Others born on November 7 are singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell, the evangelist Billy Graham, scientist Marie Curie, singers Joan Sutherland and Johnny Rivers, and ethologist Konrad Lorenz, but not in that order. The science of astrology allows us to see that all these people (as well as those born that day who did not achieve fame) were essentially the same, with some minor differences occasioned by the phase of the moon.
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The regular DAP is not, TTBOMKAU, called ``Heavyweight Directory Access Protocol.''
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Another problem is, some less developed countries got that way by not being developing countries in the first place.
During the autumn rioting in 2005, they took a courageous stand against police violence and the nasty language of the Interior Minister.
This overview page of nucleus models has a link to an extended technical description (dvi).
In upper-house elections on July 29, 2007, the LDP coalition (LDP and New Komeito) lost its majority for only the second time in history. There are 242 seats in the upper house, and half are contested in each election. The coalition entered the campaign defending 76 of its 132 seats, and as of the next morning appeared to have retained 46 -- LDP 37 and New Komeito 9. (In 1998 it won only 44 seats and the late Ryutaro Hashimoto, PM at the time, resigned.) The DPJ is projected to win 60 seats, well over the 55 it needed to gain an outright majority in the upper house. However, the LDP has a two-thirds majority in the lower house; in principle, that means it can override the constitutionally weak upper house.
At first, PM Shinzo Abe chose not to fall on his sword. (Okay, the traditional practice is slightly different in Japan. You get the idea.) And his party was okay with that, to the extent of there not being a public challenge to his leadership. He duly reshuffled his cabinet, but that was it. Then about a month later, on September 12, Abe, age 53 (the statement of his age is mildly disturbing at this point, isn't it?), announced that he would quit. The next day, he entered a hospital (see?) for unspecified stress-related abdominal complaints. (Sharp pains?) The LDP chose a new PM, Yasuo Fukuda, age 71 (it's okay this time), on September 25, and on the same day Abe emerged from the hospital to dissolve his Cabinet and formally resign.
The most important reason for the 2007 defeat was widespread anger over poor record-keeping in the national social security system: fifty million records lost. I don't understand how a problem can build to that scale before breaking. Claims (by the opposition) that many pension records had been lost only the news in late 2006, and were only confirmed in Spring 2007. (In summary reports in English, it is often reported that two ministers resigned and one committed suicide ``in the scandals.'' This gives the impression that the big pension scandal led to resignations and suicide, but so far it has not. A bit ironically, administrative reform minister Genichiro Sata resigned in December 2006 over charges of misusing of political funds. Agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka committed suicide in May following allegations that he misused public funds; his successor in that ministry, Norihiko Akagi, got into similar scandals by early July. In June, defense minister Fumio Kyuma suggested the 1945 U.S. nuclear bombings of Japan were justified, and he resigned in the ensuing, uh, firestorm I think is what you'd call it.)
To say nothing of the millions who have received smaller pensions than they'd earned, the pension screw-up has required practically all Japanese adults to visit government offices to check that the records of their employment histories are complete and correct. The lines have been rock-concert-ticket-window bad, though not Notre-Dame-football-ticket-window bad. (This was before ND's historically bad 2007 season.)
A lot of men you meet on internet dating sites will reply to your note by saying that gee, you're a swell gal, it's too bad you live so far away. This means that your beauty lives too deep below your skin.
Oh wow, man! That pun was like, mind-blowing! Intense! I better sit down. What do you know -- I am sitting down! How cool is that?
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You're not supposed to just throw it away when it deceases. Learn here what to do.
``We're waiting on some polling data,'' says one Senate Democratic leadership staffer, when approached about where her boss thought he might go the Alito front.
My Aunt Edith contributed a lot of money to the Democratic Party. She had a card to add to her wall with the president's autograph and a picture of the White House every Christmas season during Democratic administrations, although she took down Clinton after the Lewinsky affair (and she didn't remember the Democrats in her will). She also had certificates attesting to her status as a member of a Democratic ``Leadership Circle.'' It reminds me of a New Yorker cartoon. The sexy young thing sitting at a table in the glitzy restaurant is saying ``Oh, I don't think of you as an old man at all! I think of you as a very, very rich old man!'' Something like that.
A cop I know, a fellow regular at a restaurant where I know all the table numbers, was holding forth at 23 the other day. He said that before he met his wife, he was looking for a rich woman, preferably a rich old woman.
Anyway, these leadershipish things have become pretty common, along with appeals for money that are thinly disguised as polls. At the time, though, it was new to me. I asked Aunt Edith about it and she replied modestly that ``oh, everybody sends those things.'' As a joke, I decided to take her somewhat literally and ask whether the Republicans sent her such certificates too. She gazed at me in horror (it wasn't mock horror; mock horror doesn't usually include tremors of fear) and asked ``You're not a Republican, are you?'' I reassured her (without explaining that I don't have much respect for people who can be wholeheartedly enthusiastic about any political person or party), and I wasn't cut out of the will, but for all I know it may have been the most expensive joke I ever told.
