as thinking people, that were ignored by the major networks. When cable came, it spawned a large number of new networks that targeted various niche markets that only PBS had served before. So PBS, like the commercial networks, lost market share to cable. But some of the networks that ate PBS's lunch (or dinner and prime-time, rather) found it less tasty than they expected. TNN, though it did not start as a cable network, was originally aimed at one of the larger niches underserved by ABC/CBS/NBC. With its devolution into Spike TV, ``the first network for men,'' any threat it may have represented to PBS market share has pretty much vanished into the ether. At the same time that PBS has been moving to attract younger audiences, A&E and the Discovery Channels have been doing the same thing. PBS might do well to let its competition go away instead of chasing it.

PBS receives public funding via CPB, q.v., but this covers a shrinking fraction of its expenditures. One of the distinctive features of public television in the US is the twice-or-more-yearly begathons. You know, I hate to interrupt the glossary, but all of you understand what a valuable service we provide, and you know this kind of quality doesn't come free. All of this information is supported by contributions from savvy internet surfers like you. Please call the number at the bottom of your screen now and make a pledge. We have celebrities standing by to receive your calls. Look, they're all celebrities. Beverly Sills and Josh Groban aren't able to take all of your calls, so if your call is answered by Ashley or Britney or Christina or Lindsay, please don't hang up and call again! If you call now, you will receive a tasteful and attractive WSBF extra-large diaper tote! Please call within the next 18 minutes, as we have a generous challenge grant: every dollar you pledge will be matched by an anonymous donor!

Another traditional source of PBS funding is corporate sponsorships. This started out as a fairly reserved PR thing, with Texaco or some other munificence covering an entire series of shows about some environment somewhere, subtly demonstrating Texaco's commitment to the existence of an environment. That well of money has been steadily drying up, and in the 1990's public television really started to explore the quid-pro-quo and bald-advertising reaches of ``sponsorship.'' You see a lot more Britcoms sponsored by local furniture stores these days.

``For us, too, `PC' no longer stands just for Police Constable, postcard, Privy Counsellor or even personal computer, but also and above all for political correctness - a term which, whatever its polemical use and abuse, concerns a cluster of issues around codes of civility and censorship both verbal and behavioural.''

The preceding quote is dredged from page 19 of Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning, a collection of essays including some gems of aggressively bad writing. The particular essay quoted is Chapter 1: ``Classics: from discipline in crisis to (multi-)cultural capital.'' The author, Paul Cartledge, thanks ``our extraordinarily conscientious and vigilant editors.'' Those editors, Yun Lee Too and Niall Livingstone, have allowed him to clot his prose with conjunctions like ``despite - or because of? -'' and parentheticals like ``(everything going wrong - or moment of decision).'' If you have a term paper due tomorrow, borrow from this. No one will ever guess that the callow, stilted prose you plagiarize would ever (1998) have been published by Cambridge University Press. (Be careful, though: it's not utterly dreadful.)

This isn't PC. If you wanted some thoughts on political correctness, you should have gone to the Retarded entry.

Polycarbonate may or may not be ``UV-stabilized.'' The unstable PC can be recognized because it fluoresces under UV light.

There's an informative PC entry in the Macrogalleria.

This isn't a new concept. One bourbon, one scotch, and one be-eer.

You're probably wondering, ``what is a `streetcar'? Is it the opposite of an off-the-road vehicle?'' For possible enlightenment, see the TTC entry.

For most of its length CA 1 is the highway closest to the coast. It's scenic in the undeveloped parts. (There are still some undeveloped parts as of this writing, April 8, 2002, 12:40 PDT.) Its southern terminus is just south of San Juan Capistrano (roughly halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles), where I-5 (which hugs the coast to the south) moves inland and CA 1 continues along the coast. Officially (according to Section 635 of the California Street and Highway Code), the PCH is the part of CA 1 from there to a northern terminus near Ventura, fifty miles up the coast past LA, where CA 1 ends at US 101.

In the most expansive popular usage, PCH is all of CA 1 plus US 101 in those parts of California, Oregon, and Washington where there is no California state route 1. One widespread usage defines the PCH as all of CA 1 (whose northern terminus is at Leggett, where it joins US 101) plus any pieces of US 101 needed to get between the southern and northern termini.

Honk if you passed P-Chem!

In my experience, PChem course is fairly unchallenging compared to any real course covering any single topic -- thermodynamics, kinetic theory, quantum mechanics -- included in a typical year of PChem. However, the material is wide-ranging, and it is qualitatively different from and much more mathematical than that in most other courses taken by chemistry and chemical engineering majors. If the material interests you, get the necessary math preparation and then take a specific course on the material -- it'll be more beautiful and satisfying, and make more sense.

See also EMag.

There's an old saying: ``A mickle, a pickle.'' Most people don't remember what a mickle is, or even a muckle. Me neither. Let me know after you look it up. Maybe check here.

PCL is the document description language developed by Hewlett-Packard (HP) for its Laserjet series of laser printers. Compare PostScript.

Not the most important thing to say about PCM, but of concern to me right now, is that it's the most common storage method for wave files (*.WAV) on the Windows platform.

Here's a description from whatis.com.

1. People Can't Master Computer Industry Acronyms.
2. People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.

PCP is probably the less accurate term, since nursing assistants are low-skilled workers. On the other hand, since the 1970's in the US, a few causes have led to shifts in health-care responsibilities: a shortage of doctors in general practice, a severe shortage of nurses, and demands for accountability arising from growth in the fraction of health care paid by some form of insurance. Some routine diagnostic and prescription tasks that once were the sole bailiwick of physicians are now often performed by registered nurses, and various routine nursing duties are performed largely by nursing assistants. (In the hazy, almost prehistoric, past, I seem to recall that they were called orderlies.) The market for medical care has many dimensions, and the profile of labor shortages should be noted: an aging population, smaller families, and a higher labor-force participation of the daughters who historically cared for parents have all led to a need for long-term maintenance care. In the US as in Europe, a large fraction of this care is provided by immigrants from LDE's.

The principal charm of the initialism PCP is that it is also used for the drug of abuse known as ``angel dust.'' This would be a good place to note something else connecting drug abuse and nursing, probably related to the fact that the latter offers opportunities, some dangerous to patients, for the former. In Indiana and probably every other place in the US, the state may refuse to allow someone convicted of a drug felony from taking the state boards -- i.e., prevent that person from becoming a registered nurse.

Here's what the government thinks. I have no idea what the second P stands for, but we have enough PC expansions, so I don't mind if they just threw it in for disambiguation.

But worse: compare PCP. I've seen many a bloody namespace collision in my time. In German it's called a Namenskonflikt (namespace is Namensraum). If German were a little more colorful here, we could call PCP a medizinische Namensmassenkarambolage.

According to a Classics-list posting by the generally reliable Laval Hunsucker, there was an article by Sydney Goldstein entitled Mathieu functions in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philological Society. Hmmm. It turns out that the Cambridge Philological Society did once publish a Transactions, although the Goldstein article appeared in the Transactions of the Cambridge PhiloSOPHICAL Society.

Elections are one of the few hard tests of the accuracy of polling, because there are official results for comparison. The PCPO had such a test in 2006 and did quite poorly overall. A few things may be said in its defense, but they require context...

In order to provide that context, I'm writing an analysis of the 2006 PLC election, complete with irrelevant tangents. I haven't finished it, but it's holding up other material on this page, so I'm publishing it incomplete now and blaming the Israelis for any problems that may arise. By the time it's finished, I'll have settled on a single name to use to refer to district/first-past-the-post/winner-take-all/British-parliament-style voting.

The Palestinian Legislative Council is essentially the Palestinian Authority's parliament. The first PLC elections, in 1996, were conducted on a constituency basis (district voting, ``first past the post''). The 2006 elections were held under a new election law passed by the PLC on June 18, 2005. (Details for both systems here. Each used 16 districts. The first PLC had 88 seats. After proving his democratic bona fides with the 1996 election, chairman Arafat let the elections thing kinda slide.) The 2006 elections implemented a mixed system: some seats determined by district-voting for individuals, and some by voting for lists (i.e., proportional representation).

