Oh how clever. Like qq in French.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Nebraska. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
That's noble, you letch, not nubile.
The term is used in the Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) model for just about any component of a subject telecommunications network, including switching systems, circuits and terminals, other than the TMN itself. They're the things the TMN manages.
There's also a Plymouth that is, or has been, the capital of the Caribbean island of Montserrat, 350 mi. ESE of Puerto Rico. In 1995, the volcano that brought the island into existence came to life itself, and the capital and harbor has had to be abandoned, like more than half of the island.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
Expert pet breeders value pure breeds best. But these often fail to thrive, whereas mixed breeds thrive and are popular. The same seems true of words. The fastidious lexicographer might disparage automobile, electrocution, sociology, and television as misbegotten Latin-Greek half-breeds, but it looks like these words will be with us for a while.
NEAR was the ``first low-cost Discovery mission.'' It used COTS components, less-than-optimal reliability, that sort of thing. The risk is that even when low-cost missions are cost-effective, spectacular failures like the Mars lander disappearance will erode public support.
The place that English-speakers are most likely to encounter the word neat in this acception is Shakespeare's ``Julius Caesar,'' in the neat first scene, spoken by one of the mechanical men:
I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork.This is spoken by the second commoner, who, in respect of a fine workman is but, as you would say, ``a cobbler.'' As you recall, before the ``surgeon'' sentence, he said
Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl: I meddle with no tradesman's matters, nor women's matters, but with awl.
The recover wordplay might be difficult to recreate in another language -- German, say. However, the much of the wordplay here turns on the word awl, and the German word for that happens to be its cognate Ahle. German also has alle -- an adverb and indefinite pronoun with uses overlapping those of `every' and (the cognate, of course) `all' in English. So this is a very translatable bit of wordplay. I was curious how it worked out, so I checked all the Germaned Shakespeare I could find in the library. No luck. Here's what I did learn: the first translator of Shakespeare into German was August Wilhelm Schlegel. His translations made Shakespeare very popular in Germany. There have been many translations since then, but Schlegel's are so much the default that I have seen many editions of his translations, at most minimally reworked, that don't even bother to mention his name. It is reported, however, that the Schlegel versions now account for only a minority of German Shakespeare performances. (To be precise, one should note that the task of translating Shakespeare into German was eventually completed by Ludwig Tieck, Tieck's daughter Dorothea, and her husband Graf von Baudissin. But Schlegel did do the Julius Caesar.) I did find some incomplete Shakespeare translations by others, but no Julius Caesar.
I've read differing opinions on the matter, but at least according to some, Schlegel was most accepting of the bard's puns. Certainly in this same scene under discussion here, Schlegel was resourceful. For example, the wordplay between the precise and loose senses of cobbler is fairly reproduced by having the cobbler say that he does patchwork. (``Die Wahrheit zu gestehn, Herr, gegen einen feinen Arbeiter gehalten, mache ich nur, sozusagen, Flickwerk.'') Similarly, the first quoted item above becomes:
Im Ernst, Herr, ich bin ein Wundarzt für alte Schuhe: wenn's gefährlich mit ihnen steht, so mache ich sie wieder heil.
Here the pun on recover is translated with a pun one could imagine the bard himself using in its place: the cobbler makes old shoes whole again. (In German, heil is `unhurt,' cognate with English heal and hale. Also, heil is an old-fashioned way of saying `whole.' It's found in Bible translations, which dates it roughly to Shakespeare's time.) But the bit preceding this, with the awl pun, Schlegel simply skipped. It's just barely possible that Schlegel translated from a version that didn't include that line -- I'll have to look into this.
It turns out that this sense (pure, unadulterated fluid) dates back at least to the sixteenth century. In the twentieth century, according to the OED (June 2005 draft revision), it was extended to mortar -- neat mortar being made from cement and water only, and no sand. In fact, the adjective is widely used for fluids (particularly solvents and polymer resins) in chemistry and in chemical industries. It's a useful word because it doesn't mean quite the same thing as pure or unadulterated. These words are contrasted to impure -- they imply that the adulteration is dirty or generally undesirable. Also, ``impurities'' would generally be present in small quantities at most. Neat does not imply either of these things. It is used in situations where admixture may often be desirable, and in substantial amounts. (It is also used in situations where admixture generally does occur, and gives one a way of emphasizing that one is discussing properties of the pre- or un-mixed fluid.)
The adjectives neat and net are ultimately from the Latin nitidus. The root was widely borrowed from Romance into Germanic languages; in German, nett means `nice' and netto means `net' (the adjective, opposed to brutto, `gross').
The word, however spelled, is fundamentally an interjection, an expression of pity or resignation, as if to say ``oh well, what can you expect?'' It is also used as a dismissive noun, to describe a nullity of a person, someone who can't be expected to amount to anything, someone to be half pitied and half contemned, though there is no suggestion of malign intent.
The esh sound in the English word is an approximation to the ekh sound in the original word, but the esh sound is also common in Yiddish. The people I have known who were native speakers of Yiddish, or of German, Spanish, or any other language with an ekh sound, have tended not only to pronounce the word more correctly but also to use it primarily as an interjection. Those who use the esh pronunciation also use it only as a noun. This gave me the impression, at one point, that there were two words: the noun nebbish and the interjection nebbich. This is almost true, and if the latter pronunciation were able to survive, it might even become true.
Yeah, I'm kidding. But there's nothing really incorrect about the entry, apart from the conceit -- or the variant opinion -- that ``neckware'' is not simply a misspelling of ``neckwear.''
According to an email announcement from the executive director in February 2004, NECTFL is
... a 50-year-old association of language educators at all levels and in all instructional contexts. NECTFL publishes a bi-annual refereed journal and holds a conference every year in the spring. For the next five years, we will be in New York at the Marriott Marquis Hotel. ... About 2,500 people attend the conference, from 40 states and 15 countries around the globe. ...
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
I put the corrugated-cardboard `sun-shade' in backwards. I always do -- I'm an idiot.
