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``Ancient Narrative (AN) is first and foremost an electronic journal, in which selected articles will be discussed during a period of several months, before they will be revised by the authors and appear in a printed volume.Issues of the electronic journal AN will appear on the Internet three times a year. Moreover, a printed version containing revised versions of articles which have been discussed in the electronic version of AN will appear in a printed volume to be published once a year.
Special, theme-oriented issues of the electronic journal, as well as of the annual printed volume of AN will be planned. Your suggestions for such issues are very welcome.
AN is the electronic continuation of the Petronian Society Newsletter (ed. Gareth Schmeling) and the Groningen Colloquia on the Novel (eds. Heinz Hofmann and Maaike Zimmerman). Therefore, AN will, besides full articles, publish bibliographical information as well as brief notes on relevant subjects. The editors will also invite specialists for reviews, which will be published in the electronic journal and in the annual printed volume of AN.''
Articles and reviews mostly in English. French and Italian articles have appeared as well.
The ``Novel'' in the name is a pun; it's an organization for authors of poetry and fiction.
Off-hand, I can't think of a good -- I'm working on it, don't rush me! I suppose a dangling participle -- do you think that might be an example of a weak sort of anacoluthon? But I was talking to Gary earlier this month when I was really sick, and at one point I said ``when my grammar goes to hell like that, I'm really sick.'' And he said that when he'd heard me speak the previous sentence, he'd thought ``no, I didn't hear that.'' (Friends are like that -- they'll forgive a grammatical crime, even forget it, as if it were no big deal.) It's always great when we coauthor papers, because we're on the same linguistic wavelength -- reading from the same page, so to speak, and literally too. Of course, not a lot of great literature is joint-authored, but then there's Lennon and McCartney.
The idea of anacoluthon reminds me that they used changes of key very effectively. You'd be humming along for eight or ten bars in one key (G seemed like their favorite) and then suddenly a few scattered notes would signal a shift, and the whole mood changed. The clearest example I can think of is in ``Here, There and Everywhere.'' The first seven bars are in the key of C (last note A). The next three notes are D, but followed by an E flat in the ninth bar. That's want in ``I want her ev'ry...,'' which is a scale from D to A flat in the E-flat key. It's strikingly subdued, to coin a phrase, and I think you can sense something changed if you have even the slightest acculturation to Western scales. The way they play the natural rhythm of the sentences against the natural beat of the measures is also artful. But the bottom line with the Beatles is nescience. The music is too simple, almost too ordinary to sound as good as it does. Analysis is futile. Especially by me.
The serious purpose of these anagrams was to assure proper credit for priority without immediately revealing the discoveries. On the other hand, some people just did it because it was popular and they thought it was fun. (E.g., Huygens included an anagram along with the letter describing his spring-based watch.) Pity the seventeenth century: no television. What Franklin used to do, when he was an active ``electrician'' in the 1750's, was send a letter to be read to the Royal Society, but ask the secretary not to read it (to the society) just yet. (Of course, this option was sometimes unavailable. Hooke was Curator of Experiments of the Royal Society from shortly after its founding. He was Secretary of the Royal Society from 1677 to 1683, though by then his scientific work was done. Newton became President of the Royal Society in 1705, when his great scientific work was done also, but the position did avail him in the vicious fights over credit for past scientific discoveries.)
One of the great priority controversies of that era was Hooke's claim that he had devised a spring-driven watch five years before Huygens. It was difficult to check Hooke's claims, because the notes of the Royal Society from 1661 to 1682 were missing. They were found again, apparently supporting Hooke's claim, in 2006.
For ordinary anagrams, check out the highly useful Internet Anagram Server.
ANAHITA-L is a scholarly list for the discussion of women and gender in the ancient Mediterranean world. Not a religious list!
From April 1996 to March 2000, ANAHITA ran on LISTSERV software and was served by the University of Kentucky, with Ross Scaife serving as owner. The archives from that period are still available there.
In March 2002, David Meadows and Sally Winchester became co-owners and moved it to onelist.com, which was absorbed by Yahoo! Groups. The current list homepage is there. Here's the current description:
ANAHITA-L is a scholarly list for the discussion of women and gender in the ancient Mediterranean world. Discussion topics include: women's work, legal status, social roles -- both public and private, intellectual life, religious activities, and men's views on women. The discussions should be based upon historical, archaeological, linguistic, literary and other evidence from the ancient world and the various interpretations of this evidence. There are many interpretations of the source material and we encourage a variety of approaches, including controversial authors such as Stone and Gimbutas. These latter authors may be discussed critically but they are not to be taken as the 'final word' on any topic. Some familiarity with original source material is expected.This list does not encompass personal religious beliefs. It is not a list on which to reveal your personal encounters with deities or to proselytize for your religion.
See our general entry on mailing lists.
The tone and utility of the book may be accurately gauged from the first lines of that new chapter:
In 1943 I had arrived at a dead-end in my attempts to find a theory of man, society, and history that would permit an adequate interpretation of the phenomena in my chosen field of studies.
Oh, chapter three is good, it's a bunch of generally boring recollections of his ordinary childhood.
More of the same may be found at the self-regarding entry.
In Latin and Greek, prepositions are normally in the ``pre'' position: they normally precede their object. German has a couple of common prepositions that function as postpositions also, like nach (see m.A.n.). That wouldn't qualify as a figure of speech.