Teachers are encouraged to teach to the test, but they don't call it that. They want teachers to ``align'' the curriculum the test.
Here's a nice page on textual criticism.
The principle seems to work in many instances where the philological reasoning does not, as in the phrase ``play it again, Sam'' that does not occur in Casablanca (discussed at the As Time Goes By entry).
An equivalent expression is proclivi lectioni praestat ardua. According to L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson: Scribes and Scholars (Oxford, 2/e 1974), p. 248n, the ``principle of difficilior lectio seems to have been first expressly formulated as a criterion by Jean Le Clerc (Clericus) in his Ars Critica, vol. 2, Amsterdam, 1697, p. 389...''
The word Entwicklung, incidentally, is used in mathematics for what is usually called a series (or ``series expansion'') in English. I half-remember some German-speaking mathematician talking about ``developing'' an expansion in powers of some parameter or other.
Nowadays, with spell-checkers built into many kinds of text-processing software, the most common misspellings in commercial publications are homophone errors -- principle for principal or vice versa, likewise complementary for complimentary, etc. (Incidentally, I don't use an automatic spell-checker, so here you get to enjoy the traditional full panoply of orthographic absurdities and atrocities.) Ware won've uh pear of homophoans iz rellatively rer, it seems probable that the spelling of the more common word will be overused for that of the less common. For example, in a FOXNews.com story (``Sixth Human Foot Washes Ashore on Canada's Coast'') credited to the AP and dated Wednesday, June 18, 2008, ``the Straight of Georgia'' was mentioned (as well as the Strait of Georgia). A version from early the next morning managed to avoid that error, but quoted an RCMP spokeswoman as saying ``Too my knowledge, we have not encountered anything like this.'' This particular version contained a comment about spelling at the bottom:
By the end of the day Thursday, it turned out that the sixth foot was a hoax. Incidentally, I think the reason four out of the five genuine finds have been right feet is that most people are right-handed, and that right-handed people tend to be right-legged and right-footed as well. That probably makes the right foot slightly meatier and bigger, whereas the shoes are more closely equal in size. Hence, the right foot fits more snugly in the right shoe and is less likely to slip out. (This explanation depends on the hypothesis, which has been put forward repeatedly, that the reason only feet have appeared, and no other body parts, is that they were carried along by the buoyant athletic shoes they were found in.)
For over a century, newspapers were typeset with a ``hot lead'' process, in which a ``line-o'-type'' (hence the trademarked name Linotype for the first successful American invention of this kind) was created by pouring a molten lead alloy into a line of type molds. (There was at least one significant competitor, Monotype, but the Linotype brand was dominant in the English-speaking world and the word linotype is now in practice a generic term.) A linotype operator could create the line of molds directly from a keyboard -- the process was dramatically more efficient than setting type manually from a case of movable type. (For more on the keyboard, see etaoin shrdlu.) Since the typesetting was in ``lead,'' the same written word lead was used for extra lead inserted as spacing. Hence, the word lede had the advantages of distinguishing between what would otherwise have been a common pair of homographs in copy-editing, and of doing so with a word whose pronunciation (with a long e) was clear.
One irritating common error that I have seen even in the writing of otherwise observant highly intelligent people like me is the spelling ``lead'' for the past-tense verb form led. It's a sort of multiple homonym error: The uncountable noun lead is a homophone of the verb form led, but it happens to be a homograph of the verb form lead, making it look like a conjugation error instead. It produces a kind of egalitarianism: we have difficulty determining the tense of leading as well as of reading. See also leaders.
Linotype printing is called ``hot-lead'' or ``hot-metal'' printing, but the latter term is almost 20% more accurate (or say 20% more inclusive). The hot metal poured to make a line of type is normally an alloy of lead (84%), antimony (12%), and tin (4%). The particular composition chosen corresponds to a eutectic point. There's a reason for this, explained in the next two paragraphs.
Most alloys do not freeze at a single sharp temperature. Starting from a high-temperature melt and slowly cooling, one reaches a temperature where a solid phase begins to precipitate out. This solid has a composition different from the initial liquid, and as the solid phase grows, the composition of the remaining liquid shifts in a complementary fashion. (That is, whatever the solid has a relatively high concentration of is progressively depleted in the liquid.) The situation is further complicated because there may be as many coexisting phases as there are distinct elements in the alloy, and the composition of a phase in equilibrium changes as temperature decreases. (The newly-formed solid at any time is in equilibrium. Since the older solid does not remelt, its composition is essentially fixed and out of equilibrium.) The result once the last of the melt has solidified is a highly inhomogeneous solid.
