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The US government's Country Studies website has a page of links (``Austria Country Studies'') amounting to the online version of its Austria book.
Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links. There's an official government site (also in English).
Telephone numbers for International direct dialing to Austria begin with 43.
A lot of people wonder how it ended up with the not-very-mnemonic carrier code TZ. The answer is that by the time ATA got into the business (1973), all the more appropriate two-letter codes (AT, TA, TR) were taken.
Getting into the business just before deregulation, ATA is sort of a 'tween company: it doesn't have the high costs of the old-line major passenger airlines, but not the low costs of a Southwest or JetBlue. They also don't have the name recognition of the majors. Around 2002, I encountered a travel agent at AAA in New Jersey who had never heard of it. After we finished booking on ATA, he had the cojones to tell us cheerfully that we saved 1,800 or whatever dollars -- sure, no thanks to him.
ATA was the tenth-largest US carrier in 2004, ranking by passenger miles. I think ATA needs to invest in more advertising. In late October 2004 they filed for bankruptcy. Also, they're now ``ATA Airlines.'' This is supposed not to be pleonastic because ATA is no longer an acronym, just a name -- sort of a decorative collection of letters, like Kodak, but pronounced ``ayteeay.'' It's as if they had a little switch attached to the language, which turns the significance of an established usage off when flipped and prevents their name from having an expansion that ends in ``Air Airlines.'' At least they didn't claim ATA now stands for the word father translated into TURKISH.
One can sympathize with the company's name problems: air and trans are as vanilla as airline word names get (as also American, in the US), and the lack of a distinctive name is probably part of their visibility problem. Indeed, as part of their bankruptcy restructuring, they were originally expecting to sell most of their main hub facilities at Midway to AirTran Airways, a low-cost carrier founded in 1993. Eventually, Southwest won the bidding war, in an agreement to buy the lease rights to six gates at Midway. The agreement involves some cash, transfer of a hangar at Midway, and very significantly a code-share agreement, the first for both ATA and Southwest. ATA will make Indianapolis, previously a secondary hub, the new center of its operations.
The father of modern Turkey was given the single name Mustafa at birth (1881, in Salonica). A mathematics teacher bestowed the name Kemal (`perfection') on him, and it was as ``Mustafa Kemal'' that he entered a military academy in 1895. After his graduation as a lieutenant in 1905 he was posted to Damascus, where he formed a secret society of anti-royalist (i.e., anti-Ottoman), reform-minded officers called Vatan (`Fatherland'). Other stuff happened that is not relevant to this entry. Let's just say that Mustafa Kemal was to Turkey everything Charles de Gaulle could have wanted to be for France. In 1934, he promulgated a law requiring all Turks to adopt surnames, and the Grand National Assembly gave him the surname of Atatürk, `father of Turks.'
Alma-Ata (now ``Almaty,'' grumble grumble) is the largest city in Kazakhstan. The name means `father of apples.'
- n. `target'
- interj. `on target, dead on, that's right.'
Also, there's a brand of orphan computers called Atari. At least there's an FAQ for the eight-bit machines, from the <comp.sys.atari.8bit> newsgroup. We also serve a little bit on the operating system.
ATAS was founded in 1946 and is based in the Los Angeles area. It presents the annual prime time Emmy awards, offers other events in its LA headquarters, and publishes Emmy magazine. The similarly named National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) is a distinct organization based in New York. Oddly enough, NATAS is a national organization, with chapters around the US (20, as of 2004). NATAS handles the Daytime, US News, and Documentary Emmys. Sports is subsumed in one or more of those categories. NATAS chapters handle Regional Emmy Awards. Enough! PLEASE! What do you think this is, some kind of general reference encyclopedic dictionary? We're just interested in acronyms (and initialisms and abbreviations and some necessary related explanatory entries). All I ever wanted to know was, did ``Emmy'' originally stand for M.E.? (Cf. emcee.) Ah! I found an answer. (No, I'm not going to tell you here. That wouldn't be efficient. You have to follow the link.)
The NYC-based NATAS has a regional chapter based in NYC: NY-NATAS. ATAS, in addition to being a ``sister organization'' to NATAS, also serves as one of its regional chapters. This begins to sound like incest. Buy the rights, it could be a hit. There's also a IATAS, which awards International Emmys (iEmmys). IATAS is a division of NATAS. It may be possible to draw the organization chart in two dimensions, but it can't be a good idea.
A few are still kept targeted at Broadway, although that is no longer considered a serious threat (vide ATW). People have been saying for over fifty years that Broadway is chatting with death's valet. People have probably been right, but musicals still animate the body.
ATBM can also be synonymously expanded as Anti-Tactical Ballistic Missile. Again, as with ABM, confusion arises from the fact that hyphenation is not explicitly nested: ATBM is anti the TBM. These are not ballistic missiles directed against tactics, except insofar as those tactics take the form of the firing of tactical ballistic missiles. Evidently, the end of the cold war has had collateral linguistic benefits.
According to the Computer Spanglish Diccionario, a useful resource served by Yolanda M. Rivas, ordenador is seldom used.
(``Please make payment in advance to receive over 40 volumes of truth'' from ``First Floor Rear'' somewhere in Pennsylvania.)
Albertus Magnus, a Dominican priest (OP), died in 1280; he was canonized and declared a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church some time later (1931). In 1941, Pope Pius XII declared him the patron of all those who devote themselves to the natural sciences.
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In fact, Tennessee has two Athenses, because Nashville is known locally as ``the Athens of the South.'' In an article about the South that was published in 1962 (``You-All and Non-You-All,'' described within the U and non-U entry), Jessica Mitford wondered puckishly ``whether Athenians ever think of their city as `the Nashville of Greece.' '' For a similar idea, based on Emory University's self-assumed status as a ``Harvard of the South,'' see the this S.P.D. entry.
Adelaide, capital of the state of South Australia, is also known locally as the ``Athens of the South.''
The back page of Notre Dame's student newspaper (The Observer) had a graphic that included this text: ``23 players signed letters of intent: 12 offense, 9 defense, 2 athletes.'' (My italics; otherwise, I've sedated the fonts and capitalization for readability. This was from the issue of February 4, 2010, the day after National Signing Day 2010. National Signing Day is the earliest date when student athletes may sign national letters of intent. There will be more about it at the link, once I sort some of it out.)
The previous evening, an article on the website of the Huntington, W.Va., Herald-Dispatch reported the letter-of-intent pickings of Marshall University (the local Division-I school). The article included this: ``Quarterback Ed Sullivan [he wants to be in the ``big shoe,'' no doubt] and athletes Jermaine Kelson, Antwon Chisholm, Jazz King and [Harold `Gator'] Hoskins ranked among Marshall recruits who opted for Huntington over BCS teams. The Thundering Herd also added considerable bulk along the line of scrimmage, signing five offensive and defensive players to bolster the front.''
A list at the foot of the Herald-Dispatch article included position codes and other information. Those described as ``athletes'' in the body of the article had the position code ``ATH.'' The student athletes (a general term) were listed in no particular order that I could discern. Anyway, here are the position codes, in order of their first occurrence in the list, along with the number of players with that designation, along with their average heights and weights:
Position # height weight (in lb.)
QB 1 6'2" 195
K 1 5'10" 175
OL 3 6'4.7" 283
ATH 5 5'10.6" 180
DB 3 5'11.7" 177.7
LB 2 6'2" 207.5
DE 3 6'4.3" 245
DT 2 6'4" 275
TE 2 6'4.5" 210
WR 3 6'0" 181.7
It turns out that ATH, Ath, or ath is very widely used in this context. FWIW, there don't seem to be any specific codes for special-teams positions. The ATH players aren't always relatively small. Oh, and I found an authority (Bob -- a guard... in the Notre Dame library, working beneath Touchdown Jesus!) who explained that ``an athlete'' is someone who can play more than one position. There are position names for the special teams, but everyone on those teams has a position on the main offensive or defensive team -- sort of like a day job.