- With some naughty part or parts missing, such as the balls.
- With an enlarged gall bladder where the heart should be. (This is a terrible affliction to those not directly affected.)
- With the head up the ass.
- Politically correct.
- Australian National Coastal Authority,
- Australian National Council on AIDS,
- Australian Nature Conservation Agency.
Paul? You're thinking of Paul Anka.
``... has more than 5500 members and speaks for more than 25,000 CattleWomen from coast to coast.'' I am the only one who sees a problem with this reasoning?
``ANCW is the sponsor and project leader of the National Beef Cook-Off®, in cooperation with the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (NCBA) and the Cattlemen's Beef Board (CBB).''
Andromeda is a name from mythology, the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia. ``Andromeda'' is sometimes given the ``translation'' of ``princess of Ethiopia'' or ``chained lady.''
If you want to say that a machine is on, you can say that ``la máquina esta andando.'' If you tried to construct a similar expression with the present perfect of ir instead of andar, the closest you'd get would be ``la máquina esta llendose,'' meaning `the machine is going away.'
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Open Court Press has... Hey, shouldn't that be ``Full Court Press''? Aw, it's Open Court Publishing Company. Anyway, this press publishes a ``Popular Culture and Philosophy'' series. It was inaugurated in 1999 with Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing, a work praised in the journal Entertainment Weekly. This achievement was followed in 2001 by The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! Of Homer. The Open Court web site quotes a positive comment on the book that was posted at <amazon.com>. (Yes, and some others.) This is either provocative or desperate. The Matrix and Philosophy (2002) became a best-seller. (It's about the movie, not the Toyota hatchback. You say there's something else called a matrix?) Buffy the Vampire Slayer aP and The Lord of the Rings aP (subtitled ``One Book to Rule Them All'') were both perpetrated in 2003. In December of that year, I heard that Bob Dylan aP was under consideration. The Sopranos and Philosophy was forthcoming.
Everybody's trying to horn in on the action. In December 2005, the University Press of Mississippi published Comics as Philosophy. I'm not even trying to keep up with the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series. Just run the search.
I'll concede that these series only exploit commercially what has long been exploited academically, but it does make the strategy transparent. And I see nothing wrong in principle with thinking deeply and hard about subjects that are shallow and soft, so long as one is ready to admit at the end that the effort was vain, as it probably will have been. Especially if the one doing it would otherwise still have been wasting time. I'm just extremely skeptical. I'm similarly skeptical of things like ``The Erotic: Exploring Critical Issues,'' unless it comes with complimentary samples. Cf. seriousness.
You're probably thinking, ``no, that should be `Anita / I wanna meet-a' or `Andrea / Let's visit Alexandria.' ''
Look, I'm writing the lyrics to this glossary, okay? Just stop complaining and sing along.
(Shhh! Sometimes little elves sneak in here at night and stick entries like this into the glossary. Who is this ``Andrea,'' do you know? Is this just some cultural reference that I'm not getting?)
A slightly interesting aspect of this usage is that stuff is grammatically uncountable.
subscribe ANE
(Sociologists' joke. Ha-ha.)
- M. David Tilson's Aneurysm Information Project at Columbia Univ.
- Weird impassioned lecture
- from the Cardiovascular Disease Center
- List of links kept by the National Library of Medicine (NLM)
- A support group
Once believed to be due almost exclusively to atherosclerosis. That estimate has decreased.
I just put this entry in here because the word angeblich popped into my consciousness but the meaning didn't pop into my consciousness and I had to look it up. If Warren were here, he would probably ask, with something between exasperation and genuine curiosity, ``Al, why are you telling me this?'' You're probably wondering the same thing. ``Warren,'' I would counter-ask, ``you mean about the popping and the not popping?'' ``No, Al. I mean `why are you telling me the meaning of the word angeblich?' [He'd be referring to the German word that means, or is claimed to mean, `allegedly.']''
``Oh,'' I'd say, ``I have to dust off and brush up my German, and the only way I can do that and still advance the great work of building the SBF Glossar [German for glossary] is if I write entries about German words. `Leverage the synergy,' as they say.'' It would gradually come out that next June, I'm taking my mom to visit Breslau, now called Wroclaw. She was born there and thirteen years later she left; this will be her first time back.
I don't want to give you the impression that Warren would only ask petulant or sore questions. He could also make possibly helpful suggestions, like ``why don't you get a guide who speaks English instead of German?'' (It doesn't work; the guide, Ryszard, is apparently a unique resource. He serves a clientele of former Breslau residents, collecting and retelling anecdotes about Breslau then and now. His advertising is strictly word-of-mouth.)
The preceding parts of this entry were written before our June 2005 trip. I can add that some of the word-of-mouth came from Ryszard's. On our way out of the hotel one morning, we stopped near some disoriented Germans whom Ryszard gave his card. There's a large traffic of former Breslauers and their descendants, a fact you can easily understand if you read our Breslau entry.
Theatrical productions, particularly if they're not musicals, are so risky that anyone who underwrites a show is an angel.
Here's a brief investigation of other angels.
I just got around to reading a 1957 article in the Revista de Filologia Española: ``Los anglicismos en España y su papel en la lengua oral'' [`Anglicisms in Spain and their role in spoken language'], vol. 41, pp. 141-160. It's pretty interesting, and fifty years on, it might be soon enough to revisit.
