S s

                 OH
                /
               /       NH
               \      /  2
                \____/
                     \
                      \
                       === O
                      /
                     /
                   HO

The problem here is that the sierra doesn't have enough of what we linguists refer to technically as ``oomph.'' Use ``Succotash'' instead.

Even on the best phones, ``ess'' sounds almost indistinguishable from ``eff.'' Most people just use ``Sam'' and ``Frank'' to distinguish these. You can try ``Foxtrot'' and ``Sierra,'' but people will just become confused, so if you're really not going to use the standard Sam and Frank, then you get more mileage from the SBF recommendations (Fandango and Succotash) than from the boring old FCC recommendations.

A symbol related to (s) is the downward-pointing arrow. For reactions that take place in a fluid solution, this indicates that a reaction product ``precipitates out.''

The other two common praenomina are Servius (Ser.) and Sextus (Sex.).

Many volatile sulfur compounds stink, and hell is traditionally scented with the stuff. Thomas Carlyle wrote of Napoleon III

His mind was a kind of extinct sulphur-pit.

(Historically, the predominant spellings in English have used ph. However, today sulfur is the standard spelling in the US and nowhere else in the English-speaking world. You've gotta love it: some patterns are consistent.)

You're not stupid (and even if you are, you prefer to be flattered that you're not) so I don't have to tell you that when S > 1, a solution is supersaturated, and now that I have, you feel condescended to. It's an occupational hazard of glossary compilers.

For a supersaturated vapor, S is the ratio of the gas (i.e., the pressure of the vapor) to the vapor pressure of the liquid phase (at the same temperature). At 0 °C, and atmospheric pressure, one can achieve supersaturations as high as 5 (i.e., relative humidity of 500%) in clean air. [Dirt of any sort nucleates.] Cool it further (increase S by decreasing equilibrium vapor pressure) and homogeneous nucleation takes place (fog).

Their ISU (Internet Services Unit) looks kind of central.

The domain code for Saudi Arabia, as well as the ISO country code generally (SA), is often mistaken for that of South Africa. South Africa's ccTLD is <.za>.

Take care in Italian not to confuse this with S.p.A., or with another S.A.

In Dutch the term corresponding to anonymous society is naamloze vennootschap (NV).

Hello, my name is Al and I am-- I am a logophile. I confess that I am powerless against the overwhelming force of words. The terrible state that my life has reached can be explained completely by words, and yet, so abjectly addicted am I that I still cannot bring myself to renounce words (in so many words), and I continue to resist total abstinence from words. (You may have noticed this yourself.) Finally, let me say that words cannot express my gratitude for the words of support you have given me here today, and for the stories you have shared.

Let's face it, this is ridiculous. The initial A has been enormously over-used in naming continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and Antarctica. (The rare term Southern Antarctica is roughly equivalent to the more common Central Antarctica. The Republic of North Antarctica has a website, but no ccTLD yet.)

The term became well-known in English after the Nazis used it as the name for their paramilitary organization. (It started out as a group of bodyguards for Nazi leaders, and evolved into a uniformed group of street hooligans tasked with intimidating the party's political enemies. Over time, the leadership security tasks were taken over by the SS. After the Nazi party came to power, the socialist-leaning SA worried Hitler's supporters among nationalist businessmen, and posed the threat of a coup. Evidence of a coup plot was manufactured by Himmler and Heydrich for Hitler's edification, just as the SS was being reengineered into a secret police. The SA was decapitated on the Night of the Long Knives (Saturday night to Sunday morning, June 30-July 1, 1934), during which the SS murdered probably a few hundred targets (SA leaders and socialist-leaning members, and scattered conservative potential problems).

The act gave the the US president broad authority to impose a range of economic sanctions and restrictions on Syria. The White House was initially reluctant to use the authority granted in it, but there was an apparent change of policy in early 2005.

The acronym expansion given (in Swedish) above stands for `Swedish Airplane Stock Company.' Hardly anyone now thinks of Saab as an acronym to be expanded, any more than one thinks that of laser. Hence, the company name is now an AAP-assisted pleonasm: Saab Aktiebolag.

SAARC publishes an Encyclopaedia of SAARC Nations, one volume for each country. It has the thick glue and coarse cloth binding that are the marks of any authentic South Asian publication (unkerned fonts are characteristic only for SA publications in Western alphabets). The last and least volume is for the Maldives.

I have to point out that there are some who don't see the wisdom of nonprofit broadcasting. They point out, with some justice, that a small town with only five stations playing top-40 and four playing classic rock'n'roll simply cannot afford to waste spectrum space on a rare musical taste. If fifty percent of the disposable income that is listening to the radio on Saturday afternoon needs to hear Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion, then by God fifty percent of radio stations should be playing Sweet Emotion on Saturday afternoon.

Is that a weird web-page sound effect, or is that my stomach? It's my stomach.

The SABC website gets a lot of its copy from Sapa.

This name is suggestive. In Spanish, sabio is `wise' and sabe is `he knows.'

Also in Spanish, tonto means `stupid' (the word estúpido is also available). Tonto used to call the Lone Ranger ``Kemo Sabe'' (originally spelled ``Kemo Sababay''). It sounds like a gringo mispronouncing quimo sabe, which means `gastric juice knows.' In the early episodes, the Lone Ranger also called Tonto ``Kemo Sabay.'' Actually, quimo (`chyme' in English) refers to the entire mix of stomach juices including partially digested food as well as enzymes and hydrochloric acid. The same word is used in Portuguese. But in Portuguese the word for stomach (estómago) is written without an accent. Can you believe we also have an entry for bolo? No one knows (nadie sabe) what ``Kemo Sabe'' really meant, although there is no shortage of guesses. (That link might expire; google the question.)