And shouldn't it be the foot rather than the shoe that is called athletic? The shoe should be an ``athlete's shoe,'' but instead we have ``athlete's foot'' and ``athletic shoe.'' This isn't working right: the more I write, the more incomplete this entry gets. You know, when people say they have to run just to stay in one place, I look at their running shoes and think: if you want to get anywhere, maybe you should run the other way. If I erased this entry completely, I'd be done. Cf. sneaker.
Just to incomplete this entry more completely, I'd like to add that the odd attribution of athleticism to a shoe reminds one of homebuilding. (Well, okay, it just reminds me, but since I am one, it reminds one.) Specifically, rich folks will say something like ``I built this house in 1997'' when all they mean is that they hired a general contractor in 1996. At least with similarly misattributed corporate research and claimed accomplishments, no one doubts that the actual work was performed by humans and machines with individual identities distinct from that of the corporation. Nevertheless, have a gander at the GE entry. (Starship's ``We Built This City (on Rock and Roll)'' gets a free pass because attempting to parse rock lyrics dissolves the brain. Marconi plays the mamba. Oh noooo!)
ATHlet{e|ic}S. An abbreviation particularly common in Australia, where -- in keeping with Fowler's worst suggestion and widespread UK and Oz practice -- abbreviations are frequently written without a closing period. (There is no Australian organization, so far as I have been able to determine in way too much time devoted to the search, whose initialism is ATHS.)
If you are in the process of adopting a child who is a U.S. citizen or resident and cannot get an SSN for the child [or an ITIN either] until the adoption is final, you can apply for an ATIN to use instead of an SSN.
Use form W-7A. (An ATIN is only assigned if the child has already been placed in the return-filer's home and can be claimed as a dependent. An SSN must be applied for and used as soon as possible afterwards, and use of the ATIN discontinued.)
Hmmm. So it is. And a lot of folks have come up with interesting speculations connecting Atlantis with the Nahuatl word atl and tlan, which isn't a word in Nahuatl but occurs in a bunch of names. Doubtless these connections are at least as significant as various other observed coincidences.
The trial lawyers have evidently recognized that ``trial lawyer'' is not a term with positive associations. The organization has been rebranded the ``American Association for Justice'' (AAJ).
I believe it was one of the Oliver Wendell Holmeses who remarked that there is no more trying experience than undergoing a trial. I don't think it was a tautological pun. I do imagine it was the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who remarked this. Holmes Senior, the doctor, practiced in the days before modern anesthetics.
It was founded in 1857, so it has seen its share of ups and downs. The first years of the 21st century have been downs. Visit.
Edward Weeks was the editor from 1938 to 1966.
One would naturally expect ``ATLAS System'' as an AAP pleonasm pleonasm for ATLAS. This occurs, of course, but the AAP-assisted ``ATLAS accelerator'' pleonasm is much more common. One can also find higher-order-redundant pleonastic redundancies of higher order, like ``ATLAS LINAC accelerator at Argonne.'' ATLAS has 62 resonators.
ATM passes information in 53-byte cells consisting of 48 bytes of payload and 5 bytes of header. It's defined for 155Mbit/second data rates and faster. See also SDH.
The phrase can be translated as `at full mother,' on the pattern of expressions like a toda velocidad (`at full speed'). The phrase doesn't make any more literal sense in Spanish than the translation does in English. From time to time over the past few years I've asked various Mexicans what sense they could make of the phrase, and never gotten more than admittedly ignorant speculation. It's just an idiom.
The first ATM was inaugurated in London on a Tuesday, June 27, 1967. It was
apparently called an ``automated cash dispenser'' at the time. I read this in
an article by James Hudnut-Beumer. He's a professor of of American religious
history at Vanderbilt University, and the
article, published June 21, 2017, in The Conversation, is
``Why cash remains sacred in American churches.''
It never would have occurred to me to ask the question, but I was interested to read there that Marty Baker, pastor of the Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Georgia, is widely credited as the first to install an ATM inside a church. He installed two of them in the church lobby in 2005. Not one to do things by halves, apparently. These ATM's are also known as ``giving kiosks.'' It's striking how equivocal the verb derivatives can be -- dispense cash or dispense with cash, Kiosks that give cash or kiosks for giving, or forgiving or cash for dispensation?
Marty Baker saw that it was good, so he founded SecureGive, a for-profit company that makes and manages giving kiosks of many different persuasions. The term ``ATM,'' having been replaced in this context, has apparently been repurposed with the new expansion ``Automatic Tithing Machine,'' for a kind of giving kiosk that transfers funds directly from the giver's account into the church's. Some users place their ATM receipts in the plate (or pouch or slot or whatever) at the appropriate time in the service.
Now let's discuss some ethical, um, issues. If you write or say ``ATM machine,'' then you are a bad person. In principle, it's okay just to think it, but bad thoughts lead to bad actions, so keep that in mind. If you want to be a very bad person and burn in hell forever, say ``Automatic ATM Machine'' (the teller is silent).
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For obvious reasons, atomic names tend to be monosyllabic. Aaron and Oscar are pretty solid exceptions, although I knew an automobile repairman who used ``Os'' for the latter.
A semiconductor physicist of my acquaintance was upset when his granddaughter was given the non-atomic (molecular?) name ``Candace.'' He feared she would end up being called ``Candy,'' not be taken seriously as a student in school, drop out, and lead an miserably unambitious, unliberated existence. This is only a slightly extreme version of the theory that Nomenclature is Destiny. (Following that link you can find another kind of atomic name: Atom Egoyan.)
Physicists define a quantity that is one twelfth the mass of a carbon atom. (Or, if you prefer, defined as one twelfth the mass of a mole of carbon atoms, divided by Avogadro's number, which is the number of carbon atoms in a mole of carbon atoms.) Since a ratio of masses equals the corresponding ratio of weights (principle of equivalence, remember?) the mass of an atom of some element (its atomic mass), given in amu, equals the atomic weight of the element.
Physicists prefer to distinguish mass and force (weight), so in contexts typically described or analyzed in physical terms, one tends to see the atomic mass term. (These contexts are more likely to be in solid, surface, interface, gas, or plasma phase, and to depend on detailed dynamics of individual particles matter. Typical instance: atomic mass spectroscopy.) Chemists tend to deal primarily with weights, and in chemical contexts, one sees atomic weight. (Chemical contexts are predominantly liquid-phase, typically involving macroscopic numbers of particles. Any situation involving a molecular species or chemical reaction is likely to be analyzed in chemical terms.) It is, of course, impossible to define a sharp boundary between chemical and physical contexts or approaches. To some extent, the distinction is one of conceptual approach, even when the substantive situation is the same, and has more to do with pedagogical traditions in the different disciplines than with any great difference in effectiveness.
``You should write your husband's biography,'' he told me. ``I cannot,'' I answered. ``My husband is the man I cook for and iron shirts for. How can I take him that seriously?''
Fermi is one of my favorite physicists, and this is one of my favorite books.
Interviewed at a training session in Las Vegas, ahead of a non-title bout February 22, 2003, 36-year-old juvenile delinquent Mike Tyson was being philosophical about his bad-boy image: ``Every religion has a saying about throwing stones in glass houses. I can't throw a sand pebble. I can't spit, I can't throw an atom at nobody.'' (This and other reflective contemplations in the London Independent, February 10, 2003. More about this fascinating creature at the bite me entry, coming soon.)