On the other hand, if one starts with a eutectic composition, then like a pure element it remains entirely liquid until it reaches a freezing point, where it solidifies homogeneously. A eutectic alloy thus makes possible sharply controlled mechanical properties. Also, cooling requires the conduction only of the latent heat of fusion and only an infinitisimal heat flow to cool the melt through a range of melting temperatures, so a eutectic alloy can be cooled rapidly. (In fact, the only way to make bulk amorphous metal from liquid metal is to cool a eutectic alloy.) Also, for any given set of elemental components, the eutectic composition (if there is one) yields the lowest melting point. (That is, its single melting point is at or below the temperature at which any other composition begins to melt. For the standard linotype alloy, the melting point is an almost chilly 475°F. This alloy is also considerably harder than lead, though also more brittle.
In his little book Le Degré Zéro de L'écriture (1953), in the chapter ``Écriture et Révolution,'' Roland Barthes critiques and criticizes the French social-realist style. I quote here from the 1968 translation Writing Degree Four Seventy-Five (actually, that might be Writing Degree Zero; I'll let you know after I check) by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (p. 71):
Here are for instance a few lines of a novel by Garaudy: `... with torso bent, he launched himself at full speed on the keyboard of the linotype ... joy sang in his muscles, his fingers danced, light and powerful ... the poisoned vapor of antimony ... made his temples pulsate and his arteries hammer, fanning his strength, his anger and his mental exaltation.'
(Note that this scrap of translation is offered here without warranty or
representation of accuracy. Then again, the translation is not much worse than
the original. If you choose to bend your torso (rather than crouch or lean)
and launch your body at full speed at a six-by-six square of linotype keys to
achieve mental exaltation, well, all I want to know is if there's an
advance-purchase ticket discount. Barthes's original reads thus:
Voici par exemple quelques lignes d'un roman de Garaudy: « ... le
buste penché, lancé à corps perdu sur le clavier de la
linotype... la joie chantait dans ses muscles, ses doigts dansaient,
légers et puissants... la vapeur empoisonnée d'antimoine...
faisait battre ses tempes et cogner ses artères, rendant plus ardentes
sa force, sa colère et son exaltation. »)
[FWIW, in a search of medical literature databases I found no report associating antimony with any health effect in linotype operators. The characteristic occupational disability of linotype operators was deafness, because the machines were loud.]
Barthes does not identify the novel or give a full name for Garaudy, but evidently the person referred to is Roger Garaudy, a philosophy professor by profession. He is known to have published some novels and plays. If the sample above is any indication, then it's ``no coincidence,'' as a favored communist locution went, that I have been able to find no novel published by Garaudy in or out of print.
Garaudy was born in 1913 and has been a serial fanatical convert since shortly thereafter. At age 14 he converted to Protestantism. In 1933 he joined the Communist Party, eventually serving 28 years in leading positions as a member of the Executive Central Committee. Krushchev's famous ``secret speech'' denouncing Stalin (February 24, 1956, at the 20th Party Congress) shook Garaudy's faith, and he became increasingly critical of the USSR. He broke with the party after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and was expelled in 1970, following his publication of an article claiming that USSR was not a socialist state. (``Expelled'' from the party, not Czechoslovakia. I think that's right, but I'm not sure whether they tossed him out or slammed the door behind him.) As part of this pinball pilgrimage of his, he had begun to seek a reconciliation between the Catholic and communist faiths, in De l'anathème au dialogue (1966) and in A Christian-Communist Dialogue (1968), the latter co-written with Quentin Lauer, S.J. Then in 1982 he converted to Sunni Islam, taking the name Ragaa (i.e., ``Ragaa Garudi,'' so I understand, though his books seem to be published under the old name). In the 1990's he started writing antisemitic books, including one which earned him a conviction for holocaust denial in a French court.
I suppose speakers of Commonwealth English could call this group ``Led Zed'' for short. I don't recall ever having heard or seen that abbreviation, nor LZ (q.v.), but it did go by the name ``New Yardbirds.'' What happened was that the Yardbirds broke up in 1967, and still had some concert commitments in Scandinavia for 1968. Jimmy Page had joined the Yardbirds in June 1966 as bassist, and took over lead guitar in November when Jeff Beck left. Page put together a new band with John Paul Jones as bassist, Robert Plant lead vocals, and John Bonham, drummer from the original Yardbirds, and the ``New Yardbirds'' played out the remaining Yardbirds gigs. They performed as Led Zeppelin for the first time in their first show after returning to England, at Surrey University in October 1968.
The Who's drummer Keith Moon died of an accidental drug overdose in 1978. Led Zeppelin's drummer John Bonham (``Bonzo'') choked to death on his own vomit at Jimmy Page's house in 1980, after an all-day drunk. There was a lot of this stuff going around; overdoses were not a drummer specialty.
FOLDOC has a kinder, gentler explanation, but here we don't pull our punches. Except for our friends. Or for money. We got standards!