You probably thought that quimo meant `chemo.' You complete idiot! ¡Estúpido! The Spanish for chemo is quimio.

Actually, SABI itself (remember SABI?) is a bit of a misnomer. It's a ``news service that covers the South American market and Mexico. SABI provides extensive and comprehensive abstracts of articles from the main business Latin American newspapers. This daily newswire service covers newspapers, business and trade journals from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Mexico.'' (My italics.) Then again, in business circles, Miami is half-seriously called ``the capital of South America,'' so it stands to reason. More at the MIA entry.

You know (¿Sabes?), as I was rereading this entry later, I thought that the ``No one knows (nadie sabe) what'' was leading into a ``Shadow'' reference. Who knows -- maybe it was, in a shadowy way. The Shadow knows!

Oh yeah -- sacrum is cognate with the English word sacred. It's New Latin, short for Late Latin [os] sacrum (`sacred [bone]'), itself a translation of the Greek heiron [osteon]. How this bone came to be considered sacred, I am tempted to say, God only knows.

Wait! There are a bunch of student homepages, but I don't see an official page. Found it.

Despite the ugliness of the term, it has not just a usage but a meaning. For examples of the former, see Theories of Human Communication, 4th edn., by Stephen W. Littlejohn (Wadsworth, Belmont, 1992), p. 190 (ch.9).

This cleverly named law was first introduced in the US House of Representatives (as HR 4954) on the 127th anniversary of Einstein's birth. It was signed into law on Friday, the 13th of October 2006. One day and 514 years previously, a sailor aboard the Pinta had sighted land. On the 13th of October 1492, three Spanish ships made port, such as it was, on the Bahamian island of Guanahaní.

Category	Central Pressure	Wind Speed	Storm Surge	Damage
1	>28.94 in. Hg	74-95 MPH	4-5 feet	minimal
2	28.50 to 28.93	96-110	6-8	moderate
3	27.91 to 28.49	111-130	9-12	extensive
4	27.17 to 27.90	130-155	13-18	extreme
5	<27.17	>155	>18	catastrophic

When poly-Si gates began to be used, a clever way was found between the horns of this dilemma. The poly-Si gate is laid down before the source and drain, and the implantation mask contains a window that exposes the whole region from source to drain, including the gate. When the source and drain are created by ion implantation, the MOSFET channel beneath the gate is not doped because it is shielded from the ion beam by the poly-Si gate. The channel (i.e., the undoped region between source and drain) is thus ``self-aligned'' with the gate. [Strictly speaking, the channel is rarely ``undoped.'' It is simply doped to the appropriate level and not further doped by the source and drain implantations. In fact, because of surface states and gettering of impurities to the surface, the channel region may need pre-treatment before the gate is deposited. But in general, the channel is less heavily doped than the source and drain regions.] The self-alignment game also works with diffusion, but not as well: see DSA.

Okay, that was then (as recently as 1997, if my printed source is correct), and this is now. Well, by the time you read this it will also be then. The entry will be more recent, but you will be older. That's what it's all about. This SAGE has become a sealed acronym: ``SAGE - Mozilla Firefox.'' Oops, that was the title bar. It's ``SAGE Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Elders.''

Related links: ASGE, NOSCAR.

Architektur ist überhaupt die erstarrte Musik.
[Architecture in general is frozen music.]

-- Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854)
in Philosophie der Kunst [Philosophy of Art] (1809)

In Eckermann's famous record of conversation with Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, the 23 Mar. 1829 entry quotes ,,Ich habe unter meinen Papieren ein Blatt gefunden ... wo ich die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne.'' [I have found among my papers a sheet ... in which I call architecture frozen music.]

In the preceding, I have given standard translations which translate erstarren as `to freeze.' It's worth noting that the semantic fields of the two words are not quite equivalent. The verb frieren is a closer match to its cognate freeze, being the preferred word to describe the solidification of liquid associated with cooling. Although erstarren has a similar meaning, and is used in the expression corresponding to my blood ran cold, it is closer to `gel' or `congeal,' in the sense that lowered temperature is not a necessary component of the concept. Hence, given the ambiguity of such metaphors, a less poetic translation that nevertheless captures different aspects of the original expressions would be ``Architecture is music made solid.''

It is a commonplace among classicists that

A translation is a commentary.

An article appeared November 14, 2005, in the Arab News (``[Arab] Middle East's Leading English Language Daily'' based in Saudi Arabia), dateline Jeddah: ``Teacher Charged With Mocking Religion Sentenced to Jail.'' A high-school chemistry teacher was sentenced to three years in prison and 750 lashes -- 50 lashes per week for 15 weeks. The lashes are to be given in the public market in the town of Al-Bikeriya in Al-Qassim, so at least he gets out of the prison occasionally. If the article link expires, let me know and I'll put up some more details.

This word is cognate with the Old English word sæl (`hall'). The direct etymons of this word in English petered out early in the sixteenth century, but the Germanic root had been adopted in Romance, giving rise to the Spanish head term (spelled identically in Portuguese and Italian), and salle in French. The Italian augmentative form salone was adopted as salon in Spanish and French, and as salão in Portuguese, eventually giving rise to the English word saloon. Of course, the French salon is also used in English, though it's not completely assimilated. What this little history shows is that even when English loses, it gains. A word may try to sneak out of the language, but one or two of its descendants or cousins a few times removed will be sucked in. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

Okay: the salamis belonged to Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle. He was regarded as the Pentagon's top arms control expert. He is a gourmet, and like a good Cold Warrior he came prepared. In particular, he came prepared for the reported inadequacy of Reykjavik's restaurants and the expectation of all-night sessions, with the two salamis. He kept them cold by putting them on the window sill of his hotel room (fourth floor), where they were apparently blown off by a storm. Icelandic security guards successfully repulsed the aerial attack. Perle was quoted in an October 15 article as saying that the salamis were ``smashed to smithereens.'' They were ``Hebrew National'' brand.