Gee, you don't think this wording will offend anyone? Nah -- I checked it out. All our constituents are fine with it.
You wanted that spelled out.
You know, this entry used to read
``Americans for Tax Reform. A group not officially affiliated with the GOP that wants taxes reduced.''
That was funnier, but the edited entry is better because we want to serve browsers who visit us with precise and unambiguous definitions.
Remember in Robocop, that behemoth with machine guns that required some adjustment?
They're in the accreditation business. That could get interesting.
ATSIC was created in 1990 by the Labor government of Hawke. During parliamentary discussion of the ATSIC Act in 1989, MP John Howard said that establishing ATSIC would be ``sheer national idiocy'' and described ATSIC as a ``black Parliament.'' As PM in 2004, he's getting his opportunity to replace it. It's a fascinating story, so now you know what to look out for.
Atta unsar þu in himinam, weihnái namô þein;.
Attila (ca. 406-453), was the last and most powerful king of the Hun empire. His fame was such that he remains famous (in Hungary and Turkey) and infamous (in the rest of the West) to this day. His name remains a popular boy's given name today in Hungary and (also as Atilla) in Turkey. The last of his many wives was named Ildikó, and that name is still used in Hungary today. The wife of a colleague from Hungary has that name, and she explained its origin to me with pride. (But maybe she just enjoys the expected shock value.)
Ildikó was a Goth, and he died shortly after marrying her. Historians tend to trust the reports of Priscus, a historian who traveled with Maximin on an embassy from Theodosius II in 448. According to Priscus, he died on the night after a feast celebrating that last marriage. After he was buried with rich funeral objects, his funeral party was killed to keep his burial place secret. Let's review: a man of moderate dietary habits, in his mid-forties, apparently healthy and with everything in the world to live for, gets a nosebleed and chokes to death. Many are dead and no one alive will admit he attended the funeral. This doesn't sound suspicious? ``The Scourge of God'' didn't have any enemies? Other reports say one or another of his wives killed him, but the reports that have come down to us are not contemporary. If only Dan Rather would give us his gut sense of the matter, then we could be sure.
The Hun empire included many Goths, and in the Gothic language, Attila can be understood as `little father.' Ata or Atta is also a common word for `father' in various Central Asian or at least Turkic languages (see ata), and in one or another of these Attila may mean `land-father.' There are other possibilities. You could look it up.
Stalin, another fellow with some blood on his hands, was known by the epithet of ``little father.'' In Romanian, that was tatucul. Here I guess we see the diminutive ending -cul preserved from Latin. According to the W. Meyer-Lübke Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, the Romanian word tata, meaning `father,' has cognates in many Romance languages, though not in Latin. The meaning in some of these other languages is familial but varies. In Old Romanian taica meant `older sibling, advisor to young maidens,' and some tata cognates have referred variously to a younger sibling, older sibling, maiden, etc. Come to think of it, I've heard ``tatas'' used in English. It had something to do with mamas, iirc. Let me look that up in a slang dictionary... oh! I guess I don't want to go there.
There's a cognate of tata that also meant `father' in Lombardic. This was the language of a West Germanic tribe that settled in northern Italy and ended up speaking a version of Romance with little Germanic vocabulary left in it, so this is a weak reed to support a Germanic etymology. The Meyer-Lübke doesn't draw any connection to East Germanic (i.e., Gothic) or other pre-Romance languages. It seems very hung up on the idea that the initial vowel would not have been elided. In the instance of one Romance tata variant [(l)ata], it suggests a possible connection with the word ätti in Swiss German (i.e., one of the local varieties of German spoken in Switzerland). I have one thing to say to these crazy linguists: get your head out of your ass!
Before Stalin, and before he himself had much blood on his own hands, Tsar Nicholas II was known as the little father. His enemy Nestor Makhnos (a bloody anarchist military commander) was given the nickname batko by his men; this meant `little father.'
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, his younger brother Bobby Kennedy served as campaign manager. He was rather bossy with the campaign staff, who used to say ``Little Brother is Watching You.'' (I just figured I'd throw that in there for a little comic relief, so it's not all about dictatorial leaders or bloody assassinations.)
Okay now, back to that earlier Scourge of God. The stress in the English pronunciation of Attila is on the second syllable, but in Gothic and in modern Serbo-Croatian it is on the first syllable. All the continental German forms of the name apparently have initial stress.
Middle High German documents from around 1200 record Attila's name as Etzel. This represents two systematic sound shifts: (1) umlaut, specifically assimilation of a to i (yes, even though the vowels were originally separated by a consonant; that's how umlaut works), and (b) affrication of the voiceless stop /t/ into /ts/, part of the second Germanic sound shift (LV). Attila's name provides one bit of evidence that, in at least one High Germanic dialect, the LV2 process had not ended by about 450. Taken all together, the various bits of evidence suggest that LV2 began spreading from the southern extreme of the West Germanic region in the sixth century (probably from Lombardy, when the Lombards still spoke a Germanic language).
Etzel became an important character in medieval German folklore. Edsel is a variant form of the name. The most famous person to bear it in modern times was Edsel Ford, son of the Henry Ford who founded the car company named after himself. When the company introduced a new line of cars in the late 1950's, they got the name Edsel. The line flopped infamously, and the name Edsel came to stand for commercial failure. Studies later showed that one of the many reasons it failed was a public perception of the Edsel name as odd. Naming the the new line ``Attila'' or something else better known would probably not have helped much, however: the line was introduced at the start of a recession that killed off the Nash, Packard, Hudson, and DeSoto marques, and left one or two others mortally wounded.
The Ford family was partly of Dutch or Flemish descent, but if there is a particular reason for the choice of name, it is not publicly known. There have been reports that the Ford family was opposed to using Edsel as the name of a car line, but their objections can't have been too strong. The company had been family-owned, only becoming a publicly traded corporation in 1956, but the Ford family has retained a controlling interest to this day (July 24, 2005, if you must know). The company had great trouble choosing a name, even going so far as to solicit some famously terrible suggestions from the famous poet Marianne Moore (``The Intelligent Whale,'' ``The Utopian Turtletop,'' ``The Pastelogram,'' ``The Mongoose Civique''). Plato was right about poets. At the meeting that chose the name, Ernest Breech stepped into the breach. Chairing the meeting in the absence of Henry Ford II, he urged the adoption of Edsel, name of the company's second president.
Shortly before he [Thomas Apley, the writer's (George's) father] purchased in Beacon Street he had been drawn, like so many others, to build one of those fine bow-front houses around one of these shady squares in the South End. When he did so nearly everyone was under the impression that this district would be one of the most solid residential sections of Boston instead of becoming, as it is to-day, a region of rooming houses and worse. You may have seen those houses in the South End, fine mansions with dark walnut doors and beautiful woodwork. One morning, as Tim, the coachman, came up with the carriage, to carry your Aunt Amelia and me to Miss Hendrick's Primary School, my father, who had not gone down to his office at the usual early hour because he had a bad head cold, came out with us to the front steps. I could not have been more than seven at the time, but I remember the exclamation that he gave when he observed the brownstone steps of the house across the street.
``Thunderation,'' Father said, ``there is a man in his shirt sleeves on those steps.'' The next day he sold his house for what he paid for it and we moved to Beacon Street. Father had sensed the approach of change; a man in his shirt sleeves had told him that the days of the South End were numbered.
For more Marquand material, see the BF entry. For yet more material -- the whole nine yards, as it were -- try Sartor Resartus, by Thomas Carlyle.
(No, no one really knows the origin of the expression ``the whole nine yards.'' I'm sure there's a Nobel prize in it for the fellow who cracks that nut.)