The rec.toys.lego newsgroup has extensive faq documentation compiled by Tom Pfeifer. (All together in one file here.)
LEGO blocks have plug-and-socket structures on top (squat plugs) and bottom (sockets) arranged in regular patterns (as dots on dominoes). A similar relief pattern can be seen on the bottoms of the metopes of ancient Greek temples -- they look like upside-down LEGO blocks. The characteristic was copied in neo-classical architecture and can be seen on many old public buildings in the US. I learned about this from Dr. J in Philadelphia. Have a look at Prof. Siegel's Illustrated Parthenon Lecture.
See R. K. Stamper: ``LEGOL: Modelling Legal Rules by Computer,'' Computer Science and Law, Bryan Niblett (ed.), (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge U.P., 1980).
The adjective leguminous generally has the meaning one would infer from the legume definition above. Legume is also used in the more general sense of edible vegetables. The noun vegetable could once refer to any plant or non-animal life. This is evident from the attributive (i.e., functionally adjectival) use in terms like vegetable matter (equivalent to plant matter). Vegetables were not necessarily edible. (Children still feel that way.) If one excludes figurative uses (primarily to describe people), however, the (adult) meaning of the word vegetable functioning as a noun has now become restricted to the sense of edible plant. With vegetable thus serving the semantic function that was once served by the compound edible vegetable, we now have the opportunity to sharpen up the meaning of legume to include only its pulse-related senses. Let's do it! (Recommendation subject to change once I think through grains and cereals.)
The LEM or LM was the lander -- the vehicle with two rocket engines that took the astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface of the moon and back. The thing with fenders was the LRV or Rover. I'll try to fix the rest of the preceding later.
Frank Zappa's daughter was named Moon Unit; she was born almost two years before the first LEM landed on the moon. More on that Moon Unit at this CCSU entry.
In Modern Greek, the word for lentil, phakos, also means `lens,' and lentils as food are usually referred to in the plural (phakê). Indeed, the singular English form lentil is used mostly as an attributive noun (i.e., adjective). Lentils are (and lentil is a) pulse.
In Spanish, the pulse is called lenteja and the optical element is called lente.
In the satellite industry, LEO basically is anything closer than geostationary. They pronounce it both ``Leo'' and ``el ee oh.''
Complimentary lapel pins are a popular item in that industry. I guess free samples are just not an option.
However light a particle may be, you might suppose it would make some qualitative difference whether its mass is zero or not. It does, but it's not the most important of differences. In some respects, it is more significant whether its mass is large or not. The leptons are ``light'' (i.e., not very massive) particles. As recently as the early 1990's, the electrically neutral leptons (the ``zero-charge leptons''), called neutrinos, were believed to be massless. Measurements of the solar neutrino flux now indicate that at least one kind of neutrino (and its antiparticle) must have nonzero mass, and it seems likely they all have mass.
(All references to nonzero particle mass in this entry are to rest mass: the mass as it would be measured by an observer in the rest frame of the particle. Not to put too fine a point on it, matter consists of massive particles -- particles with nonzero rest mass. Note, however, that the mass of matter is not just the sum of the rest masses of the constituent particles; one must also consider the kinetic and interaction energies. Zero-mass particles are exceptional, because zero-mass particles move at light speed, and time stands still for an observer boosted into such a particle's frame. There'll be more about this at the massless entry, when that is rolled out.)
At the current energy scale of the universe, there are four fundamental interactions, or ``forces,'' in nature: gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak force, and the strong force. (In earlier, hotter epochs, these interactions were integrated into more symmetric interactions with equal coupling constants: electromagnetic with weak -- electroweak interaction, electroweak with strong -- GUT, and all forces together -- what superstring theory attempts to achieve. There are very slight experimental suggestions, and no theoretical ones, for other forces.)
(The weak and strong interactions were originally known only from nuclear phenomena, and so were called the weak and strong nuclear forces. In fact, the range of effects is more general, and the ``nuclear'' modifier is no longer used.)
The gravitational force affects and is affected by all particles, including ``massless'' ones (i.e., those with zero rest mass). The situation is actually pretty easy to describe: the distance between nearby events (the length of an infinitesimal separation in spacetime) is described by the metric tensor. The Ricci tensor, representing certain combinations of the metric tensor and its derivatives, describes the curvature of spacetime. [Aside: this is an intrinsic curvature, in the nontechnical sense. For a two-dimensional analogy, imagine you lived on the surface of a sphere (not a bad approximation) and light traveled in ``straight lines'' (great-circle trajectories) on that sphere. You would know that your space was curved because any macroscopic triangle (a spherical triangle) would have a sum of inside angles greater than 180 degrees. The same thing happens with spacetime. You should not imagine that the curvature of spacetime by thinking of it as embedded in a larger-dimensional flat space. Instead, you should think of the curvature as something detectable completely within the spacetime. When the Ricci tensor is nonzero, you can tell that spacetime isn't flat because Minkowski geometry doesn't work, just as Euclidean geometry doesn't work for curved space.] Anyway, getting back to particles: in the classical form of Einstein's General Relativity, the Ricci tensor is proportional to the stress-energy tensor (through an overall factor of eight pi times the gravitational constant, and various factors of c). The stress-energy tensor is a symmetric second-order tensor that generalizes to four-dimensional spacetime the stress tensor of three-dimensional space. The stress-energy tensor includes components for stress, energy density, and momentum density. Therefore, not just rest mass but all mass (i.e. energy), as well as momentum and forces, generate curvature in spacetime. The trajectories followed by particles are determined by the metric tensor (whose curvature is described by the Ricci tensor, remember?), so energy, momentum, and forces all affect motion gravitationally.