True, and a high voltage level represents a
False. In the early (pre-IC) days of
digital logic, this was widely used and made intuitive sense in terms of
switching logic:
``True'' meant connected to ground. False meant
disconnected, so that in many circuits, the voltage level for
False was much less well defined than that for
True = ``1'' = gnd., though it was generally positive.
Negative logic is very unusual these days. The choice is essentially arbitrary, but with switching logic rare, the confusion of ``1'' = 0 volts might be decisive. Note that what matters is the relative position of the voltages, not the absolute voltage. Thus, standard ECL, which for noise reasons does use ``1'' = VCC = 0 volts = ground, is a positive logic because logic ``0'' is at a lower (a negative) voltage. Cf. positive logic.
- an institute in New England with a very broad mission or
- an institute dedicated to the study of New England or
- an institute dedicated to the study of a new England.
In fact, according to its homepage, ``[t]he New England Institute is an initiative ... [much verbiage excised] ... [for] cognitive science and evolutionary psychology.'' I learned about this institute in a conference announcement that began ``[t]he New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology (NEI) invites papers...'' Obviously, the original naming of this institute was highly incompetent.
- From Samuel Richardson's Clarissa; or, The History of a Young
Lady:
Inwardly vexed, I told him, That he himself had proposed to leave me when I was in town: That I expected he would: And that, when I was known to be absolutely independent, I should consider what to write, and what to do: But that, while he was hanging about me, I neither would nor could.
[Letter from Miss Clarissa Harlowe to Miss Howe -- #43 in the first edition (1747-48), #41 in the third (1751). Clarissa is in the you'll-be-sorry-when-I'm-dead novel subgenre. It's another epistolary novel, like Richardson's morally despicable landmark Pamela.] - From Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853), from ch. 37,
``Chesney Wold'':
And when I had turned, I was in such fear of the coach coming up behind me (though I still knew that it neither would, nor could, do any such thing), that I ran the greater part of the way, to avoid being overtaken.
Here's an atypical one, with the word neither functioning as a pronoun, that might cause the non-native reader some difficulty. From Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), referring to himself and Alger Hiss together in the third person:
Neither would nor could yield without betraying, not himself, but his faith; and the different character of these faiths was shown by the different conduct of the two men toward each other throughout the struggle.
Incidentally, Virginia Woolf's ``Mrs. Dalloway'' was a Clarissa also. According to the Census of 1990, Clarissa was the 744th most common name for females in the US.
Jules Verne gave the captain of the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (more at the chelys entry) the name Nemo. The motto or something of Scotland is Nemo me impune lacessit.
Has referred, in particular, to the electromagnetic pulse generated by nuclear blast. A few years and many events ago, in a climate of feeling called the ``Cold War,'' one of the panics of the West was fed by the thought that even a ``small'' nuclear attack might disable defense systems by EMP, and that solid state systems were more vulnerable to EMP than vacuum tube electronics. Fears increased when a North Korean fighter pilot defected to Japan with his plane, of the model called Foxbat in the West. It turned out to have some vacuum tube electronics on board.
Their Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations
publishes a Journal of Ancient Civilizations.
My impression from this and one or two other cases is that much of the trade in scholarly journals about classical antiquity is conducted on a barter system -- the classics department or other entity to which the main editor belongs trades free subscriptions to its own journal for free subscriptions to those of other institutions.
I hope that NEPAD is pronounced ``knee pad,'' because it fosters thoughts of the situations, or postures, that require the use of a knee pad.
It was founded (around 1996) because for years, major science advisory organizations kept foreseeing a coming shortage of scientists, yet newly-minted science Ph.D.'s kept seeing a job shortage. I stopped by the website in 2005, and it looks like it's been moribund since 1999. My theory is that this occurred because science Ph.D.'s keep seeing a job shortage.
The word can also be written inscious.
The following is from the second act of Thorton Wilder's play ``The Skin of Our Teeth'' (1942). Antrobus is the inventor of the wheel (Act I), etc.
ANTROBUS: Oh, that's the storm signal. One of those black disks means bad weather; two means storm; three means hurricane; and four means the end of the world.
Later in Wilder's play, unnoticed by anyone but the audience (to the best of my recollection), the storm signal progresses to four discs.
The first time I went to England, I visited London, Cambridge, and Nottingham, in that order. Coming out of the train station at Nottingham, my immediate reaction was ``Oh wow! Life-size!'' (Well, the taxi area was cavernous, but I was not misled.)
Both sides use it to state and sometimes argue for their positions, but rebuttal and refutation seem to be more popular with the right, and meta-analysis more popular with the left. Politically selective match-making sites seem still to be a specialty of the right -- you might argue that it represents a demographic political grand strategy. Organizing and raising money for (immediate) off-net political activities seem to be a specialty of the left. So netroots in practice are usually netroots on the left. Marshall Wittmann, a conservative (Republican) activist in the 1990's and a senior fellow at the Democratic Leadership Council as of 2006, seems to be the one who coined the description ``McGovernites with modems.'' See Kos.
Charlton Rose has made available a tutorial on Netscape Frames.
Progress marches on, but this entry will remain encased in amber.
Any journal which aspires to international standing is well advised to become accessible to a large audience. Even among linguists, the Finnish language is singularly inaccessible, and this journal is published by a Helsinki linguistics society. In consequence, the official title has never been in Finnish. On the other hand, when the journal was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, no one pretending to be a linguist could fail to know German; researchers working in German were probably the largest group of linguistics scholars. So it was very reasonable to name the journal in German. Also, Swedish was a very widely used language in Finland at the time, so Finnish linguists would have found it relatively easy to learn other Germanic languages. In fact, Swedish was at the time a very important language in Finland -- in many respects more important than Finnish. Let's talk about that.
