T t

More interesting, especially in close elections, is the demographic structure -- the political geography, in a sense -- of Pennsylvania. The main population concentration in Pennsylvania is the Philadelphia metropolitan area in the southeast. The second-largest is the southwestern region that was originally built up by mining and manufacturing -- main city Pittsburgh. The rest of the state is called the T. This is not really a homogeneous area, including as it does the port of Erie, the state capital Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Dutch country, Allentown, and the Poconos, but it's a convenient term nonetheless.

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

Aviv is the Hebrew word for Spring (the season, not the hydrological feature; you realized this because I wouldn't capitalize just any noun). Putting all this together, we see that Tel Aviv could be Anglicized to Springhill. Actually, aviv has a more technical meaning associated with barley ripening, and gives its name to the corresponding month, starting around the time of the vernal equinox. Aviva is a common Hebrew woman's name.

The TAAS was instituted around 1991 by his Democratic predecessor Ann Richards, a woman best remembered for making fun of W's father at the 1988 Democratic Convention (I think that was it). It was sweet revenge for dad when W won that statehouse.

The TAAS is primarily an instrument of state educational policy, since various penalties and a few incentives are associated with schools' pass rates on the test, particularly at tenth grade and with particular attention to separately tabulated scores for blacks and Hispanics.

Steadily increasing scores on the test, and a decreasing gap between white and nonwhite students, have been called the ``Texas Miracle.'' This is not a complete fraud, since schools statewide have been feverishly ``teaching to the test.'' This has come partly at the expense of non-tested subjects (i.e., dumbing-down of curriculum to the level of the minimal-standards test, as well as shift of class time and other resources away from science, history, etc.), but it has also involved increased overall dedication to teaching, prompting the TFT to support the TAAS.

Most of the apparent steady improvement, however, reflects illegitimate factors. Independent authorities have found that the already-easy tests have been getting progressively easier. Strong indirect evidence for this claim is the fact that Texas scores on almost all other standardized tests have shown little or no improvement. In many large school districts, there have been suspiciously large increases in the number of students categorized as learning-disabled or non-English-proficient (and hence exempt from inclusion in test averages). There are indications that marginal students have been pushed into GED programs, where they do not count as drop-outs but also do not take the TAAS. In various cases that have been settled or are being prosecuted, it appears that test forms have been altered, good students' ethnicities reclassified, and scores simply misreported or not reported.

Some inconsistent correlations suggest widespread fraud, but perhaps the clearest sign that the numbers are being cooked is in the official drop-out rate, which the Texas Education Agency reports as having fallen from an annual 6.1 percent in 1989-90 to 1.6 percent in 1998-9. The latter figure is impossible to square with graduation numbers that are about 70% of enrollment numbers for the same cohorts in seventh or ninth grade.

For a bit more, including the article source of some of the opinions above, see the Mandate of Heaven entry.

     More effective for graphical browsers, and recommended in some HTML books, is to use a transparent graphic and control the space with the width parameter (define the height also, or some browsers will scale that).  One problem with the transparent-graphic approach is that unless you control the font size (and the client doesn't over-ride), all bets are off.  Another problem is that it doesn't work with nongraphical browsers.

What works:
Nonbreaking spaces (coded as   or  ). For example:
          
          
          
          
              
                  

Yeah, it's ugly, but it's fairly reliable. ``El que quiere celeste, que le cueste'' as they say. Also, if you want double-spaces after your periods, you can achieve that by inserting a   between the final punctuation and the white-space following it. (The double-spacing is primarily an English-language practice. It began as an attempt to reproduce in typing the slightly larger-than-normal spacing that typesetters use at the end of a sentence. The legibility-enhancing space is nominally one-and-a-half em's, I think. LaTeX has a declaration \frenchspacing to turn off this feature.)

Santoyo wrote then that ``hoy no se habla ... de la Mesa, sino de la Tabla Redonda...'' [`today no one speaks ... of the Table, but of the Round Board...']. Googling in January 2006, I found that ``mesa redonda'' was about 12 times more common than ``tabla redonda'' on pages with ``rey Arturo,'' though in pages that also include the word mort or morte, the frequencies are comparable. I wasn't going to take issue with Santoyo's judgment of common usage in Spanish; I was going to put it down to the passage of time and make the text of these two paragraphs an entry for the word melioration.