An attributive noun may itself be a compound noun or noun phrase. In that case, the attributive noun is traditionally hyphenated. Thus, the noun phrase ``intermediate frequency,'' consisting of the adjective intermediate modifying the noun frequency, becomes the attributive noun ``intermediate-frequency'' and can modify the noun amplifier in the noun phrase ``intermediate-frequency amplifier.'' The hyphen allows a reader encountering the words intermediate and frequency in sequence to parse them immediately as a modifier. If a compound attributive noun is written without a hyphen, then a reader is likely to misinterpret it initially as a subject or predicate, and is forced to reread or rethink the text when the noun functioning as noun is finally encountered.
Of particular interest in the present reference is the fact that the better literature, back in the day, preserved the hyphen in abbreviations. Hence, an intermediate-frequency amplifier was abbreviated I.-F. amp., whereas the center frequency of the signals such a device was designed to amplify was simply I.F. Sigh. For old times' sake, we've indicated the various historical abbreviated forms for the electronics abbreviations DC, AC, and IF. In part, this preservation of hyphenation in abbreviated forms was intended to help the reader recognize the abbreviation. It was an innocent time. A similar motivation led to the disappearance of periods in British abbreviations, as discussed in the Mr entry. We now continue with the discussion of attributive-noun hyphenation in unabbreviated cases.
The hyphenation rule is applied loosely. Some noun phrases, particularly proper nouns (e.g., Dow Jones) or disciplinary titles (e.g., Fluid Mechanics) are likely to be recognized as attributive in context and are not hyphenated. Sometimes the attributive noun phrase itself consists of an attributive compound noun modifying another noun (so in formal rather than functional terms, one may have an adjective followed by three nouns). In these cases there is no generally accepted rule; one hyphenates in whatever way seems likely to make the meaning clear most immediately.
In the case of attributive noun phrases that include a quantifier, American usage follows an interesting rule: when the noun phrase is transformed into a modifier, the noun component of the original phrase is put into singular form. For example, the noun phrase ``two cars'' becomes the adjective ``two-car,'' as in ``two-car garage.'' British usage does not follow this rule (hence ``two cars garage'', with the stress on the first syllable of garage and the comma after the quote for good measure). I'm not sure what the traditional rule has been, but now the plural-singular transformation seems to apply sometimes in Britain. It might just be American media influence. Canadian usage appears to coincide with US. Another example: ``nine days' wonder'' (British) vs. ``nine-day wonder'' (N. American). Of course, there are exceptions. See if you can find the one in the car alarm entry!
Another difference between British and North American dialects' use of plural (but not directly concerning attributive nouns) has to do with the grammatical number of collective nouns. In North American English, collective nouns are generally grammatically singular unless the noun form is plural (``Congress meets,'' ``the Miami Heat is out of the play-offs,'' but ``the Yankees win''). In British, collective nouns are usually grammatically plural even when the noun form is singular (``Manchester United win'').
Attributive nouns get a mention in the Latin lesson at the A.M. entry.
``Wing'' sounds kind of martial. Or maybe wings are intended to suggest angels' wings and death. Vide ATBM.
A contraction of à la is à la.
For more general information visit the gold entry in WebElements and the entry at Chemicool, where it was #2 on the Top Five List a long time ago when I checked.
It is certainly in organizations of people that grammatical-number distinctions begin to blur. This is even more the case for the military and civilian ``wings,'' or what have you, or organizations regarded as terrorist.
This is interesting: they seem to have a website.
- Atlas Orthogonality (oops, dead link)
- NUCCA
- The Society of Chiropractic Orthospinology (as in spine, not as in spin)
Stupid: `with berries.'
Sometimes I feel like a wrote a beautiful reference work and some jerk-off came along and scrawled graffiti all over it, and it turned out that I was the jerk-off. I also have an entry for au.
Im Jahre 1932, Audi and Horch combined, along with Wanderer and DKW (Das kleine Wunder), into Auto-Union, adopting a logo in the form of four interlocking rings that is still the trademark of Audi. [Kleine Wunder can be literally translated `small wonder,' but the German expression only has the sense of `small miracle,' and does not suggest `no surprise [that]' like the English expression. Little wonder the company folded and was merged away.]
More details on Audi company history here.
I cribbed this from a posting on the Classics list, naturally. Here it is in the archives.
Incidentally, Audi is itself not, um, unheard of as a surname. Robert Audi (b. 1941), for instance, is the author of many philosophical works, such as Action, Intention, and Reason (Cornell University Press, 1993), and general editor of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (CUP, 1/e 1995, 2/e 1999).
I'd like to mention that symbol on the greenback, the eye above the pyramid, and I would, if I could see any excuse to do it.
Incidentally, pis also means `udder,' so ``veau au pis'' does not have to mean `calf at worst.' Unfortunately, ``pis pis'' just means `worse udder.' I was kinda hoping there could be an udder-worst-type pun.
But I wasn't reminded of this immediately. I just mentioned the email to mom, and read her the WACky entry. She didn't think it was so inspired. I must have read it too fast. Yeah, that's it. Then I mentioned that yesterday I had an email from a guy who wrote ``And Stammtisch Beau Fleuve means what? Table reserved by a beautiful river?'' That made her laugh, even though it's a fair interpretation. After she stopped laughing, she commented that what her grandmother would have said about the glossary was (is?) that it's the product of an ausgeruhter Kopf. Googling on this phrase and related ones (vom ausgeruhten Kopf, etc.) suggests that this is no longer, if it ever was, a common expression. Anyway, since you asked what I wrote (you did, didn't you?), here it is:
``Beau fleuve'' is believed to have been used in reference to the Niagara River, and to be the source, in corrupt form, of the name of the city of Buffalo. I started the glossary when I was an asst. prof at the University of Buffalo, and there was a bunch of friends I ate lunch with regularly. At the time (1995), the fellow in charge of Engineering Computing was stupidly reluctant to let me set up a web site for a small glossary of microelectronics terms (and some other words and abbreviations I used in class). To bypass him, I got a website from a different university webserver for the stated purpose of having a web presence for a university group (my lunch group). To get the relevant university official to grant my request, I tried to make it sound a bit more serious or at least established [than it actually was], so I gave our informal group a name.
For someone whose national holiday celebrates independence and freedom, the particulars of the event commemorated on Australia Day can induce queasiness. Governor Phillip came to found a penal colony. The ships he came with carried, in addition to 450 sailors and government personnel, over 750 prisoners (including 15 children).
Australia celebrates its other national holiday in common with New Zealand: Anzac Day, described at the ANZAC entry. Australia has other public holidays, but they're not especially national: Good Friday and Easter Monday (I guess that's a three-day weekend plus a day to dry out), Christmas and Boxing Day, and New Year's Day. There are three officially observed days that are not public holidays: Commonwealth Day (second Monday in March), Mother's Day (second Sunday in May), and Father's Day (first Sunday in September). Various other holidays are widely celebrated unofficially or are official at the state level, but are not declared public holidays at the national level (so I understand). These include the Monarch's birthday and Labour Day.
Labour Day in Australia is celebrated on different days in different states. The day generally commemorates the establishment of the eight-hour day, and this was won separately by various trade unions at different times in different states. The eight-hour day was an early focus of the union movement (see 888) in the nineteenth century.
- September 5: Ludwig Boltzmann
- September 23: Paul Kammerer
- September 25: Paul Ehrenfest
Rhyme schemes? We don' need no steenkeen rhyme schemes!
Authorized. Dialer Error629. Connection closed by remote computer.Technical support will conclude that you're successfully connecting but that there are other problems. Check the cabling. Power down and power up. Turn off all other appliances. Jog around the block. Hmm. Apparently your operating system is too old. You should spend a few hundred dollars on an OS upgrade and more memory. Look, why not just buy a new computer? Etc.