In the case of the 133-member PLC elected in 2006, 66 seats were filled on a constituency basis and 66 by proportional representation. (I think the remaining seat is that of the President.) Ahead of the elections, it was widely supposed that Fatah would retain the largest share of seats and that Hamas would place second. PCPO conducted a careful poll of 2389 Palestinian adults from January 18 to 21 to determine which lists they would support in the PR vote. Out of 11 lists, the following six had the largest support:

				Fatah: 39.6%
				Hamas: 28.8%
	        Independent Palestine:  7.7%
		    	    Al Badeel:  7.2%
				 PFLP:  4.9%
			    Third Way:  4.7%

• The Hamas list was technically the ``List for Change and Reform.'' Technically, Hamas itself was not participating in the election. A distinction without much difference.
• The Independent Palestine list was headed by Dr. Mustafa Barghouti.
• Al Badeel or Al Badil, `The Alternative' list, was a coalition of DFLP, the People's Party, and ``FIDA.''
• The PFLP list was officially the ``List of Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa.''
• The ``List of the Third Way'' was headed by Salam Fayyad and Hanan Ashrawi.

The election took place on January 25, and it soon became clear that Hamas had won an overwhelming victory. This suggested that pre-election polling had been wildly wrong, but it exaggerates the error. Here are the final results:

seats    seats by    total
by PR    district    seats   Grouping

 29         45         74    Hamas
 28         17         45    Fatah
  3          0          3    PFLP
  2          0          2    Third Way
  2          0          2    Al Badeel
  2          0          2    Independent Palestine
  0          4          4   (independent candidates)
                            -------------------------
 66         66        132   Total

Preliminary estimates of the election commission (CEC), based on 95% of the vote, originally gave Hamas 76 seats and Fatah 43. Final results reassigned one list seat, and one district seat in Khan Younis. Interestingly, 14 of those elected to the PLC were in jails of the IOF, including the top candidate of Fatah list -- Marwan al-Barghouthi, a West Bank Fatah leader serving five life sentences. Evidently, in Palestinian elections harrowing the flesh of Isaelis is a viable alternative to pressing the flesh of Palestinians. (Another was reportedly in a Palestinian jail guarded by US and UK personnel. Perhaps this report was garbled.)

It is apparent that Hamas did exceedingly well in district voting, while Fatah and Hamas did comparably in PR voting. PCPO concentrated on polling for the PR vote, and hence missed Hamas's greatest strength in the election. (I won't comment much on the smaller parties: the sample was clearly too small to measure their strengths accurately.)

An interesting question that I haven't seen adequately addressed is why Hamas did so much better in district voting than in the PR vote. A possible answer, or band of culprits, was shouted in street demonstrations after Fatah's defeat: Fatah party members who ran as independents in the district voting. Fatah's Revolutionary Council had adopted a resolution the previous November 7 that barred Fatah party members from running as independents in the district voting. Two days after the election, PNA president and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas expelled six party members for nominating themselves as independent candidates. I'm relying on English translations of Arabic press reports, and the inconsistent patterns of transliteration pose a problem in identifying candidates on the CEC lists. I only found three of the expelled members on the lists of final returns. Possibilities for the other three include having nominated themselves but failed to get on the ballot and having names that are highly fungible under transliteration. Here are the three I could track down, in decreasing order of significance (more like increasing order of insignificance):

1. Ahmed al-Deek ran in district 7 (Salfit), where 11 candidates (one from each list) competed for one seat. Al-Deek ran third in a relatively tight race. The winner, for Hamas, had 6762 votes, and the Fatah candidate, in second place, had 5632. It is certainly plausible that al-Deek, with 4957 votes, prevented Fatah from winning that seat. List voting for the district was concentrated in the two top vote-getters: Hamas drew 35.41% and Fatah 34.35%, while no other list won more than 6.9%. The direct voting, by contrast, was concentrated among the top three candidates, who drew 32.10%, 26.74%, and 23.53%. The Hamas candidate underperformed relative to his list by a margin of 3.3%, but the Fatah candidate underperformed by 7.6%. (It should be noted, though, that Fatah district candidates as a whole underperformed relative to their list.)
2. Fayez Zaidan ran in district 5 (Nablus), where 30 candidates competed for 6 seats. Zaidan ran 23rd and won 2290 votes. The margin of votes separating the sixth-place candidate (for Hamas) and the seventh-place candidate (Fatah) was 1480, so it's conceivable that, had he not run, Fatah might have won another seat. To argue that, however, we must imagine that some voters disposed to vote for Fatah voted for Zaidan rather than a non-independent Fatah candidate. It seems likely, however, that his popularity with such voters would have drawn strength from the four weaker Fatah candidates (ranging down to twelfth place) rather than from the best-performing loser. (In each district, each voter could cast at most one vote per candidate for up to n candidates, where n was the number of district-selected seats alloted to the district.) With so many candidates and such a muddy distribution of votes, the best guess is that Zaidan had no effect on the final result.
3. Burhan Jarrar ran in district 2 (Jenin), where 32 candidates competed for 4 seats. Jarrar also ran 23rd, and he won 2040 votes. If those votes are added to the votes of the other Fatah candidates, then the most that changes, depending on how the votes are distributed, is which two of the four Fatah candidates win seats.

District voting, at least for districts selecting a single candidate, is also called ``winner take all'' voting. This points to one obvious explanation for Fatah's relative weakness in the district voting: a slight Hamas advantage, distributed evenly over various districts, was amplified by the nonlinear winner-take-all function (a very real function of too many variables). There are reasons why some nuts advocate proportional representation. But first, let's analyze one of the extreme districts.

In district 13 (Gaza [city area]), 49 candidates ran for 8 seats. This was the district in which Hamas had its best list showing -- 56.72%. It only ran five non-list candidates, and these won the top five slots. There are small technical difficulties in assessing the performance of candidates relative to their lists, as the following numbers may indicate. Out of 174,379 registered voters, 136,551 (78.31%) showed up and voted. Each received two ballots: one to cast for one of the 11 lists, and one on which to select up to eight individual candidates. A tiny percentage (0.53%, 719 total)) of the individual-candidate ballots were blank, and 3.00% (4097 ballots) were invalid.

The remaining 131,735 ballots (at 96.47% the highest percentage of valid nonblank ballots among the districts) contained a total of 977,959 votes for individual candidates, for an average of 7.42 votes per ballot. Right away, you realize there wasn't a lot of ``bullet voting.'' (I ought to make a joke here. Ha-ha.) I've decided to regard 131,735 as the highest number of votes that a candidate could win. Note, however, that 131,894 votes were cast for lists. For Gaza, this is a 0.1% difference, but for other districts it is typically 1-2%, and as much as 2.5% for district 1 (Jerusalem). In most districts, not every list fielded individual candidates, so one could argue that using a number like 131,735 (valid nonblank constituency ballots) inflates candidates' percentages by discounting the abstentions of voters who didn't have a candidate of their list to vote for, but this doesn't account for all of the blank votes. (For Salfit, discussed above, I used the total number of votes published for all candidates -- 21,066 -- yet the total number of nonblank valid ballots for candidates was reported as 21,310 by the CEC, and it's not apparent how to reconcile the discrepancy. Maybe it was write-ins.)

Using the denominator not justified in the preceding paragraph (131,735), we find that the top five candidates (all Hamas) won from 57.6% to 53.0% of the maximum of votes they could have won, comparable to their list's performance. The next three candidates (all independents) had from 47.9% to 41.7%. The eight Fatah candidates placed 9 to 16, ranking as well as they could without winning any seats. (Actually ranking almost as well as they could without winning seats. One seat was reserved for a Christian, and if the top Christian candidate had not placed in the top eight, Fatah could have had a candidate place eighth and still not win a seat.) The Fatah candidates won from 33.8% to 25.6% of maximum, whereas the Fatah list won 36.64% of list votes in the district. So in Gaza, individual Fatah candidates were 3 to 11 points less popular than their list, while Hamas candidates were no more than 4% less popular. (One might guess that partisans of other parties preferentially settled for Hamas candidates, or that fans of independent candidates preferentially chose Fatah in list voting. It would be hard to tell from these data alone.)

PCS-1900, as it's also called (from the band) is GSM-compliant. It is one of two systems (the other is D-AMPS) in widespread US use.