On April 25, 2004, two teenagers in Lee County, Florida, were arrested on arson-related charges. The unidentified minors (a high school and a middle school student) had reportedly placed an incendiary device in a wooded lot near some houses a few blocks from Interstate 75 in Fort Myers, but it had failed to go off. Local residents were evacuated after it was found, and authorities said it could have started a serious fire. The Southwest Florida Bomb Squad blew up the device around 11 a.m. the same morning.

The device itself sounds like one of those science experiments you do with stuff you find around the house. It consisted of a twenty-ounce beverage bottle filled with ``homemade napalm'' (not clear if this wasn't just gasoline) and two aerosol spray cans, tied together using kielbasa links. News reports described it as a ``kielbasa bomb'' and ``sausages of mass destruction.''

Considering the degree of sophistication of the device, I wonder if they weren't counting on it to become some hungry stray's suicide bomb. The entire episode sounds just stupid enough that it might reflect a technical conception based on sympathetic magic. You know -- soda bottles and spray cans both contain liquids under pressure that can sometimes like, you know, go boom! Did the bomb squad really check the ``homemade napalm'' thing? Maybe this was just a snack: soda, kielbasa, and spray cheese. Yum. (Preferably a diet soda, to neutralize the fat in the other foods.) The brand of kielbasa was not identified.

At 4:30 pm on April 18, 2005, an incident occurred involving sausage as a missile, but no explosive. A 46-year-old man was driving home from work. It was a nice day and he had the window down. As reported by Brian Farmer of the PA, he saw a car coming the other way and suddenly ``felt a searing pain in his nose. He managed to stop his car without hitting anyone else'' and passers-by came to his aid. He had been hit by a frozen sausage. A spokesman for the Essex Ambulance Service said that ``[h]is nose was undoubtedly fractured and he had lost quite a lot of blood ... he decided not to go to hospital but has been left with a very painful and swollen nose.'' The AP reported from London that the Ambulance Service spokesman spoke on condition of anonymity, but this is probably just an interpolated conjecture. According to the Essex Evening Echo, Essex Ambulance Service paramedic Dave Hilton said he had not come across an incident like it in 30 years on the job. The victim's decision leaves me with questions about the UK's NHS. Absent further details on his assailant's vehicle, I suppose that this was a left-handed shot. There was no further information on the sausage.

You know, this kind of story is a headline-writer's bonanza. Here are some of the better headlines under which the last story was reported:

• ``South Woodham Ferrers: Banger Mashes Nose.'' (Essex Evening Gazette; the injured motorist lives in South Woodham Ferrers, and the incident occurred as he approached the intersection of Inchbonnie Road and Broughton Road there.)
• ``Banger and Smash.'' (Very short item in Liverpool Daily Echo.)
• ``When Pork Flies.'' (A link from the <FOXNews.com>.)
• ``Flying Frozen Sausage.'' (From the CBS News website. Pretty lame, but the next item was ``Flying for Peanuts.'')
• ``Food is biting back.'' (Essex Chronicle.) Oh -- my error. This is an item out of South Woodham Ferrers from the week before. It was about a farmers' market for local produce, including a ``variety of goods ranging from sausages to venison and herbs to olives.'' First time I recall encountering the term ``meat farmer.'' (A Mr. Brew.) Jan White, of Althorne Beef, said that with ``television programmes and media articles about the origins of food and how it is treated by some retailers, people are coming back to the markets.'' Aww, people worry too much.

Alright, enough about sausage ordnance. Here's an item out of Massachusetts, a highly advanced blue state. In Newton, a dormitory community for Harvard and some other nearby universities, there was a domestic dispute on January 13, 2005. A woman showed up at about 12:30 am at the home of her ex-boyfriend's female friend. She argued with the two, striking him in the face and kicking him, and threatening to kill her. This story earned its place in this entry on account of the female friend's car. The ex-girlfriend apparently placed several slabs of salami on the trunk of the friend's car. By the time officers investigated, they found the car's paint peeling. According to Newton Police Sgt. Ken Dangelo, chemicals used to preserve the meat had damaged the car's paint job. Initial charges were assault and battery with a dangerous weapon for using the heel of her shoe during the fight (stilettoes?), threats to commit a crime, and malicious destruction of property.

The salt has the somewhat unusual property that the pressure of its liquid-vapor critical point is below atmospheric pressure. Hence, when heated it sublimates. Ancient manuscripts contain a number of recipes for producing sal ammoniac, but many of these appear to be either ignorant or purposely misleading. The primary method for producing it was essentially distillation from camel dung: when camel dung was burned, the smoke contained fumes of the sublimated salt. The salt would condense as a solid white film on a surface (glass was convenient) placed in the smoke. (The salt is water-soluble, but like ordinary salt it does occur in natural deposits. See salmiac.)

I've had a tough time getting ahold of detailed information on camel dung, but it is not surprising that ammonia salts should be present. The camel's unusual and extreme metabolism is adapted to dry conditions, and an important adaptation is to urinate as little as possible. The main reason that mammals urinate is to get rid of the nitrogen waste from protein breakdown various comes indicates the origin. Interconversion among different inorganic nitrogenous compounds is not too difficult metabolically. Birds eliminate nitrogen through the cloaca in the form of uric acid (so wash your car), mammals (most of them, anyway) eliminate it in the form of urea. (I'll have to look it up again, but in the interests of publishing this page soon I'll rely on memory to assert that fish generally eliminate nitrogen through their gills as ammonia.) Many micro-organisms can convert urea and uric acid to ammonia. Presumably camels have evolved ways to eliminate nitrogen in their dung in relatively dry form. It might be eliminated as urea and be converted to ammonium chloride by bacteria in the camel gut.