Author Howard Stone begins by noting that the greatest influence on Spanish during the middle ages was Arabic. [Raphael Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española (Madrid: Escelicer, 2/e 1950) is cited for a figure of 4000 examples.] I'm just going to be paraphrasing and summarizing for a while, so you can tack ``according to Stone'' onto any bald statements to follow, though the statements don't happen to be particularly controversial, afaik.
French was the second-greatest influence on Spanish, particularly in the 13th, 18th, and 19th centuries. That's an interesting selection of centuries there. Maybe we'll have a galicismo entry some day. Until then, you could check out Rafael Baralt, Diccionario de galicismos... (Madrid: Impr. Nacional, 1855; Buenos Aires 2/e, 1945). (The nominal clan of Rafaels sure has been active in the study of foreign influences on Spanish. But perhaps not disproportionately active, since Rafael is a popular Spanish given name.) By the middle of the twentieth century, English was the greatest influence, and possibly the most important linguistic peninsular development in contemporary Spanish. (Trust me, this is a fair translation from the Spanish, but it sounds less hokey in Spanish.) The article presents a list of something under 500 anglicisms, and Stone is quick to concede that any reader could think of others that were omitted. I say, he should have found any reader and asked him what those others were. He did get, from a man with the imposing name of Emérito Paniagua Comendador, the gift of Paniagua's own list of Anglicisms.
Stone took a somewhat expansive view of what counts as un anglicismo, which just makes my job harder. For the time being, let me mention some of the oldest direct examples:
- arrurruz < arrowroot
- este < east
- monís < moneys
- norte < north
- oeste < west
- ron < rum
- sur < south
(The compass points came via French.)
There was a time when the Dutch spoke the least foreign English: they learned it well and there was hardly an identifiable ``Dutch accent.'' The Germans, by contrast, had strong accents; Henry Kissinger's accent would count as ``very slight'' in the spectrum of those old, frequently parodied accents (das mascheen iss nisht foor gefingerpoken). At least since the 1980's, judging from the scientists and engineers I know, English is being learned well by Germans, and some of the Dutch may have backslid a little bit. That's why it's encouraging to see such an ugly neologism as Anglofem used by Dutch teachers of English. It shows that they are finely attuned to the crass academic argot of American universities.
The Bohr radius is about half an Ångström, so all atoms have diameters of one or a few Ångströms. Optical wavelengths are on the order of thousands of Ångströms (the visible spectrum is roughly 4000Å to 8000Å; your eyesight may vary), and when I was growing up the wavelengths of atomic spectral lines were typically known to about an Ångström, so it was a convenient unit for giving those.
The unit is popular among physicists but not officially recognized as part of the SI. (Technically, SI accepts the temporary continued use of this unit and the liter. This is leading by running out in front of a moving parade. Run'em over!) During the 1980's, the Ångström lost ground to the nanometer, certainly in part due to the limited character sets of graphing programs. The unit is named after the Swedish spectroscopist Anders Jonas Ångström (1814-1874). I think it was Knut, the son of Anders, who was influential in having Rutherford be awarded the Chemistry Nobel instead of the Physics. If physicists held grudges, the nanometer would rule. I suppose the best-known Angstrom today is the eponymous ``Rabbit'' of John Updike's series of novels (Harry Angstrom). The comment about the three m's is an allusion to the black-bra entry.
Appendix in the anatomical sense is Blinddarm. Der Darm is `the intestine' (the plural Därme is also used), so der Blinddarm is the false intestine (cf. English pitchblende and zincblende).
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I don't really care about the language. I couldn't understand the lyrics any better if they were in Chinese Pig Latin. (You know, Angpay ingchay, etc. Getting the tones right can be a hassle, particularly in music.) You need to visit the entry for Jukka Ammondt, the Finn who sings Elvis songs in Latin. Tell'm Lord Mondegreen sentcha.
ANK is suitable for simple segmental displays (typically LED displays or VFD's).
Some of these make an arrangement to represent the diacriticals more
appropriately than as separate characters. (Halfwidth kana can look a bit
ugly; just imagine résumé as
re'sume'.)
When hiragana is available, katakana is used only to write recent (last 500 years') foreign borrowings. Nevertheless, when the diacriticals are used, katakana can represent the entire phonemic inventory of Japanese. Indeed, more: some kana-diacritical combinations are used to represent only sounds that don't occur in Japanese, rather as English uses kh. One that is commonly used: u with the voicing diacritic represents vu. (Hebrew uses what looks like a bold grave accent after -- i.e., to the left of -- native consonants to indicate related foreign sounds.)