Thank him politely and call back later. Talk to someone who understands the arcane terminology. ``Authorized''? Let's try another userid and password. Ah-hah -- works! The problem appears to be: your password was munged!
Bingo.
By the way, the equivalent terminology from the ``Online Control Pad'' dialog box is
Internet Connection Not Established Network connection is not available. Do you want to work offline?This typically means `password mistyped.'
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
Maybe it's the only form.
According to the back-cover copy of her An Accidental Autobiography, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison was asked to describe the book she was writing and responded, ``an autobiography in which I am not the main character.'' This doesn't strike me as particularly novel.
Supposing for the sake of argument that he's wrong, I wonder: is infection transferred from one part of the body to another part of the same body by the good offices of a physician properly ``autoinfection,'' ``iatrogenic infection,'' or what? And is the physician a ``vector'' or the 'scope a ``vehicle''? (An auto? BTW, the word transfection refers to something else entirely.)
The last time I had a check-up, I asked him (same doctor) why he was examining my ears. What was he actually looking for? He said he was looking for my brain; if it wasn't there he'd be able to see straight across. If I'd had a brain I would have pointed out that in that case, there was no need to check on both sides.
The Divinyls had a hit with ``I Touch Myself.'' The middle line of the chorus is ``When I think about you I touch myself.'' Sort of like doing push-ups, I suppose.
You know, the three main forms of plague -- bubonic, pneumonic, and septic, in increasing order of how soon an obituary may be needed -- all result from infection by the same bacterium (Yersinia pestis). They differ essentially in where they are or start out, and one kind can turn into another. Similarly, pulmonary tuberculosis (the usual TB), scrofula, and a host of other unpleasant diseases can all arise from the same bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Some of these diseases, however, can be caused by other similar bacteria. Scrofula in children is usually caused by Mycobacterium scrofulaceum or Mycobacterium avium.
is a common example of autoionization.
This US military network was activated in December 1963, and became the principal long-haul, nonsecure voice communications network within the Defense Communications System. It eventually became a part of the Defense Switched Network (DSN), the replacement system activated in 1990 to provide long-distance telephone service to the military.
You can get more information about this system from the `touch tone dials'' page at telephonetribute.com and by following links from the AFCA home page.
When I worked at military labs in the 1980's, my desk phone was always part of AUTOVON. I could call out of the network (and most of my calls off base were off network as well). When calling people at other government labs, I had a choice: I could call their regular number (seven-digit number, preceded by an area code if different from mine) or I could call them within AUTOVON, in which case I always dialed a seven-digit number. The last four digits of the AUTOVON number were the same as the ordinary phone number, and the first three digits essentially identified the military site. There was a slight preference for calling within AUTOVON when possible, simply for budget reasons. Otherwise, for low- or non-ranking people like me, AUTOVON was not noticeably different from the regular civilian phone network.
AUTOVON, derived from the Army's Switched Circuit Automatic Network, was in fact designed to provide the Department of Defense with an internal telephone capability functionally equivalent to toll and Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) calls. However, it was also designed to provide precedence preemption for high-priority (much-higher-priority-than-me) users. This was implemented with a fourth column of keys, the fourth (1633-Hz) column at the DTMF entry. The column, labeled A/B/C/D from top row to bottom row there, had keys labeled FO/F/I/P, for Flash Override, Flash, Immediate, and Priority. (Also, the octothorpe key was labeled A.) Higher keys had higher precedence, and pressing one had the effect of pre-empting any lower-precedence call that was in the way. (The precedence below ``priority'' was ``routine.'') Phones with higher-precedence keys that were functional were available only to higher ranks in the military chain of command. With a few exceptions (POTUS, Sec'y of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff) those with access to them were only authorized to press those keys for specific levels of emergency. Here's some more detail.
This glossary entry is on the very cusp of futility: only a vanishingly small fraction of French-nonspeakers have the requisite level of ignorance to benefit from it, and those few wouldn't know to look here. Perfect!
Of course we're not going to give the English.
Do I really have to explain this? Gold cation of valence 1 (Au1+) is aurous. Auric is valence 3 (Au3+)! Honestly, sometimes I think you people don't even care.
Also in that movie, Honor Blackman plays the role of Pussy Galore. Somehow I think that when her parents were considering names, the future they imagined for her was nothing like being a Bond woman. (Particularly as she was born in 1927, and Ian Fleming didn't invent James Bond until after he retired with the rank of Commander from WWII service in British Naval Intelligence.)
- A verb meaning `be of use.' It means just that as an intransitive verb. The construction ``avail oneself of'' means for one `to take advantage of.' (Similarly with myself, yourself, etc.)
- A noun that is apparently short for `speaker availability.' (Availability, of course, is a noun constructed on the adjective available, from the verb avail. It's crazy, but I love this stuff.)
Chris Suellentrop did a series of ``Dispatches from Campaign 2004'' for Slate. His September 8 dispatch included this: ``It's been more than five weeks since Kerry last took questions at a press conference, or an `avail,' as it's called.''
I'm not sure in what year I wrote the preceding part of this entry. I checked back in late 2004: no more blink; no more Avance, either.
Isn't it fun to speak progressively more softly, so people lean toward you, and listen real hard, and then suddenly to shout at the top of your lungs so their ears hurt? No? Killjoy.
The AVG flew Curtiss P-40B fighters purchased by the Chinese government under a special arrangement with Curtiss-Wright. (The British had taken over a French order for P-40B's after the fall of France, and Curtiss had six assembly lines working on the order. Under an arrangement proposed by Curtiss Vice-President Burdette Wright (an old friend of Chennault), the British waived priority on 100 P-40B's rolling off one of those lines, allowing them to be sold to China. In return, Curtiss added a seventh line and delivered later-model P-40's to Britain that were more suitable for combat.) The P-40's used by the AVG were less maneuverable than Japanese Zeros, and they had crude gunsights, but the Tigers developed tactics that allowed them to achieve impressive kill ratios. After the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the US into WWII as an active combatant, the Flying Tigers' success was one of the few bright spots in a Pacific war that was starting out badly for the US. (In this connection also, recall James H. Doolittle.)
Chennault's status was rather irregular and his command a bit informal. According to a history page at the self-described official site, he was originally invited to China in 1937 by Madame Chiang, on a three-month mission to make a confidential survey of the Chinese Air Force, and his official status until the US entered the war was always a subject of speculation. ``Chennault himself states [probably in his Way of a Fighter] that he was a civilian advisor to the Secretary of the Commission for Aeronautical Affairs, first Madame Chiang and later T.V. Soong. ... Even while he commanded the American Volunteer Group in combat, his official job was adviser to the Central Bank of China, and his passport listed his occupation as a farmer.''
In July 1942, the AVG was incorporated into the USAAF, and Chennault was promoted to brigadier general. Chennault had great publicity, close connections with FDR and the White House, and a good relationship with Gen. Chiang Kai-Shek. In October 1942, he wrote FDR that with just 105 more fighters, and 30 medium and 12 heavy bombers, he could win the war by gaining air superiority and destroying Japanese shipping and industrial production. It's not clear how much of this wooly optimism FDR bought into, but Chiang's ground forces (could they even be called an army?) weren't engaging the enemy, so this approach had its attractions. In late spring 1943, Chennault was given command of the US Army's newly formed Fourteenth Air Force, and priority on supplies airlifted from India. The 14th underperformed. Chennault was eased out of command after FDR died.