A lot of camel dung was collected in the deserts east of the Egypt and south of Cyrene. In an oasis of this desert there was a temple of the god Amon (you will recall that Alexander took a side trip there before founding or rechristening the Egyptian port of Alexandria). The desert took its name from that oasis temple, and the salt took its name from the desert.

There were some trivial variants of the term sal ammoniac (including, in English, sal ammoniack, sal ammonyak, sal amoniak, etc.). There is a large subgroup of old names with the adjective beginning in arm- (e.g., sal armaniac, sal armaniack, and even sal armagnac). These seem to have arisen from a Latin spelling hammoniacum (with silent aitch) that was interpreted as a misspelling of harmoniacum.

For centuries, sal ammoniac was used as a cleanser. My grandmother was still using it in pre-WWII Germany. Here's another application:

ALPINE EVENTS
A race should be held on hard snow. The snow should, if possible, be so hard that no holes are made when contestants fall. If snow falls during the race, the Chief of Course shall ensure that the newly fallen snow be packed or swept from time to time. Course maintenance should be done continuously and indiscriminately throughout an alpine race. Recommended as a snow additive to lower the freezing point and harden the snow is ammonium chloride for above freezing conditions and sodium chloride (rock salt) for below freezing conditions. These preparations should be added to the snow on the course at least one-half hour before race time.

1. If you will settle for less than we're willing to pay, that's okay with us.
2. We don't want our less-well-paid employees to learn what we're paying our better-paid-employees. Management understands that knowledge is power, and stupid as they are, they realize that that knowledge has to be the secrets they keep.

One reference: C. K. Lau, Y. C. See, D. B. Scott, J. M. Bridges, S. M. Perna, and R. D. Davies, IEDM Technical Digest, p. 714 (1982).

Salmiac is found as a sublimate at active volcanoes. (It can also be found at inactive volcanoes if you can just keep it dry.

You can get an idea of how the formation process by pouring out saucers of ammonia and (carefully!) hydrochloric acid, and placing them next to each other. The ammonia vapor and hydrogen chloride gas react to form sal ammoniac:

                         NH  (g)  +  HCl (g)  -->  NH Cl (s) .
                           3                         4

1. An ionically bonded compound. The product, with water, of the reaction of an ordinary acid and base. For example, with A and C representing an anion and cation of valence -1 and +1:
   HC (acid) + AOH (base) --> AC (salt) + H₂O

2. A particular salt that gave this class of compounds its name: NaCl. NaCl is the main ingredient in table salt. This is the kind you sprinkle on eggs.

   Pure NaCl is hygroscopic: it forms a hydrate and cakes. In order to prevent this and allow for smooth pouring, table-salt manufacturers add an ``anti-caking agent'' such as magnesium carbonate.

   When salt is used for its hygroscopic properties, the Mg(CO₃) is excluded. One such application is in deicing sidewalks and roads: salt is effective both because of the molal freezing point depression of water and because salt is hygroscopic. (A solution of water and salt freezes at a lower temperature than pure water. The molal freezing point depression constant of water is 1.86 C/m. m here stands for molality: a one-molal (1m) solution has one mole of solute per kilogram of solvent.)

   Jewish dietary law (kashrut) proscribes the consumption of blood, and so requires animals to be kashered (or, increasingly, ``kasherized'') -- that is, the blood must be removed. ``Kosher salt'' is used for this purpose. It's not called kosher because it's kosher -- all salt is kosher. It's called kosher because it's used to make meat kosher. Since hydration begins at the surface of the salt crystal, coarse crystals keep better. And since this salt isn't intended for sprinkling on food, there's no reason to make it fine, so kosher salt is coarser than table salt. Some people taste and dislike the anti-caking agents in table salt. Frankly, if the salt you're using is going to be dissolved in water before it reaches the table, there's likely no need for you to use table salt. Use kosher salt or pickling salt (same product, different purpose).

   Ice cream salt also uses no anticaking agents (and is sold coarse), but since it's not intended for ingestion (it doesn't go in the ice cream; it goes in the ice-water slurry around the ice-cream maker), maybe you shouldstick to the other products for cooking. Popcorn salt is an even finer grade of table salt.

   There's a Salt Institute where you can learn more.

The Salt Archive has as its stated purpose ``to collect evidence to support the theory that Common Salt and its short supply from the then known sources had catastrophic influence on the development of ancient civilizations.'' I would take this with a grain.

can be salted in the shell, by applying a salt solution and then drying. To speed penetration of the solution through the shell, a small amount of wetting agent may be added to the water. Generally, pressure and vacuum are applied intermittently to increase the rate at which the solution reaches the interior of the shell.

The idea behind the alternating cycle of pressure and vacuum is similar to the idea behind repeated flushing of a vessel that can't be completely emptied. Since the air inside the unbroken peanut shells can't be completely removed in a single step, it is progressively forced out. At the beginning of a cycle, water might be applied at, say, 120 psi. This is about 8 times atmospheric pressure. (It's going to be exactly 8.000 at some moment as a cold front pushes through after a warm day, okay? We're going to take it as exactly 8 for purposes of explanation.) Assuming (it's a fairly accurate assumption) that air behaves as an ideal gas, then under maximum pressure the gas is compressed to one ninth of its atmospheric-pressure volume. The pressurization is usually applied for about 4 to 8 minutes (that would be about one quarter to one half of a kilosecond, for all you good people who don't understand stuff that isn't in metric units). If this is enough time for mechanical equilibrium to be achieved, then water (incompressible to a good approximation) has filled 8/9 of the initial air volume in the shell.