If this doesn't some familiar, visit the plastics section of Recycler's World.

Learn more without as much pain as pulling teeth at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Palladium is one of the platinum group metals. Palladium was discovered about the time the asteroid Pallas was discovered. Whoop-de-do!

At Teachers College (TC), the PD represents something between a Masters (M.Ed.) and a doctorate (see Ed.D.). As such, I suppose you could think of it as an official ABD. I'm sure it stands for different levels of accomplishment (even of ostensible accomplishment) at different institutions.

When prescriptions give two PD numbers, they may be the distances between the bridge of the nose and the right and left eyes (in that order), so 32/30.5 implies that the PD in the usual sense is 62.5 mm. You know, the fish called flounder start out life fairly symmetric and upright. As the fish matures and lists to one side, the eye on the lower side shifts forward.

When two PD numbers are given and they are each around 60 mm, it probably means that you have a swelled head. Oh wait, there's another possibility: it could be the the distance PD and the reading PD. As you focus on things that are closer up, your eyes cross and the PD decreases. A typical reading distance is 33 cm, so if your distance PD is 60 mm, each of your eyes turns inward by about 5 degrees when reading. If the distance from the center of your eye to the center of its pupil is, say, 1.5 cm, then reading PD is 2 or 3 mm less than distance PD.

Does she qualify as ``family friendly''? Shannen Doherty was the fourth ever Republican Babe of the Week. This achievement, or whatever, is recognized by the <JerseyGOP.com> website. The weekly feature is not precisely dated, but I estimate that she won the honor at the beginning of 2003, so I guess her public standing, if not her career, has been rehabilitated. There doesn't seem to be a corresponding Democratic site, but I believe there may be one or two nonpartisan weekly babe sites on the web. It is hard to sort through all the hits if you search too broadly on "babe" and "party".

A search for physics babes turned up a lot of hits for the Department of Theoretical Physics, Babe¸s-Bolyai.

My adaptation of PDCA is PDCA: ``plan, do, check, act.'' Hey, lookit me -- I'm doin' kaizen!

A number of analogous effects in differrent systems are called light-induced drift (LID).

In 1989, the US took military action to topple Panamanian dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega. On Christmas Eve, he took refuge at the Papal Nunciature in Panama City (i.e., in the Vatican's embassy, which also serves as the residence of the papal nuncio). There was some irony in this, as the nuncio had been a vocal critic of Noriega, and the nunciature had provided sanctuary for many persecuted by Noriega's régime. During the invasion, US troops discovered a house that Noriega had used for witchcraft. According to a Christmas pageant of sorts presented by U.S. Army specialists, a Brazilian witch and a variety of elaborate rituals were used to cast magic spells on numerous political enemies, including Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and the entire U.S. Congress, Guillermo Endara (the man who had been elected Panamian president earlier in 1989, but prevented from taking office), and the papal nuncio, Monsignor Juan Sebastian Laboa. (This is a very incomplete inventory.) According to Italian news reports, 32 Noriega supporters also took refuge with the nuncio.

Beginning on December 27, members of a psychological warfare team from the 82nd Airborne Division played loud rock music over (initially two) powerful loudspeaker units positioned across the street from the nunciature. The music could be heard blocks away. One of the songs played was Judas Priest's ``You're Going to Burn in Hell.'' The first day's program lasted five hours and also included selections from the Rolling Stones, David Bowie (``Modern Love''), the Who (``We're Not Gonna Take It''), and the Grateful Dead, followed (according to one report) by rap music.

The next day's set featured repeated playing of ``Nowhere to Run,'' a hit for Motown's Martha Reeves and the Vandellas in 1965. The music programs grew longer. Conflicting, or at least multiple, explanations were given of what purpose the performance served. Noriega was reputed to favor opera. The legality of the music offensive, like that of many aspects of Noriega's stay, was not clear. By the 29th, those who thought it was legal nevertheless generally agreed that the joke wasn't funny anymore, and the psyop was terminated. Noriega surrendered to US forces the following January 3. (After conviction on drug charges in Florida, he was sentenced to forty years in federal prison. This was later reduced to thirty, and he is first eligible for parole in 2006.)

In 1994, a constitutional amendment (title xii, article 305) was passed that abolished the standing army (another Central American country, Costa Rica, had many years previously abolished its standing army in the aftermath of a civil war). Panama retains ``security forces'' (PPF).

When Barbara Streisand married James Brolin at her Malibu estate in 1998, she didn't want paparazzi to so much as hear the wedding, never mind see. For four hours she blasted the press with continuous playing of ``Thunder Kiss '65,'' a heavy metal song (?) recorded by Rob Zombie in 1992 with his band White Zombie. Zombie took no offense. He said ``[h]opefully, the Funny Lady will use a track off my new album, Hellbilly Deluxe, to ward off meddling paparazzi at her divorce hearing.'' ``At least it isn't Streisand music,'' commented a reporter on the scene.

At that time, Rob Zombie claimed that some of his music was blasted at Noriega and the nuncio in 1989. So far as I have been able to determine, that was the first time that anyone publicly claimed that recognition for Zombie. I have searched LexisNexis (including entertainment news), and the artists and titles listed earlier are all I was able to reconstruct of the playlists from newspaper and wire reports. Perhaps it's a military secret. In Time (for Jan. 8, 1990: Vol. 135, Issue 2) the cover story ``No Place to Run'' (G.J. Church, R. Chavira, pp. 38ff) added the information that ``Voodoo Chile'' [Jimi Hendrix] and ``You're No Good'' [Van Halen] were played. Did Rob Zombie really rank in this company?

Here's a page with their New Year's resolutions, stacked up a couple of years in advance. As of January 2004, the first thing reported in their mission statement (in an appositive phrase; it's a fact rather than a mission component) is that PDK is now ``the leading advocate for public education.'' Further down the page, the first of the strategic goals listed is that ``[b]y 2006, PDK will be recognized as the leader in advocacy for public schools and the education profession. Well then, I guess it's just a question of getting the word out. Also, one of the first bullets under strategies reads: ``Advocacy. We will develop and implement plans to advocate for public education and the education profession. NOTE: To be recognized as the leading advocate, PDK will consider collaboration with other professional groups.

Not this purple dragon. Here are some satirical sound files.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) wrote (in Über die Psychologie des Unbewussten [`On the Psychology of the Unconscious'] 1917):

Wo die Liebe herrscht, da gibt es keinen Machtwillen, und wo die Macht den Vorrang hat, da fehlt die Liebe. Das eine ist der Schatten des andern.

It's the same in electronics: many of the simple things you can do to decrease power consumption also increase delay times, and vice versa. (To take a trivial example, increasing a load resistance in a simple BJT inverter decreases power dissipation in the output-low state, and increases RC time delay by the same factor: power goes as V²/R, delay as RC.) Thus, while power and delays are easily adjusted individually (or inadvertently affected by fabrication variances), the product of power dissipation and a representative delay like the average propagation delay does not budge so easily, and constitutes a good figure of merit.

In the foregoing analogy, Love is Delay.

In most former Comecon countries of Central Europe, communist parties have survived and sometimes held power by taking a, well, less communist economic position, adopting mixed-economy or even somewhat neoliberal views. The situation of reunited Germany, and of the PDS, is exceptional. The strength of the PDS continued to be in the Länder (`states') of the former GDR; even after 2002, the PDS retained representation in eastern Landtage (`state parliaments').

At one point it was thought that the PDS and the Greens might merge to form a more viable party. The motivation on both sides presumably was the declining individual electoral strength of each. The Greens were drifting a little bit rightward economically, however, and that merger did not occur. Instead, in 2005, the PDS merged with dissenting former socialists to form the Linkspartei.

Note: as a US city name, Peru is often pronounced with a long Ee. The name of the one in Indiana is pronounced in English like the country name.

There's an old Latin American saying that one should beware of Peruvian women, Chilean men, and Bolivian justice.

I can confirm the good sense of all three cautions from close personal experience. The dangers are listed in order of decreasing fun.

Here's a brief description. San Diego Plastics, Inc. has a short page of information on Polyethylene. The PE entry of the Macrogalleria has some more.