The electromagnetic interaction couples all particles with electric charge or a magnetic moment, which means in effect it couples all massive particles.
The electromagnetic and gravitational forces are the only long-range forces -- they are mediated by zero-mass bosons and in static situations the force between fundamental charges (masses in one case, electric monopoles -- conventional ``charges'' -- in the other). Electromagnetic forces and quantum mechanics essentially explain, in principle, all chemical reactions. The gravitational interaction, in dimensionless terms, is by far the weakest of the four interactions. However, there is no ``static negative charge'' for gravitation, no negative rest mass. Consequently, this long-range interaction cannot be screened like electromagnetism and is the dominant interaction observable on planetary and larger length scales.
The weak and strong forces are short-ranged: they cause interactions that fall off exponentially on a length scale corresponding to the deBroglie wavelengths of their mediating bosons. While all massive particles participate in the long-range interactions and the weak short-range interaction, not all particles participate in the strong interaction. The massive particles that do not participate in strong interactions are leptons. (Remember leptons?)
Note that the preceding discussion was essentially about the bare particles, which are really just idealizations of real particles. It's hard to ``turn off'' interactions in this situation. For example: an electron, as a lepton, does not participate in the strong interaction. However, the real electron is a bare electron ``dressed'' by a cloud of virtual particles. Through the weak interaction, it has a probability amplitude for transforming temporarily to a neutron, antiproton, and electron-neutrino (this is a rather less likely, high-order process, but it saves me introducing quarks). The virtual neutron and antiproton can interact strongly, so the real electron does. It's a tiny effect, but an effect of that general sort -- strong-interaction corrections to the electron gyromagnetic ratio -- began to be measured in 2001.
A post facto law. Making an act the precedent for a rule of conduct, instead of squaring conduct according to law.
I dunno. I read it in a quote at the beginning of a chapter of Megalith Science, and the term appears to refer to a physical instrument of some sort. At least no one claims it describes a feminist separatist's fantasy.
The winner: ``A common need was felt to leverage the synergy of the expertise Information technology expertise and domain specific knowledge amongst the founders to deliver relevant, cost-effective IT.'' [Notice the giveaway British spelling amongst. (In a British document, of course, British spelling wouldn't give anything away.)]
Nomenclature-is-destiny recognition: ``Regarding the merger, Vague said, `With the merger, a top priority will be to leverage the synergy's realized by the merger to drive growth and earnings.'' [No special bonus for run-of-the-mill (ROTM) apostrophe error.]
In a March 1999 web survey posted to the classics list, I reported that "leveraging the synergy" was significantly more common than "leverage the synergy" (44 versus 32 hits) while "leveraged the synergy" was unattested. It's a happening thing.
Boy was it ever. In a December 2009 survey, I found
"leveraging the synergy": 134,000 ghits)
("leveraging the synergy of": 127,000 ghits)
"leverages the synergy": 105,000
"leverage synergies": 50,000
"leveraged the synergy": 36,800
"leverage synergy": 14,000
"leverage a synergy": 10,600
"leveraging synergy": 3,880
"leverages synergy": 1,100
"leveraged synergy": 870
"leverage the synergy": 556
"leveraging a synergy": 8
"leverages a synergy": 1 (I didn't ``repeat the search with
the omitted results included.'')
There are two ghits for "trying to leverage some synergy", but
"leveraged a synergy" was unattested.
``The purpose of the conference, on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of Lisbon Earthquake, is to discuss the variety of historical implications of this event: social, political, economic, cultural, urban and architectural.''
The bare term line feed refers to related things that context distinguishes. As a button on a line printer, it means jerk the paper up. In various programming contexts, it may be an instruction to perform that action. (In some contexts, the abbreviation or code or token NL has also been used.) Within a character string, line feed simply refers to the value of a byte (or seven bits of a byte, ``lower ASCII''). (Don't ask me how things work with wchar_t.) Not every ASCII code has to represent a printable character, you know. But LF is kinda borderline. In practical programming languages that allow multiline character strings, it makes sense that the presence of the line-feed character within a string is interpreted as an end-of-line.