[I'm also ignoring the fact that the peanut is compressible and that the shell has nonzero thickness. If the peanut is substantially more compressible than water, then the air's fraction of fluid (gas plus liquid) volume is reduced by a factor even greater than 9. I do not have peanut compressibility data handy, sorry. And yes, I'm ignoring the solubility of air in brine and in peanut, and of water in air and in peanut. Look, it's approximate, okay? Science is like that.]

1. A Latin adjective (ablative neuter singular of salvus) meaning `uninjured, intact, safe.'
2. In medieval Latin, it occurs as a sort of preposition (really a prepositive adjective, but the gender isn't controlled by the noun, as it should be; let's call it a function word), in legal expressions like salvo servicio forinsico (`foreign service excepted'), salvo jure (`without prejudice to the right of ...').
3. In Spanish, a preposition with essentially the medieval Latin sense, which can usually be rendered in English as `with the exception of' or `save for,' and occasionally `save.'
4. In Spanish also, salvo means `I save,' a conjugation of the verb salvar, from the Latin verb salvare. Note that the saving here has a more restricted sense than the English cognate. To save money is ahorrar dinero.
5. In English, the legal Latin word was naturalized as a noun, so the salvo of a right is a provision that a certain engagement or ordinance shall not be binding if it would interfere that right, and more generally a salvo is reservation or a saving stipulation or legal provision.

``SonnECK, not sonic.''

You can avoid these problems by joining the Society for EthnoMusicology, but you may have to shift the orientation of your scholarship. (But that's nothing, my friend Lee started out as a composer of art [classical] music, and ended up as a music theorist. It's just as well, he didn't really look like a composer.) Also consider the American Musicological Society (AMS).

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1995. ACLS has an overview.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

-- William Seward Burroughs

-- or maybe Thellonious Sphere Monk, I dunno.

See also the Society of Architectural History (SAH) and the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS).

``The Society for Ancient Medicine fosters the scholarly study of ancient medicine broadly understood: not only Greek and Roman medicine, but also ancient Near Eastern, medieval European, Arabic, Armenian, and traditional Indian medicine, and indeed medicine from all pre-modern cultures.''

...
And then the witch doctor
He told me what to do:

He said that

Oo-ee, oo ah ah ting, tang,
Walla-walla, bing bang --
Oo-ee, oo ah ah ting tang
Walla-walla bang bang!

(``Artist'': David Seville; Song: ``Witch Doctor'')

Alas, there does not appear to be a ``SAMHSARA.''

I'm sure you'll want more. Get it from Calvin Broadus.

Of course this is unbalanced reporting, but it might not be unfair. It can be perfectly reasonable and efficient for journalists to look exclusively for the man who bites the dog. On the other hand, in a large enough universe of men, there will always be some man that bites a dog. To report an event is to imply that it is newsworthy. Hence, in that large universe, to report an instance of something that anyone could predict would be bound to happen occasionally may be understood to imply that it is happening unexpectedly frequently. That is what can make reporters' selective sampling irresponsible and dishonest.

Kurt Schlichter is a lieutenant colonel in the California National Guard. A veteran of the first Gulf war, he's now stateside and commands the 1-18th Cavalry, 462-man RSTA (Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition) squadron attached to the 40th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. The last media representative he spoke with before I contacted him was a New York Times stringer who wanted Schlichter's help in tracking down guardsmen who were ``having trouble because they got mobilized.''

I'd like to add that, refreshingly for a Swiss organization, they don't force you to read everything three or four times (in German, French, Italian, and maybe Swiss German or Romansch). The first time I visited, the default German webpages also had French Doppelgänger (in a folder named frz, presumably for französisch). When I checked again (2006) they'd come up with an even more clever idea: ``All SANAS information is in English.'' Except for scattered titles and links like Nouvelles and züruck. I trust the scholars of Mexico, Quebec, and the Navaho Reservation are up in arms.

To sanction a practice, situation, or event is to approve it officially or formally, while to sanction a country (more often ``to impose sanctions'') is to disapprove using similar authority, typically with the institution of formal impediments. (Trade sanctions are in the news.)

Sanguine, meaning both sanguinary and healthy, is similar to these. In this case as in that of sanction, the usage of the word in its different senses tends to take different forms or have different collocations.

Of course, you knew all this. You may not have been aware that to table has opposite meanings in US and Commonwealth parliamentary usage: In Canada (.ca), a law to be taken up for discussion is tabled -- one imagines the bill placed upon a table for examination. In the US, when discussion of a bill under consideration is to be suspended, the bill is also tabled -- one imagines a bill that was being read to be put down on a table for possible future consideration.

Benjamin Spock, the author, eventually became chairman of the national board, which changed its name to SANE, A Citizens' Organization for a Sane World. The group eventually split over an internal rule excluding members of the Communist Party from also being members of SANE. The Spock faction was against the rule; the Cousins faction in favor. The Spock faction won and the group became marginalized.

Norman Thomas was another prominent member.