New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island are known as the Maritime Provinces. This is the third time I mention it. It's review; you should know it already.

Numbers much greater than one are a little bit easier to discuss than factions much less than one, so it is usually more convenient to talk about P/E than about E/P: the price of a stock represents the value of the business, and any business that stays around long enough to issue stock ought to be worth more than one year of earnings. However, one problem with P/E is that while the numerator is usually positive, the denominator may go negative, near the zero-divide, you can get some shocking numbers.

Background

A common type nomenclature code for receiving tubes was introduced by a number of manufacturers in the 1930's, followed in the 1950's by a common code for semiconductor devices. Later, as more and more manufacturers realized the advantage of the use of a common type numbering code and became interested in using the system, it was decided to found a separate organization to administer the allocation and registration of type numbers.

So in 1966 the international organisation "PRO ELECTRON" was set up in Brussels to perform this function. On 1st January 1983 Pro Electron merged with the European Electronic Component Manufacturers Association (EECA) and pursued its activities under the name of "Pro Electron Registration Office, an EECA Agency".
...

In detail: Eng. pease < L. pisa < Gk. píson. OEng. (where the word was a feminine weak noun) and ME used plurals in -en, but in the 16c. peasen was edged out by peases and pease, the latter indistinguishable from the singular, and by the end of the 16 c. pea had appeared. (Confusion was probably compounded by the fact that usually, the distinction between singular and plural is singularly unimportant in mentions of seed foods. Who eats one pea? Cf. the entry for pulses, of which peas are an example.)

A similar thing happened with the Greek word phasis. Like many Greek words ending in -sis, (e.g. basis, thesis) this word was adopted into Latin and declined as a regular third-declension noun. These have a nominative plural in -es (hence phases, bases, theses (cf. the third-declension plural penes, from a native Latin word). Phases was misconstrued as a regularly constructed English plural, yielding the word phase. (Other details at the aphid entry.) In some cases, of course, the Greek or Latin singular survived essentially unchanged (e.g., thesis, apheresis) in English, or were neologized directly (e.g., aphesis).

The majority of Latin words entered English via French, however, and there different processes apply. This is relevant (keep in mind through the long hard paragraphs ahead) for the case of base.

French and other Romance languages evolved from the common speech, known as Vulgar Latin. (Vulgar used to mean common, but it got dragged down by connotations.) This speech collapsed a number of morphological distinctions (losing a gender along the way), and relied more on word order and prepositions to indicate the distinctions indicated by declension in Latin. (A roughly parallel development occurred in the Germanic languages. Old English and contemporary Germanic languages had systems of noun declension similar to those of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Slavic languages. Most of that was swept away in Middle English. Modern German retains an extensive declension system for determiners and adjectives, and limited noun declension. These systems are more and less ambiguous (respectively), in the sense of providing incomplete information about the function of a noun phrase in a sentence, so here too there is greater reliance on syntax and less on morphology.)

The point of the digression of the previous paragraph was to note that in most Romance languages, all the different forms of any given Latin noun ultimately collapsed to just a singular form, plus an essentially regularly formed plural. (In French, that was created by padding the singular with an s, which sometimes became an x, and which now is mostly silent anyway.) The single singular form was derived from an oblique form. Doubtless in individual cases, some common expression led to the derivation of the new singular form from the dative or nominative, but for the most part Romance forms follow from the ablative or accusative. When one takes account of the fact that final m's became silent in Vulgar Latin, and if one fudges the o/u distinction a bit, there is little to choose between them. In the case of base, for example, the singular ablative and accusative singular forms are base and basem. Hence base in French. The French-origin base was apparently well-established in English before basis was common, so base is not a case of back-formation like phase (as I read once somewhere). The case of case, as you were doubtless wondering, is not quite the same. The second-declension casus (ablative caso, accusative casum) gave rise to cas in Old French and thence Middle English.

Hillary Clinton, recording a guest appearance on the children's show Sesame Street, had the word ``peas'' removed from the script, saying ``hardly anyone likes peas.'' Word got out.

Somewhere Marx writes that somewhere Hegel writes that history repeats itself. Marx comments further that Hegel has only neglected to point out that the first time it is tragedy, and the second time farce. In his report on the very important pea news story, Tom Brokaw pleaded:

Mrs. Clinton, all we are saying is give peas a chance.

It's farce the first time as well.

For weeks after an event like this, the homeless poor in Washington, DC, can eat (for example) four regular meals of peas every day. It's used as an incentive to get people off the dole. (See also the CCNV entry.)

Jesse Ventura, a former professional wrestler, political radio guy, and small-town mayor, won a three-way race for governor of Minnesota with 37% of the vote. In his book I Ain't Got Time to Bleed: Reworking the Body Politic from the Bottom Up, he revealed that he does not wear underwear. Fruit of the Loom sent him twelve thousand pairs of undershorts. (Ah -- Fruit! There's the connection.) He donated them to a couple of charities, which thanked him profusely -- nobody donates underwear, let alone clean underwear, just old coats and dresses.

In a dimly remembered time before Monica Lewinsky (1997?!), President Clinton was asked whether he wears boxers or briefs, and he answered. Some people thought that was bad, then.

After his election, Jesse told Jay Leno, ``Have you seen my wife? I don't need to look for an intern.'' Hmm. I suppose this entry is implicitly reentrant.

The FDA was required by law to draw up lists of the twenty most popular raw fruits, vegetables, and seafood in the US. It was part of a nutrition labeling act passed by Congress. (I think the Constitutional authority for this legislation comes from the ``insure domestic Tranquility'' clause.) Here they are, rank-ordered first to last (links may not be entirely apposite):

Rank	Fruits	Vegetables	Seafood
1	banana	potato	shrimp
2	apple	iceberg lettuce	cod
3	watermelon	tomato	pollack
4	orange	onion	catfish
5	cantaloupe	carrot	scallop
6	grape	celery	salmon
7	grapefruit	sweet corn	flounder
8	strawberry	broccoli	sole
9	peach	green cabbage	oyster
10	pear	cucumber	orange roughy
11	nectarine	bell pepper	mackerel
12	honeydew melon	cauliflower	ocean perch
13	plum	leaf lettuce	rockfish
14	avocado	sweet potato	whiting
15	lemon	mushroom	clam
16	pineapple	green onion	haddock
17	tangerine	green (snap) bean	crab
18	sweet cherry	radish	trout
19	kiwi fruit	summer squash	halibut
20	lime	asparagus	lobster

The First Lady was right!

Julian Barnes considered (in A History of the World in 10.5 Chapters)

And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

I used to hear from an Argentine physicist colleague that Argentina had the highest concentration of physicists in the world. I doubt it, but I tried to check it (in order to develop a good physics-crossword-puzzle clue for ARGENTINA), and encountered this acronym in the process. A typical unit of ``concentration'' needed to make the claim cited in the first sentence of this paragraph precise is ``físicos por cada mil habitantes en la PEA.'' I couldn't find those numbers but I did learn that in recent years, the number of scientific and technical investigators per thousand inhabitants of the financially remunerated world is around 8 in the US, 5 in the EU, and 1.85 or so for Argentina (the highest in Latin America), and substantially less for Brazil and Mexico. It's estimated at 1.1 for Cuba (whether that's more or less than for Brazil and Mexico I haven't tried to find out).

Here's a refreshing attitude: ``It's Not Me... It's You! (And Can We Not Be Friends?)'' It's the title of ``A Modern Girl's Guide to Breaking Up,'' by Laurie Frankel. It might be interesting, but it seems to be about relationships, and since I'm a guy I can't read that.

The central character of the strip, Charlie Brown, is based on the strip's creator.

Fascinating. I probably should have made this the significant-digits entry, but then it would be out of order here among the P-E-A entries.

A couple of British terms for peanut are monkey nut and groundnut. This means that peanut butter is made from ground groundnuts. Or are they crushed? (Of course, peanuts are not nuts in the technical botanical sense, but pulses or something. You know -- the same way grasshoppers aren't true bugs, tomatoes are fruit, whales ain't fish, an' all that. It's nuts! Okay -- legumes, so pulses in fact, and not unlike peas.)