During the height of Viking activity in the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Swedes settled along the southwestern coast of Finland. Starting in the twelfth century, Russia began to be an independent military power, and Finland became a battleground between Russian and Swedish empires. In a series of religious crusades and other wars, Finland came increasingly under Swedish control until, in 1323, the Treaty of Pähkinäsaari established a border between Russian and Swedish spheres of influence. (Separated by a fuzzy line running from the eastern part of the gulf of Finland, through the middle of Karelia and thence northwest to the Gulf of Bothnia -- there, does that help? Any line that manages to separate two spheres, whether of influence or anything else, is bound to fuzzy or otherwise differ in some way from a classical Euclidean line.) Anyway, the Finnish tribes were now all in Swedish territory, and the area that would become Finland was administered by Swedes under a few different kinds of Swedish governments (over time), enforcing Swedish laws. Finland was a rural appendage that Sweden controlled, something vaguely like Ireland to the British Empire. During the height of Swedish imperial power in the seventeenth century, the Finnish upper classes became increasingly integrated into the Swedish kingdom's clerical and governmental classes, and came increasingly to speak Swedish.
Sweden's imperial power declined sharply during Charles XII's reign, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finland became for Sweden a kind of buffer territory. Over the course of various Russian occupations and Swedish-Russian wars in that century, Finnish leaders (i.e., Swedish-speaking officials of the Swedish government, mostly of Finnish origin by the middle of the century) began to see greater benefits as a Russian than as a Swedish frontier province, and thought they might achieve greater local autonomy under Russian domination. (``Finlandization'' is older than you thought.) In 1809, the Finns negotiated a peace with Tsar Alexander I in which Finland became a grand duchy under his throne, with a Russian-chosen administration. Finland prospered and grew under this conservative administration. There's more to know about this, and you can know some of it by reading it elsewhere.
Since this is an entry about a linguistics journal, I'm going to twist this history back around to a discussion of language. The Tsar... Look, I happen to be in the middle of writing this entry. I'm just saving my work so I can go and take a leak. I'll be back before you know it, because I won't save my work again until after I've been back for a while. The main thing is, Swedish was the language of education and the educated classes when the journal was begun, so German and other Germanic languages were natural second languages for the founders of the journal. I think I said something like that before, in the early days of this entry.
So the journal was named in German, and the title was written in a slightly daring irregular font, described immediately below as herausgegeben vom Neuphilologischen Verein in Helsingfors. In subsequent forms, the title page has caused some confusion. (Starting with the 1938 edition, ``Helsingfors'' has been ``Helsinki.'')
The journal got off to a slightly bumpy start. Originally, it was intended to be published in eight issues per year. These were not numbered but dated, the fifteenth of a month. The first year (1899) the issues were dated 15/1 (11 printed pp.), 15/2, 15/3, 15/4, 15/9-15/10, 15/11-15/12. (Except for the first issue, each was 8pp. or, for the double issues, 16 pp.). The second year started with a double-size triple issue 15/1-15/3 (16pp.), then 15/5 (22 pp.), 15/9-15/10 (12 pp.), and 15/11-15/12 (18 pp.). So people got nine issues for their 4 FIM that year (in 68 pp.). This extravagance could not go on, and sure enough, the first issue of the third Jahrgang begins with a letter `To our readers' (An unsere Leser) describing the inauspicious financial circumstances under which the century was beginning; 15/1-15/3/1901 (32 pp.), 15/4-15/5 (36 pp.), 15/9-15/10 (25 pp.), 15/11-15/12 (26 pp.).
When the journal was founded, no educated European could fail to know French, and so the contributions were about equally split between French and German. The following observations about languages occurring in the early issues are based on a quick scan rather than a thorough study. It's not clear whether there was an official policy about languages or just some reasonable expectation. In any case, the first contribution in a third language was an English-language review (by a Swedish-surnamed Finn) of two German English books: Grammatik der englischen Sprache and Lehrbuch der englischen Sprache, pp. 21-22 of the 15/5 issue. Most reviews were in French or German regardless of the language in which the books themselves were written (e.g., Ny-islandsk lyrik, oversoettelser og studier af Olaf Hansen, published in Copenhagen, was reviewed in German), but some of the other English books reviewed got English-language reviews. The fourth language to be used was Danish, in two letters from Karl Verner, published in the 1903 issue of 15/9-15/100 (pp. 91-109 -- page numbering became consecutive through the year after 1902). The first letter is full of linear algebra and seems to have to do with physical rotations by multiples of 15 degrees, and the second is full of drawings of machinery. The issue has a fold-out chart of calculations. It's all about technology for studying phonetics, one century ago.
You get a spooky feeling looking through those early issues. There's a review of yet another new edition of Johann Peter Eckermann's Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, of works by Henry Sweet and Victor Hugo...
The first article other than a book review to appear in English was Anna Bohnhof's lead article in the 15/4-15/5/1903 issue: ``The Mystery of William Shakespeare'' (pp. 39ff). It begins
In 1848 a certain Mr. J. C. Hart of America threw out some doubts about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays in a book, called The Romance of Yachting, whether in joke or in earnest we do not know. This gave rise to the theory that Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays. A controversy began, which has lasted until the present day and will last while »good and sound knowledge will putrify and dissolve into a number of subtle, idle, unwholesome and vermiculate questions, which have indeed a quickness and life of spirit, but no soundness of matter or goodness of quality», as Bacon says in his Analysis of the Abuses of Learning.
I have reproduced the quotation marks as they appear in this article and in all articles, regardless of language. It's a sickening precursor of the ugly C++ cin usage.
For 1904 they gave up the calendar-date scheme and started numbering the issues. I'm going to have to look more carefully to see if I can find any sign of the revolt in Finland that coincided with the 1905 Russian revolution.
The history of Finland in the twentieth century is reflected rather oddly in this journal. For example, the greatest Finnish upheavals associated with WWI and the Russian revolution were in 1917, yet in 1916 there was no volume, and volume 18 began in 1917 with the following notice (in number 1-4):
A nos lecteurs Pendant toute l'année 1916, la publication de notre revue a été arbitrairement suspendue. Gràce au nouveau régime qui règne maintenant dans notre pays après le rétablissement de a constitution de la Finlande, nous sommes heureux de pouvoir continuer notre oeuvre modeste dans le domaine de la philologie moderne.