What one loses when writing Japanese uniformly in katakana (or
kana generally) is not phonetic but semantic. Japanese has far fewer
different syllables than English, and though Japanese words tend to have more
syllables, homophones are still much more common. Using kanji reduces ambiguity, somewhat as different
spellings of English homophones does (e.g., signet and cygnet; cereal
and serial, red and read; reed and read; led and lead, LEED, Lied, and lead; lie and lye; I'm just having fun
here -- you can skip to the next sentence; meat, mete, and meet; lamb and lam,
some and sum; ton and tun; ball and bawl; new and knew; no and know; peel and
peal; bee and be; buss and bus; tax and tacks;
clew and clue (well...); knit and nit; its and
it's; there and their; there's and theirs; here and hear; hair and hare; air
and heir; R&R, and are and arr;
hoar and another word; me and mi; bore and boar; bite
and byte; won and one; to,
too, and two; fore, for, and four, the
(stressed) and thee; would it be cheating to mention disc and disk?; deck and
deque?; choir and quire; slay and sleigh; tray and
trey; fey and fay; bay and bey; pray and prey; fryer and friar; pie and pi;
tale and tail; rale and rail;
born and borne; there's no particular order to these, by the way; why and wye;
pearl and Perl (and perl); carrot, caret, and
carat (and
karat); shoot and chute; chord and cord; pried and pride;
pries, prise, and prize; lime and Lyme; lane and lain; lade and laid;
bale and bail; wail and wale (and in most cases
whale); weal and wheel; wont and want; tract and tracked; pleas and please;
wether, weather and whether; wither and
whither; foreword and forward;
hi, hie, and high; desserts
(noun) and deserts
(verb); fort and forte (sometimes); tire and tier; tier and tear; tare and
tear; stare and stair; bare and bear; beer and bier; road, rode, rowed, and
Rhode (Island) ; stake and steak; steal, steel, and stele; seamen, semen, and
siemen;
pail and pale; peer and pier; pear, pare, and pair; flew, flue, and flu; deign and Dane; blue and blew; stew and Stu; dug
and Doug; shoe and shoo; lo and low; oh and O; an and Anne; cane, Cain, and Kane; able and
Abel; kneel and Neil (and Neal); mic and
mike (and Mike); aught and ought; turn and tern; earn, erne,
and urn; birth and berth; hight and height (oh
yeah, happens all the time); white and wight; flee and flea; through and threw;
sine and sign; from and frum; metal and mettle;
medal and meddle; mind and
mined; find and fined; bait and bate; bead and Bede; need, knead, and kneed;
yoke and yolk; would and wood; gilt and guilt; wine and
whine; look, I realize that some weirdos pronounce wh as /hw/,
stop wining about it; mule and mewl; role and roll; this is easier than doing
a crossword puzzle, and cheaper; bored and board; duel and dual;
rho, row, and roe;
doe and dough; rough and ruff; do and doo (and due, for nonpalatizers); tule
and tool; mill and mil; neigh
and nay; aye, eye, I, and i-; son and sun; tore and tor; matte and mat; nappe
and nap; stayed and staid; not and knot; rout and route; route and root; dies
and dyes; stile and style; vane and vain; wain and wane; poll and pole;
pall and pawl; all and awl (even de bard hadda problem wit'dis -- are you
mechanical?); so and sew; toe and tow; ate and eight;
mite and might; right, rite, wright, and write;
cite, site, and sight; night and knight; there are probably entire
webpages devoted to this stuff; hale and hail; ail and ale; mail and male; sail and sale; bin and been
(usually); bean and been (some Brit.); bred and bread; this is beginning to be
tiresome; tide and tied; sees, seas, and seize;
tee and tea, tees, teas, and tease; vial and vile; mien and mean; call and
caul; principal
and principle; pour and pore (and for some
poor); plate and plait; wear, ware, and where; we're and weir; were and whir;
dear and deer; and in some but not all common pronunciations:
ant and aunt; can't and cant; beet and beat;
then (when unstressed) and than, effect (noun) and affect (verb);
complacent and
complaisant (q.v.);
complementary
and complimentary; tort and torte;
sentry and century).
(Kanji writing, like English spelling, is not phonetic. But it doesn't pretend
to be.)
Oooh, I thought of some more: assent and ascent, stoop and stoep.
This entry started out to be about a reduced Japanese character-set encoding, didn't it? Oh well, I lost interest. There are other entries that talk about Japanese. It was more important to put in links to all those words above that are personally important to you. Yes -- you! (Yew? Yoo?) You've heard that radio commercial for the product that promises to put words directly into your head, effortlessly and without repetition, including the fifty or whatever most important ``power words''? The concerned announcer, with a voice poised between grief and grievance, explains that ``people judge you by the words you use... draw conclusions about your education, even your intelligence!'' (Correct conclusions.) They report research proving that a bad vocabulary can sink you faster than bad breath! Well I'm here to tell you that bad spelling can sink you faster than a led anchor. And not just any bad spelling. Everyone makes typos -- that's no big deal. But if you use a correctly spelled wrong word, people draw the conclusion that you don't know which word is which! Worst of all, spell-checkers won't save you, because you've spelled the wrong word correctly! CALL KNOW and oh weight a second -- that wasn't my point at all. The important thing was
Look folks, I'm really sorry about this, but here's the situation. This entry is having a hard time finishing itself up, but in the meantime other entries on this same page are ready and have been tapping their shoes for weeks waiting to be published. So really I'm very sorry, but we're going to have to let this entry go out half-dressed so the show can go on. I'm sure you've been in a similar situation yourself, in seventh-grade choir, say, so you'll understand.
There are actually two competing definitions of annuitant. According to some it is a person entitled to receive benefits from an annuity. According to others it is a person who does. If you google on annuitant alone, you get (I mean I just got) a bit under a million hits. If you add the search term definition, you still get 300,000. Under the circumstances, it's almost surprising there isn't greater disagreement on the meaning. Oh wait, there's more. An annuitant is also a formally retired U.S. intelligence officer who is still on the government's payroll and available for assignments. For when you want to bring back Sean Connery for a special assignation, I guess, or something like that.