But first I had a look in Corominas y Pascual. The `table' sense of tabla cognates is common in Catalan, Gallo-romance, Italian, etc., not to mention French, though Portuguese and Galician usage is parallel to that of modern Spanish (i.e., Castilian). However, it turns out that in Old Castilian tabla at least briefly had the sense of `table' also. So I decided that the semantic movement was a bit too complicated, and this information became a tabla entry. Let no one say that there is no logic to the placement of entries in this glossary.

I don't know anything about it, but I do know this:

``A gentleman is never unintentionally rude.''

I think Osbert Sitwell (Edith's brother) said this, but I'm not sure.

Hmm. I guess I better have something to say about TACT after all. Okay: it's an extension of COCOA.

This is reminiscent of the problems that the Republic of Macedonia is having: FYROM.

To say nothing of former-republics-of the SU. And the basketball `Team Formerly Known As The Washington Bullets.' Now unknown as the Washington Wizards (!).

See also TIFKAD.

Qu'est-ce le Temps Atomique International (TAI)?
Le Temps Atomique International est une échelle pratique de temps destinée à être utilisée dans le monde entier. Le TAI est une échelle uniforme et stable; il ne suit pas par conséquent les légères irrégularités du mouvement de rotation de la Terre.

TAI is a weighted average of times kept by atomic clocks around the world (over 200 as of July 2004), computed by BIPM. It is estimated to be accurate to within a tenth of a microsecond per year. Cf. UTC.

Why is this entry alphabetized by definition instead of by headword?
Because yesterday a disk problem munged A.html -- that's why.

There, happy now?

Tailor asks, ``Euripides''?

Man asks, ``Eumenides''?

Name from Persian talk > Arabic talq > Old Castilian talco > Medieval Latin talcum. [Old Castilian evolved into New or Modern Castilian, the language called ``Spanish'' in English, and talc is still talco (q.v.), in Spanish.]

Mmm. Feels good on the skin.

Mmm. Feels good on the skin.

The usual flow of vocables between Latin and Spanish has naturally been from the former (and earlier) to the latter (and later). This word is one of the exceptions. Since Latin continued to be widely used for learned, ecclesiastical, and some official communications for centuries after Spanish and other Romance languages became established, there was a need to coin Latin translations of new terms. Because most of Romance vocabulary was derived from Latin, the natural way to fit new words into the Latin system (where all nouns must have a gender and a declension, and all verbs a conjugation, etc.) was by back-formation: creation of a word that would have evolved into the corresponding Romance form.

This was relatively straightforward for Spanish, because the original derivation from Latin was straightforward. In particular, most Spanish words ending in -o are masculine nouns (see LONERS) derived from Latin nouns of the second declension. Most of the original nouns in turn are masculine or neuter. Spanish, like all major Romance languages other than Romanian, retains only masculine and feminine genders, so neuter nouns were naturally collapsed into the masculine. [The Spanish noun forms represent a kind of consensus regularization of the more complex Latin system: the most common Latin singular form (for dative and ablative cases) ended in -o, and the accusative singular -um of classical Latin had a similar sound, since Vulgar Latin and even Late Latin dropped final m's.]

It is mildly interesting that in back-construction, the Spanish masculine talco became a Latin neuter talcum rather than a Latin masculine talcus. This is slightly surprising. It is true that gender is not always preserved when a word is loaned between languages, but it does tend to be preserved under conditions that apply here: the source language (Spanish) is well understood by the user of the destination language (Latin), which has available the readily identified gender, and preserving gender does not conflict with the morphology of the destination language. I can't think of any precise comparanda, but of some relevance is the word naranja (feminine in Spanish and French), whose ultimate form in English (orange) and French was influenced by a Latin neuter (aurum); see details at the adder entry. Possibly there was a preference for giving chemical substances neuter gender; elements named in the modern era generally end in -ium (neuter second declension in Latin) or -on (neuter second declension in Greek).

One of the main patterns of phonological change that occurred in the transition from Latin to Spanish is lenition, in particular the sonorization (a/k/a voicing) of isolated stops (labial p to b, dental/alveolar t to d, palatal k to g). This sometimes occurs initially (Late Latin cattus > Sp. gato, `cat') but is primarily intervocalic. Hence L. vita > Sp. vida (`life') and acutus > agudo (`sharp' in various senses). Sometimes the loss of an unstressed vowel conceals the fact that there was originally an intervocalic stop. Thus, for example, Latin aliquod gave rise to algo. So talicum could have given rise to talgo.

