Learn less interesting stuff like density, chemistry and all that rot at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Whaddya mean, ``normally open''??!!!
A member of EFTA; like Iceland it has stayed out of the EU.
Here's the Norway page of an X.500 directory, but you probably can't access it.
Like Japanese particles generally, it is written using the hiragana syllabary. Those who study Japanese as a foreign language usually encounter mnemonics to help them learn the roughly 100 basic kana (hiragana plus katakana) symbols. Here's a good one for the hiragana no if you already know Hebrew. (The following paragraph is reproduced as image content below, which may help if your browser does not display the non-Latin characters properly.)
The Hebrew word for of is שׁﬥ (transliterated ``shel'').
The first Hebrew letter (on the right, since Hebrew is written
RTL) is shin.
The modern cursive form of shin is
![[IMAGE: A curve with the topology of a printed letter e, but rotated about 45 degrees counter-clockwise, and with the straight line and sharp bend rounded.]](images/cursiveShin.png)
.
The Japanese particle -no does not mean `of' (or shel) exactly.
It means 's, so it follows the possessor and precedes the possession. However,
Japanese is now written left-to-right. If you read it right-to-left, like
Hebrew, a phrase with -no will have the possession-of-possessor order.
So naturally the cursive Hebrew shin should be flipped over to produce
the hiragana no: の
Here's a png of the preceding paragraph:
[Interestingly, the word shel has undergone a semantic evolution similar to that of de (loosely `of') in Latin. In Classical Latin the genitive case was used for simple possession and attribution, and the use of de was more restricted. In Vulgar Latin, the case distinctions broke down or went away, and de came to be used more generally to mark the possessive. Somewhat similarly, Biblical Hebrew frequently can indicate possession with suffixes that mean `my, our, your,' etc., whereas Modern Hebrew makes do with ``shel.'']
There's a Laurel-and-Hardy movie where Ollie rhetorically asks Stan Laurel (the generally sheepish one) if he knows how to spell ``not.'' Stan spells it out in response: ``en, oh, ott.''
In Italy, the Laurel-and-Hardy movies were long-ago dubbed using bad accents (i.e., the accents of Anglophones with poor ability to pronounce Italian). Even today, the Anglophone accent in Italian is known as lorelenardi.
(The definition was once a tone-setting feminist slogan.)
Here is a relevant, if loose, parallel: during a scientific conference in 1938, Enrico was approached informally regarding the Nobel in physics for that year (the story is told Atoms in the Family). He was told that he was being considered for it. Because he was an Italian national, and because the Italian government had put in place some stringent laws on the movement of currency (and given the rules on collecting the prize within a certain period after the award), there was a question whether an award at that time might not be inconvenient to the awardee, hence the consultation. Fermi said it would be okay, and the following November it was announced that he had won. (The Fermis took the opportunity of the trip to Sweden to emigrate to the US.)
The 1919 edition of the Encyclopedia Americana, in its evidently rather poorly edited article on the Nobel Prizes (in vol. 20, accessible as a Google ebook), lists the laureates from 1901 to 1914 in the five categories. (The ``Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics'' had not yet been invented.) The only American to receive the Nobel Prize in physics during that period, as the listing correctly indicates, was Albert A. Michelson. Following the listing, there is this paragraph (my comments are in square brackets):
From the list it is seen that six Americans were awarded prizes: Elihu Root [1912] and Theodore Roosevelt [1906] for their labors in behalf of peace; A. Carrel in medicine [1912; listed as French in the preceding list, apparently correctly, though he did work in the US from 1904 to 1912, and the work for which he was awarded the Nobel was done at the Rockefeller Institute]; Prof. Theodore Richard of Harvard University in chemistry [1914]; and A. A. Michelson [1907], Thomas A. Edison [nope] and Nikola Tesla [nope] in physics. [As this is seven names, they presumably meant to mention Carrel in some oblique way.] No awards were made in 1914-15. In 1916 the prize for literature was awarded to Verner Heidenstam, Sweden. In 1917 the peace prize was awarded the International Red Cross of Geneva. No 1918 prize was awarded. In 1918 Theodore Roosevelt, with the consent of Congress, distributed his prize among war charities. Consult Mosenthal, "The Inventor of Dynamite" in the Nineteenth Century (1898); `Les Prix Nobel' published annually at Stockholm. [Many of the WWI-era Nobels were awarded in the years immediately following the war.]
Oh.
They (mostly Xe) do form a small number of not-very-stable compounds, as well as some plain unstable compounds called excimers. Another way that noble-gas atoms can be bound chemically is in endohedral fullerenes -- fullerenes with nonbonded chemical species inside. The common notation for a Xe inside the standard 60-carbon fullerene is Xe@C60 (and it's a tight fit; He@C60 rattles around).
The closed electronic structure makes atoms of these elements chemically very unreactive -- hence the adjective ``noble''. They are also commonly called ``inert gases'' and ``rare gases,'' but these terms are better thought of as descriptions than names. The term ``inert gas'' can be ambiguous because it (and ``inert atmosphere'') are sometimes applied to non-oxidizing gases or to gases that are nonreactive in a particular situation (including nitrogen, carbon dioxide and even hydrogen, depending on context). The term ``rare gas'' is of questionable accuracy: helium, the lightest noble gas, is the second-most common element (at least of normal matter) in the universe, even if it is relatively rare on earth. Argon is 1% of the atmosphere by volume.
Another consequence of the spherically symmetric and ``rigid'' electronic structure is that their mutual van der Waals interactions are weak, so they have very low boiling and melting points (hence ``gases'').
[In fact, 4He does not even have a solid phase at ordinary pressure for any temperature. It undergoes a transition from a normal liquid state to a superfluid phase at 4.3 K. The superfluid phase is a sort of macroscopic equivalent of an atomic ground state: just as quantum mechanically, an atom in its ground state cannot lose energy even though it has positive kinetic energy, so the superfluid fraction of helium-4 does not lose energy by fluid friction. Yes, that's oversimplifying things a bit. For reassuringly normal behavior, raise the pressure to 26 atmospheres, and helium-4 solidifies just below 1 K.]
The noble gases are the group of elements in the rightmost column of standard periodic tables: group 8A in the sensible CAS group numbering traditionally used in the US and 18 in the stupid IUPAC compromise group numbering adopted in 1985.
Resistance to oxidation arises from multiple causes, but these can be broadly classed as thermodynamic and kinematic. Thermodynamics determines whether the oxidation is energetically favorable, kinematics determines how fast a thermodynamically favored oxidation will occur. Many metals, including gold and such non-noble metals as the pure metal aluminum and the alloys called stainless steels, form a thin but dense layer of oxide that prevents further oxidation. Hence oxidation of the bulk is prevented under conditions where it might be thermodynamically favorable.
Kinematic factors can depend dramatically on the oxidants and nonmonotonically on their densities, so they're a bit tricky to quantify. If you want a simple guide to just how noble an element is, thermodynamics is a better bet. In particular, I recommend the reduction potential, since I have a list of reduction potentials of common metals handy:
| Reduction Half-Reaction | Standard Reduction Potential (volts) |
|---|---|
| Au+(aq) + e- --> Au(s) | +1.83 |
| Pt2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pt(s) | +1.19 |
| Ir3+(aq) + 3e- --> Ir(s) | +1.16 |
| Pd2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pd(s) | +0.99 |
| Hg+(aq) + e- --> Hg(s) | +0.80 |
| Ru2+(aq) + 2e- --> Ru(s) | +0.8 |
| Ag+(aq) + e- --> Ag(s) | +0.80 |
| Rh3+(aq) + 3e- --> Rh(s) | +0.76 |
| Cu+(aq) + e- --> Cu(s) | +0.52 |
| Bi3+(aq) + 3e- --> Bi(s) | +0.32 |
| 2H+(aq) + 2e- --> H2(g) | +0.00 |
| Pb2+(aq) + 2e- --> Pb(s) | -0.13 |
| Sn2+(aq) + 2e- --> Sn(s) | -0.14 |
(Many of the metals listed have other oxidation states; I have given the reduction potentials for half-reaction from the lowest positive oxidation number.) Positive reduction potentials essentially correspond to oxidizing agents rather than reducing agents. Metals with positive reduction potentials do not react with ordinary acids to yield hydrogen gas. (Sulfuric acid is another story -- it's not just a strong acid but also an oxidizing agent.) Generally, more positive reduction potentials mean higher resistance to oxidation. Hence, a reasonable definition of noble metals might be those with reduction potentials above a particular value.
A better-defined group of elements including gold is its column of elements in the periodic table, sometimes called the ``coinage metal.''
``Good night'' in Spanish is buenas noches, literally `good nights.' I have no idea why. ``Good day'' can be done with either number: buen día or buenos días.
If making no comment by not commenting is too difficult for one's spokesman, perhaps the solution is to have no spokesman (spokesperson? spoker?) at all. As of 2007, Senator Hillary Clinton has a number of spokers. One is her Senate spokesman, Philippe Reines. Commenting in May on two new biographies of Clinton, Reines asked ``Is it possible to be quoted yawning?'' (``Aw-oouahhh''?)
In Joseph Heller's Good As Gold, the hero electrifies (it's a metaphor, okay?) a White House flack by coining the original phrase ``I don't know.'' Later, a presidential spokesman deploys this work of rhetorical art during a press conference, and everyone is stunned. I'm working from memory here, so some details may be off.//
/**/
Nawtr' Dahhhm, mebbe?
![[Football icon]](icons/football.gif){kind=icon}
There used to be an advertising campaign for a cigar: a heart attack waiting to happen -- a sedentary suit, unconcerned by his BMI, planted on a plush leather chair -- would issue the stirring ad slogan: ``We're gonna getcha.'' He meant that you couldn't resist becoming a White Castle cigar smoker. As if their tobacco were addictive or something. Hah! Usually, when somebody smiles confidently and says that ``we're gonna getcha,'' it's not a friendly smile. The we refers to less retiring persons who have been delegated the task of ``getting you,'' possibly with some discretion as to how they instantiate or ``concretize'' the relatively vague thr-- er, promise.
This is a meaty topic. I'll fill in some more stuff later.
Oh wait -- I think it was White Owl cigars, not White Castle. Whatever.
Back when I worked at Arizona State University (ASU), one of our Japanese post-docs, Nobu, took a short vacation in Mexico and returned with a dusty, impressively old-looking tome. He explained gleefully that the vendor had sold it to him cheap because it was old. Nobu didn't happen to know Spanish, so he asked me to read some and tell him what the book was about. I found it difficult to understand, like medieval Catalan or... something. As you can guess from the entry in which you're reading this story, it was actually Italian. However, since I had this idea fija (`idée fixe' in English) that it was just ``really weird Spanish,'' the nickel didn't drop for a minute or so. We went to Rita (a grad student from Sardinia), who confirmed that it was (fairly modern) Italian. I don't remember what the book was about.
A somewhat related story about Enrico Fermi and his sister and a physics book is retold by Laura Fermi in her biography of her husband Enrico, Atoms in the Family. I'll try to put that in here later.
I was reading an Italian mystery last year (I picked up a bit of Italian since my time at ASU) and having trouble with one longish and idiom-laden sentence. Then, as I walked through the library not far from a small group talking in polite library tones, I distinctly heard one of them say noi -- a word that, afaik, doesn't occur in any western Romance language other than Italian. I rushed back to where I was sitting and got the book. I approached them and asked (in English) for help. They said they'd try, but soon admitted defeat. When I tried to discuss the problematic text with them, it turned out they didn't know Italian... We continued the discussion in Spanish. I wanted to know ``¿¡qué palabra es `noy'!?'' It turned out that what I had heard (which would be written ``noy'' in Spanish) was a slurring of ``no oí,'' Spanish for `I didn't hear.' Precisely.
I suppose that as they had been speaking in somewhat hushed tones, it was natural that one of them should have said it, and said it a bit louder than usual. That's my excuse. For a related story involving Nobu and no and n', see the nimporta entry.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
Some of you more inquisitive readers are probably wondering why this particular phrase. It doesn't look like a take-home exam problem. I was not vouchsafed this information. I provided the Latin translation on a don't-ask-don't-tell basis. Furthermore, the resemblance of the Latin verb sistere and the English word sister is purely coincidental, and does not reflect any special message tailoring on anyone's part.
Hmm -- I can see that some of you more inquisitive types just won't give up. You want to know ``well then, what was the sex of your email correspondent''? Look, you must realize that if I start giving out detailed information like that you'll be able to guess the identity of the person who made the query. Then, given your filthy imagination, you will probably go and destroy this probably-innocent coed's reputation. Therefore I vow to tell you nothing about my correspondent unless you drag it out of me.
It's important to know that there's a singular-plural distinction even in the imperative. If she had been commanding more than one person to not stop, she would want to say Nolite sistere! I provided this information just in case (JIC). Things have been known to get kinky at that school.
BTW, there are other verbs that translate `stop,' and slightly milder ways of expressing an imperative (specifically, by using the ``jussive'' sense of the subjunctive; `may you not stop').
In his nomenclature essay, Price was concerned with the direct psychosocial consequences of certain names; how these exert an irresistible force on one's fate. For example: ``Cora has good posture and a severe hairdo.'' He notes that, as a 1920's Roger, he had been destined to a life of near-sighted studiousness and giving the class oration at high school commencement. (In clear confirmation of his prediction, these things had in fact already come to pass. My own research has determined that Norberts are at high risk of becoming dix-huitièmistes. See also our advisory on Virginia at the NJCA entry.) Price failed to adduce another strong piece of evidence for his hypothesis: the well-known cases of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woodrow Wilson, and Werner Erhard (the est guy), who changed their names and their lives. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (A bit more on Woody and Werner at the electrical banana entry. BTW, Mad Libs came into the world as Roger Price was in the kitchen carving a banana. Bananas have the highest humor content of any tropical fruit.)
The meanings Price was concerned with had little to do with the original meanings of the names -- their etymologies. If you want to know about given-name etymologies, the site to visit is Behind the Name. See also IncompeTech's NameDB.
Here's a link to a nice collection of author names apposite to the titles of books they wrote.
Not really appropriate to this entry, but I don't have another place to list them right now, are The Funny Name Server and Name of the Month. See also the Kabalarian Philosophy Home Page (``Teaching the Principles of Mental Freedom''). The Kabalarian Philosophy is similar to the idea of this entry, but they seem to be in dead earnest, so I concede they might be a lot funnier. On the other hand, we are informative.