Mai 1917.La Rédaction.
I only put this entry in because it caught my eye. If you're not expecting it, even if you're reading about the popular writer Ludwig Fulda (whose only connection with nerve-neuro-anything was that he committed suicide in despair in 1939), you start reading neur... and you expect something like Neuritis or Neurom (`neuroma'). (FWIW, neu Rom is ungrammatical, but das neue Rom is `the new Rome,' an epithet currently applied mostly to the US. ``Das neue ROM'' is the ROM update. ``Der neue Roman'' is `the new novel,' which looks a bit redundant in English. Etymologically, of course, it's something like ``the new romance.'' ``Der neue Römer'' is `the new Roman.') The initial ambiguity of the word Neuromantik reminded me of unionized, though I can't find quite as perfect a homographic situation along those lines for neur-. Of course, if you stare at even an innocent word like ``neoromantic'' for too long, that starts to look weird too -- especially if your eyes start to go and you start seeing ``necromatic,'' which looks like the worst of necromancy, necrophilia, and movie Draculas combined.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil that ``he who fights with monsters might take care that in so doing he not become a monster. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you, also.'' [If the tenses, verb aspects, and grammatical persons seem jumbled there, don't blame me. I'm just being faithful to the original: ``Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehen, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.'']
A favorite locution of Nixon (RMN), along with ``Remember:'' and various trite football analogies.
Another popular rhetorical tool along these lines is the more schoolteacherish ``when you consider that...''
Alright, let's get to work and take this entry to the next level. The head term was coined by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin around 1870. You know, this would be a good place to say something about Bakunin. Nowadays, I imagine that Bokonon is better known than Bakunin, because more high-school students are required to read Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 sci-fi novel Cat's Cradle than are required to know very much about Europe, such as the fact of its existence. Vonnegut's Bokonon invents a new religion to distract the people of the island of San Lorenzo from their miserable lives. ``What is sacred to Bokononists? Not God; just one thing: man.'' I imagine there are some analogies between Bokonon and Bakunin. Eh.
The novel is about the end of the wold. Oh no, the end of the world! It turns out (for the purposes of this fiction) that at room temperature, liquid water is thermodynamically unstable -- supercooled. (That is, even though it's cooled below the true ``freezing point,'' so that a solid phase is thermodynamically more stable than the liquid phase, it's still liquid because its molecules haven't happened to jump through the microscopic metaphorical hoops necessary to make the transition.) That (fictional) thermodynamically stable solid form of water at room temperature is an allotrope of ordinary ice called ice-9. The kinetic barrier to formation of a crystal of ice-9 is so high that it hasn't happened naturally on the earth's surface yet. A scientist has created it, however, and eventually it is accidentally released into the ocean and seeds the sudden crystallization of the oceans. This isn't really a spoiler because Vonnegut tells you right at the start of the novel that the world will end and pretty much how.
As a matter of fact, water does have a number of allotropes. The usual hexagonal form stable at moderately low temperatures and ordinary pressures is called Ih in a notation introduced by P.W. Bridgman. There's another low-pressure form that is cubic, designated Ic. This form is kinetically favored at very low temperature: under the appropriate conditions, it forms more readily than ice Ih. Nevertheless, it is probably not stable. It's hard to determine. Other forms are assigned higher Roman numerals -- II, III, .... The numbers assigned to stable phases go up to about XII or XIII, as best I can recall, but exclude IX. The reason is that there is a form that was originally numbered IX (a solid form that occurred below room temperature), but which was later discovered to be metastable, so it doesn't appear on a chart of stable allotropes. (None of these solid allotropes is stable at anything like room temperature and ordinary pressure. I seem to recall that ``ice 9'' was used in another scientific context besides a water-ice allotrope, but I can't recall where.)
So there is an ice IX, but, like many of the observed phases, it is metastable: thermodynamically disfavored. The apt (or at least scientifically ironic) choice of the number nine to designate the dangerous allotrope is unlikely to be coincidence. Kurt Vonnegut had an older brother who became a physicist. Cat's Cradle, like much of Kurt Vonnegut's work one way or another, is autobiographical; the narrator of the story has an older brother who's a scientist also.
[Kurt's older brother Bernard was a well-known meteorologist who discovered that silver-iodide smoke could seed rain. See his sole-authored paper, ``The Nucleation of Ice Formation by Silver Iodide,'' Journal of Applied Physics, vol. 18, pp. 593-595 (1947). The premise of Kurt's book is a ``phase-shifted'' version of this, if you will. I also recall a paper of Bernard Vonnegut concerning the wind speed required to pluck the feathers from chickens, but I haven't tracked it down yet. The closest I can come up with is D. Keller and B. Vonnegut: ``Wind Speeds Required to Drive Straws and Splinters Into Wood,'' Journal of Applied Meteorology, vol. 15, pp. 899-901 (1976).]
Let's talk about Bakunin. Okay, I'll talk about Bakunin, you listen. Back in 1843, Richard Wagner became Kapellmeister of the Royal Opera in Dresden (patience -- we'll get to Bakunin!). Come 1848, when revolutions roiled the European continent (but failed to jump the Channel -- another of those kinetic barriers, I suppose), Wagner publicly positioned himself on the left, and that year also he met Bakunin. For various reasons, among them that it was center of the publishing industry, Saxony had a somewhat anomalous political situation in the Germanies, so revolution (and its suppression) came late there.
Dresden is the capital of Saxony. Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war there when the city was fire-bombed near the end of WWII, and he survived the firestorm in Schlachterhaus Fünf. He draws on those experiences in a book whose title is the translation of this designation: Slaughterhouse Five. See also L.T.I.