There doesn't seem to be much information on Oriol, but Alejandro Goicoechea was a designer who was willing to try some unusual tactics to reduce weight and friction. I guess Oriol put up the money. Over the years, Talgo has designed trains with variable gauge (since 1968) and the ability to lean into curves (since 1980), but the main constant feature has been light weight (notice the name). I'll fill in more details when I don't have to reorganize them every time I learn something new.

Tallahatchie Bridge was made famous by the early sixties song ``Ode to Billy Joe.'' It was reputedly a hit in Latvia (.lv). To this day, still no inquest into the doings that fateful day up on Chocktaw Ridge.

My friend Marvin used to sigh with an ostentatious ``sigg,'' but this was ahistorical. The ``gh'' used to be pronounced (when this was still a common sound in English) as /x/ (i.e., like the ``ch'' in loch or Bach).

Last time I talked with him, Marvin was studying Sanskrit.

``Aggie'' is derived from the Agricultural in A&M. Aggie is itself abbreviated Ag, with plural Ags.

The Texas A&M logo is ATM, with a large tee and kerning to give a printer fits.

• Torah (the first five books of the Bible, or pentateuch)
• Nevi'im (prophets)
• Ketuvim (`writings' i.e., the historical books, etc.)

GENDER FAIRNESS ALERT:
The pronoun his above is not meant to imply that the suit is male. The suit may be female, or a eunuch of either sex, or both, or ... look, what I'm trying to say is, I don't care which bathroom he uses.

1. A Japanese word meaning `word.'
2. An old East Indian weight whose name, more commonly tang or tanga, survived as the name of one or another coin.
3. A Spanish flamenco dance, of Arabic origin. Tango was originally the Spanish word for a Gypsy (Gitano) or Moorish (Moro) dance festival. (See MILF for comments on Moro.)
4. A sexy and complicated Argentine dance, and the music that goes with it. (The accordion player should emote like crazy, so the camera has something to go to when the dancers fall over.) It takes two to tango because otherwise the woman would fall on her back and crack her head, and the man would look pretty silly gliding an air dance partner. The dance is punctuated with sudden stops, so it's a bit of a skill to keep time with the syncopated music and look half-way graceful. The dance is generally believed to be of African origin, but I think few people in Africa do ballroom jazz dance.
5. Latin `I touch.' First principal part of tangere, etymon of tangent.

I wonder under what name they market TANG in Latin America.

You know, I remember in the early days of feminist social criticism (until about 1973), how the party line was that girdles and bras and iron maidens were all tools of patriarchal oppression. Burn your bra! (Take it off first. Better yet, buy a more flattering size, and burn it.) Happy days are here again, I suppose.

In one of the increasingly loopy interviews hyping the release of the 2003 movie ``Troy,'' Brad Pitt (``Achilles'') predicted that it would soon be common for men to wear skirts. This is nothing. I'm waiting for the articles in men's magazines that explain how certain styles will flatter my figure. You know -- should I go the double-breasted look to appear more imposing? To correct for girlish shoulders, how much padding is too much? I've got a little too much tummy -- what to wear?! what to wear?!

Here's an ironic disconfirmation of Mr. Pitt's prediction: in Summer 2005, ABC aired a six-hour miniseries called ``Empire,'' putatively about the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. It was comically anachronistic, and just wrong in places where it wasn't impossible. At one point, Octavius is shown lacing up his pants. What, no zippers?

Also, every so often the fire inspector comes around and demands that the hallways be cleared of these fire hazards. The obvious solution is to take the garbage back into the overcrowded lab. You'd love to call OSHA and have the accountants, firemen, and environmental experts duke it out, but you know they'd only shut down your project.

Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

Abbreviation used in cataloguing by TOCS-IN.

Tapuakh, `apple' in Modern Hebrew, has a less certain meaning in Biblical Hebrew. The Hebrew Bible refers at various places to tapuakh for a fruit tree and its sweet fruit, prized for its shade, etc. This unlikely to have been apple, because the apple was rare, not native, and had meager fruit where it did occur in Biblical areas. Various alternatives have been proposed (citron, quince, and apricot) each with its own botanical or historical problems. Fig and pomegranate are presumably ruled out by Joel 1:12, since this lists those along with tapuakh. There's also some ambiguous evidence from an Ugaritic tablet.