Checking around, I find the word in an inspirationally titled softcover from 1974: My Purpose Holds: Reactions and Experiences in Retirement of TIAA-CREF Annuitants (by Mark H. Ingraham with the collaboration of James M. Mulanaphy). An interesting feature of this title is that the subtitle is separated from the short title by an explicit colon. Okay, I looked inside. It contains a lot of quotes from retirees describing what their lives are like.
Lord forgive me for ever claiming that anodize meant ``electroplate,'' which sounds similar but means almost the opposite.
It's a small world. The editor of this glossary was at university with Oscar Nierstrasz.
Wow, urgent developments!
As Gertrude Stein lay dying, she asked ``What is the answer?'' There was no reply, and after a pause she laughed and said ``In that case what is the question?'' Sic, I'm sure; she was pretty parsimonious with commas. According to Donald Sutherland in Gertrude Stein, A Biography of her Work, ``[t]hen she died.'' That's elegant, I suppose, but maybe she just stopped talking and died two hours later, or maybe she went into Cheyne-Stokes breathing. When did she lose bladder control? Sometimes, the better part of wisdom is not seeking the answers or even the questions. (Oh, you think this discussion is in poor taste? At least it's not meretricious self-disclosure. For that you want to wallow pretentious in the blow-by-blow of Melanie's personal battle with legal drugs. While there, you can ``experience the goddess collection.'')
It is widely claimed, though I haven't seen a good source, that the last words of Pancho Villa were spoken to a reporter:
Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something.
Maybe in a movie?
-
PROVOCATION by Peter D. Kramer:
Listening to Prozac: REACTION by Peter R. Breggin, M.D., and Ginger Ross Breggin:
A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self.Talking Back to Prozac:
What Doctors Aren't Telling You About Today's Most Controversial Drug.
So far, the reactions are winning on rhyme points. This entry should probably include Souls Without Longing (currently discussed at the miscellaneous book titles entry), although the title it replies to (Souls With Longing) was discarded before its book was published; it's possible the authors of the second book were unaware of the other (working) title. I'll deal with this when I clean up the book titles entry.
Antanaclases are usually more clever than funny. Here are some examples:
-- Vince Lombardi
-- proverbial
A good compound example is at the Dew-Drop Inn entry, but it's funny. (It's plausibly but not demonstrably attributed to Groucho Marx.) Franklin's famous advice about hanging together is alluded to in the frass entry.
A marginal or mild antanaclasis occurs in the U2 song ``In God's Country'':
Running rivers are a very popular image in song, beyond verging on trite. In fact, U2's ``One Tree Hill'' explores the conjugation of ``run like a river to the sea'' (you run, it runs, we run; also the imperative form). The song is a threnody for Greg Carroll, a friend of Bono's who was killed by a drunk driver while running an errand for him in Dublin. I suspect all this Dublin river running partly alludes to Joyce's Finnegans Wake (a book that is a play on words in its entirety).
Here is something I read on the Internet about this important body-building topic:
I first learned about the ANTF through Paul Cribb B.S. Sci. HMS. Paul is a research scientist whom studies muscular dynamics he is also the research director for the supplement company AST Sports Sciences.
There is no explanation of what studies muscular dynamics do to or with pointy musclehead Paul. The CFT who wrote the paragraph also got the title somewhat off. It's apparently ``B.H. Sci. HMS.'' I suppose that stands for ``Bachelors in Health Science HMS.'' (I don't know what HMS stands for here.)
Hmmm. Not quite enough information for a definition. ``Little Dome'' is inside a topographical feature that looks like a whorl on your fingerprint. But bigger. And the lines are concentric rather than spiral as in a true fingerprint whorl, but really, without turning your hand over, how many of you could so much as tell me how many of your fingers have deltas? Hm-hmm, just what I thought. Anyway, a definition is probably coming up real soon.
...
Ahh! Here's something a couple of pages later, Figure 1-4. It's a side view, a cross section of the earth's surface sort of like an ant farm. About as complicated as an ant farm too. The source is ``After C. F. Lamb in Halbouty, 1980. Used by courtesy of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.'' It says ``Production is from the Nugget sandstone on an anticline above a branch off of the Absaroka thrust fault.'' And it appears to be in Wyoming again. Well, there you have it: an anticline is
a geological feature from which oil or gas can be produced. A number are found in Wyoming.
There. It could be a bit more technical, I suppose, but the SBF glossary is free and it's under construction. Also, we know you're interested in getting those helpful insider details, like about Wyoming, that smarten you up and make you sound like a professional. You can throw off stuff like ``Oh, yeah, another anticline -- just saw one in Wyoming last month wildcatting.'' Real cool. Blend right in with the people who do it for a living. Maybe I'll fill in with some more details later.
Well, now it's later. I've been thinking about the definition. It's pretty good from a practical point of view, the sound-smarter-through-bigger-vocabulary point of view (POV). Still, it does sort of have that ``a chair is something you can sit on'' feel. Of course -- a chair is something you can sit on if it isn't stacked with books, but then, so is the floor (FYI: a floor may be harder on the butt, and to fall off of, though YMMV). But in these cases you could say the floor is functioning as a chair, so basically it's a chair. And a spare tire leaning against a wall is a chair too. No problem, really.