This glossary entry is concerned with names that have an evident meaning, whether that is the same as the original meaning or not, where those names have operated magically, molding their bearers so that the names would come to be ironic commentary.
One way or another, the idea that the meaning of a name affects its bearer
has a classical provenance:
Nomen est omenoccurs in a battuta of a comedy of Plautus. (Persa 623 ss.)
- Paul N. ``RED'' ADAIR
- A daring firefighting
specialist. The nickname ``Red'' he had from childhood, for the fiery
color of his hair, before he started wearing his trademark red
overalls. He was the most famous pioneer in capping oil-well fires and
blowouts, both on land and off shore. Oil-well fires are noisy, and he
became noticeably hard-of-hearing. He earned the nickname
``Hellfighter'' for his exploits. In 1968, a movie called ``Hellfighters'' was made
starring John Wayne as ``Chance Buckman,'' the red-overalled Adair
character. Red Adair was a technical advisor for the film, along with
a `Boots' Hansen and a `Coots' Matthews who also have no other movie
credits.
- Brad ADGATE
- A senior vice president at Horizon Media, a company that buys ads.
He was named Advertising Age 2002 Media Maven, and in 2005 he
was ranked the #3 most quoted executive in Advertising Age's annual
'Media Talk' listing.
- Georg AGRICOLA (1494-1555)
- The surname is a Latin word meaning `farmer.' The subject of this
subentry was a German physician who wrote several works on mineralogy
and metallurgy. You might ask, ``how is this any more noteworthy than
a German physician who wrote several works on mineralogy and metallurgy
and was named Georg Landwirt [`George Farmer']?'' It's more noteworthy
because it's not common for Germans to have Latin surnames. When
medieval and early modern Germans have been known by Latin names that
are not essentially their German names translated, then one could
expect the name to be chosen to make some point (e.g.:
Paracelsus). The point here, if there was one, seems wildly
off-target.
Agricola's most famous work, De Re Metallica, was published in 1556, when he was already sleeping with the minerals. Yes, that was a lame joke. We know -- we're experts at that sort of thing. We only included it here because we want to expose you to every kind of humor (diverse humor includes differently-abled humor, ha, ha). Otherwise, we'd have written that it wasn't about the rock group. That would have had you ROTFL, because it puns both on Metallica and rock group. (It would have. It hasn't because of the timing. We know. Another thing about timing: Georg Agricola was a near contemporary of Paracelsus, another physician. Paracelsus was the first great champion of medicinal chemistry. The novelty of Paracelsus's idea might be inferred from the fact that Agricola, a physician interested in chemical processes (in mining and metallurgy) wrote little or nothing about medicinal chemistry. Then again, Agricola wrote only what he knew; Paracelsus went beyond what he knew and so was able to say a great deal (pretty much all of it nonsense, alas).
Oh wait -- his name was German: Georg Bauer. (Bauer meant `peasant'; in Latin translation he gave himself a free upgrade.) So his books were actually by Georgius Agricola -- the mixed German and Latin is sloppy and misleading. Hmmph. Oh well.
De Re Metallica was Englished by Herbert Clark Hoover (an engineer who became famous as organizer of relief efforts in Europe after WWI and later became president of the US) in collaboration with his wife Lou Henry Hoover. (And look, if a girl gets Henry as her surname, how much sense does it require to avoid giving her a name like Lou as well? People surnamed Henry should be able to see this coming and make appropriate preparations.) The Hoovers also collaborated on an English translation of the De Architectura of Vitruvius Pollio.
There's a Georg-Agricola-Gesellschaft, e.V. (founded in 1926), but it's not primarily about him. It's ``zur Förderung der Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik'' (`for the advancement of the history of the natural sciences and technology').
- Erin ALLDAY
- Under her byline, the San Francisco Chronicle published an
article on Americans not getting enough sleep (``Waking up grumpy is
Zzz factor,'' November 8, 2007).
- ALPHA
- A borough in Warren County, New Jersey. It's the
first municipality you notice upon entering the state (on
I-78 from
Pennsylvania). Okay, it's not actually the first one you pass through.
Harry Zikas, Jr., was elected
mayor there in 1999, at 21 the youngest mayor in New Jersey. After
his reelection in 2003, he said ``I will ALWAYS keep Alpha priority one
....'' (I know it doesn't look promising now, but I swear to you that
this is a very exciting subentry.)
Alpha was founded because of the high quality and quantity of limestone deposits found there. The limestone attracted the cement industry, which flourished in the early part of the twentieth century. Alpha was incorporated in 1911 and is named after the Alpha Portland Cement Company.
I should probably clarify the ``first municipality you notice'' thing. It has to do with geometry, but the details will have to wait until the next time I'm east-bound in that area. I really want to clear this priority thing up and find out which is the real alpha town, but all I can tell you now is what I witnessed the last time I left New Jersey on I-78. Near the 3.8 mile marker, there's a sign announcing that you're entering the township of Hopatcong. Then, just 0.4 miles later: ``Entering the Boro of Alpha.'' But wait-- at the 2.8 MM, ``Entering the Twp. of Hopatcong.'' I didn't realize I'd left. But Alpha comes roaring back! Again after just 0.4 miles: entering Alpha. Things quiet down. At 1.8 miles, no Hopatcong riposte, 1.4 miles, 1 mile, looks like Alpha is going to take it to the finish line. But wait! At 0.8 miles -- Hopatcong! The tension mounts! Help me, Dashboard Jesus, I can hardly steer! At 0.6 miles, 0.5 miles, Alpha is silent. It's 0.4 miles, still haven't seen a sign, 0.3 .... The bridge is coming into view, still no new entering sign. Is this it? Just before the bridge -- I see a sign! A SIGN! Hang on tight -- it's gonna be a cliffhanger! At 0.1 miles, just feet from the shore, I see -- ``Entering... the town of Phillipsburg''! Gasp! It's over! It's alll over!! Oh my heart! Omigod! Ohh--mega!
(For those of you who sincerely care: I-78 bypasses Alpha in a semicircle around the south. It avoids the residential streets but goes through a couple of arms of the roughly star-shaped incorporated area.)
- AMA
- It's the American Medical Association or
something.
- Markeith AMBLES
- An American football player. He was a highly recruited high school
player out of McDonough, Georgia. When he arrived at USC in 2010, he
was the #3-rated receiver in the country. He played in the first four
games for the Trojans as a true freshman, but was declared academically
ineligible for the rest of the season (or, in case it's not the same,
was suspended for academic reasons, according to other reports). How
do you get into academic trouble just one month into your freshman
year? ``Maturity issues,'' they say. He left USC either voluntarily
or ``voluntarily'' in November but returned in January. He was
punished and almost kicked off the team in April for being a
no-call-no-show. In August he was declared academically ineligible to
play in the 2011 season and he soon left USC for good.
Not editorializing or anything, but this whole student-athlete charade is unfair. No one asked Einstein to run a minimum 5-second 40, did they? So this guy is a wide-receiving genius -- why should he have to stay awake through a bunch of boring lectures just to play farm-team football for scraps and peanuts, under the tyranny of well-compensated coaches (guys who lacked the skills to earn a hyper-rich retirement in their playing years)?
Anyway, Ambles meandered around the no-TV-coverage backwaters of college football for a while (places -- like Arizona Western Community College -- that are so little-known they might be fictitious) before reemerging in 2013. In April it was announced that he had signed with the Houston Cougars, to arrive on campus (there isn't much irony content in this entry; all this detail is just due diligence and digging for ironic dirt) in the summer, able to play immediately and with two years of eligibility remaining. The Cougars play in the Big East, and Ambles, teamed with WR Deontay Greenberry, should give them one of the best receiving groups in that conference.
- Scott AMEDURE
- Amatore, Amadori, etc., now used as surnames, are versions of a
common given name borne by various medieval saints, many of them
martyrs. The original given name was the
Latin Amator, meaning `lover,'
implicitly of God. Scott Amedure suffered and died for a different
kind of love.
Jonathan T. Schmitz, a waiter in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, agreed in 1995 to appear on the Jenny Jones talk show, where he was told that he would learn the identity of a secret admirer. When the show was taped in Chicago on Monday, March 6, he learned that his acquaintance Amedure was the secret admirer. According to Jim Paratore, president of Telepictures Productions (which produced the show), ``We observed nothing confrontational or any signs of embarrassment between any of the guests before, during or after the taping.''
On account of adverse publicity or whatever, that show was never aired, but it was screened by the jury in Schmitz's trial for the murder of Amedure the next year. During the show, Amedure outlined his sexual fantasies about Schmitz, which involved ``whipped cream and champagne'' and focused on Schmitz's ``cute, little hard body.'' All members of the jury agreed that they observed signs of embarrassment. (Schmitz was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison. The conviction was overturned on appeal, and confirmed in a second trial, where the original sentence was reinstated.)
Schmitz said later that he thought he had handled the situation well and was putting it behind him. The following Thursday morning, however, Schmitz found a note attached to his apartment door. The note ``contained sexual references,'' as they say. (That makes me think of C++, but I'm pretty perverted.) In reaction, Schmitz bought a 12-gauge shotgun and five rounds of ammunition, and drove to Amedure's Orion Township, Michigan, mobile home. There he confirmed that Amedure had written the note and then shot him twice in the chest, allegedly. I like to add ``allegedly'' because it shows that I'm being careful to cover my ass. Don't want to be provocative.
- Bruce ARENA
- Head coach of the Galaxy (an MLS
team) of Los Angeles, Ca.
- LANCE ARMSTRONG
- If he had gone into track and field, he would have been a natural
for the javelin throw. Instead, he went into bike racing and had some
success, taking the Tour de France (sounds
like a touristy thing) a few times (seven, a broken record). Oops,
scratch that: he won it zero times. In mid-career, he got testicular
cancer but beat that too. Now he's the poster boy for more comfortable
bicycle seats.
Interestingly, there's another, unrelated guy with the same name -- Lance Armstrong -- who also races or raced for the USPS team, though not as successfully. He would get regular autograph requests. (You wouldn't think it'd be a likely mistake for fans to make, since he's a black man and the famous Lance Armstrong is a blonde, but I guess the name is everything. Or maybe we've finally achieved the true ``color-blind'' society!) Knowing the post office, they probably get each others' mail as well. Evidently there's something about the name that predisposes one to bike race for the post office.
I don't believe in Peter Pan,
Frankenstein, or Superman.-- ``Bicycle Race'' (Queen)
- Daniel ARrEOLA
- A police officer who left his job as a result of sexual misconduct.
In Mid-November 2009, he and fellow officer Adam Fisher (I'm still
thinking about this name) resigned from the Glendale, Ariz., police
force after Police Chief Steve Conrad notified them that he planned to
fire them. Fisher and Shannon Godina, a police records employee, had
been conducting an affair, and Fisher would visit Godina's house when
he was supposed to be on patrol. An investigation into this found that
Fisher and Arreola were doctoring time sheets and sending ``sexually
and racially offensive'' messages to other officers in Glendale. The
actual messages were not quoted, but we can take the quoted description
at face value, since nowadays there's always someone eager to be
offended by anything, you pervert.
Before the officers resigned, Godina had confessed to having had sex with Fisher ``on the clock'' (kinky!) three to five times in 2008 and was fired, possibly without the option of resigning instead. In her confession, she also volunteered that she wanted to leave her post at the records office to become a police officer. Now that she's out of the records office, it would be harder for her to change her own employment records (not to mention time sheets), and her termination from this job might be a problem if she does try to become a police officer somewhere. Maybe she should change her name, or at least its termination. I suggest changing -ina to -iva.
No wait: according to a news report, ``Police say Godina confessed to having sex with Fisher because she wanted to leave the records office and become a police officer.'' Now I get it: she really didn't have the opportunity to resign, so she had to get herself fired. She should sue the police department for violating her thirteenth-amendment rights.
- DARIUS A. Arya
- Darius was the name of a couple of important Persian emperors, and
Darius A. Arya is the name of an American archaeologist. Well, I guess
Darius (like Cyrus) is still a common enough given name in Iran.
- ASPLUNDH
- There's a Swedish surname Asplund, with the meaning `aspen
grove.' I don't know where the extra h came from, but Carl Hjalmar
Asplundh came from Sweden in 1882 and worked as an accountant in
Philadelphia. After he died in 1903, Carl's second son Oswald took up
work as gardener and later founded a landscaping and tree surgery
business, employing his three younger brothers as tree trimmers as they
worked their way through college. Those brothers, Griffith, Lester,
and Carl Hjalmar (junior) founded the
Asplundh Tree Expert Co. in 1928.
This history is cribbed from that company's website's history page. According
to itself, in 2006 ``Asplundh is the world's leading vegetation
management company, with over 28,000 employees serving utilities and
municipalities in the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand.''
And on the subject of surprising final aitches, don't forget Jean Anouilh.
- AUTOBIOGRAPHY
- This is the name of an unexpectedly aptly named song on Ashlee
Simpson's debut album. But before we get into that, I want to point
out that Ashlee is an artist, a musician, a creator (creatrix?). As a
mere indication of both her musical acumen and ability, here is an
unsparing and perceptive self-critique that she allowed to be
published. About burping the alphabet, she commented ``[m]y worst
letter is S. It is a closed consonant and
at the end when I am out of wind.'' But she's also fair: ``... my
favorite letter is G. It is an open consonant and it is at the
beginning when my wind is strong.'' Modestly, she concedes that her
older sister ``Jessica burps the alphabet better
than me. She has better wind and she is a
much louder belcher.'' (Thanks, sis.) Maybe Ashlee should discuss
this with her singing coach. I hear that if you control your voice
just so, you can conserve your wind so as to make it through a longer
piece. Then again, maybe a natural singing talent doesn't have to
worry about that breathing stuff.
Well, I guess I'll tell you more about it later. Right now I feel a sore throat coming on.
- HARRY BAALS
![[Picture of Shelley Long and Ted Danson on the set of Cheers, 1984; Britney Spears was a very young girl then.]](images/SL-TD.jpg)
- Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1934-1947
and 1951-1954. Fort Wayne was named after (and apparently by)
General
``Mad'' Anthony Wayne. The actress Shelley Long is from
Fort Wayne.