The standard German term for peanut is Erdnuß (plural Erdnüße), parallel to British groundnut. But perhaps one shouldn't read too much into that. German-speakers seem to have an inordinate fondness for Erd- nouns (and Afrikaners for aard- animal names, like aardwolf, aardvark). In German, strawberry is Erdbeere: literally `earth berry.' It's been suggested to me that the reason is a certain earthiness in the flavor. I specifically asked if that was before or after washing. After. But I think the name might reflect that they tend to grow close to the ground.

In South Orange, New Jersey, on April 2, 2004, twelve-year-old Jules Gabriel was suspended pending a district hearing on May 13. The suspension arose from remarks he made to a girl in his social studies class at South Orange Middle School. According to school officials, the girl reported that Jules had threatened to expose their highly allergic teacher to peanut butter cookies. According to the boy's father Loubert, Jules had been carrying a snack packet of Nutter Butter cookies and had said he had ``something dangerous'' but (so I gather from muddled reports) made no explicit threat. Look, there's a very simple solution to this: ban cookies.

The March 2, 2013, issue of The Economist has a special report on Africa. As you know, Zimbabwe's economy collapsed a few years ago. The national currency of Zimbabwe collapsed along with the economy, and shops there ``use dollar bills. In the absence of American coins, they give out bags of peanuts instead.''

Oh yeah, it's this: the peanut is technically a legume --a member of the pea family. Moreover, the part of a peach outside the pit and stone, and the part of the pear outside the seed and seed case, is known in botanical terms as fruit. Yawn. And the pea pod (minus the peas, of course) is also.

Let that be a mnemonic to you.

You know, perfect electrical conductivity is such a standard assumption or first approximation that when I studied electromagnetism I never heard an acronym for it. That is, perfect conductivity was the default assumption, and it was only ``imperfect conductors'' that required an explicit terminology (these were usually ``Ohmic'' or p-type semiconductor or some other particular kind of more-realistic conductor, rather than a generic ``IEC'' -- acronym I never saw. However, a colleague of mine used ``PEC'' in a casual conversation recently, so I guess it's used generally, and not just in the context of a particular theoretical model.

A Stammtisch-funded scientific investigation conducted on a very good batch of nearly three pounds of unshelled pecans determined that 53% (+/- 1%) by weight of a bag of pecans is edible. The rest is shell, natural packing material inside the shell, and spoiled pecan (very little in this case).

In 1842-3, British forces under Major General Sir Charles James Napier conquered Sindh (a province in the lower delta of the Indus, part of present-day Pakistan). To announce his victory, the general sent a telegram with a message consisting of the single Latin word above. The pun is two-fold. Even by the principles of international relations prevailing then, the British hadn't, well, let me just quote Napier on this: ``We have no right to seize Sindh, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be.''

It should be noted that his conquest of Sindh followed closely on a humiliating British defeat in Afghanistan. The contrast with that, and admiring reports of the opposition faced by the British, probably helped burnish his reputation. The Afghan defeat also contributed to the decision to annex Sindh, since there was a perceived need to restore lost military prestige. Napier was governor of Sindh from 1843 to 1847. He began the project of creating a modern civil administration, initiated various public works projects, and moved the capital to the then-small port town of Karachi. His success was mixed. He was an opinionated, almost capricious, micromanager of a governor, with a special and further distracting interest in criminal cases. He often sat as magistrate in these cases himself.

It's hard to evaluate his actions, however, without staking a position on the general ethics of enlightened imperial rule. The international justification for annexation, such as it was, resembled modern justifications on grounds of ``national security.'' In the power politics of that time, if the Mirs who had ruled Sindh could not keep the French and the Russians out, then the British seemed (to some British) to have cause for invasion. Indeed, the Mirs had been pressured by the British governor of India to sign a treaty guaranteeing, i.a., to keep all other European and American powers out. Napier's judgement that they had failed to honor their side of that bargain was his pretext for invasion. At the end of the century, Rudyard Kipling followed the same reasoning in urging the US to take over the Philippines (``take up the white man's burden''). He reasoned that Spain was too weak to hold them, and that either the Japanese or the Germans would try to take them if the US did not do so first. Modern Realpolitik reasons in similar ways, though the relevant strategic ``positions'' and military assets are less locations and men than technologies. (Did you know? Money continues to be important.)

The point of the preceding paragraph of crude review is that the rationale of conquest determines what the conquering power is entitled to do not only during but after the fighting. British colonialists in Asia undertook to bring their colonies into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and did so to a great extent. This could be regarded partly as a value-neutral introduction of improved technologies, but there was also interference in local affairs. For example, critics observed correctly that slavery was an ancient custom in much of the region, and that the British had promised not to interfere with local customs when they took over. Napier ignored this, acting harshly (and probably sometimes unjustly, since he admitted that he often judged against the evidence) against people accused of slavery. He likewise acted against Hindu suttee, and against cuckolded (or merely homicidally jealous) husbands who murdered their wives.

Back home there was criticism of Napier's methods in the press, but this was not an era of imperial self-doubt among the general public. He was lionized for his victories, and well remunerated by the crown. A bronze statue of C.J. Napier, by the sculptor G.G. Adams, is in Trafalgar Square, London. The port of Napier, on the eastern side of North Island in New Zealand, was named after him.

Despite this, he took criticism rather poorly. In 1852, a writer in the Quarterly Review (vol. 182) described his conquest of Sindh as a `harsh and barbarous aggression,' and Napier tried to sue for libel. It may be characteristic that the chief justice, while noting the author's right to express his opinion, also freely admitted that he himself accepted Napier's version.

Okay look, I'm not going to finish this entry today. For now let me summarize one of the points that I may eventually get around to laying out, which is that pretty much all of the famous Napiers of that era were descendants of the mathematician John Napier.

See also positive logic discussion.

PCML is a synonym of PECL.

``Purged'' has other associations. I wonder, if Bush 41 hadn't lost lunch and consciousness in the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, whether he mightn't have won in 1992.

I was surprised to see how much obscurity surrounded the approaches to the science. During the first steps, they began by supposing in place of proving. They presented me with words which they were in absolutely no condition to define for me, or which at least they could not define without borrowing from knowledge that was absolutely foreign to me, and which I could only acquire by the study of the whole of chemistry. And so, in beginning to teach me the science, they supposed that I already knew it.

(I lifted this from Lavoisier in the Year One, by Madison Smartt Bell. References there point to a work where the French original may be found, but I haven't had a chance to track it down. While I'm waiting for that chance with bated breath and blueing face, why not check out our anticline entry?)

Übersetzung: Fußgängerüberweg.

``PEFA aims to support integrated and harmonized approaches to assessment and reform in the field of public expenditure, procurement and financial accountability.''

This entry is just about the name usage. In a situation reminiscent of the HEMT/MODFET/TEGFET/2DEGFET thing, there are differing national preferences in usage, though all the common initialisms are constructed from English words. As of 2005, PEFC appears to be the most popular term in Japan and the UK. PEMFC is the most popular in every other relevant country I can think of, to judge by ccTLD-restricted searches. Overall, PEMFC is about twice as common as PEFC, and SPFC lags far behind. The only place I can find where SPFC is popular is the Netherlands, where SPFC seems to run a decent second to PEMFC (more than half as common).

If you think of the expansion at all, you should try not to think of PEFC as standing for proton-exchange fuel cell, because technically, and against the standard usage of PEFC, that would include PAFC. All the more reason to stick with PEMFC.

There's a picture of him in the third edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

You know, it's possible to draw a straight line that goes through St. John, NB and St. John's, NL, and nicks the southern tip of Île St-Jean. (And if you can't walk on the water, it's much easier to draw this line on a map of the corresponding places.) We've decided that if we ever have any worthwhile information about PEI, we'll deposit it in the entry for the postal abbreviation PE. Just as you suspected and feared: reading this entry is a complete waste of time.

Most of the polymers being investigated operate at low temperature (below about 100°C -- low compared to other materials) and pass hydrogen ions. The ions are hydrated, so you can think of them as hydronium (H₃O⁺) ions. Less common names for PEMFC are PEFC and SPFC.