But the thing is, I've been slogging through the book, and I have to admit I'm growing a little bit disappointed in myself. I read and read, but I don't, like, see the definitions, know what I mean? This book is an ``Introduction,'' and there I was in the introductory chapter (chapter 1 has the same title as the book), and I wasn't feeling very introduced. Let's face it: geology is a deep subject, and you have to be pretty sharp to cut it in that field. You dig what I'm sayin'? It's rocket science, and when you think of rocket science, you think of Forbidden Planet. And where did that vanished genius race put all its technology? You got it: deeeeep underground.
The machine is a cube twenty miles on a side!
You can imagine if those geology majors are geniuses, or study hard to compensate, that the professors must be gods. What about the author of this geology book I've been reading? Edgar W. Spencer. Parmly Professor of Geology, Washington and Lee University. Taught at Hunter while attending Columbia. Department chairman at W&L since 1959. A Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). You can sense the understated confidence. And he's written a couple of other books. And -- what's this? -- there on the dedication page it says
To the Memory of
Two Outstanding Teachers
Arie Poldervaart
Walter Bucher
That just chokes me up, y'know? I mean, I mean I, I gotta, I gotta blow my nose. Frnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnfrnzzz! HRNFRNfrnfrnfrnfrnfr,shnfrnfrnfrnzzz!!!
It's such a moving testimony to the tradition of scholarship and mentorship! I have this beatific image -- Drs. Poldervaart and Bucher, perched in heaven, smiling down on their old student Edgar, nodding in kindly encouragement as he struggles to make the third edition of his Introduction (©1969, 1977, 1988) even clearer than before. Of course, they're in geologist heaven, so maybe they're smiling up at him. I'm not sure. It might help explain why the vertical axis on Figure 1-4 has Wyoming's surface at a depth of four kilometers, decreasing to negative depths below the anticline, whatever it was.
That does it! I'm energized; with this fantastic introductory textbook I'm going to turn the anticline thing around!
And I know just what to do: to the index! Sure, why didn't I think of this earlier? There:
Hmmm. This method may not be as effective as I had hoped. I didn't even know that Texas and Florida had a coast in common. Now I need to look up salt ridges to see if I can disentangle the description.
You have to ask yourself: did the accomplished educator who wrote this book really mean for the student to go all the way to page 305, encountering anticline after anticline, without some sort of working definition? Not likely. If he had, his textbook would be as disorganized and incomplete and pedagogically frustrating as a certain glossary I know of.
Hey! That's it! Glossary, page 469:
Anticline. See Fold.
We're almost there! I can sense it! Page 474: Flow fold, (Fold) Height, (Fold) Hinge, Hinge line, .... Auugh! What happened? Is there some other kind of ``Fold.''? Not an entry? Not the binding crack? Should I go to the chapter on Fold? The table of contents suggests only Ch. 17 -- ``Folding in Theory and Experiment.'' Pages 362-385. It's surprising that everything seems to be explained in terms of something that is itself explained later on in the book. I guess that's to keep you interested. The last pages are going to be pretty explosive.
Time out! I need a warm, nourishing hamburger, with crisp but deceptively greasy fries.
Mmmm. All praise ketchup, the soul-soothing sauce! I feel balanced, relaxed, fat-free, confident. I -- what's this? The definition of anticline appears like a vision before my moistening eyes --
As I should have realized immediately, the glossary is hierarchical, perhaps a bit like the author. The Fold entry just happens to consist of three pages of other entries (including ``Flow fold,'' etc.) that are distinguished from main headwords printed in the identical font, size, and style.
Obviously, the anticline illustrated in Figure 1-3b is a fold outcrop that has been eroded to leave a surface that is really a cross section of the fold. The concentric ovals indicate that the feature was convex in two directions and not one, but the ovals are fairly eccentric (i.e., elongated in one direction), so it pretty much conforms to Carey's definition borrowed by Spencer. You remember from pg. 179: ``elongate domal features.'' There, now, that wasn't so hard!
Relief! But, well, now I have a confession to make. An embarrassing admission, really. Now I know what you're thinking: ``If you, a big-shot glossary author, don't have it all together, then what hope is there for shiftless stupid nobodies like us?'' I take your point, yet I must disappoint.
I've been putting up a brave front, but the truth is that I've been a secret skeptic, a doubter. Like former US president Jimmy Carter, I mistrusted my true friends, and set myself up for betrayal by those I should have recognized as my enemies. I am a sinner. As Jimmy confessed to Playboy magazine, so too I have sinned in my heart. My sin is pride.
You see, I was beginning to think that maybe this textbook is not the great pedagogical monument that it obviously really is. I was harboring treacherous thoughts like ``why doesn't he say what the mantle is first and then talk about how important it is for understanding mesoscopic crustal features?'' O, me of little faith! (Or oh I myself of little faith! Whatever is the reflexive vocative form.)
How wrong I am! This textbook didn't become a great three-edition success by accident -- first it had to be selected by hundreds of geology professors. Can hundreds of geology professors be wrong? The answer is obvious, I should think. The popularity of this text tells us not only about the quality of the book itself, but also about the solicitude of the geology profession for its students. Yes, it tells us a lot. If only I could have figured that lot out by reading it. (I'm so moved that I'm going to cry again, but this time I'm not going to write the details into the anticline entry. Use your imagination.)
Cf. EMag entry. Incidentally, I see that in 1883, Dr. I.C. White conjectured that oil and gas deposits could be found in anticlines.