The Greek word mêlon, and malum and pomum in Latin, likewise evolved in the direction of increasing specificity, toward apple. Simultaneously, other fruit came to be called pomum de ambr', pomum bosci, etc., with ample apple etymons scattered across the grocery shelves of Europe. Interestingly, in Modern Hebrew potato is tapuakh adamah, reminiscent of the French construction (pomme de terre).

From the first issue (Nov. 1977) through September 1985, it was published in Bloomington, Indiana (by the Saturday Evening Club), where IU's main campus is located. Bob Tyrrell (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.), who has always or virtually always been the magazine's editor-in-chief, was a right-wing provocateur or gadfly there as a student. (``Conservative provocateur'' sounds oxymoronic.) The editorial offices moved closer to the national political action in 1985 -- Arlington, Va.

David Brock was a prominent contributor with investigative pieces like ``The Real Anita Hill'' (March 1992, p. 18ff) The magazine had one or two splashy scoops in the way of Clinton scandal-mongering. (Didn't everyone? There was enough to go around.) Some time toward the end of the Clinton years, though, it ran into the ground; it was bought and completely remodeled for a different kind of audience that didn't happen to materialize. In the year 2001 a lot of marginal magazines folded (for another example, see the Zn entry). A year or so after that failure, TAS was refloated, again under Tyrrell's editorship. That's from memory; I'll have to check the details.

A political opinion magazine with a similar name but the opposite (left-wing) political, uh, view, is The American Prospect.

Oh, alright: it's a rorschach, but with black-and-white figures that are identifiably human rather than blotches. Created back in 1935 by Henry Murray and colleagues. The science of psychology has advanced so far in half a century that the test is now used in 1999.

There are also a Children's Apperception Test (CAT) and a Senior Apperception Technique (SAT).

Satellite phone link is higher-tech, but it has a major disadvantage: the speed of light is so slow that there is a noticeable delay in the transmission.

Members are informally called ``Tau Bates.'' For the next meeting, wouldn't it be cool if the conference venue were the Bates Motel? No, I guess not.

A glass case across from our Engineering Library entrance displays a number of framed and mounted commendations. A typical one reads

Okay, it's nice to know that the 2005 Convention is number 100, and I'm glad that we made the secretary happy. It's great to know that we won this commendation four times in the 1990's and all, but we need to find a more appropriate place to display this. Someplace less conspicuous, lest other chapters become envious, God forbid -- stranger things have been known to happen. The deserving people who actually made the perfect reports, especially if they have moved elswewhere, are the ones who deserve to have the commendations as mementos, to display in their own homes.

1. Brownish gray (brownish grey in the UK), or
2. grayish brown (greyish brown).

So many possibilities -- what a vague term!

``Now is the time to kill the `Taxasaurus' monster! Kill the dinosaur, kill him now! If you don't he's going to eat more jobs. So take this lead pencil and give him lead poisoning.

Kill him!''

Well, okay, Charles Shumer defeated D'Amato in the latter's bid for a fourth term in 1998. When Moynihan retired in 2000, he was replaced by his hand-picked successor, outgoing First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although famously thin-skinned, she has been scrupulously correct and modest in office. She is widely expected to pull a Cornelia Wallace for 2008.

"The age of chivalry is past," said May Dacre. "Bores have succeeded to dragons."

The Young Duke (1831), bk.ii, ch.5.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

More on the passing of the age of chivalry at the calculator entry.

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

A total body workout is a set of routines to exercise the whole body, or a complete set of exercises or something. I don't think it can be regarded as an aggregation of workout for the whole body, and it's not very commonly referred to by the initialism TBW either.

A related disease caused by the same bacillus is scrofula.

Infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis is extremely widespread. It is estimated that two billion people (or roughly one third of the world's population) is infected, that new infections occur at a rate of between 8 and 10 million per year, and about 2 million people die of TB each year.

Also expanded Tactical Ballistic Missile. I guess that lobbing one of these babies is mere tactics, while going intercontinental is strategic. I never really understood this terminology. Would that such knowledge were completely obsolete.

Hmmm .. theater tickets ... missive missiles ... it's practically the same acronym.