Membership by invitation only:

Members of American PEN are elected by the Membership Committee. The standard qualification for a writer to join PEN is publication of two or more books of a literary character, or one book generally acclaimed to be of exceptional distinction. Also eligible for membership are editors who have demonstrated commitment to excellence in their profession (usually construed as five years' service in book editing); translators who have published at least two book-length literary translations; playwrights whose works have been produced professionally; literary essayists whose publications are extensive even if they may have not yet been issued as a book. Candidates for membership should be nominated by two current members of PEN, or may nominate themselves with the support of a current member. Inquiries may be addressed to, and membership applications are available from, PEN Headquarters.

The local London letter post, begun in the late seventeenth century, was known as the penny post. The price was raised 100% in 1801, but it wasn't called the tupence post or even the two-pence post, but the two-penny post. I'm not sure if this is because the uninflected form of penny was preferred for the attributive noun in this case, or because somehow pence just sounds bad attributively, or just because.

In Spanish, a penknife is a cortaplumas (a `cut-pens'). (It's one of those plural nouns in stock Spanish terms, but the singular form is more common in Argentina, at least.)

Also the full surname of the founder of Pennsylvania. That is not the same as the person Pennsylvania was named after, as explained at the entry for ``This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.''

It seems churlish to point it out in the context of an event like this, but the cognates in the Spanish and English titles include some false -- or at least not entirely true -- ``friends''. The main one is encuentro, which in this context means `meeting,' and really lacks the agonistic or belligerent connotation that is latent in encounter. (In a more general context, encontrar is simply `to find,' whether the thing found was sought or not. In contrast, in English, ``to encounter'' is to find something that one either wasn't specifically looking for or that one specifically wasn't looking for.) I wonder if a Spanish or other Romance original is the source of expressions like ``encounter session'' or ``youth encounter,'' ``marriage encounter,'' etc.

Juvenil, of course, is an adjective cognate with English juvenile, and it has, roughly speaking, the same range of meanings. Though it's hard to measure, I think that the connotation of immaturity (inmadurez) is much stronger in English -- hence the use of the Germanic words in the English translation.

For more on national skills having the most tenuous contrived relationship to spinning, see english.

Of course, the five diagonals of the original pentagon together also constitute an pentagram. This is the same figure rotated 36 degrees and scaled (the lengths of the outer pentagram exceed those of the inscribed pentagram by a factor of the square of the golden ratio).

Fanciful expansion created in 1994, after a scandal about a nominally rare but embarrassing and not really inconsequential error in look-up tables for the FDIV implementation. Pentium is an Intel trademark for its chip generation following on in the 80286, 80386, 80486 sequence. The problem was fixed, and apparently the damage to the trademark was not considered extensive, since subsequent generations continued as Pentium II, Pentium III, etc. Besides, it would probably have been even more numerically unlucky to have a ``Hexium.''

Note, incidentally, that pent- is a Greek root and -ium is a Latin noun ending. Hence, the word is technically a barbarism. I suppose an advantage of barbarisms is that they are less likely to infringe an existing trademark. At least, they would be if barbarisms were at all rare. The closest regularly constructed neo-Greek noun would be pention. That word, however, would probably be interpreted as a barbarism. Judging from ghits, that word occurs primarily as a misspelling of pension, particularly on pages whose authors whose primary scripts are not versions of the Roman alphabet (particularly Japanese, Korean, and Russian, on a quick look).

Writing -tion for -sion is a natural error when the s is unvoiced, since there is no difference in pronunciation and since most Latin -io words ended in -tio (in the nominative; -tionem and -tione in the accusative and ablative, respectively). Most of these words ended up (sorry) as -tion words in English, though exceptions exist. (Patio is not one; it is derived tortuously from Latin pactum. Petitio occurs in petitio principii; that was never really naturalized [let's say it got a green card], but it is probably recognized by those who still wince when newsreporters and other morons say ``that begs the question....'' [See hysteron proteron, where we mention but don't explain the term.] Ratio is the most common -io word to have become fully naturalized in English in its nominative Latin form, although there is one other somewhat less common word that did so as well.)

It remains to be said that pent- is not the most appropriate root for the fifth in a sequence. The Greeks used the pent- form of the root for cardinal numbers and derived words (i.e., words referring to things that there were five of). For ordinal and fractional terms (where we use ``fifth'' instead of ``five'') the Greeks used pemp- instead of pent-. Needless to say, the kind of five that the pentium processor represented was ordinal -- see 80286 above. Admittedly, the numbering stumbled a bit initially: the 80186 followed on the 8086, which followed the 8080 and 8085.

The more widely used 8088 was essentially an 8086 that functioned with a cheaper 8-bit external bus. Sometimes, a step back represents a kind of progress. Ford's greatest success was the Model T, which in many respects was a more primitive vehicle than the company's previous models, right on back to the Model A. Then again, sometimes a step back isn't a step forward. The original IBM PC used an 8088. But the AT&T 6300, available at a better price at about the same time, used an 8086. (Progress by simplification is a widespread theme in technology. A famous programming-language example is in the evolution from ALGOL to C, summarized at the Algol entry. Yeah, I can do it both ways.)

1. Arbor Day: A day currently observed on the last Friday in April at the national level in the US, and on a variety of dates at the state level and in other countries.
2. Cecil Burke Day: Founder of the Days Inn chain of ``budget luxury'' (his coinage) motels. North America's largest glass-enclosed tropical conservatory is Cecil B. Day Butterfly Center at Callaway Gardens. Georgia State University has a Cecil B. Day School of Hospitality Administration. A Day School!
3. Daniel Day-Lewis: A British actor, the second child of Cecil Day-Lewis (Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972) and his second wife, Jill Balcon. Balcon is French (and balcón is Spanish) for `balcony.' Daniel, his older sister Tamasin, their mother, and her father Sir Michael Balcon, have all been involved in the film business.
   
   Daniel's father was also involved in TV and movies, at least to the extent of having some of his novels adapted. His pen name was Nicholas Blake, and Daniel's full name is Daniel Michael Blake Day-Lewis. Daniel was born on April 29, 1957, two days after his father's 53rd birthday.
4. Doris Day: The stage name of a singer and actress who was born Doris Mary Ann Von Kappelhoff. How she got the name, and how Stockwell Day almost did, is a story told at the Victoria Day entry.
5. Dorothy Day: A political activist. (The Victoria Day entry has a little bit about her.)
6. Stockwell Day: A Canadian politician. The entire Doris/Stockwell/Victoria Day nexus is thrashed out at the Victoria Day entry.
7. Victoria Day: A public holiday commemorating the birth of Victoria, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress of India.

... Buh-doo-dee-oo-ah-dah!
... Buh-doo-dee-oo-ah-dah!

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot,
Twelve full ounces -- that's a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you.

Nickel nickel nickel nickel
Nickel nickel trickle trickle
Nickel nickel nickel nickel
Trickle trickle trickle trickle
Nickel nickel nickel nickel
...

More useful info at the KFC entry, of all places.

The Mojo Radio site had an opinion on the Pepsi/Coke issue and earned the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Belch of Approval. I'll have to see if I can track down a non-404 version of the page.

This was discovered by R. Whitely, Esq., custodian of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge (the college has its own pronunciation issues, described at the link). Whitely found the poem in a nineteenth-century volume of reminiscences, and published it in the Johnsonian Newsletter, XXIV (December 1964).

Oh Samuel, who on some folks' lips
Are designated Samuel Pips,
While others follow in the steps
Of those who call you Samuel Peps,
At Cottenham the proper step is
To sound the Y and call you Pepp-iss,
To such ignorance all Magdalene weeps
Well knowing you are Samuel Peeps.

Oh, alright. Here's a little information: born February 23, 1632, died May 23, 1703. Both dates are Old Style. Thus, he was born on March 4, 1633 of the Gregorian calendar, since the new year used to begin on March 25 in England. That's how the legal and conventional numbering went, anyway, and Pepys followed it, but January 1 was widely thought of as the New Year's Day (which it was legally in Scotland). When England adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, the year numbering was also legally moved back so it began on January 1. For a number of years thereafter, the early months of each year were labeled with both years to avoid ambiguity. I first noticed this when reading the scientific correspondence of Benjamin Franklin (dating from the 1750's). In historical writing, the usual practice (and the one followed here) is to give Old-Style dates but to label the year as currently understood. It's distantly like analytic continuation on the complex plane.