It's very hard to believe today, but Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was rarely performed in the years after his death in 1827. (All of Beethoven's late works were neglected, but the Ninth required a large number of instrumentalists and vocalists.) Wagner attended a poor performance of it in Dresden, and then in Paris in the Winter of 1839-40 he was inspired by a brilliant performance given by the Conservatoire orchestra. Partly by using cost-saving measures such as employing volunteer extras, Wagner overcame objections to the cost and staged a performance of the symphony in 1846.
In 1849, Wagner staged another performance of the Ninth Symphony. At the end of March that year, Bakunin was in the audience for the final rehearsal. (He was also at the time on the run from the police of many different countries, so attending a rehearsal rather than a public performance had advantages.) After the rehearsal, Bakunin approached Wagner and said that ``even if all music were lost in the approaching world fire, they should risk their lives for the survival of that symphony.'' (The quotation marks enclose my translation of ``...sie sollten, wenn beim nahen Weltenbrand auch alle Musik verlorenginge, für den Erhalt dieser Sinfonie ihr Leben wagen.'') As it happens, the Dresden Opera House, though not quite the whole world, burned down the following May 6.
Well, you know: Dresden, fire, and ice. It struck me as an interesting bunch of connections. Incidentally, the verb wagen, which I translated as `risk' above, is etymologically unrelated to the English word wager (from Anglo-French). Instead, that noun is related by a torturous route that I won't trace to the noun Wagen, which is cognate with the English wagon. (Cf. the VW entry and footnote 31.) The surname Wagner means carter or wagon-maker.
Wagner took part in the Dresden uprising in May, and when it was put down he narrowly escaped arrest with the help of Franz Liszt. He went into exile, spending a few years in Zurich, Switzerland. (He was amnestied in 1862.)
Gee, I almost forgot about the New Class. Bakunin coined the term and used it with something close enough to its current meaning. This is moderately impressive, considering that no Marxist revolution had ever yet taken place to provide empirical evidence. (Though frankly, 1789, 1830, and 1848 provided some good clues to 1917.) (I ain't talkin' Sudoku here, BTW.) Look, I don't really know anything about this. Let me quote some experts, such as Lawrence Peter King and Iván Szelényi, authors of The New Class: Intellectuals and Power (U. Minn. Pr., 2004). At some places, this book looks like a bad translation from the German, so it must be really well-researched. King and Szelényi write on page vii (you didn't expect me to delve deep into the actual text, did you?):
Bakunin accused Marx of advancing a theory that was actually a project by the intelligentsia to exploit the working-class movement. By pretending to represent working-class interests, intellectuals sought to establish themselves as a new dominant class after the fall of capitalism and the propertied bourgeoisie. History did not follow Bakunin's forecast: while intellectuals in the first Marxist-inspired revolution, the Russian Revolution of 1917, did play a formidable role, soon after their victory not only were they squeezed out of power positions by the Stalinist bureaucracies, but many of them perished in the Gulag.
But though he foresaw to some degree that socialism on Marxist principles would be dictatorship by a new elite, Bakunin was not the person directly responsible for the vogue this term eventually had in the 1950's and 60's. That vogue stemmed from a book entitled The New Class by the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas.
In his memoir Life in Dark Ages, Ernst Pawel mourned ``the loss of an entire generation of potential [Yugoslavian] leaders'' during WWII. Writing around 1993, as Yugoslavia was breaking up and Bosnians were being used for target practice, he speculated that this loss ``contributed much more decisively to the current crisis than those hoary `primitive tribal hatreds' reflexively invoked by pompous pundits simulating omniscience.'' (Despite this mocking stance, Pawel makes clear throughout the book that primitive tribal hatreds were very real and could readily become violent.) He continues:
Perhaps the most representative figure of this truly lost generation is Milovan Djilas, now at eighty-two an unhappy and powerless but still keen observer of the political scene. Born in Montenegro--his ``land without Justice''--in 1911 and already a dedicated Communist in high school, he came to Belgrade in 1929, enrolled in the liberal arts faculty of the university and soon gained the reputation of a charismatic firebrand. In 1933 he was arrested, brutally tortured and sentenced to three years in the Sremska Mitrovitsa penitentiary, which at the time already hosted the elite of the Communist party. On his release he was elected to the party's clandestine Central Committee and became its most notoriously doctrinaire member, the Saint-Just of the proletarian revolution. During the years of Partisan warfare he was Tito's chief lieutenant; after the victory he became Tito's vice president and most likely successor, indisputably the second most powerful man in postwar Yugoslavia.
(Some paragraphs following this seem to be poorly researched or at best interpretively phrased, so I'll free-hand from here.) In the early 1950's, after the break between Tito and Stalin, Djilas started publishing articles demanding reform of the party and the government. This was especially easy for him to do because propaganda was part of his portfolio. Generally speaking, this is called ``giving a man enough rope to hang himself.'' He created a journal called Nova Misao (`New Thought'), in which his own articles were increasingly unorthodox. His criticisms, particularly in a series of articles for the journal Borba from October 1953 to January 1954, led that January to his expulsion from the government and removal from all party positions. He later resigned from the party, though he always continued to regard himself as a communist. He also got a chance to experience how Sremska Mitrovitsa was operated under the new regime.
I should probably say a bit more here about the ideas of Djilas on The New Class, but given the odds against your having read down to this point, I'll just stop abruptly.
Narrowly defined, the New Criticism was a movement in American literary criticism, dominant in the 1930's and 40's. The core group of New Critics labored in the American hinterlands, influenced by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, William Empson and others on the East Coast and in England. (Don't ask ``what others?'' -- I'm typing just as fast as I'm finding out.) Broadly defined, the New Criticism was a movement in Anglophone literary criticism that included many of the ``influences'' on the narrow group, and was dominant from the 1930's to the 1960's. I'm focusing first on the narrowly defined group because that's how I happened to start out.
The movement got its name from the title (The New Criticism) that John Crowe Ransom used for a major essay on poetry, published in the journal New Directions in 1941. It seems everything was New.