Within electronic text files, things may be a bit more complicated. See the discussion at the CR entry.
LFA traces its lineage to one of various competing Latin schoolbooks of the 1920's that were called Elementary Latin. (Another one was by M. L. Smith, 1920.) The Elementary Latin that became LFA was first published in 1923 (and hence is in the public domain). The original version is available in a one-pound, 391-page paperback reprint from Simon Publications. That 1923 book was originally written by B. L. Ullman, Charles Henderson, and Norman E. Henry.
LFA is later editions of the same work -- rewritten, expanded by the inclusion of readings and split into two volumes. At least by 1945, the publishers (Macmillan Company) were advertising LFA as by ``Ullman and Henry'' ($1.84 for the first year book, $2.40 for the second). Henderson was only mentioned in in the second book. (For all I know, this may have reflected his contributions.) I just noticed that I own a copy of the second book (© 1942, 1950; fifth printing 1953). This one lists B.L. Ullman as editor and also as author, along with ``the late Norman E. Henry.'' At this point Henderson gets no mention in the second book either.
The readings in LFA, particularly the simple early ones, are regarded by students and teachers alike as boring. (There are scattered exceptions like ``Anna et Rana.'') Nevertheless, it has been popular over the years among high-school teachers who favor an approach that emphasizes grammar, and teachers frequently supplement it with readings from some other sources. These readings are typically taken from other texts (and materials developed for and keyed to other texts) or stand-alone pedagogical materials: graded readers, and story collections that are not graded but at least simple. (A list of Latin texts discussed in this glossary can be found at the Latin school texts entry.)
Over the years, there have been various revisions and additions to LFA, including a third book, for which there are few dedicated ancillary materials published. Among the most important ancillary materials is a workbook (for the first two books) first created by Marcia Stille. Or maybe by Marcia Stille et al. It's hard to know now, because giving due credit is not a priority. The eighth edition of LFA, infamously error-ridden, was the last to list all three original authors (somewhere). The ninth edition credits only Ullman, dissing not only Henderson and Henry but various people who have revised subsequent editions for better and worse. The workbook no longer mentions Stille, to say nothing of the three or more others who did substantial work on it. ``Company policy,'' you understand. It's a similar story with other old Latin textbooks. You'd figure they might at least get a foreword (not forward) mention.
Works about proper language use are perennials. Just think of Strunk and White. Wheelock's Latin, which first appeared in 1956, is still in print, now in its sixth revised edition. (For this work, copyright is in the control of the original author's family. Prof. Richard A. LaFleur, at UGA, is current keeper of the flame.) Even when subsequent works are substantially or completely new, there is a marketing advantage in publishing a book as the latest version of a respected or beloved classic. The New ``Fowler's'' comes immediately and bitterly to mind.
The phenomenon is not restricted to books for English-speakers only. Here's an example sampled randomly using a convenient selection procedure I developed just before my trip to Poland: Polnische Grammatik (a compact German manual of Polish grammar) is volume ``942/942a'' of the collection Sammlung Gröschen. The 1967 version (specifically 942a, apparently) lists Dr. Norbert Damerau as author, but the copyright page acknowledges (precise degree of indebtedness unclear) the 1926 Polish grammar published by Dr. Meckelein.
Dictionaries have similarly long histories. Ordinary (one-language) dictionaries tend to flaunt their bloodlines, preserving a respected name in the title (think Webster). The same thing occurs to a lesser degree with bilingual dictionaries (read the LSJ entry up the Pakistan link), but there is also a great deal of indebtedness acknowledged only in the prefatory material that no one reads (follow that Pakistan link).
I infer, from queries and requests from revision authors of Latin primers, that scattered earlier versions of some such works may be hard to come by even when the work has been popular over time. With dictionaries, the earliest works are often forgotten and sometimes lost (see v.a.).
The -d added to just about any infinitive yields the present participle, but usually this doesn't function adjectivally nearly as prolifically as the English present participle (in -ing), to say nothing of functioning as a gerund (it doesn't).
Ló stands for horse; be is a postfix particle. That's about all I have to say about the semantics.
It's difficult to have a language that is agglutinative and that also maintains complete vowel harmony.
There are worse profanities in that language! Can you imagine?
In 2004, the British food company Warburtons commissioned the BBC to conduct a survey marking the launch of its new Cheese Flavour Crumpets. (The new Cheese Flavour Crumpets were introduced by Warburtons, not the BBC. The BBC doesn't do advertising.) The survey, which polled 2,000 British moviegoers, asked what were the cheesiest lines ever uttered in a movie. The winner, or anyway the top vote-getter, was a line uttered by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie Titanic. In a romantic scene with co-star Kate Winslet, he stands with arms outstretched at the bow of the sinking ship and shouts ``I'm the king of the world!'' Not long after, in a scene we don't get to enjoy, he dies. Cf. planetarch.