Typical commercial antioxidants, like BHA, BHT, gallic acid and propyl gallate, are phenolic compounds that become stable free radicals when they release a single hydrogen. The resulting free radical can also release a second hydrogen to revert to a stable fully bonded compound. Both reactions terminate the auto-oxidation (also ``autoxidation'') chain reaction.
Chocolate is an excellent source of antioxidants.
Here's the first paragraph of the preface of Antiplane Elastic Systems, by L.M. Milne-Thomson (Springer-Verlag, 1962):
The term antiplane was introduced by L.N.G. Filon to describe such problems as tension, push, bending at couples, torsion, and flexure by a transverse load. Looked at physically these problems differ from those of plane elasticity already treated [in Milne-Thomson's Plane Elastic Systems, (Springer-Verlag, 1960)] in that certain shearing stresses no longer vanish.
The Filon article referred to is probably ``On Antiplane Stress in an Elastic Solid,'' Proc. Roy. Soc. vol. (A) 160, pp. 137-154 (1937). That's actually a pretty interesting article, and I plan to quote from it eventually.
As a Jew, I have my own theories about the subject. I agree with much of the argument in Why The Jews? by Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), but it's a big subject and this is a small entry.
Everyone recognizes that ``Anti-Semitism'' is not about Semites as such. It is about the ``Semites'' of antisemitic fantasy: Jews. Antisemites, since long before Marr, like to define Jews and themselves in ways complimentary to themselves, and since Marr they have liked to play with the confusion engendered by ``Semite.'' The historian James Parkes proposed the all-lower-case, unhyphenated spelling as a less inaccurate way to use a word that has become somewhat useful. Here is an explanation by the philosopher Emil Fackenheim: ``... the spelling ought to be antisemitism without the hyphen, dispelling the notion that there is an entity `Semitism' which `anti-Semitism opposes.'' [``Post-Holocaust Anti-Jewishness, Jewish Identity and the Centrality of Israel,'' in World Jewry and the State of Israel, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: Arno Pr., 1977), p. 11, n. 2.]
Listen, Joe:
Gary and I are at the local Perkins. Toothpick-armed wait-person with hair
in a severe bun takes our order like it's a big favor she resents doing. She
leaves, I says to Gary I says ``Olive Oyl is in a bad mood.'' Gary glances
suspiciously towards the Heinz.
Later I learned that her name is Kim. Not that you asked.
By the way, if you order mashed potatoes, tell them to nuke 'em twice, so the bottom isn't cold.
Time magazine's Notebook feature (issue of Oct. 21, 1996, p. 25) quoted
Larry Harmon (a.k.a. Bozo): ``It irks me when people use the character's name in a demeaning way.''Larry Harmon bought the franchise rights to Bozo in 1956. There have been as many as 100 authorized Bozo portrayers working simultaneously in the US. Read more here.
Even though relatively few entries in this glossary involve the Spanish language, relatively many (two, to be precise) of the instances where the word antonomasia occurs do: see gringo and Hernán Cortés. This disproportion is probably not accidental.
A friend of mine from high school is named Anupam Singhal, and for a while at least he was practicing medicine in Pennsylvania, so this makes sense. Well, it's a good mnemonic, anyway. For me. The Summer after eleventh grade, I think it was, his parents took him and his brother for a visit to the ancestral country, which I guess is Sri Lanka. The main thing he had to say about the visit when he got back was that it felt really weird to see his name everywhere. Now he can have the same experience on the Internet.
The last game of the 2008 Fighting Irish football season was the traditional humiliating defeat by USC. At the end of the post-game show on Notre Dame's hometown station, WSBT-AM, ahead of the recap of painfully lopsided game stats, one of the commentators suggested to the more sensitive listeners that they might `want to turn your radio down for the next three to five minutes.' The fellow who was about to (in a manner of speaking) run down the stats replied professionally that ``we never say that on radio.''
Australia's other national holiday is Australia Day. The rest of the major public holidays in Australia are discussed or at least listed at that entry as well.
Beginning in the 1950s researchers observed that the metal titanium, and some other materials, formed a very strong bond to surrounding bone, a process termed ``osseointegration.''
After years of careful research and study, dental implants (titanium cylinders placed into the jawbone to support replacement teeth) were refined with high success rates. There are now patients who have had implant supported teeth for more than twenty-five years.
Thus osseointegration began a revolution in dentistry, and at last, an answer to the many problems associated with missing teeth.
Typical materials: TeO2 (Tellurium Oxide), PbMoO4, LiNbO3.
When they get together for reunions, do they intone ``We are the alpha and the omega''?
(For the Christianity-impaired, that's a reference to Revelations 1:8.)
Here's a page with almost no information on Angola from city.net. Here's a decent map. The most useful information on such a map, and information not shown, is the areas subject to (demobilized, of course) UNITAS control. Luanda, the capital, is the seat of government for its entire metropolitan area.
You know, Angola is not simply connected: there's a bit of it called Cabinda on the other side of the Congo River, on the Atlantic coast between Congo and Congo Republic.
African Studies Center (at the University of Pennsylvania) offers a resource page. The Norwegian Council for Africa (NCA) has a Angola page.