Ransom's title reveals a reliable feature of New Critics: they focused their studies narrowly on poetry. It could be hard to tell whether they viewed poetry simply as paradigmatic, or simply forgot other forms of art literature altogether. This prejudice was not unique to the New Critics, but common to many of the critical approaches to literature that arose around that time in Anglophone academe. Richards's Practical Criticism is a parallel example: only a few sentences into the preface does IAR indicate, in passing, that the literature whose criticism is discussed in the book is all poetry. (By the 1960's, the pendulum had swung to the opposite extreme. As the celebrated charlatan Jacques Derrida would write in De la grammatologie in 1967, ``Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.'' This is typically translated `There is nothing outside the text. N'ya-n'ya.' By implication, everything is a text, and equally worthy of being misunderstood by academic critics. On the other side, we should note that Derrida's rhetorical stance amounted to the claim that there was nothing inside the text either, since it could be twisted to mean anything and hence nothing. Incidentally, ``de la grammatologie,'' can be translated `all about grandmother.' Also, when I say that Jacques wrote this in ``De la grammatologie,'' I don't mean as a marginal comment or graffito or anything: I mean it was part of the text -- it had to be, after all. Page 227, to be precise.)
Some of the most important New Critics were
- Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), mentioned at Brooks and Warren and Naked Babe and the Cloak of Manliness, The.
- John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974), mentioned above.
- Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), mentioned at the Brooks and Warren entry.
- Allen Tate (1899-1979), mentioned in this entry.
- Kenneth Burke (1897-1973).
- William Kurtz Wimsatt (1907-1975).
In case you were wondering, they're listed in diminishing order of how long they lived. Looks like lit professor ain't a bad gig.
(Working, working. Don't complain that the content is incomplete. The content is always incomplete. Rejoice -- yes, I think rejoice is the opposite of intransitive complain -- that I'm rushing out all this content before it's all polished and shit, and at the risk of great personal embarrassment, just so you can have another source to plagiarize your term paper from.)
- Canada: NDP members.
- US: A group of moderate Democrats formed in 1996. Less conservative than the blue dogs. As of May 2005, the New Democrat Coalition in the US House of Representatives, chaired by Rep. Ellen Tauscher (Calif.), had 42 members.
Pronounced by some with two syllables (e.g., neewis) to distinguish it from Usenet news[groups].
At the time that the word news arose in English, most people were illiterate and acronyms were rare. The story about the word news being an acronym of ``North East West South'' is untenable, a coincidence that works only in English, and in fact silly.
Here is a short, somewhat idiosyncratic list of online news organizations or sources:
- AGI Agenzia Italia (AGI)
- American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
- Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)
- British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
- Cable News Network (CNN)
- Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
- Canadian Television (CTV)
- Christian Broadcast Network News (CBN)
- Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)
- Courier News (Plainfield and central NJ)
- Deutsche Welle
- Drudge Report
- ESPN (Look, if you're a real sports fan, you don't really care what ESPN stands for.)
- Fox News Channel
- Guardian Unlimited
- Google News (news aggregator and search engine)
- History News Network (amateurish)
- La Stampa
- London Times
- MSNBC
- News Index (news search engine)
- Newsweek (MSNBC)
- New York Observer
- New York Sun
- New York Times (NYT)
- PhysOrg.com (science and technology news)
- Saudi Arab News
- Science Daily
- Sky News
- Slashdot
- USA Today
- Virtual Library for International News Sources
- Washington Post (WP)
- The Westfield Leader and Scotch Plains-Fanwood Times (Union County, NJ)
On January 7, Michael Kinsley had a light-heartedly pessimistic ``Op-Ed'' column on the same topic in the Washington Post. (Op-Ed in scare quotes because I don't consider a column an Op-Ed if it's by someone on the editorial staff of the newspaper whose ``Op-Ed'' page it appears on.)
Here's an example of probably nonlinear extrapolation from that article:
The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.
The previous group of economists who believed that the business cycle could be tamed (but believed this for the wrong reasons, as we now all realize) were the Keynesians (the followers of John Maynard Keynes). Keynesians believed that the economy could be fine-tuned by fiscal policy -- deficit-based government spending to increase in bad times and decrease in good times. Okay, in very good times. In very, very good times. Eventually, anyway. When Nixon announced that he was a Keynesian, you had to know the jig was up. Today we believe in monetary policy.
In Euroland, they believe in everything -- fiscal policy, monetary policy, and fairies. When the French and German economies stall, the French and German governments rack up big deficits (fiscal policy). They don't play games with the currency, because that's controlled by the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to assure stable growth (monetary policy). Before they could join the the euro, countries had to demonstrate the fiscal discipline that would allow a common currency to work, by meeting certain ``convergence criteria.'' In order to make sure that countries continued to exercise fiscal discipline after they joined, penalties are imposed on a country that fails to keep its budget deficit in check (fairies).
Okay, now: let's build on these successes with a more challenging resolution. When I'm striding at a healthy but unhurried pace toward a door ten yards away, and some jerk decides to hold it open for me, I will not rush appreciatively to minimize the time he or she stands there holding it. Instead, I will immediately slow down and grab my hip, and start limping in obvious pain. They want to do a good turn, let 'em put in the hard time. Give 'em value-for-money: do the whole steppinfetchit routine. (And if they grab my elbow to help me along, I'll whack'em with my pocketbook. Must remember to pre-deploy brick.)
Stepin Fetchit used to say about his stage act (not his demeaning turns in the movies) that just getting to center stage was half the act.
Also, if you do decide to resolve to lose weight in the new year, resolve big. Failing to lose five pounds is embarrassing. For the same amount of effort, you can fail to lose fifty pounds, which is heroic.
Somewhere in the glossary I have a list of good ideas. When I find it, I'll place a link to it from here. Until I do, I'll mention here that it's a bad idea to go shopping in a supermarket (Meijers) or hardware store (Menards) wearing a red polo shirt, unless you want to have lots of short conversations with strangers.