The image at right shows Shelley Long and Harry Baals on the set of the NBC show ``Cheers'' in 1984. Shelley Long is the one to the left. Hmmm. I think maybe the guy with her is actually the actor Ted Danson. I guess I don't have a picture of Harry Baals. I can't honestly say that bothers me very much.
Also not shown at right is Britney Spears. Why do I mention Britney Spears? The reason I mention Britney Spears, and Britney Spears images in particular, is that if you have (or even just mention) pictures of Britney Spears on your web page, you can increase your hit count. This is what's called ``shameless promotion.'' It's nothing special, and I didn't invent it. I should probably mention Brittany Speers as well -- it'll rank high in searches on the misspelled name. If you want to know how to spell her name (it's an odd variant), go to Britney's record producer's official webpage and see Britney Spears's name written in big letters. They also have pictures of Britney's album covers.
December 2, 2001: I just checked on Google: the ``Brittany Speers'' thing hasn't worked so well -- this page only ranked thirteenth out of ``about 193'' (most of those unintentional mispellings). I'm going to type it in a third time now and see what happens: Brittany Speers.
Oh yes: nekkid.It's obvious that you just can't get enough of this stuff. Go see the Alana Miles entry.
April 14, 2002: We're up to third of ``about 706.'' YES! (Google is trying hard to help steer people to pages with the name spelled properly, but we know you're looking for us.) And we'll also try to get you with brittany spears.
- Jolee BACON
- As the AP had it, ``Jolee Bacon
really sizzles when it comes to hog-calling.'' This was the lead in an
item datelined Sept. 22, 2008, Lewiston, Idaho. On Saturday the 20th,
she had taken first place in the hog-calling competition at the Nez
Perce County Fair. The Northern Idaho woman has raised several
champion hogs for 4-H contests. She won over the crowd as she started
her call with ``a few loud snorts and a long, drawn-out `sooey'.''
- Jeff BAGWELL
- Houston Astros first baseman, as of this writing (2004 postseason).
- Lauren BAIER Kim
- A reporter for the Wall Street Journal -- it publishes financial
news, dontchaknow. Baier is pronounced ``buyer.''
- Harvey R. BALL
- Harvey R. Ball (July 10, 1921 - April 12, 2001), an ad executive,
was the person with the strongest claim to having invented the smiley
face -- the simple, circular yellow face with an ear-to-ear grin
and no ears (
).
In 1959, Mr. Ball founded an advertising and PR agency in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1963, one of his clients, State Mutual Life Assurance Company of America, asked him to help with the reassurance of workers in the wake of a merger. According to Ball's claim, corroborated by issues of the Worcester Times & Gazette of that time, and by State Mutual Life company records, that was the beginning of the smiley face. It stands to reason: the meaningless smiley originated as a meaningless feel-good PR gesture substituting for a substantive assurance of continued work or placement and transition help? Oh well. State Mutual Life is now Allmerica Financial Corporation. Ball recalled that he was paid $45 for his artwork and never applied for a trademark or copyright. At least he wasn't fined.
According to the AP, the smiley's popularity peaked in 1971, when fifty million smiley buttons were sold. In 1999, the USPS issued a smiley-face stamp. Who says there isn't a distinctive American culture?
In 1989, Charlie Alzamora stepped forward to dispute Ball's claim of priority. You wouldn't think, by that time, it would be anything that anyone outside the post office would want to claim credit for. Alzamora, by then program director for New York radio station WMCA (AM 570; I don't think it had religious programming in those days), told the New York Times that a happy face with a slightly crooked smile was developed by the station in 1962 as a promotion for its DJ's. The face, with the slogan ``the WMCA good guys,'' was printed on thousands of sweatshirts distributed by the station.
They say that success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan. This must be an exceptional case.
- Lacey BANGHARD
- A page 3 girl. It's about the hair. Yeah, that's it.
- Joseph ``Jose'' BANKS
- When Banks was arrested on September 4, 2008, the FBI described him
as one of the most prolific bank robbers in Chicago history, accusing
him of holding up at least 20 banks.
- PEGGY BANKS
- Well, you may have a little money in a piggy bank, and you may add
to it, but you're supposed to wait before you get it out.
Margaret-Eleanora Banks, known as Peggy, was 22 in 1745, an orphan
living with her brother. At the time, she and Harry Grenville already
planned to marry, but her fortune was a mere 5000 pounds. They didn't
marry until 1757, by which time her sister had died unmarried, doubling
Peggy's fortune by the terms of their father's will. (Harry Grenville,
as governour of Barbados, had also improved his own circumstances.)
- BANNING, California
- A town of 25,000 an 85-mile drive east on I-10 from downtown Los Angeles. (Pass Ontario,
CA, along the way.)
In December, 2002, a lesbian student at Coombs Middle School there sued
the Banning Unified School District. She had been banned from gym class
for over a week because administrators felt that other girls would be
uncomfortable getting undressed in front of her. The plaintiff, 14 at
the time of the incident, is being represented by lawyers of the ACLU and the NCLR. She claims that she felt ``humiliated
and denigrated.'' Is it okay to use that word again?
In an interview with Reuters, she explained that ``It's fine if they're uncomfortable but it's still discrimination.'' But apparently it's not fine if she's uncomfortable.
- Bob BARKER
- Host of the TV shows ``Truth or Consequences'' for 18 years and
``The Price is Right'' for 30 years. I'd like to say that that makes
him something like a carnival barker, but his role was not so
full-throated. So that's not the excuse for this entry.
He's a vegetarian and very active animal-rights advocate. He co-hosted the 1986 PATSY awards with a dog named Mike.
- PÍO BAROJA y Nessi
- Son of Serafín Baroja. The given name Pío is
the Spanish form of the Latin name Pius (meaning `pious'). The surname
Baroja is not likely to be related to Baroque (barroco in
Spanish). It does, however, suggest Hebrew vocabulary related to
piety. Words with the same consonants in Hebrew (b,r,kh) are various
conjugations of `bless' and related words. (For example, the noun for
benediction, transliterated into Spanish, is barajá. A
common boys' given name in Hebrew is Baruch, `blessed.' )
Actually, baraja is a Spanish word also: barajar is `to
fight, stir [as a pot], mix [especially cards -- i.e. shuffle].'
The origin or the word is unknown.
See also baraka.
When you consider the position of the hands, barajar naipes (`to shuffle cards') resembles Christian prayer. Maybe the Spanish word comes from the Arab-speaking Muslim world, as playing cards themselves did. (Okay, Corominas y Pascual reject an Arabic origin, which proves that if barajar has an Arabic origin, they're wrong.) Arabic, another Semitic language, has a cognate of the Hebrew root. The same Arabic word was adopted into Swahili, a Bantu language of coastal East Africa. Although Swahili is the native language of only a minority of Bantu-speakers, it is widely used as a commercial lingua franca. US President Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan, and his first name means `blessed.'
It's plausible to speculate that Baroja is a ``New Christian'' name -- i.e., a surname of (Roman Catholic) Spaniards descended from converted Jews. It is much more probable that the name is simply derived from the place name Baroja (annexed to the municipality of Peñacerrada in the province of Álava). The name of Álava is derived from Basque and means `intermountain region.' Interestingly, however, Álava is a homophone of alaba (`[he] praises') except that the stress in the latter word is on the penult. Serafín Baroja, a mining engineer (born 1840 in San Sebastián), was a writer of popular cantos in Basque (lyrics that various others later set to music). I don't have to tell you what Serafín means and that it's derived from Hebrew, do I? Good.
Pío, also born in San Sebastián (Dec. 28, 1872), like his father had a practical profession but is remembered for his artistic work (novels and literary essays, mostly). He became a physician and practiced for two years in Cestona, but that life was too dull and he moved to Madrid. There he tried his hand at various businesses, and successfully established a bakery with his brother Ricardo (a painter and self-taught engraver). You don't need to know this, but then you don't need not to know it either. All you really need to know you learned in kindergarten, so stop reading and get back to work.
The first sentence of his Memorias is
Yo no tengo la costumbre de mentir.
(`I am not in the habit of lying.') This may suggest to sensitive persons like me that he was an unselfaware scold. Referring in the memoir to the publication of El Árbol de la Ciencia in 1911, he noted that he put in it his concerns as a physician and as an amateur philosopher. He adds that this novel ``es el libro más acabado y completo de todos los míos, escrito en el tiempo que yo estaba en el máximo de energía intelectual.'' (That `it is the most finished and complete of all my books, written at the peak of my intellectual energies.')The title El Árbol de la Ciencia is an obvious allusion to the Biblical ``tree of the knowledge of good and evil,'' so right there you've got your nomen-est-omen money's worth. (The title is the traditional, now archaic, expression of `The Tree of Knowledge.' See árbol entry for details.) The novel follows one Andrés Hurtado. Hurtado sounds like it ought to be related to huerto, `garden' (< Latin hortus), and therefore stand as another reference to the Garden of Eden. Then again, maybe not. Hurtado is a common surname in the Spanish-speaking world, so common that one never thinks of its meaning: `stolen' or `hidden.' Hanks and Hodges suggest that ``the reference was probably to an illegitimate offspring, whose existence was concealed, or to a kidnapped child. (Portuguese has the equivalent surname Furtado. Both surnames are the past participle of a verb -- hurtar, furtar -- ultimately derived from the Latin fur, `thief.')
Let's take a closer look at that novel, then (and let's call it Tree, which rhymes with brevity). The book follows Hurtado from the beginning of his medical education (hey -- write what you know). Paragraph three is this sentence:
Por una de estas anomalias clásicas de España, aquellos estudiantes que esperaban en el patio de la Escuela de Arquitectura no eran arquitectos del porvenir, sinó futuros médicos y farmacéuticos.
[`By one of these classic anomalies of Spain, those students waiting in the courtyard of the Architecture School were not architects to be, but rather future physicians and pharmacists.']It turns out that the general chemistry class for first-year students in medicine and pharmacy was taught in an old converted chapel, and that the entrance to that was via the Architecture courtyard. I mention this not because it is interesting in itself, but because it is not interesting in itself. It's not unusual in any large educational institution for classroom space to be taken where it can be found; to find in this some indication of Spanish singularity suggests a limited experience. It's too bad, because the novel fairly bursts with broad assertions about national and regional character which I wish I could pass along in good conscience. Instead, I shall have to pass them along with a bad conscience.
Yes, I will finish this entry, honest. Where did I put the book???!!
I found the book! Maybe later I'll use it.
Baroja is considered an important influence on Ernest Hemingway and on John Dos Passos. Hemingway is said to have adopted the ``spare realism'' of Baroja. This sort of thing is always relative. Cervantes was celebrated in part for his unwordy style. Look, not to take anything away from Cervantes or even Baroja, but Spanish as ordinarily spoken and written is often verbose and embellished and wordy. Any competent writer of any century who wants to maintain his readers' interest must write more tersely than average.
- Henry Randall BASKETT III
- As a high school athlete in Clovis, New Mexico, he lettered in
football and track as well as basketball. And at the 2000 state track
meet in Albuquerque set the state record of 7 feet in the high jump.
Nevertheless, he pursued a career in football. He was hired by the
Minnesota Vikings in 2006 and as of 2009 has played for the
Philadelphia Eagles and the Indianapolis Colts.
- Michael BEER
- Author of Taste or Taboo: Dietary Choices in Antiquity
(2009).
- Peter BEERING
- Security coordinator for the 2002 Indianapolis 500. Spectators may
bring coolers no larger than 14 inches wide and 14 inches high. If
there's no length restriction, that could pack enough beer. You can
also bring a ``small backpack.''
- Charlotte BEERS
- She's a CEO of Ogilvy and Mather. (That's neither here nor there;
it's in Chicago, and it's ``an international advertising, marketing and
public relations agency.'')
Beers has been quoted as saying that ``I had my first kiss while I had a bottle of Coke in my hand. Coca-Cola isn't about taste; it's about my life.'' Take it from an ad executive, I guess.
- Wallace BEERY
- He was born Wallace Fitzgerald Beery, and used his real name as an
actor. He won an Oscar for the eponymous lead role in a boxing movie
entitled ``The Champ'' (1931). To capitalize on that success, MGM
starred him in a movie with the unfortunately suggestive title of
``Flesh'' (1932). Implausibly, a movie poster describes him as a
svelte ``200 lbs. of flesh and muscle.'' I guess the stipulation means
that they're not counting the gut. The movie was directed by the
great John Ford, who refused to take directing credit or whatever.
It's a movie about the great Polokai, king of the beer-hall wrestlers.
He's also a novelty or gimmick of a waiter: he carries a beer barrel
to your table to fill your mug. Read more here.
In a still from the movie that you can see
here, Polokai (Beery) drinks from a mug about as wide as his own
mug and almost as long as his upper arm.
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif)
- Alexander Graham BELL
- When I was a kid, I thought it was called ``Bell Telephone''
because a bell rang when there was a call.
- Ladan and Laleh BIJANI
- Bi- is a Latin prefix for `two,'
and jani is the nominative plural form of janus.
Janus was the name of an old Italian
deity with two faces on opposite sides of one head.
In Farsi, Ladan means nasturtium and Laleh means tulip. Ladan and Laleh were twin sisters born in Tehran on Jan. 17, 1974, conjoined at the head (two brains, joined skulls). They made headlines (sorry about that) around the world when they underwent an operation to become separate.
They took their gamble at the Raffles Hospital in Singapore. The operation began at 10 AM Sunday, July 6, 2003, with one team removing a vein from Ladan's thigh and another spending a reported six hours to saw through the skull. The vein was needed for grafting into Ladan's brain; conjoined, the twins shared one vein). On Monday evening, 32 hours into the operation, the grafted vein had blocked. This was not immediately fatal -- presumably because their circulatory systems were still joined and apparently because there were a number of collateral blood vessels. It was decided to continue the operation, and around noon on Tuesday they were separated and placed on separate operating tables. Then blood vessels in the bases of both of their brains burst, and despite strenuous efforts both died -- Ladan after 2 hours and Laleh 90 minutes later.
The preceding paragraph is the most coherent account of the operation that I was able to reconstruct from a review of press accounts at the time. There were a number of conflicting and even incomprehensible reports at the time, which I'll try to sort out later.