In March 1996, during the campaign for Taiwan's first direct presidential elections, the PRC test-fired ballistic missiles off the Taiwanese coast. Some of the missiles landed within sixty kilometers of Yonaguni (Japan's westernmost populated island). In a 1996 Joint Declaration of US President Bill Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, Japan agreed to provide the US with logistical support during regional ``contingencies.''

In August 1998, North Korea fired a three-stage Taepo-dong 1 missile over the Tohoku region of Honshu (Japan's main island). A Pentagon report leaked in 1999 estimated that since 1996, China had stationed 150 to 200 M-9 and M-11 missiles aimed at Taiwan in its southern regions. In the years since these incidents, Japan has increased its cooperation with the US on TBMD.

TC was founded in 1887 by Grace Hoadley Dodge as the New York School for the Training of Teachers. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler was appointed its first president, and that same year he created a laboratory for performing experiments on children, called the Horace Mann Lincoln Institute for School Experimentation (see HML). That school became independent of TC in the 1940's.

TC actually got the name Teachers College, already without the apostrophe, along with its permanent charter in 1892. In 1894, it moved to its current digs on West 120th Street, hard by Columbia University, and in 1898 it became affiliated with Columbia University.

The words MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO are engraved high on the front of Teachers College at Columbia (on West 120th Street, facing south to Pupin Hall, which houses Columbia's Physics Department). You want to know what those words mean? Go to school! I mean, look it up. At the ASICS entry.

John Dewey joined the faculty in 1904. This is regarded as a good thing.

One of the girls who hung around with the hoodlum gang a friend mine belonged to (back in the day) used to be called ``TC.'' This name was never in the vocative case, or even within her earshot. I'm not gonna tell you what it meant, but it had nothing to do with technical committees.

This had problems, however. In particular, in the low-energy regime the Higgs field self-coupling approaches zero, so it doesn't minimize energy with nonzero vacuum expectation (remember your basic Landau-Ginzburg theory). This is called the coupling problem, naturally enough. Another problem is the hierarchy problem: the Higgs mass is sensitive to the full spectrum of all particles of any mass, which suggests difficulties when one finally gets to four-force unification.

One bright idea to address these problems is to suppose that the Nambu-Goldstone (symmetry-breaking, mass-generating) bosons are not elementary but composite. A simple way to produce these is from a fermion-antifermion pair, like the pions (u/u-bar, d/d-bar). In TC, the fundamental fields that replace the Higgs scalars are two-component fermions that also give rise to mass.

Extended TechniColor (ETC) is an extension of this scheme, designed to address the problem that t and b quarks are a lot more massive than u, d, s and c.

Don't ask me what that means.

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

Another source of approximation is that all modern textile mills are made to metric scale, and they typically have round numbers of threads per centimeter. Then 150 threads per cm would be 381 threads per in. Naturally, this number must be rounded, since non-round numbers feel rough and uncomfortable against tender customers' skin. Moreover, somebody is going to round 381tc up to ``390tc'' or ``400tc.'' In the absence of a legal requirement of exacting honesty, one can hardly expect other mills to label their equivalent textiles with the inferior-seeming ``380tc.'' Just hope they don't round to the nearest multiple of 500.

Alea iacta esto!

Okay, it seems that comment may be obscure. You may remember how, in the Prior item (not the prior entry; I mean the Arthur Norman Prior item), we talked about Julius Caesar and the Rubicon in a familiar way, as if it were a reference anyone should recognize. It's not that really, it's just a pivotal event in world history. The Latin phrase above is one guess (that of Erasmus) as to what exactly Caesar said as he crossed the Rubicon. (There are slightly differing reports of his precise words. The phrase given means `let the die be cast.' Another version, alea act est, means `the die is cast. Perhaps he said it in Greek.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a signal act tantamount to a declaration of war (with the Senate, although that could always be smoothed over and talked away, and his sometime ally Pompey, who raised troops).

A degreasing agent and an HCl source for oxidation in IC manufacture, until its use was discontinued for ecological reasons.

The TCC program provides up to twelve months of child care to working AFDC recipients upon loss of eligibility for AFDC due to increase in earnings from employment. The idea is obviously to diminish the economic disincentive to work provided by AFDC. TCC and AFDC-CC were created by Title III of the Family Support Act of 1988, Public Law 100-485.