In early 2006, there seems to be a greater number than usual of stories in the media about people crowding the gyms on account of their resolutions to get in shape. Some of it is seasonal: Men's Fitness magazine has a smattering of articles on things like adjusting your routine to deal with January crowding, and on designing a home gym, since this is the month you're likeliest to decide to do it. Both stories are in the February 2006 issue (``display until January 31'') also eventually mentioned at the mirrors entry.
The Observer, student newspaper for Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, had a front-page article on January 19 entitled ``Campus gyms see new year influx,'' with slugline ``Motivated exercisers flock to the Rock, Rolfs at spring semester's outset.'' The Rock (nickname for the Rockne Memorial Building, named for legendary chemistry professor Knute Rockne) and Rolfs Sports Recreation Center (named after a donor, I think) are said to be experiencing a flood of ``resolution-makers and fitness faithful.'' (It's a Catholic school, but the Church gave evolutionary theory a general nihil obstat in the 1950's or 60's). The director of RecSports reports that the first 6 to 8 weeks of the Spring semester are the busiest time of the year.
NexGen was supposed to continue as a wholly-owned subsidiary, but I don't know
what kind of distinct existence it maintained. What would have been their
Nx686 was marketed as the AMD-K6, next generation in AMD's Superscalar uP
series. As it happens, at midyear 1997, AMD reported that it would not be able
to meet K6 production targets, not long after engineers had told stock analysts
that ``yields had been all that they had hoped for'' (as reported in
the 8 Sept. 1997
issue of Semiconductor Business News).
Studying the Delphic oracles would have taught the ``analysts'' how to
interpret such an ambiguous report.
I'm not sure if it's the same company, but a NexGen with the same URL is now (2004) in the consumer electronics retail business and also offers related services.
This interesting page from the US National Weather Service gives a contemptibly foolish explanation of Doppler radar, if you realize that the word ``phase'' is not a synonym of ``frequency.'' (I.e., if you remember high-school physics.) [It is possible to measure the phase shift of a scattering wave, if there is no frequency shift. That is essentially what a hologram does.]
I have more to say, but it's also obvious.
Cf. qq1.
Newfoundland and Labrador is not (and was not) one of the ``Maritime Provinces.'' Not even two of the ``Maritime Provinces.'' You have three guesses left. (Warning! Spoiler information at the entries for New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.)
The provincial capital is St. John's. Let's petitition some government to make St. John's's the official possessive form of St. John's. I have no position on whether St. John's should be alphabetized among the SA's or the ST's. On May 29, 2002, the Board of Regents of Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. John's, recommended to the provincial government that the name of the university be shortened to Memorial University, but as of 2004 I haven't noticed any change in usage. Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec are Canada's two easternmost provinces. Don't people think these things through in advance?
There isn't enough humor in this glossary, so I'll repeat here something that made me laugh at an (I hope) not-entirely-serious page.
A determined contingent of Newfies, thickly muscled from pushing houses down dirt roads to kickstart their furnaces, heavily fueled their boats and quietly embarked upon a vacation.
(Yeah, there was more, but that was the funniest part.)
If I had to guess, I'd say that 38% of book sales by volume are nonfiction.
Barnes and Noble, which used to discount books on the New York Times best-seller lists, now makes up its own best-seller lists as well, and also mixes fiction and nonfiction. Does this trend away from a fiction-nonfiction distinction signal the approaching collapse of the commitment to truth and civilization, or does it herald the dawn of a more nuanced and mature understanding of the radical ambiguity of language?
You know, abstracting can be done well or badly. Chemical Abstracts is done much better than Physics Abstracts, and they are correspondingly much more heavily used (and more expensive). This isn't just my opinion, you know, this is my professional second opinion. Of course, the situations are not simply comparable. It is rather harder to organize physics abstracts than chemistry abstracts, because chemistry papers can always ultimately be categorized by the substances they study, and there is no comparable principle for physics papers. Also, there are many more chemists and chemical engineers than there are physicists.
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
The College Football Hall of Famewill be moved from South Bend to a site across from Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta, on a piece of land to be donated by the Cathy family, founders of Atlanta-based Chic-fil-A.
Jersey number ranges in the NFL:
- 1-19:
- Quarterbacks, kickers, and punters.
- 20-49:
- Running backs and defensive backs.
- 50-59:
- Linebackers.
- 60-79:
- Linemen.
- 80-89:
- Receivers and tight ends.
- 90-99:
- Linebackers and defensive linemen.
In 1991, Cecil Adams answered a question regarding evolution in man. Here is some of the answer (the full answer is at The Straight Dope):
As for whether our genes are accurately reproduced, you silly goose, the genes always accurately reproduce. Except sometimes. On the latter occasions one of several things results: one, monsters-- that is, grossly malformed babies resulting from a genetic mistake. Years ago most monsters died, but now many can be saved. This has made possible the National Football League. ...
Teller, of the famous Penn and Teller comedic magic act, was born Raymond Joseph Teller (on St. Valentine's Day 1948). He legally changed his name to Teller. On his driver's licence, NFN appears in the space for his first name.
% frm -s new
That is, returns data only for email messages with status ``new.''
Let's try that again, shall we?
It is composed of 35 specialty nursing organizations.
Therefore, it comprises 35 specialty nursing organizations.
There, now: that wasn't so bad, now was it? Gooood.
Based in Pitman, New Jersey.
In the IPA the ng sound is represented by a non-ASCII symbol that looks like a lower-case n, but with the second stroke extended below the line like the descender of a letter j. On the other hand, most languages that have the sound and which use an alphabet script avoid using a separate symbol for it. The earliest instance of this situation is probably Greek. In Greek, two successive gammas (not a digamma!) represent the ng sound. Thus for example, our word angel comes from the Greek word spelled ággelos (`messenger'). The Greeks further recognized that the nasal consonant preceding kappa (unvoiced version of gamma) and chi (aspirated version of kappa) was also sometimes an ng, and represented these by an extention of the double-gamma representation: gamma-kappa represented the consonant pair that occurs in most native English-speakers pronunciation of think, and gamma-chi the nasal sound in a typical reporter's pronunciation of ``Nkomo,'' perhaps. A more native example of the gamma-chi sound which works for some Anglophones is income, since most speakers aspirate the c, but for some the n is just /n/. (And in case you're wondering, Greek didn't have an aspirated gamma sound. I should also note that the chi pronunciation I refer to is the Classical Greek. On the Italian peninsula, the chi was eventually pronounced /ks/, and became our letter ex.)