In a July 10 Op-Ed for the New York Times William Safire wrote: ``In the 19th century, Chang and Eng had no such choice, and lived out their lives as sideshow curiosities, often called monstrosities, though they managed to father 22 children. [SBF: I guess they spent a lot of time in bed.] In our time, two famed Iranian sisters, ...29-year-old law school graduates whose brains were linked in the womb... found a hospital in Singapore and a score of neurosurgeons willing to carry out [their] decision to risk their lives for physical independence.''
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about the French monarchy, observed that when a regime tries to reform itself, it can trigger a revolution by kindling hope in those who had despaired: ``Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men's minds.'' The French revolution was also known for the separation of heads, by a procedure invented by one Doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin.
The Bijani sisters returned to Iran in separate coffins.
- François BILLETDOUX
- In French, billet doux means
`love letter.' I was tempted to suppose that the surname was adopted
(or imposed, like
Faux-Pas-Bidet), but so far as I
can tell Billetdoux got his name from his parents in the usual way. [I
might mention that François is the Old French form of the
word français, `French,' but this is not exactly unusual.
I can't think of any place for which a remotely similar naming
phenomenon is common. Okay: Brittany (a part of France!), Norman (via
France), Israel, and Judith (essentially the female form of Judean).]
According to the 2005 Encyclopedia Britannica, Billetdoux was a ``French playwright whose works, linked with the avant-garde theatre, examined human relationships and found them doomed to failure.'' Love it.
His daughter Raphaëlle Billetdoux is a novelist and scriptwriter. A Virginie Billetdoux acted in various movies between 1974 and 1980 (mostly French, but the 1980 was Spanish), but that's as much as I know about her.
- Mark BITTMAN
- A food columnist for the New York Times. Until January 2011, he
wrote a weekly food column called ``The Minimalist.'' He also blogs or
blogged a few times a month at NYT's Diner's
Journal.
The surname Bittman arose in a few ways, but as it happens, none of them seems to be related to the English word bite or bit. Edward Schneider also contributes to the Diner's Journal blog, and schneider literally means `cutter' in German. (Yeah, yeah, a less literal translation would be `tailor.' Picky, picky! Go pick at your food.) Maybe this Schneider should have his own subentry, but yesterday he blogged about pork-stuffed cabbage: ``A batch lasts through several meals, even when we have company to help eat it, and perhaps that is why I don't need to make it more frequently than I do.'' Ahem. And perhaps he should follow this train of reasoning a bit further.
- Don BLACK
- A prominent white supremacist. Among other things, he became
Grand
Wizard of the KKK in 1978, after the resignation of his friend
David Duke from that position.
- Joseph BLACK
- Although he is best remembered today for his discovery of latent
heat, his first published scientific work was his M.D. dissertation
(1754), a chemical investigation of magnesia alba -- `white
magnesia.'
Milk of magnesia is a white suspension of magnesium hydroxide (Mg(OH)2) in water, used today as an antacid and mild laxative. Magnesia alba is magnesium carbonate (MgCO2). It's a mildly basic salt, rather than a base like milk of magnesia, so it's not very useful as an antacid, but it was a popular laxative at the time of Black's historic study.
Not that it has aught to do with any of this, but Joseph Black was a Scotsman born in Bordeaux. (That's in France, okay? My amusing observations are more amusing if you know enough to be mildly surprised.) His father and maternal grandfather worked there as factors (in the wine trade). Once in Procter Hall (the graduate college dining hall at Princeton University) I asked an economics Ph.D. student I was talking with what she was doing her dissertation on, and she said something like ``factors in widget production,'' although it wasn't widgets but something I've forgotten, lo, these 25 years later. So I said, approximately, ``oh, I know -- don't tell me -- factors are uh, uh... commissioned commercial agents!'' I was heartbreakingly pleased with myself for knowing this bit of economic arcana, but I hadn't guessed what she meant. She just gave me the look. On another occasion, in a different food service facility (The Debasement Bar, downstairs from the dining hall) a different economics graduate student (name withheld because I don't remember it) gave me a virtually identical look, and then explained it with the memorable words ``I can have any man I want here.'' [Believe me: I would not, could not, make this up.] She obviously understood the law of supply and demand, even if she could not recognize intellectual enthusiasm. So perhaps the factors woman's look meant the same thing -- it was in the same toxic male:female ratio.
And the point here is about mathematics. At the time it didn't occur to me to associate any mathematical sense of the word factor with economics, because economic behavior, like all human behavior, seems too slippery to make any very sophisticated mathematical analysis appropriate (I was right, of course). Joseph Black is remembered as the father of modern quantitative chemistry. (It's also said that he weighed the guineas his students paid to attend his popular courses.)
- Arthur BLANK
- Mr. Blank is the owner of the Atlanta Falcons NFL franchise as of
this writing, around the time of a USAT
article published November 13, 2017: ``Jerry Jones taught a lesson by
fellow owners: He's not as powerful as he once was,'' byline Nancy
Armour, whom I commend for understated punning. She wrote:
Blank has mastered the art of speaking volumes by saying nothing. On Sunday [2017.11.12], as he and Jones stood on their teams' respective sidelines before the game, Blank made no effort to welcome Jones to the swanky new stadium that Jones all but designed.
``[A]ll but designed'' here refers to the fact that Jones pioneered the use of swanky stadiums (now typically subsidized by local governments blackmailed by the threat of franchises moving elsewhere) as a revenue tonic.
``That's rare,'' Jones acknowledged, when asked about the lack of pleasantries. ``I've had games where I didn't visit for whatever reasons, but it's rare.''
Gosh I feel so sorry for that poor rich man.
- Chris BLANK
- Chris Blank is either a writer for the Associated Press, or a typo
in the byline of ``Fired aide to ex-Mo. gov runs for gov's dad's
seat,'' which went out on September 2, 2010. Here's the first line:
``It's been three years since was fired [sic] after pointing out
that his then-boss, former , [sic ] and others in Blunt's
administration should not be deleting [oh yeah] certain e-mails
because they belonged to the public record.'' I wouldn't normally
think it necessary to mention this, but the comments in square brackets
are mine, and did not occur in the original article. Sic is a
Latin word meaning `thus,' used to indicate
that an oddity in quoted text is from the original, and not the fault
of the quoter.
The man fired was Eckersley, 33 (first name not stated). Now he's running ``for a seat long held by [Roy, Matt, or perhaps Scott] Blunt's father, outgoing U.S. . [sic].'' Also: ``It is ironic how the whole thing has played out,'' Eckersley told at [sic] his campaign office in , [sic] the Blunts' hometown. ``But what a great story to come full circle and show that not only can a whistleblower stand up and make a difference ... [explicit ellipsis too... this story's got it all... missing] (but also) take that experience and pack it up and take it to . [Sic.]''
One paragraph begins with a comma: ``, the head of the political science department at in Springfield, said he thinks....'' In the old days, these lacunae might have suggested that the author (Blank) had neglected to insert appropriate TK's or or . I suppose what happened here was that the missing text was incorrectly marked up, although there aren't any stray tags visible in the source.
- Mildred and Robert WOODS BLISS
- A philanthropic
couple who in 1920 acquired a woodsy property in the Georgetown
section of Washington, D.C. called Dumbarton Oaks. ``The name combines a
reference to the original [from the last time the glaciers receded,
presumably] great oaks on the site, several of which are still
standing, with the eighteenth-century name `Dumbarton,' taken from the
Rock of Dumbarton in Scotland.'' Twenty years later they conveyed the
estate, including gardens, a nineteenth-century ``Federal-style'' house,
and their collection to Harvard University. It's a long way from
D.C. to Cambridge; I'm pretty sure ``convey'' here does not mean
physically transport. Whatever. So Harvard now uses Dumbarton Oaks
as a research
resource (CHS) in Byzantine studies, the
history of landscape architecture, and pre-Columbian studies. The
collections of Byzantine and pre-Columbian art and the rare books and
prints relating to the gardens are on public display.
To those who are more concerned with post-Columbian civilizations, Dumbarton Oaks is best known as the site of high-level discussions among the major WWII Allies that led to the creation of the UN. These were officially known as the ``Washington Conversations on International Peace and Security Organization'' and better known by the short (I believe unofficial) name of ``Dumbarton Oaks Conference.''
- WILL BOAST
- Author of a 2011 story collection entitled Power Ballads.
- Loreena BOBBITT
- If I weren't hewing to alphabetical order, I would have put this
little item right after
HARRY BAALS's.
Vocabulary word for this lesson: bob.
- John Stough BOBBS
- Bobbs performed the first gallstone operation in the U.S. -- in
Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1867. For this he was honored and burdened
with the epithet ``father of cholecystectomy.'' Aww, thanks, guys, you
shouldn't have, really. When my former roommate Dennis graduated from
medical school, I gave him a self-tightening vice-grip and a single
disposable lab glove, and a card that noted that he had passed a great
milestone, and that this was far better than passing a great gallstone.
Okay, kidney stone. Whatever.
He reported the surgery (``he'' Bobbs, that is) to the Indiana State Medical Society in May 1868. He was at the time president of its surgery section. In fact, he was a founder and first secretary of the Indianapolis Medical Society in 1848, and was instrumental in organizing the Indiana State Medical Society the following year. [I don't know whether he was wind-instrumental or string-instrumental or what. I'm basically just quoting a brief memorial by Charles A. Bonsett, M.D. (MS Word doc here).]
The nomen-est-omenicity that accounts for this sub-entry of the glossary is the relevance of ``bob'' (doubtless ``bobb'' in some antient spelyng) to Bobbs' calling and fame, but I only put this in so as to amortize the lucubration required for my great kidney stone witticism. See bob or the Loreena BOBBITT item above if you don't get the ``bob'' connection.
There is a lack of consensus regarding the precise vital dates of John Stough Bobbs. Most agree that he was born on December 28, 1809, but according to Find A Grave, it was December 22. And while most sites that mention it give his date of death as April 12, 1870 (probably based on each other, with the original date guess arising spontaneously as a quantum fluctuation), Dr. Bonsett and Find A Grave agree that it was May 1.
- Usain BOLT
- He does it from the starting line.
- Jay BonanSINGa
- Well, the interviewer on the radio repeatedly pronounced his
surname ``Bona-SINK-uh,'' and I'm going with that. He's the author of
The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy
(Kensington Publishing, 2005). It's not entirely forgotten -- there
are annual commemorations and a dedicated historical society (EDHS, q.v.). But, as tragedies go, the
fame of this one is underproportionate to the number of lives lost --
800.
- Gianni BONADONNA
- An Italian oncologist known for his research on the treatment of
breast cancer. In Italian, buona donna means `good lady' or
`good woman.' (Bona is a dialectal variant of buona.)
- CHASTITY SUN Bono
- Her mother Cher played the title role in the movie Chastity.
Chastity Sun was born on March 4, 1969; the movie was released on June
24. She was known by the nickname
``Chas,'' but never changed her legal
name. In 1993, she recalled that ``at school, guys would come up to me
with dictionaries and read me the definition of chastity.'' I guess
they weren't trying to pick her up in any sense of the term. I wonder
if this happens to girls named Faith or Serenity.
In 1995, confirming years of tabloid-press rumors, Chas ``came out'' in a cover story in The Advocate (the oldest and largest now-LGBT publication in the US). I suppose, in principle, that a lesbian may be as chaste as anyone else. Nevertheless, chastity is a traditional conservative notion, and out-of-the-closet lesbianism isn't.
Is having a lesbian daughter some kind of occupational hazard of Republican pols (like her late father Sonny Bono, former US Vice President Dick Cheney, and Alan Keyes), or is it just statistical chance? In her 1998 book Family Outing: A Guide to the Coming Out Process for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, wrote that, "as a child, I always felt there was something different about me. I'd look at other girls my age and feel perplexed by their obvious interest in the latest fashion, which boy in class was the cutest, and who looked the most like cover girl Christie Brinkley. When I was 13, I finally found a name for exactly how I was different. I realized I was gay.'' At the time, her father was not yet a politician, but he was when she came out.
More recently, Bono has been saying something slightly different. Eventually Ms. Bono underwent gender reassignment surgery, keeping the same girlfriend for a while as she (Chas) and then he (now Chaz Salvatore Bono) did so. Gosh, the things people will do for a chance to compete on Dancing With The Stars. Maybe the parents tempted fate, word-playing around with the Sun/Sonny thing. Anyway, he's been saying now that he knew from an early age that he was born in the wrong body. I swear, after the next gender change, I may have to start taking these self-discoveries with a grain of salt.
- Jody BOURGEOIS
- During the Soviet era, much of Russia was closed to outside
visitors, perhaps especially those from
bourgeois democracies.
One area that was off-limits was the Kamchatka-Kurils region (the
Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril islands). (This region is reportedly
now called the ``Russian Far East,'' though it seems unreasonable to me
to exclude eastern Siberia from that designation).
The Kamchatka-Kurils region is seismically very active, and therefore of particular interest to seismologists around the Pacific rim. Jody Bourgeois is a professor in the professor in the department of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Washington, and she has been studying the Kamchatka-Kurils region. (Here's an article on her research, from a UW house organ.)
- BORING
- This is the surname of a writer of engineering textbooks. I'll
look up some of his work later. For now I'll quote Douglas Richman, a
UCSD virologist. In 1993, analyzing the
frustration widely shared by scientists at the media's impatience with
ambiguity (easily explained by rich ignorance peppered with stupidity,
ISTM), he said ``[t]he trouble is, a
balanced scientific presentation is intrinsically boring to the
public.''
[Cue the falling calendar tear sheets to indicate the passage of time.]
Well, I checked some library catalogues, and it turns out that the Borings are an industrious tribe. Nose-to-the-grindstone type of folk, as you'd expect. So far, though, I've only found historians, a theologian, a probate lawyer (hmmm...looks promising), an agricultural entomologist, and a psychologist. I will keep digging.
[Cue the tick-tock sound to indicate the passage of time. Use some echo-chamber effect to make it sound a little ominous, build to anticlimax. Why are you reading this? These are the editing directions!]
You know, I think I was just confusing Dull and Boring. (But if you think I was just confusing, dull, and boring, why are you still reading?)