Pepys kept a private diary from January 1, 1660, until May 31, 1669, writing in it almost daily. (He decided to stop on account of what he perceived to be his failing eyesight, and I suppose we have to take his word.) He wrote in the diary using an idiosyncratic shorthand, and apparently never intended any kind of publication. He also built a fine library of 3000 volumes, carefully selected and laboriously indexed, and often purchased with monies ``left over'' from funds allocated for government purchases. (This practice, something we might call misappropriation and corrupt today, was widespread in his day, and he evidently felt no compunction about it.) He bequeathed this library to his alma mater, Magdalene College, Cambridge (mentioned above).

John Evelyn, a friend of Pepys and a fellow Fellow of the Royal Society, died in 1706. Evelyn's diary of the years 1641-1706 was passed down in his family and not published until 1817. The publication of Evelyn's diary kindled interest in that of Pepys, and the latter was deciphered by Rev. John Smith and published starting in 1825.

It's amazing how precious documents continue to emerge a century or more later. In 2006, missing notes from the early years of the Royal Society were found in a house in Hampshire, England.

Other entries with some Pepys comment:

• multiplication (wait for it)
• This is gonna hurt me more than it hurts you.

You can use the holes to insert metal hooks for hanging tools in the shop, or for inserting merchandise-display hardware in a store.

Perforated plywood is available, but more expensive. For the uses you'd probably put it to, the usual perf board is just as good. One thing that keeps the cost down with fiberboard is that the material is so weak that the holes are not drilled but punched.

The word perfect originally meant what the word complete now means, with no necessary connotation of superiority. The meaning drifted.

Of possible interest: 13.

One of the very interesting questions about the trajectory of a Moon orbit is whether it intersects the surface of the Moon. For that reason, NASA likes to define PC (and apocynthion as well) as the altitude above the surface (perhaps above sea level, or mare level; I'm not sure of the precise definition). That way, if your current orbit has a negative PC value, then you know that if you don't do something soon, your next apocynthion is going to be multivalued (apocynthia).

The words periodista and journalist are perhaps more similar than is apparent. The English journal was borrowed from Old French (where the spellings jornal and jurnal are also attested) meaning `daily.' So a journal is a particular kind of periodical. The relationship is a bit more obvious in Romance languages. For example, common words for journal and day are journal and jour in Modern French and giornale and giorno in Italian.

Journal is also a synonym of diary, and this too is a closer relation than is immediately evident. The word diary stems from the Latin word dies, `day.' As it happens, all those jourish Romance vocables also stem from that word, through the Latin word diurnal (meaning, in English `diurnal'). What happened to that word was that the vowel i came to be articulated as a palatalization of the preceding consonant: in Latin, diurnal was pronounced like ``dee-oor-nahl,'' and the ``dee-oo'' became ``dyoo.'' Of course, in just about any language a palatalized dee is at risk of becoming a jay. In English, for example, ``did you'' pronounced quickly (as ``didyou'') becomes ``didja'' or ``didjoo.'' So diurnal --> dyurnal --> jurnal.

That assimilation, pardon the expression, is the basis of a gag in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall. Woody plays himself as usual (talk about type-cast), only more so: a neurotic New York comedian (``Alvy Singer''). In a paranoid sequence, he interprets the loose pronunciation of ``did you eat?'' as ``did Jew eat?'' I wouldn't bother mentioning this except for the translation problem: how to dub a pun? In the Spanish dub of Annie Hall, it was handled gracefully using the word judía which means both `Jewess' and `bean.' Spanish is, in physicists' terminology, a degenerate language, which means that puns are so easy they're not even funny (I mean that literally).

The d in ``dj,'' incidentally, is just the beginning of the usual articulation of the English j (or Italian gi). In Russian, that sound is represented by two consonants: first a d, then a zh (the French j). In German, one writes dsch, where sch (having the sh sound of English) has to represent the zh sound which German has no standard way to write. The French adieu, through the aphetic form 'dieu, became Tschuss in German. Tsch is the German orthographic equivalent of English ch, and these are simply the unvoiced versions of dsch and j. Had enough?

It remains to be noted that daily is not derived from the Latin dies. Instead, English words like day and daily come from a Germanic root, and the Germanic and Latin words have a common root in Proto-Indo-European. There ya go! Whereas English in the past 1000 years has undergone great changes in the pronunciation of vowels, German has undergone comparable changes in the pronunciation of consonants. In particular, initial d became initial t, so English day is cognate with German Tag.

Okay, I gotta quit here for now. When I finish the entry, you will connect the Japanese Diet with the German Bundestag (called dieta in Spanish), and journey with journal.

Since periodization is a big concept, this ought to be a big entry. But it's not a very deep concept. Therefore the ideal person to quote on the subject is Charles A. Beard, who was once considered an important historian. Here's a bit of his introduction (December 1931) to the American edition of J. B. Bury's excellent study, The Idea of Progress (pp. x-xi of the Dover edition):

... the ideas of every epoch in history are related, usually with one dominant concept setting the key-tone for the others. Indeed, historians, with good reason, break the story of mankind into ages according to their characteristics--to the outstanding ideas disclosed in events, actions and philosophy. Thus we have an age of despotism, an age of reason, and an age of democracy. Though there is danger of over-simplification in such arrangements, there can be no doubt that whole periods are marked by particular types of thought, particular conceptions of life and its values. Neither statesmen nor artists nor writers can escape their pressures.

Well, not entirely wrong. Beard's ``ideas disclosed in events'' discloses a weakness in his attempt to link periods with ideas. Sometimes the only ``idea'' disclosed by an event like a defeat or victory is that of death or survival. These are more conditions than ideas. Hence, many of the endpoints of analytically useful historical periods are the dates of decisive military conquests -- 1066, 1453, etc.

Of course, the POV that Beard expresses is congenial to the book he introduces. I doubt that Bury would have agreed with the generality of Beard's extreme claim, but Bury's book is the history of an idea, and in such a history many of the relevant periods are those defined by a particular intellectual climate. Here is the most explicit contemplation of the periodization problem in Bury's text:

    Fontenelle is one of the most representative thinkers of that period--we have no distinguishing name for it--which lies between the characteristic thinkers of the seventeenth century and the characteristic thinkers of the eighteenth. It is a period of over sixty years, beginning about 1680; for though Montesquieu and Voltaire were writing long before 1740, the great influential works of the ``age of illumination'' begin with Esprit des lois in 1748. The intellectual task of this intervening period was to turn to account the ideas provided by the philosophy of Descartes, and use them as solvents of the ideas handed down from the Middle Ages. We might almost call it the Cartesian period; for, though Descartes was dead, it was in these years that Cartesianism performed its task and transformed human thought.

(Ch. v, sec. 10, pp. 116.)

The period of US history from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of WWI (hmm, we seem to have skipped over a war there) is called ``the Confident Years'' (it'd be too much to claim that they're ``known'' by that name), but definitions vary. Van Wyck Brooks, concerned with the history of literature, wrote a book with the title The Confident Years: 1885-1915. Brooks's own writing was periodized by Edmund Wilson, as you may gather at the vitamin entry.

Søren Kierkegaard wrote that

Philosophy is perfectly right in saying that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other clause--that it must be lived forward.

The formulation above is in the translation by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong of Journals and Papers, second edition. Incidentally: either there's a typo somewhere or the first edition used ``backward.'' This is undated, but from 1843, and it's labeled ``IV A 164.'' I'd like to tell you what that means, but I'm reading this through the opacity of a nightmarish, staggeringly balky electronic interface (Intelex^®) and it's hard to turn a page or find the table of contents, let alone discover what all the different codes mean. I think IV A 164 is a loose paper. [It happens to be on p. 450 of the Hongs' volume I; note that the Hongs organized these analecta first by subject (this one is under ``EXIST, EXISTENCE, EXISTENTIAL''), and only within subjects by date.]

Ordered by year of first publication:
1995. Life in Dark Ages. An autobiographical memoir by Ernst Pawel.
2000. When I Lived in Modern Times. A novel by Linda Grant. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction.
2006. My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale. An autobiographical rumination on approaching old age, by James Atlas. There's some more from James Atlas at the biography, major entry.