``TCCS is a freely-available system to support what we call project control, a simple but powerful form of software configuration management. TCCS is implemented as a front-end to the two most common source control systems in POSIX-compliant environments, RCS and SCCS. TCCS provides a common command-line interface to both systems, and extends them by supporting multi-release, multi-user, multi-platform development.''

This is the WWWVL site for Tcl and Tk.

An interpreted script language. From the comments at whatis.com, I guess Sun supports it.

Oh! It's got an acronym, has it? Well, then -- it's legitimate.

Okay, maybe it's not that interesting.

Whaddaya mean, `and my first-born son'!?

Bill Hatanaka, ``Group Head Wealth Management, and Chairman & Chief Executive Officer TD Waterhouse'' at least as of May 2006, played four years of professional football with the old Ottawa Rough Riders/Hamilton Tiger Cats of the CFL, and was a member of the 1976 Ottawa team that won the Grey Cup Championship.

Joe Moglia, the CEO of TD Ameritrade. Before going into the financial services industry, he capped a 16-year coaching career as the defensive coordinator for Dartmouth College's football team. They say that this capped his coaching career, but in 2005 he published Coach Yourself to Success: Winning the Investment Game ``in which he explains the essential principles of investing.''

I think TD has really fumbled in not sponsoring any football team.

Drop-kick me Jesus through the goal-posts of life!

Oh wait, I think thats Australian football.

• SHDA: Síndrome de Hiperactividad y Déficit de Atención (ADH Syndrome)
• TDA
• TDAH: TDA con Hiperactividad (`ADD with Hyperactivity' -- ADHD)
• THDA (q.v.)

Back in the day, you'd mark an exposed rotating part (a fan-belt sheave mounted on the crankshaft, say) with chalk and adjust ignition timing with a strobe light that was in sync with the spark. Nowadays, with electronic ignition systems, the internal microprocessor adjusts timing, and when the timing is off you replace the computer. My 1990 Honda didn't even have a timing chain either: it had a toothed belt. And, of course, instead of a fan belt you've got an electric-powered fan that's activated according to engine temperature. The older engines were more mechanical and more interesting.

Cf. Latour-de-France, Le Tour de France, and Lance Armstrong.

The 1998 race came to be known as the ``Tour de Farce,'' after the Festina team car was found packed with drugs and needles.

Although the English word exploit and the Spanish word explotar are cognates that appear to have experienced similar semantic drift in recent years, their meanings do not quite coincide. Explotar does not refer to just any kind of profitable utilization. The kinds of mining done at Telluride qualify. For more on explotar, see the miga entry.

Tellurium. Atomic number 52. The heaviest chalcogen, unless you want to count elements with no stable isotopes. Now there are two such elements: polonium (Po), in the same group but nominally metallic (the pure stuff is a p-type semiconductor) and the element provisionally known as ununhexium (barf).

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

Back when I used to work at Fermilab and other places where the wearing of radiation-monitoring badges was standard, I always heard stories about the guy who left his lab coat in the beam tunnel overnight, and how, after tag monitors were developed at the end of the month, an ambulance was sent to pick him up at home. Good story, anyway.

Fosse was balding and self-conscious about it, and derby hats were about as common on his dancers' heads as on Bolivian Indians'. He thought his hands were ugly, and white gloves were a frequent part of his and his dancers' costumes. He was slightly pigeon-toed, and sure enow, an exaggerated knees-together stance is part of Fosse's gestural vocabulary. Fosse also liked to use a splayed fingers. What personal deformity explained that?

See also the drip.

Venedikt died young. Too bad he could not take advantage of SARG.

Notice that the first Tears ingredient listed is mouthwash. According to a news item reported by CourtTV.com, mouthwash was the reason a woman in Michigan was charged with DUI after an automobile accident on January 9, 2005. She rear-ended a car at an intersection, and an officer at the scene observed that she appeared intoxicated. According to the officer, she failed a breathalyzer test but denied consuming any alcoholic drinks. She did say, however, that she had drunk three large glasses of Listerine. Spit it out! You're not supposed to swallow it! The arresting officer also found an open Listerine bottle in the car. According to the news item, Listerine brand mouthwash ``contains between 21.6 percent and 26.9 percent alcohol.'' (Is that by volume or weight? At room temperature, 22 wt.% is equivalent to 27 vol.% alcohol in water.)