Well anyway, here's some of the Boring fare I found:
- Current Probate Decisions and Legislation, by James L. Boring and Alan F. Rothschild, (Chicago, Ill.: American Bar Association, 1995). I suppose if you stand to inherit some loot, it may be interesting. Dickens made an interesting story (Bleak House) out of a Court of Chancery case that lasted until... well, I won't spoil the story, but let's just say it was a case of rather poor rich estate planning. I didn't know that sort of case could be ``thrown out'' of court. Also in the story, someone goes up in smoke. No -- literally! An instance of SHC.
- M. Eugene Boring has made a career in translating theological works. In 2005, Baker Academic published Apostle Paul: His Life and Theology, his translation of a book by Udo Schnelle. In 2002, Westminster John Knox Press had published Boring's translation of a book by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter: The Quest for the Plausible Jesus. Wake me when someone comes out with The Plausible Santa Claus.
- Fire Protection Through Modern Building Codes by Delbert F. Boring, James C. Spence, and Walter G. Wells, (Washington, D.C.: American Iron and Steel Institute, 1981). Not a protection against SHC, though.
- Literacy in Ancient Sparta by T. Boring (Leiden, 1979).
- Managing Insect and Mite Pests of Texas Small Grains, by Emory P. Boring and Carl D. Patrick, (College Station, Tex.: Texas Agricultural Extension Service, Texas A&M University System, 1994).
- Djawid C. BOROWER
- Author of a thin picture book. The protraits aren't original; he
borrowed them from Federal reserve notes and other currency.
Specifically, he reproduced some portraits from currency (like Ben
Franklin's from the $100 bill, described as ``a US dollar'') in oil on
canvas and printed these on recto pages of the booklet, with a dozen or
so unrelated words arranged artistically (sideways and in
half-inch-high letters) on the facing pages. It's a keeper: the
library can keep it on the dollar table, as there don't seem to be any
takers.
- Bob BOYLE
- Robert Boyle made a number of important early discoveries in
chemistry, and is best known for his work in the theory of gases. The
irony of his name has not escaped wits before me. Thomas Hood once
suggested to the Duke of Devonshire that ``Boyle on Steam'' would make
a fine sham volume in a library. [See Bon-mots [sic]
of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Walter Jerrold (London:
J. M. Dent, 1897), p. 88.]
Boyle discovered that for a fixed quantity of gas at a constant temperature, pressure and volume vary inversely, publishing this fact in 1662. A mere quelques années plus tard (1676), the Frenchman Edme (Peter) Mariotte also discovered this law. For this reason, we all call it la loi de Boyle-Mariotte.
- Lawrence BRAIN
- A psychiatrist who counsels affluent teenagers throughout the
Washington metropolitan area.
- Walter Russell BRAIN
- A British neurologist, created the first Baron Brain in 1962.
- BRAUNSCHWEIG
- The north-central German city of Braunschweig gave its name
to a couple of foods. One is a yeast-dough cake with brown-sugar
icing; it's still popular in Denmark, where it is known by the name
Brunsviger. The other is a very homogenized smoked liver
sausage. Loosely, therefore, it's like a cold hot dog. In fact,
considering what's allowed to go into hot dogs, one would probably
prefer a Braunschweiger to a Frankfurter. Still, it's not recommended
that you eat it raw directly by biting the end of it.
In October 2002, a 35-year-old man in Braunschweig was arrested for kicking his pet and biting it on the nose. He was reprimanded, and the dog, a black and white husky crossbreed, was put in a shelter to await a new owner. Considering that this was a classic case of man bites dog, it's surprising how little coverage this story received. Even the newswires didn't bite.
[Braunschweig is known as Brunswick in English. Both names are derived from the personal name Bruno (related to brown). The second part of the name (also spelled -wich in various English place names) comes from a widely-used Indo-European root for a collection of houses. The Latin reflex is vicus, `village, row of houses.']
- Arthur A. BRIGHT, Jr.
- Author of The Electric-Lamp Industry -- Technological Change and
Economic Development from 1800 to 1947, (New York: MacMillan Co.,
1949) and various shorter works on the same subject.
- Cameron BRIGHT
- Second-billed star of a dim 2006 movie with the title of
Ultraviolet. They don't call it black light for nothing, I guess. Or
they do call it... Ah, never mind. (I think this movie
starred Milla Jovovich's abs. Anyway, their owner got top billing.)
Bright's birth name was Cameron Douglas Crigger. (Wait, don't tell me -- problem was, there was already someone registered with the SAG under the name ``Cameron Douglas Crigger,'' right?) Anyway, he took his stage name long before he was cast in Ultraviolet. His first lead role was in the movie Godsend (a 2004 release starring Robert De Niro, Greg Kinnear, and Rebecca Romijn), filmed in 2002, when he was nine. Bright's first acting work (it was in a commercial) was when he was six. That was also his name in Ultraviolet -- Six, a nine-year-old boy.
TMI yet? I don't know when Ultraviolet was filmed, but on the evidence of the semi-final product, editing needn't have taken long. There was some delay, however, because the studio was unhappy with the original version, which they saw as ``too emotional.'' They butchered it down from 120 minutes to 88 and achieved a PG-13 rating, and on release, March 5, 2006, Bright was a couple of months past his own 13th birthday.
Jovovich played Violet Song Jat Shariff; her role got the lion's share of the proper proper-noun nouns, but even that name includes ``violet'' and ``song.'' Dramatis personae include a Detective Cross and Detective Breeder. (To say nothing of Six. We don't want to mention ``BF-1'' either. Oops, too late!) If poor judgment is conserved or nondecreasing, then we should all be grateful that they concentrated so much of it into this one disposable movie. The thing was written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, who also created ``Gun Kata'' (a ``unique blend of gunfighting and martial arts'') for his previous film, Equilibrium. It is said that Jovovich used a more ``authentic'' version of Gun Kata in this movie, relieving me of the need to invent such a claim for your amusement.
But maybe, as Wimmer and many of his fans believe, this was a far better film before the studio's complete re-edit. Do we have any other evidence regarding Wimmer's brightness level? Yes we do! While on the set, Kurt Wimmer asked Milla Jovovich to punch him so he could get a feel for the intensity she was putting into her action sequences. For several days afterwards, Wimmer directed the film with a literal black eye. Thank you, Milla.
Y'know, back there where I wrote ``TMI,'' I thought of my friend Fu, a naturalized US citizen. He's originally from Shanghai. Casting for this movie was done in Hong Kong; filming was in Shanghai and perhaps also Hong Kong. I suppose Shanghai is to Hong Kong what Vancouver is to Hollywood -- a convenient and less expensive filming venue up north along the Pacific. Cameron Bright was born in Victoria, BC, and as of 2013 -- so far as <imdb.com> knows -- still lives on Vancouver Island. As I shouldn't have to remind you, this item is all about Cameron Bright and his name. Insert your own Shanghai joke here:
____.
______?
__!
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk:-)
When he went to register to vote (in Missouri), Fu took his US passport as ID, and the registrar, or recorder, or whatever the idiot's title was, wouldn't accept it as proof of age because it didn't state his age (only his date of birth). Perhaps there was some confusion as to the reason, but it's not the first time I've heard of election officials in the US refusing to accept a US passport as ID.Remember that anecdote. The next time you're on TV doing election-night analysis and have a weird result from ``bell-wether'' Missouri, this will explain it no matter whither the wether wandered off to.
- Calvin BROADuS
- The name of the, uh, entertainer -- yeah that's it, entertainer --
who performs as Snoop Dogg. He is the host of the ``Girls Gone Wild''
video series, in which young women (``amateur girls'' is the enigmatic
technical term I see in the spam that gets
through my filters) bare their breasts at cameras and later sometimes
sue the distributor of the videos (Mantra Films Inc., owned by Joseph
R. Francis). Repeat 84,000 times: ``What is informed consent?''
Informed consent apparently consists of a sign posted in the video
shooting area that says ``By entering, you consent to the use of such
film [sic, possibly misreported] and your image in a commercial
film product.'' Court records in a civil suit brought in Louisiana,
settled on July 21, 2004, indicate that some of the apparently drunk
naked girls are not of legal age to drink.
The videos are advertised on late-night television and sold by mail-order and also what might be called mail-disorder. Also in July 2004, Mantra Films agreed to pay nearly $1.1 million to settle FTC claims that the company shipped video tapes or DVD's to people who had not ordered them, then billed these ``customers.'' (It's a lot like sample issues, free!)
As part of the settlement, the company pays more than $548,000 to people who received the materials and returned them but were not reimbursed for shipping costs. Money is due at least 84,000 victims. Mantra has gotten off too easily so far; there should be triple indemnity for fraud, and damages for harassment and emotional distress. As a society, we are sometimes not nearly litigious enough. As of August 2004, racketeering and other charges are pending against Francis in Florida.
- BRONFMAN Family
- A prominent Canadian family whose wealth is based on patriarch
Samuel Bronfman's business in distilled spirits. Bronfman is a
Yiddish word meaning `distiller' or `liquor merchant' (from the word
bronfn, `brandy.') Some of Samuel Bronfman's ancestors must
have been in the business, but his immediate ancestors were not. His
father, who had become wealthy as a tobacco farmer in Bessarabia (then
part of Imperial Russia, now of Moldova) discovered that Manitoba is
not good tobacco-growing country and went into other businesses (not
including the brewing or wholesale distribution of alcoholic
beverages).
(The Bronfman family is associated with Seagram's. It should be noted, however, that Samuel Bronfman actually founded a liquor distributor, Distillers Corporation Limited, in 1924. The company later acquired Joseph E. Seagram & Sons and took over the Seagram name, so it is incorrect to say, as some do, that Bronfman founded Seagram. Even Seagram didn't found Seagram. The distillery was originally founded in 1857; Joseph E. Seagram only became a partner in 1869, then sole owner in 1883. He died in 1919 and his heirs sold it to Bronfman in 1928. Starting in the mid-1990's, Seagram's assets were sold to various other companies, and the Seagram Company Ltd. went out of business in 2000.)
- Bob BROWN
- The founder of Australia's Green Party, and currently (2008) its
leader. (To be precise, what he founded in 1972 -- with a first
meeting in his living room -- was the United Tasmania Group, which is
described as ``Australia's first `green' party.'' The official name
of the party is now the
Australian
Greens.) This party is widely described as the ``world's first
`Green' party.'' I guess that means it was either the first political
party in the world to make environmental issues the central part of its
platform, or the first to be founded with the intention of making
environmental issues the central part of its platform. This may be,
but by the time Bob Brown first assumed elective office in 1983, as a
member of the Tasmania state parliament, many other issues were in the
mix. In his first term, he introduced a variety of private member
initiatives, including bills for a freedom-of-information act, ``Death
with Dignity,'' a lowering of parliamentary salaries, ``gay rights
legislation, banning of the battery-hen industry, whatever that is, and
a ``nuclear free Tasmania.'' I guess the last two count as green in a
strict sense.
- Cleveland BROWNS
- In the seventh and eighth games of the 2001 season, this NFL team was beaten in overtime on plays by
opposing players named Brown. On November 4 in Chicago, Bears safety
Mike Brown returned an interception for a TD that beat Cleveland 27-21. On November
11, the traditional Veterans' Day, Pittsburgh kicker Kris Brown scored
a field goal in OT to lift the Steelers to a
15-12 win.
After the 1945 season, the NFL-champion Cleveland Rams became the first pro football team to move to the west coast, becoming the LA Rams for 1946. Also in 1946, one of the most successful competitors of the NFL was created in the AAFC.
Paul Brown was already a college coaching legend when Art ``Mickey'' McBride, founder of the AAFC Cleveland team, hired him to be the first coach and named the team after him. Paul Brown was a great innovator, and one relatively innovative thing he did in 1946 was to hire a couple of brown-eyed players.
``Brown-eyed'' is a coy way of saying dark-skinned. I think this is clear enough in Murray McLauchlin's ``Brown-Eyed Man'' and in Chuck Berry's ``Brown Eyed Handsome Man.'' It might count as something like an in-joke, since I don't think I've ever heard any white people use it, unless Van Morrison counts. He was quoted in books published in 1996 and 2006 to the effect that the title was originally meant to be ``Brown-Skinned Girl'' (reflecting the fact that it was ``a kind of Jamaican song'') and that he absentmindedly changed the title to ``Brown Eyed Girl,'' not noticing he had done so until after recording it. He apparently didn't explain how he happened to change the chorus to match the mistaken title. The explanations are a bit confusing. The 1996 book is entitled Inarticulate Speech of the Heart. Look, I like the song, and I think the word ``eyed'' works better musically, but songs associated with Jamaica seem to induce linguistic lapses. For another example, see the ``Louie, Louie'' material under Mojo Risin, Mr.
(I can't think of any convincing evidence for my claim at the beginning of the previous paragraph, so I guess it's time to switch the subject with an irrelevant personal anecdote. When I was filling out the application for my first driver's license, I asked a guy filling out his own form next to me what color my eyes were and he said ``hazel.'' Eventually I had a look at my eyes in the mirror and decided that they were brown. Well, they are mostly white, but the iris is brown. When people say ``eye color'' they normally mean iris color, unless they're talking about jaundice or bloodshot eyes or something. Also, when people name colors, there's a certain amount of context. To the guy I asked, who was black, ``brown'' was probably the color of his own eyes, while mine, being lighter, required some other term -- hence ``hazel.'' But they're not as light as those that I would call hazel, so I think of them as brown, and I changed that. I also remeasured myself and raised my height a half an inch the last time I renewed, and I think somewhere along the line I may have changed my middle initial. Someday when I go to renew my license I'll probably be arrested for stealing my own identity.)
Paul Brown coached the Cleveland Browns from its first season in 1946 to 1962, when the third owner (also an Art M. -- television executive Arthur B. Modell) fired him at the end of the season. One of greatest running backs of all time, fullback Jim Brown, played his entire career (1957-1965) at Cleveland. Paul and Jim were inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967 and 1971, resp.
Paul Brown later went on to be majority owner and first coach (1968 to 1975) of the Cincinnati Bengals, whose home field today is in ``Paul Brown Stadium.''
- David M. BROWNSTONE
- Coauthor, with Irene M. Franck, of The
VNR Real Estate Dictionary (Van Nostrand
Reinhold Co., 1981).
- Charles Francis BRUSH
- An inventor of electrical devices, including a generator and an
electric arc lamp. (All electric generators before Tesla's had
brushes.)