Last week I ate twice at ``Thailand Restaurant,'' a wonderful place on Central Avenue in Clark, New Jersey, occupying a location that used to be a 50's-style diner. The prices are reasonable and the food is tasty. I can't say from personal knowledge, but according to what I've read the food is quite authentic.
On the other hand, I've also read (again on various online restaurant-review sites) that the portions are modest and that ``mild, moderate'' and ``hot'' should be understood as `hot, spicy hot unbearable for an American palate,' and `guaranteed martyrdom.' In fact, the portions are generous and when I asked for something between ``moderate'' and ``hot,'' making clear that I had been adequately warned, my food was not noticeably spicy-hot at all. On the second visit, when I recounted my previous experience and asked for ``hot,'' I got something that was noticeably but not especially hot.
Perhaps it was a communication problem. Probably the most authentic aspect of the restaurant is the personnel. The restaurant has been in business for a decade or so, but the front-of-the-house staff all sound like they just came off the boat. They can understand a little English, but be sure to order by number. If you're trying to guess what has been said to you, definitely try replacing l's with r's and inserting r's at the end of long-duration vowels.
It reminds me of a famous putative exchange between the famous wit Mrs. Dorothy Parker (b. 1893) and the famous beauty Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce (b. 1903). The story goes that, as they approached a door somewhere, Mrs. Luce yielded with ``age before beauty,'' and Mrs. Parker went ahead while retorting ``pearls before swine.''
Mrs. Luce apparently denied that the incident occurred. I haven't tracked this down, though, and in principle she might have been presented with a particular version of the story and simply denied that that occurred. Celebrity gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, who published the anecdote on October 14, 1938, in the Hartford Courant, claimed there that she heard it directly from Parker, but perhaps ``Dorothy Parker tells me'' is just a figure of gossip-column speech that could mean ``I read something like that in The Spectator.'' There doesn't seem to be any other direct comment or claimed comment on the story from Parker.
Graham's is the second publication of the anecdote that anyone seems to have found, and the first that mentions Luce. The earlier one, September 16 of that year in The Spectator of London, has it between ``Mrs. Parker and a snooty debutante.''
Apparently the only person ever to positively claim that she witnessed the exchange was Gertrude Benchley. The claim appears only in Robert Hendrickson's American Literary Anecdotes (New York, etc.: Facts on File, 1990), p. 174:
Recalled Mrs. Robert Benchley when she was 80 years old: ``I was right there, the time in the Algonquin, when some little chorus girl and Dottie were going into the dining room and the girl stepped back and said, `Age before beauty' and Dottie said very quickly, `Pearls before swine.' I was right there when she said it.''(Italics and quotes sic. Robert Benchley married Gertrude Darling in 1914 and died in 1945. Gertrude Benchley turned 80 in 1969 and died in 1980.)
[At least one webpage attributes this quote to ``Mrs. Robert Benchley's biography of her husband.'' There doesn't appear to be any such.]
Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley were star members of the famous Algonquin Round Table, which met daily at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until about 1929. (There are widely credited claims that they had an affair.) If Mrs. Benchley's recollection of the age...swine incident is accurate, it would likely to have occurred during the Round Table days. If so, then one could reasonably have expected the exchange to have been reported by FPA in ``The Conning Tower.'' [During that period, fwiw, Ann Clare Boothe was single and then married to (Aug. 23, 1923) and divorced from (1929) George Tuttle Brokaw. Tuttle remarried, and died in June 1935. Clare Boothe married magazine magnate Henry Luce in November 1935. Tuttle's widow married Henry Fonda. Henry seems to have been a successful name for second husbands.]
Here, from <quoteinvestigator.com>, is one detailed excavation of the anecdote. What doesn't get said enough in analyses of this sort is that Mrs. Luce (or Mrs. Brokaw or Miss Booth), a celebrated writer, was smart enough to guess that a dimwitticism like ``age before beauty'' would elicit a sharp retort from the likes of Mrs. Parker, and would at least have had a rejoinder ready for the expected retort, if she have been (I think that's the probably-contrary-to-fact subjunctive) foolish enough to launch the first verbal assault.
Identity groups in professional organizations often raise the same sort of question. In this case: is this a caucus of lesbian, gay and bisexual philologists, or is it a caucus of those who do philology related to the lesbians, gays and bisexuals of antiquity? I think the answer is sometimes and yes.
In regard to the first question: it is considered impolite to ask, but it is not considered impolite to say. It's probably even considered impolite to guess, but our visitors demand information, and we have to come up with answers somehow.
The LBGCC has cosponsored events with the Women's Classical Caucus (WCC) and the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups.
In 2000, the LBGCC changed its name to LambdaCC.