Here's an item that made international news on Dec. 21, 2009: ``Angola Woman Kills Husband With Ax.'' God, those people are brutal savages! ``Court documents record that 44-year-old Norma Mote summoned police to the couple's home early Friday and told dispatchers she had just killed her husband with an ax. Police found 56-year-old Kevin Mote dead in a second-floor bedroom. The Steuben County coroner's office ruled his death due to numerous ax strikes to the head. Neighbors say the Mote family was quiet and kept to themselves in the area just outside Angola city limits about 40 miles north of Fort Wayne.'' Oh! It was Angola, Indiana.
International mail is divided into three general categories: LC (letters and cards), CP (parcel post), and AO.
AOA has its own voluntary extra virgin certification for Australian olive oils (extra virgin explained here). See, however, the AOOA entry.
In an academic position announcement, I saw ``... AOC/AOS open, but with a preference for a candidate who could teach an undergraduate course in Introductory Logic.'' The AOC/AOS thing seems to be especially popular among philosophy academics. Another position announcement included the following: ``AOS: Philosophy of Mind/Philosophy of Cognitive Science. AOC: Open, but department has needs in Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, and Epistemology.''
Are you the demographic AOL has targeted? New in AOL version 5.0: Horoscope right on your welcome screen!
AOL, with 17 million subscribers as of mid-1999, is by far the largest ISP. Its nearest competitors, Worldnet from AT&T and ailing MSN from Microsoft, have fewer than 2 million. It had been expected that there would be a shake-out, with a few big ISP's dominating, but as of 1999 that hadn't happened. As of July 1999, there were over 6500 North American (US, Canada, Caribbean) ISP's registered with Boardwatch Magazine, most serving just a few hundred dial-up customers in a few area codes.
Cahners In-Stat Group estimated in August 1999 that there were 66 million internet accounts in the US, with AOL's share down from 21.5 to 24.3 in the past year (despite an increase of 5.1 million customers). IDC estimated only 37 million total accounts, with AOL's share dropped to 39.3 from 42.1 and MSN to 4% from 5.9%. Note that the numbers in this paragraph are not consistent with the numbers in the previous paragraph. The internet is changing that fast.
Aolsucks.org now redirects to <aolwatch.org>.
Mmmm, here's something interesting:
``The AoM / IAoM is a bona fide nonprofit professional educational organization with articles of incorporation, constitution & by-laws (1983) and Federal Tax Number. [Dang! Even a Federal Tax Number! And here I thought they were protesting too much.] The lettering, AoM, IAoM, and AoM / IAoM, in both upper and lower cases, are unique to and registered trademarks of the Association of Management and the International Association of Management. Use of said in any manner other than by the Association or an outside reference to any other organization is a violation of Federal Law and will be proscecuted [sic]. Please make a note of it.''
This seems to imply that they regard as illegal the appearance of AoM right here in this glossary, unless what I really mean is AOM -- Alpha & Omega Ministries, or AOM -- Compagnie Aérienne Française (formed in a merger of Minerve and Air Outre Mer). Of course, AOM is unique to the outfit described earlier in this entry, so these other organizations do not exist.
``What does it take to be a member of AORBS? Any gentleman, who sports a real beard and has, at least one time, portrayed Santa Claus; whether it was for your own kids on Christmas Day, or whether you are a full time Santa, wearing the red suit for the public. Our members range from who men put on the suit for their grandkids just one night a year, all the way to men who are Santa 24/7 throughout the entire year.'' And here I was thinking that this was the quintessence of seasonal work.
Another paragraph announces ``Santa Gatherings'' (cookies and milk?): ``Santa Claus gathers with hundreds of his Brothers and Descendants, along with their Mrs. Clauses at luncheons across the country. If you are one of those, and you would like to join us, just let us know by clicking [there].'' ``Those'' was apparently not sufficiently inclusive, and starting in 2007 there was a bitter battle for control of AORBS (and its old domain name, which was <aorbsantas.com> until some time after Christmas 2007). A number of competing organizations have sprung up.
``The American Oriental Society is the oldest learned society in the United States devoted to a particular field of scholarship.''
Hmmm. Interesting qualification. Continuing...
``The Society was founded in 1842, preceded only by such distinguished organizations of general scope as the American Philosophical Society (1743) [APA], the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1780) [AAAS], and the American Antiquarian Society (1812) [AAS]. From the beginning its aims have been humanistic. The encouragement of basic research in the languages and literatures of Asia has always been central in its tradition. This tradition has come to include such subjects as philology, literary criticism, textual criticism, paleography, epigraphy, linguistics, biography, archaeology, and the history of the intellectual and imaginative aspects of Oriental civilizations, especially of philosophy, religion, folklore and art. The scope of the Society's purpose is not limited by temporal boundaries: All sincere students of man and his works in Asia, at whatever period of history are welcomed to membership.''
This must be a ``particular field of scholarship.''
The Journal (JAOS) comes included with membership.
It became a constituent society of the ACLS in 1920. ACLS has an overview.
Also in 1842, Notre Dame University (bordering South Bend, Indiana) was founded, and Edgar Allen Poe more or less invented the detective story or roman policier.
In the earlier B language from which much of C was derived, the compilation proceeded through a program called bc to an intermediate language, which was in turn converted to assembler source by ba, and a.out was the default filename of the output from the assembler as.
You know, I once heard an ugly rumor that some Fortran compilers were nothing but C compilers with preprocessors that translated Fortran code into C. But that's impossible, because Fortran is so far superior to C. But for one reason or another, the Fortran compilers I used in the late 1980's all spat out executables called a.out.