This will give you an idea:

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Laura Ingraham are all Great Americans but they are each, individually and collectively, participating in the destruction of our national political discourse and national existence simply. I make this statement with all due care and regard because each of these media pundits has achieved noteworthy and important attention and audience from a large segment of average Americans. Just a few short years ago, prior to Limbaugh's breakthrough radio program and the subsequent appearance and explosive growth of conservative weblogs, these same Americans were subjected to a steady diet of a monopolized media-generated and media-dominated liberalism. The media-drumbeat in America, and the West generally, advocating directly or indirectly for a Liberal-Progressive World State, has been and continues to be supported by a university-trained Elite corps of ``professorial intellectuals'' and ``experts.'' These Elites in turn very often end up in diplomatic, bureaucratic, and technocratic positions throughout government at all levels, further exacerbating the problem of the Liberal bias in America. Granted, without the Limbaugh and Hannity voices, Dan Rather would still be anchoring CBS; but without the Limbaugh and Hannity rhetorical seduction, Americans would see the danger of the World State as very much imbedded in the discourse of democracy, which is simply another name for the Open Society.

Maybe I should have started with this: ``The far more dangerous Liberal bias is found today throughout the Democratic Party and in the far left advocates of the anti-America crowd as well as the moderate to conservative wings of the Republican Party and even on conservative talk radio.''

1. The ability to stay calm in a crisis or catastrophe: self-possession, imperturbability.
2. A demonstration of this ability: equanimity.

From the French sang-froid, `cold blood.'

Sangfroid is a notch above stoicism: you have to be not so much resigned as purposely functional. Also, strictly speaking, sangfroid requires the ability to stay cool through the heat of one's own disaster. It's no trick to be philosophical about other people's tsuris (cf. Schadenfreude).

Can you believe it?! I don't have a Santa Claus entry! Until I can devise a permanent fix for this problem, please visit the (provisional) Moore entry.

Please now pop about three levels off the digression stack.

Because the nasalization of the vowel is difficult to distinguish from a straightforward nasal consonant (and presumably because of aphesis of the final o), o dicionário de Morais (formally Grande Dicionário da Língua Portugesa, 10/e 1949) finds it necessary to warn against the sam and san misspellings of this common word.

On the other hand, the Latin insanus was restricted to mental ill health. This carried over only incompletely to Romance. In Portuguese, insânia and insanidade mean `insanity,' and insano means `insane.' This is the general pattern, certainly for Galician, Catalan, and French. In Spanish too, insania is `insanity,' but insano is `unhealthy' (more specifically, `deleterious to health'). Wait, wait! It's not just Spanish. Italian has settled into the standard pattern, but insàno once also had the sense of `ill, sick.' Anyway, I was trying to make the case that somehow the influence of insanus in Romance was relatively weak, but it's a weak case. Be that as it may, in English, apparently under the influence of the restricted semantic field of insane, the word sane also came to be restricted, referring now only to mental health. Of course, English can afford to be profligate, having other words to cover other portions of the sanus semantic field. For one there's sound, cognate with Dutch gezond, German gesund, and Yiddish gezint. The ge- (written with a yogh in Old English) became a vowel in Middle English (isund, ysonde), at the same time that the aphetic form (ultimately spelled sound) became increasingly common. [A similar process was sometimes arrested before the initial vowel was lost, hence German genug is cognate with enough.]

The convergence of são and São in Portuguese, cognates with sano and San in Spanish, is reminiscent of a similar situation in German and English. The English words hail [the verb], hale, heal, healthy, and whole are all derived from a common source of related words. These may originally have had a principal sense of `healthy' or of `whole' with a connotation of impregnable (think of ``physical integrity''). Through either of these senses the words might have become associated with deity either before or at the beginning of Christian proselytization. Anyway, German has a similar constellation of words, and as it ended up, the noun Heil has among its senses both `salvation' in the religious sense and `well-being.' (As you probably know if you've seen a WWII movie or two, Heil is used as a salutation also, parallel to English ``Hail!'' or Latin ``Salve!'')

As of early 2002, familiarity with SAP and the ability to install it (which includes extracting data from legacy-system records) is one of the dearest (i.e., highest-paid common skills in the IT field.

Nonterminal p-sounds are aspirated by English-speakers. The pi-phi letter combination that is represented ``pph'' in the English word Sapphic (designating, for example, the eponymous style of poetry) was originally also an aspirated p sound. The eff sound represents a corruption in languages that don't observe the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. A similar thing happened with the Hebrew pe (which used a dot to indicate lack of aspiration). Interestingly, with the beyt (which became beta in Greek), aspiration was transformed into a difference in articulation -- the undotted beyt (i.e., aspirated; what is written ``bh'' in transliteraton of, say, a Hindi or Sanskrit word like Mahabharata) is now pronounced with a vee sound. Note that in Hebrew, the b/v distinction is not phonemic except in foreign words that have not been integrated into the language: context determines which allophone occurs. Greek beta is now pronounced vita. So it goes. In Arabic, the b/p distinction of the original Semitic alphabet is absent. (That's discussed in one or two other places in this glossary. If you haven't seen it already, keep reading; it's bound to appear eventually.)

SAPLF publishes a Bulletin, and in 2003 a special issue of the Bulletin was published (volume XII, no. 1, 206 pp., two languages, USD 15 incl. domestic postage), ``devoted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir - a late contribution to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Le deuxième sexe.'' The table of contents lists one article entitled ``Pourquoi reparler de Simone de Beauvoir.'' My sentiments precisely. They don't actually come out and say it directly, but I infer that they regard Beauvoir as a philosopher. It's not a problem for me, but this kind of thinking could have consequences.

If you think of a college as being divided into different departments in the same way as a hospital is divided into wards, then SAPLF, with or without surviving in-patients, would be something like an intensive care unit.

For another acronym ending in LF, see INaLF. You know, if the French language were simply eliminated, that would free up a lot of acronyms to be retasked for more pressing purposes. Especially in Canada (to say nothing of Europe).