Cf. paroxytone and properispomenon.

There is an official Perl homepage. One place to start to get to know Perl better is in Vienna. A good tutorial is served from Northern England.

The central archive of Perl documentation and distribution (source) is CPAN. [That's a link to an entry of this glossary. You probably think it would be more convenient of I just kept a link to the archive itself here, but then if the URL changed I'd have to update both the CPAN entry's outlink and this one. Alright, I'll tell you what I'll do: this link goes directly to the ftp archive, as of this writing. If the address is out of date, don't say I didn't warn you.]

Perl is pronounced ``pearl,'' although some fear it like a pronounced peril.

You don't have to forgive me for that pun now. I can wait.

Technically, one distinguishes the language `Perl' from the filename and command `perl.'

Perl is the modern German word meaning `pearl' (perle and berle in Middle High German). Jed Perl is an art critic for The New Republic. I got to thinking: now who else has a surname Perl, and it took me a while to realize -- hey, my grandmother's maiden name was Perl! (I wrote this before the reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan.)

When I was working on my M.S. project, I once got some detailed instructions on cooling my sample in situ. My mentor kept referring to ``the glass thing, I can't remember its name.'' My mentor was Dr. Dewar.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes nine Perl programs.

In Japanese, the word is pâma. I find this mildly amusing because it's an instance of an originally long English term whose Japanese form is a little longer than the English term it actually corresponds to. (The a marked by a circumflex has nominally double vowel quantity, so by Japanese count their version is a three-syllable word.)

Japanese has a number of radically truncated loan terms from European languages, particularly English. Here (for your convenience, of course) are some examples of truncated loans taken from a truncated part of a handy Japanese dictionary: daiya (< diamond, though daiyamondo is also used), defure (< deflation), dema (< German Demagogie), demo (< democracy, also demokurashî), and eakon (< air conditioning).

I don't know whether ``permanent wave'' was independently shortened in Japanese or the term ``perm'' was borrowed directly. I would expect the latter, but the final -ma suggests otherwise. (Final consonants in foreign words tend to be represented by syllables ending in u. ``Daimondo'' above is exceptional because du does not occur in native Japanese words.) The verb form of perm is probably pâma suru.

The best-known peroxide is hydrogen peroxide (discussed at the disproportionation entry, q.v.). The most stable of the known metal peroxides is barium peroxide (BaO₂; it releases oxygen starting at about 500°C and converts completely to the oxide (BaO) by 900°C.

This word forms a minimal pair with pero (`but') for distinguishing the -r- and -rr- sounds in Spanish, and perro just generally seems to be the word people often think of one requiring an ability to pronounce the double r. Schools in Argentina, at least, are very concerned that students be able to pronounce the rr correctly. One of the daughters of my friend Laura had a problem with this, and Laura had to spend a heavy chunk of change on ineffective speech therapy for her. Then one day the girl came home from school and said ``¡Escuchá mami: perrrrrro!'' A classmate had explained it to her.

In Spanish, most animals are described by a single noun having either male or female gender. To indicate natural gender one has to add the word macho or hembra. (There's a little more about that at the sapo entry.) Perro is one of the few animal words with distinct male and female forms. The female form is perra.

Just as in English, the word for dog is used metaphorically for a human in various stock expressions. Perhaps the most common is ``ser perro viejo'' (`to be an old hand [at something]' -- literally `to be an old dog'). The expression corresponding to the English ``his bark is worse than his bite'' is the more general and confident-seeming ``perro que ladra no muerde'' (`dog that barks does not bite').

The Spanish word perra is used to describe an unpleasant person, somewhat as the English word bitch is used. The expression I used to hear a lot was ``y la perra que lo parío'' (`and the bitch that gave birth to him'), but that gets surprisingly few ghits. That most necessary English expression ``son of a bitch'' is fairly accurately translated by the very common Spanish expression ``hijo de puta,'' which literally happens to mean `son of a whore.' There is a dog connection, however. Perro has the widespread slang sense of `john' -- that is, the customer of a whore.

Perrito caliente (`hot little dog' or `little hot dog') is a loan translation of the American term hot dog. (The precise loan translation perro caliente seems much less common.) The usual term for the hot dog sausage is salchicha, and to be honest, that's the only term used in my family. Perrito caliente, for those who use the term, apparently refers only to the sandwich: sausage in a long bun.

The words person and parson appear to be among the few English words that have etymologies stretching back into Etruscan (Etr.).

Person is PC for `female human.'

Name etymologies are a particular interest, so much so that we have three entries devoted to printed works on the subject:

• Familienname
• Hanks and Hodges
• Reaney and Wilson

There's something on the name Herman at the SN entry. The Herman discussion is a tangent to the German discussion, and both touch on Latin. If you want to know about Roman names, see the tria nomina entry. You might want to read the caesarean entry, too. A German-seeming name with no connection to Latin that my fertile imagination can concoct is Katz.

The UK entry has information on the Windsor royal family name, and the II entry, with general information on junior names, touches on that. Somewhere I ought to mention that Clovis is simply an archaic form of the name Louis. There, I did it! Before I'm through, I hope to settle some puzzling matters concerning George Biro. That'll be at the ball-point pen entry.

Other specific names mentioned include

• Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
• DO NOT ENTER. HARD-HAT AREA.

Just so your visit to this entry will not have been a complete runaround, I'll point out that news stories regularly come out of Sweden about how the governments has refused to register some millstone of a moniker that parents have decided to give their child. (You know, like Moon Unit Zappa [see CCSU] or Niger or something like that.) It's not unusual for governments to impose such constraints, and they're a good deal stricter in places like Argentina, but I suppose that Swedish parents have more extreme ideas about child-naming. The latest story along these lines (as of this writing) was first carried by the AP on April 3, 2007, but appears to be on the level. Michael and Karolina Tomaro had a baby girl in late 2006 and baptized her Metallica. The Swedish National Tax Board has been refusing to register the name. The Tomaros took it to court, and the County Administrative Court in Goteborg ruled in their favor on March 13. The tax bureau, which has appealed the county court ruling, is something like the US Social Security Administration, and its refusal to register the name is preventing the parents from obtaining a passport for their daughter and is delaying their travel plans. Why would anyone want to leave Sweden?

Of course, personal notices are not an entirely ineffective search method. Around 1905, my grandfather made his way from near Odessa to Rotterdam, from where he went to Buenos Aires and his sister and brother-in-law and their first child went to New York. Later, he took out an ad (put a personal notice) in a New York paper looking for his sister, somebody who knew her saw it and passed it along, and the siblings were reunited.

A related sort of advertisement is the ``author query.'' This is placed by someone writing a nonfiction book, seeking information that might be useful. It seems to be most common in the search for persons who may have known the subject of a biography. I used to see these ads occasionally in the backs of the sort of magazines that still included some original short fiction, just before the big section with all the summer-camp and military-academy ads.

It's all a crock. ECE rules.

Actually, the PERT method, whatever it is, seems to be perty old: it's mentioned in the 1960 Random House Dictionary, where the description makes it sound like better living through bureaucracy.

Currently (Nov. 19, 2009), among webpages tagged by Google as ``Spanish [language] pages,'' 249,000 (all numbers approximate) contain the phrase ``animal doméstico'' and 6,550,000 contain both the word perro and the word gato (18,400,000 and 14,800,000, resp., contain one or the other of these words).

Similar comments hold for German (with ``Haustier'' as the compound noun corresponding formally to pet). The same seems to be true also for French animal domestique and Dutch huisdier, but I haven't done the corresponding Google searches for other languages than Spanish.

In 1996, PETA proposed that the Hudson Valley town of Fishkill change its centuries-old name to Fishsave, on grounds that the name conjured up violent imagery of dead fish. (The town was named by Dutch settlers in the early 1600's; kil is a Dutch word meaning `stream.')

Code 1 in PCS. May also be indicated by `PET' embossed on surface.

This book has one of the most subject-appropriate dedications I have ever read:

This book is dedicated to my son, Eddie,
and his wife, Sarah.
May your bonds be strong and durable through
whatever stress life hurls at you.