- JOHN BUchAN
- His name evokes that of John Bunyan (1628-1688), a preacher who
wrote an allegory that became the second-best-selling book in the
English-speaking world (after the Bible). The title was The
Pilgrim's Progress. John Buchan, the son of a Presbyterian
minister, was also a popular writer, but he achieved high sales volume
more by being absurdly prolific than by preeminence. Today, he's
possibly better remembered as the Scottish Unionist politician John
Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, who served as Governor General of Canada
from 1935 until his death in 1940. Either that, or as the author of
Thirty-Nine Steps, which was made into a film by Alfred
Hitchcock. Anyway, it seemed reasonable that his memoir, published
posthumously in 1940, was titled Pilgrim's Way: An Essay in
Recollection. It was well-known to be a favorite, if not the
favorite, book of JFK. I was surprised to
learn that Pilgrim's Way was the title only in the US, and that
everywhere else in the English-speaking world it apparently bore the
title Memory Hold-the-Door (I'm not absolutely certain what the
hyphenated expression means, because it seems never to have been a very
common expression for a door-stop) with no subtitle. (The text of the
US edition doesn't seem to have differed from that of the other
published edtions; even the spellings were unchanged. However, the US
edition, from Houghton-Mifflin, had no illustrations. The editions
published in London by Hodder & Stoughton had ten full-page plates made
from photographs.)
Pilgrim's Way as I shall continue to call it, refers often to pilgrims and pilgrimage. It alludes to and often simply evokes Pilgrim's Progress, and no wonder. Here is a paragraph from chapter I, recalling Buchan's childhood. (The phrase ``people the woods'' below seems to mean something like `provide personalities to think about as he grew up in a woodland area near the Firth of Forth.')
One other book disputed the claim of the Bible to people the woods--The Pilgrim's Progress. On Sundays it was a rule that secular books were barred, but we children did not find the embargo much of a penance, for we discovered a fruity line in missionary adventure, we wallowed in martyrologies, we had The Bible in Spain, and above all we had Bunyan. From The Holy War I acquired my first interest in military operations, which cannot have been the intention of the author, while The Pilgrim's Progress became my constant companion. Even to-day I think that, if the text were lost, I could restore most of it from memory. My delight in it came partly from the rhythms of its prose, which, save in King James's Bible, have not been equalled in our literature; there are passages, such as the death of Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, which all my life have made music in my ear. But its spell was largely due to its plain narrative, its picture of life as a pilgrimage over hill and dale, where surprising adventures lurked by the wayside, a hard road with now and then long views to cheer the traveller and a great brightness at the end of it. John Bunyan claimed our woods as his own. There was the Wicket-gate at the back of the colliery, where one entered them; the Hill Difficulty--more than one; the Slough of Despond--various specimens; the Plain called Ease; Doubting Castle--a disused gravel-pit; the Enchanted Land--a bog full of orchises; the Land of Beulah--a pleasant grassy place where tinkers made their fires. There was no River at the end, which was fortunate perhaps, for otherwise my brothers and I might have been drowned in trying to ford it.
- Charles BULLION
- In 1640, Richelieu forbade local mints from issuing any but
low-denomination coins, and simultaneously introduced a standard gold
coin, the Louis d'or. (Cardinal Richelieu was from 1624 until
his death the chief minister of French king
Louis XIII's government. He was famously successful at this job.)
Charles Bullion was the long-time finance minister under Richelieu and
hosted the new coin's introduction. [For another French finance
minister, see the eponymous
Silhouette.]
Don't confuse Charles Bullion with the powerful and more interesting Duke of Bouillon. The duke and his duchy straddled the border of the Bourbon-Habsburg battlefield. In 1642, as the Cardinal was slowly dying, Bouillon took part in the treason organized by the marquis de Cinq Mars. It failed, and Bouillon was in the soup. After negotiations with Richelieu, he ended up ceding the fortress capital of Sedan to the crown, more-or-less in exchange for his own life. [For another pair of names involving oui and non, and for the example set by a renowned mathematical physicist of how one should deal with those odious sniveling cretins who conflate them, see the Liouville entry.]
But perhaps I should mention that Sedan was of some broad military and consequently political significance later on. On September 1, 1870, German armies (of the Second Reich) under Bismarck's leadership broke through French defenses at Sedan, forcing the capitulation of Emperor Napoleon III. This led to the overthrow of the ``Second Empire'' (the Second French Empire, by a counting that not too unreasonably excludes Charlemagne's) and its replacement by the Third Republic in 1876. The German victory in the Franco-Prussian war established the new European order that would prevail until WWI.
On May 15, 1940, German armies (Third Reich this time) broke through the French defenses of the Meuse and surrounded Sedan. Once the full extent of the defeat became clear, it was simply a matter of time until France sought an armistice. Hitler dictated the terms, which became known on June 20 and were signed on June 22. In after years it became popular to claim that Marshal Pétain staged a coup that overthrew the Third Republic, but it is more accurate to say that the National Assembly ratified its own suspension and the end of the republic on July 10, 1940.
The Fifth Republic was created in 1958 as a constitutional republican government of, for, and by Charles de Gaulle, but has progressed into a benevolent dictatorship of the bureaucrats, all eager to become Eurocrats. If the Fifth Republic lasts until 2033, it will surpass the Third Republic as France's longest-lasting experiment in democracy. I write this in 2003. A lot may happen in 30 years, and a lot may not.
- Bill BURDEN
- A lawyer who has represented Canada 3000. Details at the John
GROUND subentry.
- Millar BURROWS
- An archaeologist. See the 1QIsa entry for an example of his
important work in caves. Not to be confused with Fergus Millar, the
Roman Historian. What is it with this ``Millar'' business, anyway?
- David M. BUSS
- A professor of psychology at the University of Texas, his books
include Sex, Power, Conflict (1996), The Dangerous
Passion (2000), and The Evolution of Desire (1994; 4/e,
2003). His studies show, among other things, that women prefer to
marry up (``hypergamy'') and are happier if they do. You don't say!
Men who surf the web probably have better marriage prospects than those
who don't. You may now kiss the bride.
- Ron G. BUTTERY
- A US Agricultural Research Service scientist who specialized in
flavor chemistry. Co-editor, with Roy Teranishi and Fereidoon Shahidi,
of Flavor Chemistry: Trends and Developments
(ACS, 1989). [And other stuff, I'm sure,
but that was what came to hand. In this particular instance, all three
editors have surnames ending in the same vowel, sort of as if all three
were flavor adjectives. The only Teranishi I know, however, elides the
final vowel in the name -- standard Japanese practice.]
- Richard Evelyn BYRD
- Richard Byrd was a US Navy pilot who became famous in 1926 for
flying to the North Pole (from a base on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian
island far above the Arctic Circle). It seems certain now, especially
based on relevant diary entries made public in 1996 (Byrd died in
1957), that Byrd went more than 75% of the way to the pole but lied
about reaching it. Nevertheless, the resulting fame (particularly in
America, where his claims were generally believed) brought him private
financing for other aviation feats, and he left the service in 1927.
(He returned in 1940 and reretired in 1947 with the rank of Rear
Admiral.)
If only his name had been Bird, he would have made it 100% of the way to the North Pole. (Actually, he was born in Winchester, Virginia. So perhaps the relevant criterion is whether he was an authentic member of the illustrious Byrd family of Virginia. See FFV if this does not compute.)
- John CAGE
- A composer who escaped the confines of traditional music. We have
a bit about him at the copyright
entry.
- Geoffrey CANADA
- An ``educator and activist'' based in Harlem (the one in New York
City). It may not seem like a very noteworthy fact that he's not
``based in'' (I don't know what this means, really) Canada, but it's
weird to read about him (``when Canada was in Los Angeles'' and parking
was at a premium, ``Canada agreed to be interviewed by [filmmaker
Davis] Guggenheim, but still had his doubts''). Maybe he was forced to
emigrate when ``smart'' online forms made his life a bureaucratic
nightmare. (Cf. this AB.)
As it happens, one way that he's based in Harlem is that he founded and runs a charter school there. But he's originally from the South Bronx. I learned this from a PBS TV program created and hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The particular episode I saw was focused on the genealogies of Canada (evidently a major undertaking) and Barbara Walters. It turns out that Canada had ancestors who were surnamed Cannaday when they emerged from slavery. His earliest traceable ancestor with that name was the son of a slave woman on a plantation owned by a man named Cannaday in Franklin County, Virginia. Circumstantial evidence and available genetic evidence suggest that the surname is justified by parentage as well as plantation of origin. ``Cannaday'' is evidently a variant form of the common Irish name Kennedy. I'll try to remember to learn something about the name now that I'm back home in Indiana.
- CHESHIRE CAlhoun
- On the opening day of CSWIP 2005 (the
conference website
seems to have vanished), Cheshire Calhoun was scheduled to deliver
the plenary address, entitled ``Losing One's Self.'' I'm afraid I
missed it, myself -- I mean the lecture -- but I imagine everything
went off as planned.
``How do you know I'm mad?'' said Alice.
``You must be,'' said the Cat, ``or you wouldn't have come here.''
Alice didn't think that proved it at all; however, she went on ``And how do you know that you're mad?''
``To begin with,'' said the Cat, ``a dog's not mad. You grant that?''
``I suppose so,'' said Alice.
``Well, then,'' the Cat went on, ``you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.''
``I call it purring, not growling,'' said Alice.
``Call it what you like,'' said the Cat. ``Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?''
``I should like it very much,'' said Alice, ``but I haven't been invited yet.''
``You'll see me there,'' said the Cat, and vanished. - W.F. CARABINE
- Mr. Carabine was the Chief Classification Officer, Kingston
Penitentiary, Ontario. (He had a contribution to the section on
Utilization and Coordination of Treatment Facilities in Prison in the
1957 conference mentioned at the binding
entry.) His contribution starts on page 128 of the English
Proceedings and one ``F.F. Carabine'' has a contribution to the
companion French Rapport. I guess
I never appreciated the magnitude of the French animus against W. The
English side gets in its digs by dropping the hyphens in J.-C.
LaFerrière and the like. I bet you never realized how much
orthographic inside baseball is played in these meetings.)
Anyway, I thought it interesting that someone named Carabine should have gotten into the corrections business. Carabine is an alternate English spelling, and the standard French spelling, of carbine (i.e. carbine rifle).
- Geoff CARLESS
- A writer on motorcycling. He was the author of a little volume
(26 pp.) Motor Cycling for Beginners in 1979 (from
EP Publishing), and just three years later he published Advanced
Motor Cycling (27 pp., from A & C Black Publishers
Ltd.). He also wrote for the English magazine Motorcycle
Monthly, at least in 1978.
- George Washington CARVER
- He chose to make his career at Tuskegee Institute, where he spent a
lot of time contemplating peanuts. Had
he chosen Buffalo, the destiny of jelly composite sandwiches would have
been quite different.
Vocabulary word for this lesson: arachibutyrophobia. (Meaning: `fear of having spiders get into your butter,' I think, but be sure to check at the granola entry.)
I guess that when I wrote this subentry, I must have thought that there couldn't not be some ironic connection between his name and some aspect of his research into peanut products. I still feel that way, but I haven't discovered it yet (unless you count the fact that of all the peanut products he came up with, none was peanut butter). That's how it is sometimes.
- Stacey CASE
- A tee-shirt printer and musician in Toronto, who came up with the
idea for the Pillow Fight League (PFL).
PFL contestants or participants or athletes or whatever fight in
costume.
Stacey is a guy. On New Year's Eve 2005, his band played a bar in Toronto. The act that followed his was a mock pillow fight put on by a local burlesque troupe. Women from the audience came forward hoping to participate. An idea was born.
- Johnny CASH
- What can you say? It was his real (i.e., birth) surname, but it
didn't do his father a lot of good. More information s.v. KFC. See also the Johnny PAYCHECK item below.
- James A. CASHIN, M.B.A., CPA
- A professor of accounting at Hofstra University, and
Editor-in-Chief of Handbook for Auditors (McGraw-Hill, 1971,
reissued 1982), which finally, finally, was published as Cashin's
Handbook for Auditors (McGraw-Hill, 1986), a revised edition
co-edited with Paul D. Neuwirth and John F. Levy.
For a number of Schaum's outlines in accounting, Cashin collaborated with Joel L. Lerner, M.S., P.D., once chairman of Faculty of Business at Sullivan County Community College. [One that is ready to hand is Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Accounting II, (McGraw-Hill, 1974). There were subsequent editions in 1981, 1989 (by which time he was retired), 1994, and 1999, not counting translations into Spanish, French, and Chinese, so you might say he cashed in, or amortized the original investment of effort. Not to mention Principles of Accounting, (McGraw-Hill, 2001) ``based on Schaum's Principles of Accounting I.'']
- CASHMAN
- The New York Yankees had the most expensive roster in baseball from
1998 to 2012. (In 2013 they were reportedly overtaken by the Dodgers.)
Brian McGuire Cashman has been (as of 2013) the Yankees' general
manager since 1998. The GM job includes, among other things,
negotiating player contracts with the players and their agents.
- JOHN CAVANAUGH
- Two presidents of the University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame du Lac
-- the one in Indiana). The first was Rev.
Fr.
John W. Cavanaugh,
C.S.C., president 1905-1919. The second, Rev. Fr.
John J. Cavanaugh,
C.S.C., was president 1946-1952. They weren't genetically related
in any known way, but the junior
one worked as a secretary for the senior one when he was university
president. When John W. retired from the presidency, he gave John J. a
parting gift of a full scholarship to Notre
Dame.
- Roger W. CAVES
- Editor of Encyclopedia of the City (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005).
- P.C. Cheng
- A former colleague of mine in the Electrical Engineering Department
at UB. His name came up in connection with
some research at the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve one lunch, and I remember
Jack saying something like ``he's an electrical engineer and you call
him `P.C.,' and you don't think that's
funny?'' No.
- Charles Waddell CHESTNUTt
- The first African-American fiction writer of note. Born in
Cleveland in 1858 to free black parents, he was certainly ``black'' by
social definition. Phenotypically, however, he apparently didn't look
any more black than Sam Clemens. To judge from a black-and-white
photograph, even Hazelnutt would have been an ironic name.
- Charles MANNING CHILD
- A zoologist who studied reproduction and development. He's
actually best remembered (he lived 1869-1954) for his work on
regeneration of limbs, but it's slightly harder to tie that specific
topic in with ``manning'' and ``child,'' especially as the phenomenon
occurs primarily in simple animals.