When the war ended in 1945, ten AVG pilots formed an air cargo company called Flying Tiger Line, originally flying Conestoga freighters purchased as war surplus from the United States Navy. It achieved a number of firsts, and after acquiring its rival cargo airline Seaboard World Airlines on October 1, 1980, it surpassed Pan Am as the world's largest air cargo carrier. As it happens, my uncle Robert flew for them in the late 1970's or early 1980's. In 1989, the company was purchased by FedEx.
Oh, here's something: meetings are held in Lancaster, CA. Also, there are no meetings until further notice.
The Latin word avis became ave in Spanish, so the Latin prayer Ave Maria would sound like `Mary bird' in Spanish, to anyone who didn't know that it doesn't mean that.
To be fair for a change, I should probably note that there's a good reason why AVLIC/AILVC seems not to be well-represented in French-speaking parts of Canada, and why there is no provincial AILVC chapter for Quebec. According to the AVLIC Mission Statement, AVLIC is ``a national professional association which represents interpreters whose working languages are English and American Sign Language (ASL).'' (That is, they interpret between ASL and English.)
Similar radical shortenings (radical eliminations, literally) in European languages include auto, bil, and uncle. More generally, Japanese has a lot of much-shortened loans from European languages, particularly English. For some examples, see the perm entry.
Really, nature does not abhor a vacuum -- it's the pressure outside that pushes stuff in.
The first time I wore my ``Nature abhors a vacuum tube'' tee shirt to work (in 1994 or thereabouts), a student objected!
On April 29, 2003, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted Aruba native Sidney Ponson. At the time, he was a 43-54 career pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, with a 4.74 ERA. He had never had a winning season. In the subsequent three months, he caught fire, racking up a 12-5 record with a 3.45 ERA. He turned down a $21 million 3-year deal and at the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline he was dealt to the San Francisco Giants for for pitchers Kurt Ainsworth, Damian Moss and Ryan Hannaman. In San Francisco he was only 3-6, but had a 3.71 ERA. In the off-season, Baltimore lured him back for $22.5 million over three years.
You know, the sports analysts talk about his not giving up the long ball so much in 2003, and mental toughness and rotator-cuff injuries and controlling his weight -- what a crock! Pitching is a science, like astrology and psychology. He just got psyched by the knighthood. After ten games in 2004, he's 3-7 with an ERA of 6.47.
Okay, I confess, I made it up. A moment of weakness.
See some relevant phonological thoughts at the AWWA entry.
Uncertainties concerning what constitutes an animal under that law were resolved by Secretary of Agriculture Clifford Hardin, who exercised his administrative authority to exclude rats, mice, and birds. These together make up anywhere from eighty to ninety-eight percent of warmblooded lab animals, depending on which interested party's estimate you believe. The AAVS filed suit against the USDA in 1999, maintaining that the original intent of the legislation was to include them. It's a good thing no one is proposing counting fruit flies or flatworms.
Here was the USDA's breakdown for 1998:
| Category | Number |
|---|---|
| Oooh! Bunnywabbits | 287,523 |
| Guinea pigs | 261,305 |
| Hamsters | 206,243 |
| Other Animals | 142,963 |
| Pigs | 76,568 |
| Dogs | 76,071 |
| Primates | 57,377 |
| Other farm animals | 53,671 |
| Sheep | 27,381 |
| Cats | 24,712 |
``Other animals'' includes ferrets, woodchucks, armadillos, chinchillas, horses, spotted hyenas, and opposums. The categories are given above in the order in which the USDA presents them. If you don't like that order, then you could try suing the USDA. A few groups that you would expect were unhappy with the decision to exclude the most common lab animals. They took the usual multi-track approach -- direct petition, indirect pressure, lawsuit. On October 6, 2000, a lawsuit brought against the USDA by the ARDF was dismissed by US District Court Judge Ellen S. Huvelle.
``As part of Awareness Week, the State Emergency Management Agency and the National Weather Service will be conducting two `Test Tornado Warnings' between 2:00PM-2:30PM and between 7:00PM-7:30PM, Wednesday, March 17, 2004.'' March 17th in St. Joseph County, home of the Fighting Irish. If you think the Einstein shindig was big...
``Should actual severe weather be a threat on March 17, the testing will be held on March 18.'' It's reminiscent of the day of the Doolittle raid in Tokyo.
You know, this whole awareness thing was so memorable that the next year when I ran across the forgotten old email announcing it, I created an entirely new entry for it (contrast). I may be stuck in a rut, but I have deleted the announcement.
Perfect for fans of A.J. Jacobs: Bored with his routine, George Mahood decided to change his life by celebrating every holiday on the calendar -- from Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day to Inane Answering Machine Message Day. Join him on his strange, hilarious adventure!
(With National Curmudgeon Day between them, you have a three-day holiday.) Paperback price $13.40 for this shlock? I'd rather read a book.
Oh wait, here's a good one: National One-Hit Wonder Day was September 25, 2018. Wait -- it was September 25, 2017? But I just heard-- EVERY YEAR??? This soooo wrong.
Many of these observations, celebrations, PR events or what-have-you's have names that include ``Awareness Month,'' and many don't. Months claimed in connection with health issues are frequently named ``<Foobar> Awareness Month'' or ``<Foobar> Safety Month.'' Many related to group pride or solidarity of one sort or another get names including ``Heritage Month'' or ``History Month.'' Just to shake things up, some group is bound to rename its ``<Foobarian> Pride Month'' ``<Foobarian> History Awareness Month.'' And on the other side, the shills for research on one or another disease will discover that the victims live in shame, requiring ``Oblong Somitis Incognita Awareness Month'' to be rechristened ``OSI Pride Month.'' In short, I don't think the distinction between awareness months and pride months, say, is a sharp one, so I'm going to use this entry as a central repository for designated months, however designated. The entries for awareness days (eventually) and awareness weeks will function similarly.
There aren't a lot of awareness trimesters or awareness fortnights, although Prevent Blindness America does sponsor a 61-day ``month'' (see PBA). I can google up at most tens of thousands of awareness weekends, versus millions of weeks and months.
Most designated months coincide with calendar months. This is a sensible approach, since ``October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month'' is a little more memorable than, for example, ``The 31 days following the fifth day after the fourth Thursday in September are Breast Cancer Awareness Month.'' In order to discourage the sensible practice, I'll go out of my way to provide more extensive publicity -- a whole entry, say -- when I become aware of month-long awareness months that don't coincide with calendar months. The only one I have an entry for just now is Hispanic Heritage Month.
- January: Autism Awareness Month.
- January: Cervical Cancer Awareness Month or National Cervical Health Awareness Month.
- January: National Birth Defects Prevention Month.
- January:
National Blood Donor Month.
You'd figure they'd already need it for New Year's Eve (National Drunk Driving and Heavy Bleeding Awareness Night). Then again, maybe January is when all their regular contributors are all tapped out, so to speak. - January: National Glaucoma Awareness Month (see PBA).
- January: Autism Awareness Month.
- January: Autism Awareness Month.
- January: Stop that!
- January:
Thyroid Awareness Month.
Monitored or whatever by the AACE. Someday someone's going to notice that thyroid sounds like ``thigh 'roid,'' the same way someone once noticed that Uranus sounds like ``your anus.'' Then, in the same way that the pronunciation of Uranus drifted toward ``your a nuss'' (homophonous with the apparently preferable urinous), thyroid will begin to be pronounced ``thy roid'' or ``thirr ow id'' or something. That's the trouble with awareness -- it has unforeseen consequences. - February: African-American History Month.
- February: AMD/Low Vision Awareness Month (see PBA).
- February:
Heart Month.
Not like ``I <heart> NY.'' More like AHA. - March: Workplace Eye Health and Safety Awareness Month (see PBA).