Some people like to have a lot of l.*ers. Some people like l.*ers of the same kind, some people like different l.*ers. Some people have felt they had the wrong kind of l.*ers and known that they wanted a different kind of l.*er since they were six. (The l-word, of course, is ``letters.'') Some people feel that four is enough for anyone. So LGBT may stand, as an example, for ``Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer and Questioning.'' I've seen that apparent expansion.
I'm with Mrs. Campbell -- just don't do it in the street and scare the horses. This isn't too theoretical. Since I've been in Indiana, I've never lived more than two miles from at least one horse stables. The nearest one to me now is across the road from the nudist colony. More about that at AANR.
Wait! This all seems to arbitrarily assume just two genders! This oppresses the multisexuals! Toss another dean on the flames.
It is supposed that the LHC will have enough energy to detect the Higgs boson. Elementary particles physicists are hoping for Higgs plus -- the Higgs boson plus some other particles. This would finally take the science into a domain of phenomena that are not already predicted by the Standard Model, which has been in place for decades. Personally, I'm rooting for Higgs minus.
The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field, and the Higgs field is a kludge. In order to have all the nice symmetry properties that explain the relationships among the known lighter particles, it is necessary for the fields of which those particles represent excitations to be massless -- that is, to give rise to particles that have zero rest mass. To explain the mass, Higgs posited the existence of a single scalar field (now called the Higgs field) which in its pristine (``uncoupled'') form would imply a single massive particle (the Higgs boson, or just ``the Higgs''). When there is a coupling between the fields, the number of kinds of elementary excitations -- i.e., the number of kinds of particles -- is preserved, but the properties of the particles can mix. This mixing gives rise to a nonzero rest mass of the other particles (and to interaction between the Higgs and other particles).
The Travel Library site lists useful mundane information for the places it describes, including driving side. For Texas, they report ``Driving side: N/A.'' Yeah, that'id be about raght. For Virginia, they seem pretty optimistic: ``Driving side: Drivers drive on the right-hand side of the road'' and ``Languages: English, Spanish, French, German.'' I suppose that refers to intervehicle communications (profanities and suggestions).
Leah was Jacob's first wife. Rachel was the one he wanted, but Jacob's uncle (brother of his mother Rebeccah), tricked him into marrying Leah. Always check under the veil.
Only about 10 per cent of the general population is left-handed, so LHP's are evidently disproportionately prevalent in the bigs. This is evidently because of their advantage over RH pitchers. Conversely, one would expect lefties to be less over-represented at other (hitting) positions, since their advantage is in hitting against the minority of pitchers who are lefties. I no longer have any idea what I meant when I wrote the last sentence. This either means that I'm getting stupider or smarter. Maybe they should be under-represented, all other things being equal, but probably they're not.
Until 2009, LHR was published by the University of Illinois Press. UIP's description of the journal was very similar to the current one (2010) quoted in the previous paragraph, with one easy-to-miss difference. LHR was previously said to encompass ``American, English, European, and ancient legal history'' (my emphasis). The omission is almost certainly reflects no change in editorial policy, for many reasons. For example, it would be awkward to study American law in a broad historical context while ignoring British precedents and antecedents. I don't know if the description change was an oversight or a conscious streamlining (perhaps by the new, English, publisher: Cambridge U.P.), but the omission is more significant than usually. ``Europe'' may include England or not, in different political usages of the term, but English law is a very different thing from continental European law. The general principles of law throughout western Europe are based on Roman law, with various important codifications. England (along with Wales) traces its laws to a traditional and virtually pre-historic ``Common Law.'' (Scotland's system is something else again, with Roman Catholic canon law an important component, but I don't know much about it.)
The journal used to be published in three editions per year (``Spring, Summer, and Fall''), but now there are apparently four. According to the journal's current adverising information, the copy dates are (12/18, 2/5, 5/7, and 8/6). [Isn't it sweet how they use the US date-ordering system?]
The UIP page used to state that the annual subscription fee included membership in the American Society for Legal History (ASLH). I'm not certain, but it seems that ASLH dues (which depend on income and job status) include a subscription to LHR.
In 1954, the Westfield (NJ) library was a room in someone's house. In the 1960's it took an expanding portion of the municipal building. In the 1970's they created a second floor where some of the high ceilings used to be. I was away for a while. Today it has a building of its own further up East Broad Street.
Thank you for letting me contribute. The ALA has lots of other round tables, like EMIERT and LRRT.
This expression is frequently used in referring to equations, as mathematics requires clear, efficient expressions, and ``l.h.s.'' uses one less alphabetic character than ``left.''
Cf. RHS.
I saw a Chrysler with the chrome letters LHS on the right rear fender.
In the bad old days, when earrings were uncommon on male landlubbers, the mnemonic for sexual orientation was ``left is right and right is wrong.''
It should be a buggy Unix command: not NO HangUPs, just Less HangUPs. (Of course, that should be fewer.)