- FORREST CHURCH
- The author of
Father and Son: A Biography of Senator Frank Church and editor of
The Devil and Dr. Church
Entertaining Angels
Everyday Miracles
The Seven Deadly Virtues
A Chosen Faith (with John Buehrens)
God and Other Famous Liberals
Life Lines: Holding On and Letting Go
Lifecraft: The Art of Living for the Everyday
The American Creed: A Biography of the Declaration of Independence
Bringing God Home: A Spiritual Guidebook for the Journey of Your Life
Freedom from Fear: Finding the Courage to Love, Act, and Be
So Help Me God: The Founding Fathers and the First Great Battle Over Church and StateContinuities and Discontinuities in Church History So he's destroyed veritable forests in the process of writing various church-related (and Church-related) books. I cribbed most of this list from the also-by page in So Help Me God, so help me God, and that's what inspired me to center the titles. If I hadn't chosen to pun on his given name, it would have been a much shorter entry.
The Essential Tillich [Paul Tillich was a famous theologian]
The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Prayers
The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Hymns
The Macmillan Book of Earliest Christian Meditations
One Prayer at a Time
Without Apology: Writings of A. Powell Davies
The Jefferson Bible
Restoring Faith: American Religious Leaders Answer Terror With Hope
The Separation of Church and State: Writings on a Fundamental Freedom by America's Founders. - Carol P. CHRIST
- Carol P. Christ was born a Lutheran (well, close enough -- they
believe in infant baptism, don't they?) and eventually became a
priestess of Aphrodite. She has written extensively on women's
spirituality and feminist theology, and has taught at various
universities. Christ, of course, is a loan of the Greek
christós `anointed [one].'
I became aware of Christ (I like to write that) because of a coincidence of titles. The classicist Peter Green wrote The Laughter of Aphrodite: An Historical Novel about Sappho (Murray, 1965). Carol P. Christ wrote a collection of essays called The Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess, (Harper and Row, 1987). Another coincidence involving Carol P. Christ is that Carol T. Christ is a prominent academic (a scholar of Victorian literature).
- J. Bradford CHURCHILL
- Of the University of Colorado at
Boulder, presented Sed Sine Nominibus Res Notavit: The
Stylistics of Military Campaign Narrative in Latin
Historiography
at the 1997 APA meeting.
I mention this Churchill here because the most famous man he shares a surname with is also known for his military campaigns and his narrative stylistics. There is also a connection between Winston S. Churchill and Latin; the former was famously defeated by the latter.
Ironically enough, the same university (UCB) is famous for another Churchill, also quite combative. In July 2009, after years of litigation, it seems they were finally able to make Prof. Ward Churchill's firing stick.
- Andrew CLEMENCY
- A defense attorney in Phoenix, Arizona. Most criminal cases that
go to trial end in conviction on at least one count. Clemency,
therefore, is much sought. Andrew Clemency was in the news on June 28,
2012, when his client Michael J. Marin, 53, collapsed in the courtroom
and died within minutes of being convicted of arson.
Video of the scene went viral. Shortly after the jury's verdict was read, Marin covered his mouth with his hand, which seems natural enough, and appeared to press the palm toward his lips, which does not. He seems to have taken a suspected second pill surreptitiously as proceedings continued, and he took drinks from a drink bottle that I don't think TSA would have allowed. The possibility of suicide by poison pill was immediately suspected, but toxicology results won't be back for months from this writing.
The charge on which he was convicted was felony arson of an occupied structure, which carries a penalty of from 7 to 21 years in prison. The structure was his own mansion, occupied by himself. Marin, a retired Wall Street trader, had tried to raffle off the mansion earlier, but the raffle had been deemed illegal. At the time of the blaze he had $50 left in the bank, thousands of dollars in delinquent debts, and a $2.3 million balloon payment coming due.
He climbed down a rope ladder from a second-floor window of the burning house, wearing scuba gear. (SCUBA, as you may learn at its entry, stands for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, but it evidently works in smoke as well as under water.) The house was described as ``engulfed in flames,'' and was later found to have begun at four separate ignition points, and firefighters ``were forced to assume a defensive mode after learning that no one was in the house,'' according to a Phoenix New Times article August 27, 2009, about a week after Marin's arrest. It does appear that an occupant was endangered, even if it was the setter of the blaze himself.
A mountain climber who had reached the summit of Mr. Everest, and a former Wall Street trader whose art collection included 18 original Picasso works, Marin seems to have been a more imaginative and ambitious planner than the average person. I suppose the timing of the fire (before dawn on July 5, 2009) may have been part of a calculation based on the Independence Day work load of firefighters. (Fortunately, at the time of the fire the art works and various other valuables were at a modest home Marin had in nearby Gilbert -- about 10 miles from where I used to have a modest home in Tempe.)
The case went to trial when plea-bargain negotiations broke down. A spokesman for the prosecutor's office said that a sentence of somewhere between 10.5 and 21 years in prison would have been sought after conviction. Experts quoted in news reports said that, based on comparable cases (similar and worse crimes were cited) this would have been a relatively harsh sentence, and that a plea bargain would have resulted in a lighter one. Of course, in plea bargaining the prosecutor's office has to factor in the possibility of an acquital, whereas in sentencing a judge does not. Had there been one I, for one, am certain Clemency would have asked for a certain clemency.
- Phyllis CLEVELAND
- In 2005, Phyllis
Cleveland was elected by the fifth ward to serve on the Cleveland
City Council.
- BILL Clinton
- The text of a legislative act is a bill, and as governor of
Arkansas and president of the US, Bill Clinton exercised great if
technically indirect influence on bills. Every US president should be
a Bill or Billie. If this rule had been in effect since the beginning,
it would have eliminated all or almost all of our worst presidents. Of
course, it would also have had the side effect of eliminating the likes
of Abraham Lincoln, but who's to say that the more experienced William
Seward would not have done as well? If the rule had been in effect in
2015, it would have winnowed the field of 22 or so prospective
``credible'' candidates for 2016 down and focused attention on the
smaller and more manageable subfield of 0 who might be truly qualified
for the office.
- Jerry COATS
- A US Air Force captain from Meridian,
Mississippi. In the Summer of 1990, Coats volunteered for a posting as
a NORAD quality-control evaluator at the
DEW Line, on the outskirts of
Tuktoyaktuk (``Tuk''), a village of
800 Eskimos in the Northwest Territories of Canada, on the Arctic
coast. His commanding officer told him: ``For 20 years I've been
threatening to send lieutenants to the DEW line. You're the first guy
I've known who has asked for it.'' Coats considered it the least among
evils, since he had to fulfill a career requirement of at least one
``remote posting.'' Tuktoyaktuk is 250 miles north of the Arctic
Circle, in the ``banana belt'' (as opposed to the eastern Arctic, which
is really cold). It's ``an unseasonably [is that the right word?] warm
day'' (above freezing) in the Summer of 1991 when a reporter for the Washington Post interviews him, but Captain
Coats is wearing a (single)
parka. ``You'd have to be crazy to come here for the weather,'' he
notes.
- Henry COCKERAM
- Author of The English Dictionarie, or an Interpreter of Hard
English Words, first published in 1623. This would be
unexceptionable, except that the OED2,
instead of defining the verb irrumate, gives only a quote from
Cockeram's dictionary (and he defines it, um, backwards).
- Lester Lloyd COKE and Michael Christopher COKE
- Father and son respectively. Their Jamaica-based family business
(according to various criminal indictments) is drug smuggling (and the
usual concomitants, such as arms trafficking and political
manipulation).
- Marilyn COLON
- The way CMUD explained it, it was all
the result of people in neighboring houses pouring grease down their
drains. It sounds innocent enough, but it built up over time and
clogged the sewer line. Evidently, this closed space accumulated
flammable and even explosive substances (methane, I imagine). Finally,
one very bad day in February 2006, ``[w]e heard a thump,'' said Marilyn
Colon. There was apparently a discernible moment's pause before her
toilet exploded. ``Feces, urine, oil...it went all through the
house,'' said Colon.
This reminds me that the main sewer of ancient Rome was known as the cloaca.
- Alex COMFORT
- Published The Joy of Sex in 1972. Wished people remembered
all of his other very important work, research, political activity
and poetry and stuff.
In 1974 he published More Joy of Sex and in 1991 The New Joy of Sex. Similar titles coming soon to a glossary entry near you.
- Captain James COOK
- On Sunday,
February 14, 1779, he and four of his men were killed in a
confrontation with Hawaiian natives at Kealakekua Bay. Their bodies
were left on the beach and taken away by the Hawaiians. The next week,
when the explorers (and invaders -- stress according to your political,
uh, tastes)
attempted to retrieve at least the captain's remains, they were
informed by native priests that he had been given a chief's disposal;
his bones had been burned and were kept by the Hawaiian King. The
priests denied that he had been eaten. Most of the large bones were
eventually returned, with burn marks and great solemnity, and a known
hand injury was regarded by the ships' officers as positive
identification. (It did turn out that some of the bones had apparently
been distributed elsewhere.) The ribs and vertebrae were never
returned. Some arm bones said to be of one of the marines were also
returned. The Europeans early on received seven or eight pounds of
rotting (deboned) thigh said to be Cook's, but they were also later
informed that the flesh of his deboned body (which was not returned)
had been salted and preserved. Apart from the thigh meat, no other
flesh was recovered.
The preceding summary is based mostly on The Voyages of Captain James Cook, copyright 1999 by Richard P. Aulie. Part of this is available online from the Captain Cook Society (CCS). What really happened is controversial, which probably means that if I read something else I'll only get confused.
Of course, ``Hawaii'' is a Hawaiian name. When Captain Cook discovered the islands in 1778, he named them the Sandwich Islands (after the Earl of Sandwich).
- William COOKWORTHY
- Cookworthy (1705-1780) was an English chemist who developed and
patented (1768) a process to make fine white porcelain from raw
materials available locally (especially if you lived in Cornwall).
Even using ``China clay'' imported from China or America, the best
porcelain manufactured in England was not comparable to that made in
China, but Cookworthy's work changed that. [So I've read. On the
other hand, I seem to recall reading in House Beautiful (a
nineteenth-century classic) that the best china was from France, and
that England was only good for stoneware. However, my copy of the book
is at home.)
- Edward DRINKER Cope
- A nineteenth-century ichthyologist. More generally he was a
paleontologist and a prolific taxonomist of vertebrate paleontology,
but he was also active in ichthyology and herpetology, and for this
part of the glossary, that's the salient fact. If you break up
herpetology into the study of amphibians and reptiles, then two thirds
of his living-creatures work involved creatures that live all or much
of their lives in the drink.
- Juan Carlos Córdoba Ocana
- The given name of a Mexican outlaw who went by what you might call
the nom de guerre ``El Furcio.'' If all the world's a stage,
then that name explains why this player has had his exit.
- Reggie CORNER
- A cornerback for the NFL's Buffalo Bills, who drafted him in 2008.
At the University of Akron he played free safety and cornerback.
- Matthew R. COSTLOW
- An analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy and a Ph.D.
student in Political Science at George Mason University, at the time
that he contributed
``The
Cost of the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal: Not Scary'' to the RealClear Defense website.
- Don Hernán CORTÉS
- The conqueror of Mexico, born in 1485 in Medellín, in the
Spanish province of Extremadura. His
parents were both of noble
descent (that don means `sir'), but his family was in reduced
circumstances. A weak and sickly child (okay, I admit this isn't
relevant), he was packed off at age 14 to Salamanca. [This implicitly
means to the great university at Salamanca. Salamanca's fame was such
that it became an antonomasia for
higher education. There was even a saying, still recalled today in
its archaic expression -- Lo que Natura non da, Salamanca non
presta. (`What nature does not give, Salamanca does not lend.'
More loosely: Human garbage in, human garbage
out.) Anyway, back
to our story.] The intent was for young Hernando to study law, but
after two years he returned home without the university having bestowed
the slightest mark of recognition of accomplishment. (``[S]in ... el
mas pequeño lauro universitario,'' as the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada puts
it.)
[You know, I was about to characterize Salamanca as the great
medieval Spanish university. As it happens, the modern era began precisely in 1500, so
Hernando just got in under the wire. Renaissance? What Renaissance?]
Not to keep you in suspense any longer, the reason that Cortés is listed here is that he came from a noble family and studied law, and his name means `courts' ... almost. Actually, his name means `courteous'; courts would be cortes (no accent; accentual stress on penult instead of ult). In Spanish as in English, the words for courtesy (or courtly behavior) and courtesan were derived from the word for court. The enciclopedia has listings for some individuals with the surname Cortés and somewhat fewer with surname Cortes. And I've seen the name of this particular conquistador written every which way, final ess or final zee, accent either way. Look, we're going to stick to the court angle; I really don't want to get into what happened in Mexico. There was both diplomacy and mayhem involved.
Incidentally (or ``BTW'' as we net-savvy cool people say), the names Hernán and Hernando are versions of Fernando (in Spanish) and Ferdinand (English). One of the major sound shifts in Spanish was for eff to become aitch. More about that at some other entry, maybe Spanish. For stuff about the similar-sounding name Herman, see SN.
- Kent COUCH
- In 2006, 2007, and 2008, Kent Couch has flown east by lawn chair
from Bend, Oregon. The lawn chair was suspended by about 100
brightly-colored helium-filled party balloons, and carried east at
about 20 mph by prevailing winds.
The stunt, or the experience, is modeled on the 1982 flight of Larry Walters, who was three miles above Los Angeles when he surprised an airline pilot, who radioed the control tower that he had just passed ``a guy in a lawn chair.'' Walters paid a $1,500 penalty for violating air traffic rules.
Others have emulated Walters, but none has had a more appropriate name.
- Mary Ellen COUNTRYMAN
- As of March 2009, she was the US Consul General in Florence, Italy.
- Margaret Smith COURT
- The dominant women's tennis player of the 1960's, although she was
Margaret Smith until 1966. At some point she was successfully courted
by a Mr. Barry Court. She must have liked the name. She retired in
1966, married and started a family. With Barry's encouragement, she
came back in 1970 and immediately won the Grand Slam (singles titles at
Wimbledon plus the U.S., French, and Australian Open tournaments) all
in that year.