Arnold Lobel created a series of children's picture books about two pals named Frog and Toad. From their clothes, it is clear that Frog and Toad are both male. (Lobel died of AIDS in 1987, age 54, so there was some talk. You probably want to know: he was survived by his wife, also an illustrator, and their two adult children.) The characters' names presented the Spanish translator, Pablo Lizcano, with a gender problem. All Spanish nouns have grammatical gender, but for most animals, and especially for wild animals, there is a single noun, with a single grammatical gender, for each animal regardless of the number of natural genders that animal exhibits. ``Frog and Toad'' in Spanish is ``Rana y Sapo,'' and while sapo is male, rana is a female noun. Lizcano's solution was to invent the name Sepo, which by the usual rule is male. Quite unnecessarily, it seems, the character named Frog in English (and who somewhat more closely resembles a frog than a toad) has been given the name Sapo (`Toad,' remember?).

Unless, until, and probably even if I write a Matt Groening entry, this here will be the place to mention the Akbar and Jeff thing. They are the principal characters of Groening's ``Life In Hell.'' Here's a snippet of an interview he did for Flux Magazine in 1995:

Flux: let's talk about your `Life In Hell' comic strip. Point blank: are Akbar and Jeff gay?

Groening: Here's my standard reply: Akbar and Jeff are either brothers or lovers--or both. Whatever offends you most, that's what they are. [pause] Yeah, of course they're gay! Big commercial mistake on my part, by the way. A big brewery approached me wanting to have Akbar and Jeff promote their beer. ...

It seems I don't mention it elsewhere, so I'll mention here that translating the lyrics of (appropriately) Madonna's ``La Isla Bonita'' (`the pretty island') poses a gender difficulty also. As I heard it, she whispers the line ``Me dijo que te quiere.'' An accurate literal translation of this would be `He or she told me that he or she wants you [or that he or she loves you, or that you are dear to him or her].' The gender of the third person (he or she) is uncertain -- from that sentence at least. To be honest, not one web page I can find agrees with my recollection of the lyric, and over a thousand web pages disagree with me and claim that the song contains the at-best stilted line ``Te dijo te amo'' (`He or she said to you I love you'). (The Spanish is stilted. The English is less stilted, probably because the Spanish is really gringo. At least a thousand include the merely unusual ``El dijo que te ama'' (`He [or almost It was he that] said that he loves you'). As Gary and I and some graduate students drove to a conference many years ago, I replayed that bit about twenty times in my earphone. I really think that everybody else on the web is relying directly or indirectly on liner notes that may correspond to only one or some of the versions released. Gary says he'll look for the cassette.

Fat is glycerine esterized with a fatty acid at each of its three hydroxyl (OH) groups, and saponification is an ester-to-salt reaction -- something like a strong-base-to-weak-base reaction, where the fatty acid form organic salts with the alkali ions.

Fat for soap comes as a byproduct of meat production. Where exactly the fat is diverted for soap production is a matter of practical economics. Nowadays slaughterhouses divert a fraction of their production. In my grandparents' day, excess fat could be gotten from butchers. Further back, people would trim fat when they carved up their own animals. If you didn't have fat you didn't have soap, and you used an alternative (see QS and almond powder entries). I suppose that in lean years, people went dirty as well as hungry.

See the hard water entry for how soap works or doesn't. It will be clear from that entry that one wants to use soft water for soap production. In the old days, when people normally made their own soap, reverse osmosis and demineralized water were not available. You don't need much water to make soap, so distilling was practical enough (if you already had the still for other purposes), but so was rainwater and some well water.

A quite good soap-making site is part of the Old Timer Page.

The actual process of soap-making can get involved when you consider fragrance (see EO and FO) and color. A central constraint is that fat and lye don't diffuse very well in soap, so the last bit of saponification takes a long time. This can be mitigated by mechanical mixing (blending, stirring) and by using emulsifying agents (like DPG). In the end, soap made with only the minimum ingredients tends to remain harshly basic (pH about 9) from unreacted lye. Mild acids may be used to neutralize the soap, but strong acids just drive the saponification reaction backwards. Some fat may be added late in the process. This is intended not to saponify, but to soften the soap. (You might ask why not just use excess fat from the start. The answer is mostly that by adding fat late, you can use nicer but more expensive oils -- particularly vegetable oils with desirable anti-microbial properties -- without having those oils wasted by being converted to soap with the rest of the oils.)

See also the 99.44 entry.

I don't know what the first pee is doing there, since it's not pronounced.

``Headquarters Air Combat Command (ACC), through the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center (AFRCC), is the single federal agency responsible for coordinating search and rescue activities in the continental United States. [Hawaii and Alaska -- you're on your own.] It also provides search and rescue assistance to Canada and Mexico. Besides coordinating actual SAR missions, the AFRCC is active in formulating SAR agreements, plans and policy for the continental United States.''

A high school pal of mine explained the formula for determining the expected annual family contribution: one quarter of the value of the family home. Of course, that was many years ago, before the big eighties inflation in college costs. That outstripped residential-property appreciation, so the formula must be different.

The book Athens, by Christian Meier, begins with the story of the evacuation of Athens in 480 BCE (ahead of advancing Persian troops, delayed heroically at Thermopylae by a small Spartan rear guard under the command of Leonidas). The Athenians retreated from Attica across the water to Salamis. The maps on the inside front and back covers label this body of water the Sardonic Gulf.

For those who prefer not to contract SARS, as well as for those who would like to attempt suicide by contracting it and spending an unpleasant final week or two on a respirator, a useful piece of information is the incubation period. That is, the time people remain asymptomatic after infection. The incubation period is typically about a week, but has been as long as two weeks in some cases. (In many cases it's impossible to say precisely, since the particular chain of transmission, or at least the moment of infection, is unknown.) So if you want to catch SARS from people who don't seem to have the disease, your best bet is to hang out with people who may have come in contact with the virus in the past week or so. Visit the Middle Kingdom.