[Note that throughout this entry, by ``g sound'' I mean what is usually called a ``hard gee'' (not a ``soft'' or ``sweet gee''); in other words, the consonant in the word go.] An ng sound arises naturally from a kind of slurring-together of n with g or k: Since g and k stop consonants are articulated at the back of the mouth, it is less effort to pronounce an ng than an n before the stop. The income example above is an example of this, though English spelling doesn't show it. That is, in + come --> income represents an instance of n + k --> (ng)k. Greek spelling makes this change more visible. For example, the name pancreas was constructed from Greek pan + kréas, `all flesh.' The many compounds that include a pan prefix usually use a Greek letter nu, but pancreas is written págkreas.
The Greek practice of writing gamma-kappa for what we represent by ``nk'' works so long as there are no words that actually have a g-k consonant cluster (like rug-cutter). If there were such words, they were probably rare.
It goes without saying that English spelling does not have a general rule for indicating the n/ng distinction. As usual some general patterns hold imperfectly. In particular, a final nk or ng is fairly certain to imply the presence of an ng. Also, when the letter en precedes a k or g sound (uncle, anger, ankle, banquet, anxious, etc.), it usually indicates an ng, although dialects differ, and not entirely systematically. It is important to observe, however, that ``ng'' may or may not indicate the presence of the stop consonant. For example, ringer and ringlet have no g sound, but Ringo, ingot, and English do. (The difference is noticeable in the German word English, which has no g sound.)
(As a sidelight on the Greek double-gamma practice: in the Korean Hangul script, two g's together represent a harder gee sound, something conceived as lying between /g/ and /k/, even though that is really a voicing difference.)
Nigeria.com says it's ``the premier Nigerian website on the Internet.''
In Beast of Burden (off the 1978 Some Girls album; lyrics written with Keith Richards), Mick Jagger sang
There's one thing, baby, I don't understand:
You keep on telling me I ain't your kind of man --
Ain't I rough enough?
Ain't I tough enough?
Ain't I rich enough?
(It's so nice Mick didn't lose touch with his ordinary-guy roots.)
Cf. OGC.
Refers to any of the charitable and not-so-charitable organizations which volunteer their real or imagined expertise to the public and the public's governments. It also refers to organizations, some of them the same, which generate, transfer, or administer humanitarian and other aid. E.g.: Greenpeace, The Tobacco Council, NOW, ... NGO's are a twentieth-century realization of the Platonic ideal of government proposed in his Republic. Their variety and disagreements raise an issue not much considered by Plato: in the day of the philosopher-kings, which shall be the king's philosophy? The scientific take on this question -- the way science keeps itself honest and on-track -- is: ``how will you measure it''? The sociological terminology is: ``how do you operationalize it''? The political form is: ``who counts the votes''? Luis Alvarez once said:
There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to an opinion as Fermi.
The term NGO also refers to organizations, some of them the same, which generate, transfer, or administer humanitarian and other aid, such as MSF and ICRC.
Generally speaking, NGO's are organized as nonprofit corporations, so they are also NPO's. The Mandel Center for Nonprofit Organizations at CWRU offers Master of Nonprofit Organizations (the ``MNO'' -- sounds a bit too alphabetic) and Executive Director of Management degrees, and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management (this really doesn't sound so good). If they're so good at this nonprofit management stuff, why do they have to charge tuition?
Related acronyms (mostly for subcategories of the generic NGO):
- CBO: Community-Based Organization.
- DONGO: Donor-Organized Non-Governmental Organization.
- GONGO: Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organization.
- NGDO: Non-Governmental Development Organization.
- PDO: Private Development Organization.
- PSO: Public Service Organization.
- PVO: Private Voluntary Organization.
- quango: QUasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organization.
- VO: Voluntary Organization.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for New Hampshire. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
The NHA homepage was first webpage that I noticed had an extra
at the end of each sentence to assure proper spacing!
Cf. Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), corresponding advocacy organization for social whutzits.
``National History Day is not just one day, but a yearlong education program that makes history come alive through educator professional development and active student learning.'' NHD is an educrat's idea of a useful site. Its main feature is that you get to see a lot of webpages that are refreshingly free of unfamiliar information before you have to face any page containing historical stuff. Its principal sponsor is The WWII Channel.
National here means, or certainly at least originally meant, Canadian. In fact, although a majority of the teams play in the US, a majority of the players are still Canadian, despite the influx of Russians.
One little-appreciated unfortunate consequence of hockey is Tim Hortons coffee. There's no justice: a lockout by the owners cancelled the entire 2004-5 season, but Tim Hortons coffee poured on. (Tim Horton was a hockey player. There was only one of him and his last name was spelled without an ess.)
Amazingly, the most successful hockey players move efficiently and spend much of their time not attacking other players. Fortunately, these facts have not been widely noted. Hockey is regularly touted as a down-to-earth sport played by regular blue-collar sorts of guys. (Senator John Kerry did inestimable damage -- I can't estimate it, can you? -- to the sport's reputation during the 2004 presidential primary campaign in New Hampshire, when he put on skates and a Bruins jersey and played a scratch game with some firemen.) I think that ``regular guys'' are people who go to the race track in hopes of seeing a gruesome accident. On the other hand, my friend Paul ate with the Canucks one day because they were staying at the same Toronto hotel as he was. But that was back when the average NHL player earned under a million dollars. (In 2003, the average NHL player earned 1.79 million USD.)
``... NHS and NJHS chapters are found in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, many U.S. Territories, and Canada.''