The problem of widespread alcoholism did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a study published in The Lancet on June 15, 2007, it was estimated that the drinking of alcohol not meant for internal consumption (``surrogate alcohols'' like cologne and antiseptics) may account for nearly half of all deaths among working-age men in Russia. This simply extrapolates the 43% rate found in a thorough study of death among working-age men in Izhevsk, a city in the Urals. Dr. David Leon, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, led a study that examined all deaths of men aged 25-54 in that city from 2003 to 2005. They also interviewed the men's closest relatives for information on the men's drinking and smoking habits, socio-economic class, etc. The study showed that the consumption of surrogate alcohol was the strongest predictor of mortality. Men who consumed it had an approximately six-fold greater mortality rate than men who didn't.

TEA-21 is the principal US transportation law at the federal level, superseding the similar ISTEA (1991). A notable feature of ISTEA continued in TEA-21 is the use of MPO's to provide local official input to funding decisions.

What, you wanted to know About technical documentation, as such?

Thus, when the university web-page has a link labeled simply ``Technology,'' rather than something a little more specific, like ``Information Technology'' or ``the limited information-technology resources provided by the university for student use but wholly inadequate for research,'' that is arrogation and buffoonery. Similarly, when I receive instructions for requesting classroom space for next semester, and the instructions contain the statement ``[n]ot all classrooms have technology in them,'' that is a flatfooted error, about as bad as the misspellings in announcements for the too aptly named self-improvement courses. Thank you. Please save this information somewhere, preferably in your brain.

It seems others have noticed the problem. The preface of Edward Tenner's Our Own Devices (Knopf, 2003) begins ``Technology appears to have become a synonym for electronic systems. It should not be so. Just because microprocessors are all machines does not mean that all machines, even all important machines, are built around chips and circuits.'' [The book is subtitled ``The Past and Future of Body Technology.'' It's about clothing, shoes, helmets, ergonomic chairs, and the like.]

In October 2007, it was reported that a 28-year-old Virginia man had broken the US record for most tee shirts word at one time: 183, in sizes from S to 10XL. The world record remained at 224. The report said he ``donned them.'' I want to know how many he was able to put on by himself before he needed help, and if he took them off with a box cutter.

You might still remember the incident on a Southwest Airlines flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Tampa, Florida, which took place on Sunday, September 30, 2007. A man sitting in the last aisle was told by a cabin attendant that he had to change his tee shirt. It was a novelty item that described the wearer as ``Master Baiter.'' He bought it in the Virgin Islands. The airline later apologized. (The man was from Largo, Florida, where five days later a man used his clothes to steal a puppy.)

Pat Schroeder, witty one-time US congresswoman from Colorado, is credited with coining the epithet ``the teflon president'' for Ronald Reagan. The name referred to the fact that allegations of various kinds of wrongdoing never stuck to him.

In the announcement, I included the following apt ``quote'':

Quasi Caesar: Gallium est omne partitum, inter radicis tres.
              (The Chemical Beam Wars, Book I)

There was some discussion of this (and some more, but poster John Price-Wilkin is now elsewhere) on the CAAL mailing list.

Here's an old posting on TEI.

The Modern Hebrew words t'lulit (`hillock'), talul, (`hilly'), and the word talil, `lofty' that appears in the Targumim (as you can imagine, here I'm cribbing here from Brown-Driver-Briggs) suggest that the original root was tav-lamed-lamed. Arabic and Syriac cognates are biconsonantal, although an apparent Old Aramaic cognate is triconsonantal (tav-lamed-yod). The evidence suggests that the Proto-Semitic root was triconsonantal, but that the two final ells converged, or assimilated if you can call it that, in a case where the vowel between them was a shwa. (This is what it suggests to me. In the compressed style of Brown-Driver-Briggs, perhaps it was considered too obvious for comment.) The question is where and when, and possibly how, that change took place.

It's been suggested that the two-consonant word was borrowed from Assyrian. Assyrian is an East Semitic language that was heavily influenced by Sumerian (a non-Semitic language). The loss of aleph, ayin, and back fricatives (excellent consonants to lose, if you ask my throat), and their replacement by vowels, severely compromised the integrity of the triconsonantal structure of the language. Assyrian was written using Sumerian script, though among the scribes there some knowledge of the alphabetic script used by the Phoenicians, and apparently some awareness of the originally triconsonantal basis of Assyrian. But if tel was borrowed from the Assyrian tilu, it was presumably borrowed from Assyrian speech.