This new disease, which flared in Hong Kong in March 2003, was eventually recognized to be the same as the disease that had affected many hundreds of people in neighboring Guangzhou (what we all used to call Canton, and what is also called Guangdong) province of southern China since the previous November. In Guangzhou, and later elsewhere in China, the severity of the outbreak has been repeatedly masked by government censorship, or more precisely by a culture of secrecy and dishonesty.

The largest initial concentration of victims outside Guangzhou province has been in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, SARS is not called SARS but ``atypical pneumonia.'' BusinessWeek correspondent Bruce Einhorn and others have suggested that the SARS name is avoided because of the similarity to SAR, the technical designation of Hong Kong in terms of its political status. Then again, in Guangzhou, it is also called (the Chinese for) `atypical pneumonia,' which is a reasonable alternative to a not-very-Chinese-pronounceable Roman-character acronym. For more on the acronym, see the next SARS entry. Have a look at the ARS entry as well.

In French, SARS is called syndrome respiratoire aigu sévère as well as pneumopathie atypique. In German it is Schweres Akutes Respiratorisches Syndrom. In Italian, Sindrome Acuta Respiratoria Severa.

Even though you came here to find out about SARS as quickly as possible, you find your attention wandering, and you ask yourself whether ``there could be an etymological connection between the German word schwer and the Latin word severus.'' Semantically, it seems not unreasonable: the German word means `heavy' or `difficult' and the sense can be stretched comfortably to overlap that of the English word severe. The Latin word severus, of course, has meanings close to the English and French terms derived from it. (The English verb sever, OTOH, has a separate Latin etymology.) Coincidentally, I got to wondering the same thing myself, so I hopped on the forklift and went to pull Pokorny off the shelf. Julius Pokorny's book Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch [English: `Big book of wild-ass guesses'] lists both words, and lists them as coming from distinct (but partly homophonic) Indoeuropean roots. One root (Pokorny p. 1151) is [conjectured to have occurred as] *uer- and *suer-, and had meanings related to `balancing,' hence schwer, `heavy.' The Latin word came from a distinct root (p. 1165) that took forms *uer- and *uer<shwa> meaning `[demonstrating] friendliness.' (Why don't we have a word like that?) This led to words meaning `true' and to the negated form se-verus, `without friendliness.' If you want to defend the claim that linguistics is a science, one of your stronger pieces of evidence is the fact that the conclusions seem ridiculous.

In other SARS-related language news, on April 25, 2003, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines named her Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit SARS Czar. Why didn't dubya think of that? (Uh, thank you, that suggestion has already been submitted.) Dayrit was given sweeping powers, including the authority to call upon the Armed Forces, the police and other government agencies to compel public compliance and order quarantine, and the power to order the examination of incoming and outgoing vessels and to suspend classes or close schools to prevent the spread of the disease.

In a speech the following May 15, however, President Aroyo was already saying ``[i]lan ba ang biktima ng SARS sa Pilipinas, 10 [actually 12; she was unaware of two newly confirmed cases], ibaba pa sa walo dahil yung dalawa na merong pinadala ang blood test sa Hapon, pagbalik negative pala. Walo ang nagkaroon ng SARS at dalawa ang namatay.'' I felt that you'd prefer to read it in her own words. The English-language publication BusinessWorld felt the same way (``Asian meet held to save SARS-hit travel sector,'' p. 12 of the 16 May 2003 edition).

Another early adopter was Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). chairman Morris Chang named deputy chief executive Tseng Fan-chen the company's ``SARS Czar.'' (In Britain there's been talk of question whether a SARS Tsar should be named.)

Data from national health authorities are tabulated daily except Sundays by WHO. Initially, the only explicit indication of freshness of the data was release time, usually a specific hour around 15:00 GMT+1. After April 16, 2003, the tabulations have indicated the date of the latest update for each nation's or region's data.

Under a variety of conditions -- i.e., in a variety of theoretical models -- the numbers of cases and deaths increase exponentially (equivalently, the logarithms of these numbers increase linearly in time) until a substantial fraction of the susceptible population has been exposed. Changes in behavior, treatment, quarantine, or other policy, if effective, should be detectable by a change in the doubling time of either of these numbers. All other things being equal, cumulated statistics should minimize the fractional error due to statistical fluctuations and allow those changes to be detected most clearly. Of course, all things are not equal. In particular, data from the PRC have been inaccurate (falsified at various levels) and have not been timely. Also, the US data have been suspect in a different way. The CDC and WHO case definitions do not correspond precisely, so in its cumulative reports WHO initially treated ``suspect cases under investigation'' from the US as comparable to ``probable cases'' elsewhere. By the WHO report of April 19, this had led to the following anomaly: the US had 220 reported cases, the third-largest number among countries or regions reporting, and no reported deaths. The next three countries were Singapore, Canada, and Viet Nam, with 177, 132, and 63 cases, and 16, 12, and 5 deaths respectively. The next week, CDC physicians stopped uttering inanities like ``we've just been incredibly lucky'' and started reporting probable cases.

The following table gives the cumulative number of cases and deaths as tabulated by WHO. Certain subtotals extracted from WHO's (I had to write that) official reports are given in parenthesis: when numbers appear in a format #1 (#2, #3), #1 is worldwide, #2 excludes all of the PRC other than Hong Kong, and #3 excludes all of the PRC. Furthermore, because I can't find probable-case numbers for the US from the early period, and because the numbers were relatively small, I have recomputed the earlier numbers by excluding the originally reported ``suspected'' numbers and assuming the numb