- March: Women's History Month.
- March:
Irish-American Heritage Month.
(Hey, doesn't St. Patrick's Day fall on...) - April: Child Abuse Prevention Month.
- April: Mathematics Awareness Month (MAM).
- April: Women's Eye Health and Safety Month. (Apparently this month name is a trademark of the PBA. I think I'll stick with ``April,'' but thanks anyway.)
- April:
National Male Awareness Month.
(For those who needed reminding?) - April:
Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
(A little consultation might have prevented an awareness-space collision.) - April:
Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Awareness Month.
(Neatly synthesizing the last two awarenesses. Sponsored ``for a number of years'' by 2012 by the BC Society for Male Survivors Of Sexual Abuse. BC stands for British Columbia.) - May:
Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month.
(In Canada, May is Asian Heritage Month. Inclusivity explicitness creep has not arrived yet.) - May: National Sight-Saving Month: Ultraviolet Awareness Month (ask PBA why ``Month'' has to be on both sides of the colon).
- May:
Older Americans Month.
(Canada does not celebrate Older Americans Month.) - June:
Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.
(Really GLBT pride month, I think. The Stonewall anniversary is on June 25. NCOD is in October.) - June: Vision Research Month (see PBA).
- August: Cataract Awareness Month. (Visit Niagara Falls! Oh, wait... visit PBA instead. Sorry.)
- August: Children's Eye Health and Safety Month (see PBA).
- August: National Physically Challenged Month.
- September: Sports and Home Eye Safety Month (see PBA).
- October: Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
- October:
Disability Employment Awareness Month.
I'm aware that there has been a dramatic increase in disability unemployment: the percentage of American adults collecting federal disability insurance doubled between 1989 and 2010. The fastest-growing class of disability claims is mental disability. - October: Linguistic Inconsistency Awareness Month (LAME).
- October: National Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
- October:
Polish American Heritage Month / Miesiac Dziedzictwa Polskiego w
Ameryce.
(Note that the English name implies a Polish celebration of American history, while the Polish name implies celebration of Polish and American history.) - November: American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month.
I'm going to have to automate this. It's too much. In connection with the business of aligning awareness months with calendar months, let me note this: When Comte created the Positivist Calendar, even though he made 28-day months and intercalated five or six year-end days that had no weekday correspondences (so that the rest of the year, days of the week corresponded to date mod 7), he did align the years. (Year 1 coincided with year 1789 of the Gregorian calendar, naturally.)
- National Handwashing Awareness Week
(In 2006, it was December 3-9)
Learn about the Four Principles of Hand Awareness at the homepage of Henry the Hand, Champion Handwasher. - National Folic Acid Awareness Week
(January 8-14 in 2007)
Become acutely aware at the website of the National Council on Folic Acid. - Sea Otter Awareness Week
(September 25 to October 1 in 2011)
Cute and furry! - National
Robotics Week
(April 7-15 in 2012)
Interestingly, the text string "Asimov" does not occur on any page of <nationalroboticsweek.org> that Google has crawled. Granted, that seems to be no more than a couple of dozen webpages.
The party flag is essentially the same as the flag of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Germany (black device on white disc on red field), except that the four-armed black swastika is replaced by a three-legged black triskelion. Supposedly, this emblem represents three sevens.
AWD on a vehicle with four wheels sounds like it ought to be equivalent to 4WD, but it's not. 4WD includes ``low-range'' (high torque) gearing for deep mud or snow or steep grades. A 4WD must be stopped or slowed to a crawl to shift in or out of low range (done by toggling a switch or lever). AWD is power to all wheels, but without the special gearing.
The Strawberry Statement collects the scattered thoughts of James Kunen, a 60's student radical at Columbia University. (Bibliographic details at the AAHM entry.) It's written in diary style, so I can tell you that on a Tuesday, July 16, 1968, the author visited the programming director at WABC radio in New York City. The two had a mutually unsatisfactory meeting, but agreed that there was some news content on the mostly-music-format WABC-AM, in the form of two newscasts per hour. Kunen felt these were insufficently detailed, and characterized them for the book: ``Canada is still sinking and the Russians have bombed Detroit, now back to the Show.''
[This glossary entry is just begging for a juicy example, isn't it?]
Depending on your release, this may differ from nawk (New awk).
Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes a couple of awk programs.
Nowadays, shoe repair and manual shoe manufacture have gone the way of cobblestones. I suspect that most English-speakers' first encounter with the word awl, or even with the concept, occurs in Shakespeare's tragedy ``Julius Caesar,'' in the punny opening scene. Sadly, the standard (Schlegel) German translation is missing this bit. It wouldn't have been hard to recreate the pun: English awl and all can be translated to Ahle and alle. (The respective initial vowels here are short and long in quantity, but these are close enough for a good pun -- especially with a good actor's pronunciation.)
It's also occasionally expanded as ``absent without official leave,'' but in the military usage it is implicit that leave must be granted offically, or rather by a commanding officer. The way the Oxford Dictionary of the US Military handles this is to expand it as ``absent without (official) leave.'' They claim the acronym came into use in the 1920's, but I think it was already in use during WWI. Various American soldiers AWOL from their units during one or another World War are complaisantly mentioned by Gertrude Stein in some of her books.
When the horn sounds, the driver must push a button within a few seconds or else the brakes will be applied. Since the 1950's there has also been a mechanical visual display which changes to a sunburst pattern when the button is pushed, and to plain black when the bell rings.
Such a system is called ``fail-safe'' because its failure modes are designed to be safe. For example, in a power failure, the electromagnet goes off and the system signals to stop; if the brakeman is incapacitated, the brake goes on automatically. A common way for fail-safe systems to fail to perform safely as designed is by being turned off.
In the Jethro Tull song `Locomotive Breath,' Ian Anderson sings something like
old Charlie stole the handle
and the train it won't stop going no it couldn't slow down
For more railway-related songs, visit this chronological listing with comments or this alphabetic list.
The word fail-safe came into popular use with the novel Fail-safe, by Eugene Burdick & Harvey Wheeler, (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1962). This story of accidental nuclear war was published during the Cuban missile crisis and was made into a movie of the same name (Dr. Strangelove without the yuks).
java.awt package. (A
package is a collection of importable classes. Don't you just love the
uneven level of detail you get in this glossary?)
The consonantal w is a glide, and if one purses the lips slightly when pronouncing it, one produces a bilabial sound that is represented by a beta in the IPA, and which is the usual sound of b in Spanish. It is therefore not surprising that in ordinary speech, the glottal g and bilabial b of Spanish sound similar. This has led to some orthographic changes. For example, in Cervantes's original text, the word for `grandmother,' now spelled abuela, was spelled aguela. For some discussion of the Modern Greek g (gamma), see the galaxy entry.
Haested Methods sponsors a number of electronic discussion groups related to water works. See their forums page for information about WaterTalk, SewerTalk, StormTalk, and GISTalk. They also sponsor a Spanish-language version of WaterTalk, called AquaForo.
To be stuck inside of Mobile,
With the Memphis blues again.
Refrain of ``Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again.'' First released by Bob Dylan on ``Blonde on Blonde'' (1966).
There was also A [now defunct] Webpage (Wasted) On Tom Lehrer. Maybe it was related content. The names allude to his 1959 album, ``An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer.''
Probably the best-known statement of an axiom is the first sentence of chapter I in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Axioms explicitly so-called occur most often in mathematics. Most high-school students used to make the acquaintance of axioms, even if they did not come into a friendly relationship with them (i.e., even if they didn't exactly become familiar) in standard one-year courses in formal geometry. That was before high-school geometry courses were abased by mathematics-hating ``teachers'' and other saboteurs of children's education, who adopted wretched books full of time-wasting pictures and geometry-related stories with a very optional afterthought chapter or two about proofs at the end.
Euclid's geometry text taught rigor of thought to over twenty centuries'-worth of schoolboys. Euclid made a distinction between axioms and postulates, explained at the postulate entry.
``There's no twirling spectacular quite like AYOP. It brings together the best baton twirlers, teams and corps in the world for a series of National and World Open Championship contests - all under one umbrella. It can be appropriately called the `World Series of Baton Twirling' ... sanctioned by the NBTA INTERNATIONAL.''
And where are AYOP events held??? That's right -- they're ``held [every year in July] in the spacious, air conditioned Notre Dame University Athletic and Convocation Center (JACC)''!!!! Hip-hip hooray! Hip-hip-hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Go! Fight! Win! Hip-hip hoo--what? Oh, it's not cheerleading? Better go to the majorette entry (once it exists) and learn more.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Arizona. USACityLink.com has a page for Arizona.
Arizona is a community property state.
The US is the world's second-largest copper producer after Chile. Each produces about two million tons a year. You might ask: if they both produce about that much, and if production varies by maybe 10% year-to-year (how did you know that?), then how come Chile is consistently first and the US consistently second? Go ahead, ask, I can answer. The reason is, production is driven by the market. In a year with high demand, prices go up and production everywhere increases, so while the overall numbers vary a lot, the ratio of production between major producers varies less rapidly. Part of how this works is that the cost of extraction varies for different sources. At any given time some sources are not worth using. When prices increase, it becomes profitable to use those higher-cost resources. Major producing countries like the US and Chile have a number of such mines, so production by both varies with world demand. Some statistics show this kicking-in of higher-cost resources. In the US, Arizona is has the richest and most economically efficient copper mines, and in a typical year between a half and two thirds of US production comes from Arizona. When demand is low and increases rapidly, most of the extra production comes from Arizona, which has ready excess capacity. On the other hand, when demand increases steadily, Arizona's share declines, as higher-cost producers enter the market. Instead of saying Arizona here, I probably should be saying Phelps-Dodge.
Of course, a lot of other factors affect production, such as resource depletion, lack of investment capital (a major factor for Zambia), political issues (gee, why can't Zambia just borrow abroad on the strength of its rich resources, and why did the bottom fall out of Zairian production in the early nineties?), personnel and transport (proximity to market) considerations, etc.
It's slightly unusual to have a noun ending in -ar that isn't the noun use of a verb infinitive, but you get used to it before the time when you can remember getting used to it. Another slight oddity: the woman's name Pilar. [Other non-infinitive nouns ending in -ar that I can think of are male: pulgar (`thumb'), collar (`necklace'). Mar is trickier; see its entry.] The word asar, which in Latin American prounciations is a homophone of azar, is a verb meaning `cook over an open flame.' Asado, meaning precisely `grilled beef steak,' is the national dish of Argentina.
Latin had four classes of verbs, whose active infinitives (if they weren't deponent verbs they had active infinitives) ended in -are, -ire, or -ere. (That's right: mere spelling didn't quite tell you the conjugation of -ere verbs.) The -are class was the largest, I'm pretty sure. Romance languages typically collapsed these four regular conjugations into three, and the conjugation that collected the -are verbs (-ar in Spanish) were usually still the largest group. Modern Greek has a class of verbs with infinitives ending in -aro. It dates back to Byzantine times, when it was constructed on the basis of -are verbs borrowed from Italian (or perhaps more precisely Venetian). The ending is highly productive, and seems to provide the most common conjugation for loan verbs. For example, stoparo and sakaro (`to stop, to shock') are standard in Modern (demotic) Greek today. (German has a similar class of verbs, with infinitives ending in -ieren, mostly borrowed from French.)
Greek-speakers living in foreign countries often use this conjugation to create hybrids used in local versions of Greek (a North American example: muvaro, `to move'). The pattern is not uniform, however. Greeks in Germany use preparizo for `to prepare,' from the German preparieren. The German verb is borrowed, in turn, from the French preparer. This verb is also an -are verb (viz., it's derived from the Latin preparare). I believe that Latin -are verbs generally ended up as -er verbs in Modern French.
where N is nitrogen and R represents a molecule bonded to the functional group through a carbon chain. Particular azides have names including the prefix azido-.
Note carefully the difference between an azide and an amine. An azide has three nitrogens bonded to one organic group; an amine has three organic groups bonded to one nitrogen (R3N).
H
\
\
O
/
/
Cu
\
\
O
/
/
O == C
\
\
O
/
/
Cu
\
\
O
/
/
O == C
\
\
O
/
/
Cu
\
\
O
/
/
H
The mineral takes its name from its color. For more about the occurrence of this hydroxy-carbonate, see the Fahlerz entry. For a similar mineral, see malachite.
The formula for the Bohr radius is
ħ
a = ----- ,
0
αcm
0
where ħ is the reduced Planck's constant (h/2π), α the fine-structure constant, c the speed of light in vacuum, and m0 the free electron mass.
If you want to compute the properties of an isolated hydrogen atom, you start with the complete Hamiltonian for the nucleus and electron, and separate out the Hamiltonian for the center-of-mass motion. This leaves a Hamiltonian for the electron-nucleus separation. (In classical physics, the Hamiltonian is a function of independent momentum and coordinate variables, and ``canonical'' equations of motion equivalent to Newton's equations are obtained as first-order partial differential equations involving the Hamiltonian. In quantum mechanics, the Hamiltonian is an operator function of momentum and coordinate operators, and it is formally identical to the classical Hamiltonian so long as intrinsic spin is ignored. The Schrödinger equation is a first-order partial differential equation involving the quantum Hamiltonian.)
Anyway -- the Hamiltonian, or any equations derived from it, looks similar for the electron-nucleus separation as for an electron orbiting an infinite-mass nucleus, but with a ``reduced mass'' (its value, half the harmonic mean of the electron and nuclear masses, is about 0.05% smaller than the free electron mass). Using the reduced mass can give you a slight improvement in accuracy for an even slighter amount of computational work, if all you're dealing with is an atom with one electron, or a Rydberg atom with only one highly excited electron. (A Rydberg atom is an atom with one or few electrons in large-n states, and the other electrons not in highly excited states.) The Bohr radius, however, is defined using the free electron mass, and not the reduced mass.
| Name | Area (sq cm) | Width (cm) | Length (cm) | Length (in) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A0 | ||||
| A1 | ||||
| A2 | ||||
| A3 | ||||
| A4 | ||||
| A5 | ||||
| A6 |
It is superfluous to note that Hermann Melville was rather a literary naturalist. But in chapter 32 (``Cetology'') of Moby Dick, he makes a surprisingly direct connection: ``According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into CHAPTERS), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large. I. THE FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the SPERM WHALE; of the OCTAVO, the GRAMPUS; of the DUODECIMO, the PORPOISE.'' After enumerating the Folio whales, he writes (the ``books'' here are still metaphorical; we continue in chapter 32 of Moby Dick):
Thus ends BOOK I. (Folio), and now begins BOOK II. (Octavo).
OCTAVOES.*--These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may be numbered:--I., the GRAMPUS; II., the BLACK FISH; III., the NARWHALE; IV., the THRASHER; V., the KILLER.
*Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because, while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its dimensioned form does not preserve the shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
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Based in Frederick, MD.
The social science of small-group interactions would probably explain why the APDR doesn't get a link at A3CR2: this town ain't big enough for two alphas.
``Ay THREE cee arr two.'' It has kind of a ring to it, but they should drop the ``two'' so it scans with ``cee THREE pee oh.''