- Regina CREAMER
- On June 24, 1999, Ms. Creamer was working as a clerk at Bird World
Pet Shop (of Panama City, Florida), which also sells other animals than
birds. A coworker noticed that the
top was off one of the snake cages, and a man standing nearby was
acting strangely. The man, James Lawrence Collison, eventually got a
chance to tell police his side of the story. According to the report,
``he saw the snakes loose in the store and caught them and placed them
into his pocket for safekeeping until he could find an employee.''
Each of the snakes was about three or four feet long.
The coworker saw a boa constrictor's head pop out from under Collison's shirt and called Ms. Creamer. Speaking to reporters later, she said ``it was hilarious. He kept saying he wasn't taking anything, but those snakes were just moving around and one was under his shirt, and he was doing all kinds of strange things and trying to keep it in there.'' Then the snake in his trousers poked out of his pocket. It was a milk snake. Ms. Creamer called 911.
But Mr. Collison was just a piker. On November 21, 2009, a man was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport with 15 live lizards strapped to his chest -- two geckos, two monitor lizards (monitor lizards!) and 11 skinks.
- John Dominic CROSSan
- Active in Historical Jesus (HJ)
research and a prominent member of the Jesus
Seminar. Author (among many other books) of The Cross that
Spoke, in which he reconstructed a ``Cross Gospel,'' supposed to
have preceded the passion narrative (PN)
found in Mk 14-16. He argued that this
Cross gospel was later incorporated into the canonical gospels and the
noncanonical gospel of Peter.
- Joseph CURL
- On a Monday in 2012, many hours after April Fools's Day had ended
even in Hawaii, US Pres. Obama made a number of surprising statements
regarding the Supreme Court's review of health care legislation he had
signed two years earlier. The following Wednesday and Thursday, his
press flunky (that's the neutral, official term, right?) Jay Carney
was besieged by White House reporters wanting to know how former
University of Chicago constitutional law instructor Obama's
unprecedented attack on the Supreme Court could be squared with a
minimal understanding of US constitutional law. Instead of simply
saying that The Great Orator was speaking without a teleprompter and
could therefore not be expected to be coherent, let alone correct, Yale
graduate Carney tried to argue that Mr. Obama clearly meant what he
clearly didn't say.
Finally, veteran CBS reporter Bill Plante offered the generous suggestion that ``He made a mistake, and you can't admit it.'' At 74 years of age, Mr. Plante hasn't much to lose and can afford to scratch thin skin. After some more Carney stammering and reporter ridicule, Plante said ``You're standing up there twisting yourself in knots.'' At the end of the week, former White House reporter Joseph Curl wrote a column for the Washington Times entitled ``Carney is twisting himself into knots.'' I thought the juxtaposition of that title and that byline was cute. I hope you did too.
- Rose Marie CUTTING
- Author of Anaïs Nin: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K.
Hall & Co., n.d.). Nin (1903-1977) was an unimportant scribbler
who was held in extremely high regard by enough people to be something
of a nuisance. She was best known for a preposterously long diary that
she published in six volumes after vast yet inadequate cutting.
- GRAY Davis
- The 37th governor of California, serving 1999 to 2003. Long-time
Democratic-party apparatchik. In the haze of history, he was Gov.
Jerry Brown's chief of staff. (That was
when the latter -- formally Edmund Gerald Brown, Jr. -- was
California's 34th governor. Jerry Brown also went on to become
California's 39th governor in 2011.) In Time magazine's
Viewpoint column (August 11, 2003), Joe Klein wrote:
The standing joke about Davis is that his personality reflects his name, but Gray is darker than that.
(That's the only joke I can think of that contrasts two parameters of color. See HSV.) Joe Klein also wrote a best-selling book about a politician (Bill Clinton) who is not colorless, although he (or who even) was described as the first black president of the US. (I guess this eased the way for Mr. O'Bamaugh, our first black Irish president.) The book, published anonymously until the authorship was discovered by text analysis, was entitled Primary Colors. That puns at least a couple of ways, since the story focuses on Clinton's primary campaign in 1992. Coincidentally or not, it was in the (2002) primary that Gray Davis was darkest, spending a reported ten million dollars in the Republican primary to help defeat the person who would clearly have been the stronger opponent to Davis in the general election (LA mayor Richard Riordan).
- Jefferson FINIS Davis
- The tenth and last child of Jane Cook Davis and Samuel Davis.
First and last president of the Confederate States of America (CSA). (He had a cousin named Jefferson C.
Davis who played some less important role in Alabama history during
that time. It seems the family wasn't very thoughtful about naming.)
There was also a Jefferson Columbus Davis, not a relative, who during
the Civil War rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army.
I'm going to have to sort some of this out eventually.
For another terminal name, see ENDE.
It was not uncommon to give the name Finis to the last child in a family. Sometimes I imagine it was given by mistake. Sometimes the mother's death in childbirth certified the name. Jane Davis survived the birth of her son Jefferson in 1808 and lived until 1845. But she was born in 1760 some time, so the name was not unreasonably chosen. Jefferson Davis (named after Thomas Jefferson, of course) dropped the Finis in his twenties.
- Dr. Kevin M. DE COCK
- De Cock was Director of the
HIV/AIDS
department of the World Health Organization in December 2006, when
exciting news about circumcision was announced. In
studies being
conducted in Kenya and Uganda, it was found that (male)
circumcision cut new HIV infections in heterosexual men by about 50%,
confirming an earlier South African study that
found a 60% decrease. All three studies were cut short when it was
decided that it would be unethical to deny the clear benefits of
circumcision to the uncircumcised study participants (the control
groups).
A specialist in infectious diseases, De Cock's professional publications had often concerned condoms to some degree. However, until news reports quoted him in connection with the circumcision studies (in a BBC item: results a ``significant scientific advance,'' but ``[m]en must not consider themselves protected'') he had never achieved public prominence that was ironic commentary on the entirety of his two-part surname.
Before his appointment to the WHO position, in March 2006, De Cock had severed, sorry, served for six years as Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Kenya. Thus, it may be that he has some professional connection with US NIH-sponsored studies in Kenya and Uganda. I just don't know yet. However, the nomen-est-omen significance of the results already obtained is so striking that we've decided to cut short further investigation and release this sub-entry now.
- Charles DE GAULle
- He had a lot of gaul, and he ruled Gaul. (Some, possibly even he,
thought he liberated it.)
- Tom DELAY
- In October 2005, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), then recently resigned from
the post of majority leader of the US House, was indicted on charges of
money laundering in 2002. In 2008 the DA who originally brought the
charges retired. The case finally came to trial in 2010. He was
convicted in November and sentenced in January 2011 to 3 years in
prison and 10 years' probation. As of January 17, 2011, he's out on
bail pending appeal.
- Giacomo DELLA CHIESA
- Della Chiesa is a surname meaning `of the church' in
Italian, and Giacomo Della Chiesa served as Benedict XV (1914-1922).
- CECIL B. DeMille
- As a given name in modern times, Cecil represents a transferred use
of the surname of a noble family that rose to prominence in England
during the sixteenth century. That Cecil is an Anglicization of
the Welsh given name Scissylt, possibly a Celtic form of the
Latin Sextilius, from the
Sextus, `sixth.' (Back and forth between given and family
names. Sextilius was a gentilicium: a family or clan name [see
tria nomina]. It was presumably
derived from Sextus, a given name (praenomen) for the
sixth boy.) Sextilis, on the other hand, was the name of the
month preceding September (Latin for `September,' in case you
were wondering) until 27 BC, when it was renamed mensis Augustus
in honor of Augustus by Augustus.
None of that is of any interest, which is why I wanted to get it out of the way first. Cecil was also occasionally used as a given name in the Middle Ages. In that time, it represented the English form of the Latin Caecilius, an old Roman gentilicium. The popularity of this name in Medieval Europe is probably due to the fact that it was borne by a minor saint of the third century, a friend of St. Cyprian.
More to the point, however, Caecilius was originally derived from the byname Caecus, meaning `blind.' Cecil B. DeMille was one of the most successful filmmakers of all time so far.
- PETER DESIRA
- A reporter with the Herald Sun newspaper of Melbourne,
Australia. The Sun published his greatest scoop just two days before
Valentine's Day 2004. But this part of the glossary is just bursting,
so why don't you read all about it at the Heidelberg United entry?
- Dictionary of GENETICS
- I don't know if it's because of the meaning of the word
genetics or for some other reason, but the following can't be
mere coincidence. A book entitled Dictionary of Genetics
(``including terms used in cytology, animal breeding and evolution,''
which I count as only the colon of the title) was published in 1948; it
was by Robert L. Knight. A book entitled A Dictionary of
Genetics came out in 1968; it was by Robert C. King. I'm sure if
only King hadn't gone on doing revised editions, one of the
appropriately qualified Robert Kaisers would have been willing to do
the honors for 1988.
- Scott DIRECTOR
- He has worked as an actor and as an
ADR artist, and he is credited with
composing the original music for
Little Boy
Blues, a 2005 short.
- Stephen W. DIRECTOR
- Engineering Dean at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
(UMI) as of fall 1996.
Rose Friedman, widow of Milton Friedman and a like-minded economist, is the former Rose Director.
- Joe DIRT
- See David SPADE.
- Kent DOLLAR
- An accountant, bank auditor for the Perry County Bank in
Perryville, Ark. Participant in a Dec. 14, 1990 afternoon meeting at
which he and the bank owner, Robert M. Hill, made an illegally large
contribution to William J. Clinton's 1990 gubernatorial campaign and
urged (this is the point where most readers fall asleep) Clinton to
appoint Hill's partner in the bank, Herby Branscum, Jr., to the
Arkansas State Highway Commission. That appointment was made, and on
July 2, 1996, Mr. Dollar was a witness in a trial of Mr. Hill and Mr.
Branscum. They were not charged with bribery, but certain
kinds of fraud and misappropriation. The defendants were acquitted of
the most serious charges (conspiracy, misapplication of bank funds, and
making false entries to bank records), and the jury hung on the rest.
A mistrial was declared on the latter charges, and a retrial was not
sought.
(In retrospect, this looks like a possible instance of prosecutorial abuse. The case in which the charges were brought was one that prosecutors in the office of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr stumbled across in 1994 while focused on other issues. It was always clear that charges were threatened and brought in order to put pressure on the defendants to cooperate with Starr's investigation; prosecutors were always eager for a plea bargain. Of course, investigators' guesses about facts they cannot prove are part of what they use to decide whether witnesses are cooperating.)
- James H. DOOLITTLE
- Led an April 18, 1942, air attack on Japanese home territory, bombing mostly Tokyo,
with single-plane missions originally planned for Nagoya and Osaka.
Here's a page on the raid, served by the US Naval Historical
Center.
Residents of Tokyo, feeling secure from enemy attack, did not take seriously the air raid drill that coincidentally had been scheduled for that morning. The drill ended at noon, about the time that the Doolittle party arrived. From the ground, many assumed the planes were part of the drill, until the bombs exploded.
In terms of damage to military targets, the raid did indeed do little. In terms of morale on the Allied side, and fear and misjudgment on the enemy side, it did a great deal. Doolittle, decorated and promoted, went on to do a little acting in other theaters of the war.
The story of the raid is told in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by Capt. Ted W. Lawson (Random House, 1943). The first paragraph reads
I helped bomb Tokyo on the Doolittle raid of April 18, 1942. I crashed in the China Sea. I learned the meaning of the term ``United Nations'' from men and women whose language I couldn't speak. I watched a buddy of mine saw off my left leg. And finally I got home to my wife after being flown, shipped and carried around the world.
(For a similar contemporary use of ``United Nations,'' see the VOA entry.)
- ROB D. DRAIN
- Oh, alright -- he goes by Robert D. Drain. He's a
U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge. In his court in Lower Manhattan on
October 11, 2005, proceedings began regarding the ``petition for
relief'' of Michigan auto parts maker Delphi Corp. (spun off by
GM a few years before) under Chapter 11 of federal bankruptcy laws.
We have more on unusual judge names.
- DREW
- A humorist who makes comics. But he doesn't draw them. Other
people drew them -- mostly not as comics but as non-comic
illustrations. Drew only draws them from an archive, adding
cartoon-balloon content (sometimes adding cartoon balloons too) to make
them funny. (I just have to
link well; I don't have
to be clear. Apologies to Don Henley.)
This item might work better if Drew had stopped not drawing comics. Someone please let me know when that happens.
- Duke Nukem FOREVER
- Duke Nukem Forever is the sequel to the video game (a first-person
shooter) Duke Nukem 3D. Forever is almost how long it took to appear.
Duke Nukem 3D came out in 1996, and Duke Nukem Forever was announced in
1997. Normally, one might have expected the sequel to come out by
2000. It was available to play at the 2010 Penny Arcade Expo (in
Seattle, Sept. 3-5). PAX 2010 had already
sold out its 150,000 or so admission badges when the announcement was
made. There was a very long line of people waiting to try out DNF.
(Fill in your own joke here: ____________________forever.) DNF will
go on sale in 2011.
- Raymond W. DULL
- Wrote a very popular mathematics handbook; first edition 1926,
second edition 1941. I have before me the third edition, 1951: 56
chapters, 1041 sections, xx+822 pp., revised and edited by Richard Dull,
Raymond's son, partly based on material developed by his late father.
The book is entitled Mathematics for Engineers. Here is the
first paragraph of the first edition preface:
This treatise on mathematics has been prepared primarily for engineers. In this we would include (1) engineers who want a quick and convenient reference, (2) engineers who have grown somewhat rusty in their mathematics, and (3) engineers who feel the need of a text for the study of mathematics.
- John DYE
- He died, January 10, 2011. Of course, we all expect to be dying
someday, but he was only 47. He was an actor, but Dye was his surname
at birth. And he is best remembered for his role on the TV show
``Touched By an Angel,'' where he played the angel of death Andrew.
- JOSH EARNEST
- White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary, as of May 2013.
- Peter EARNEST
- Executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington,
D.C., as of May 2013.
- Ben EAST
- Coauthor, with Olive A. Fredrickson, of Silence of the
North. The book is the story of Fredrickson's very difficult life
in the Arctic wilderness. It was made into
a movie of the same
name that was released in 1981.
- Elizabeth C. ECONOMY
- Economy is (as of this writing, June 2010, and since at least
2006) a Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the US
Council on Foreign Relations, and has
published on environmental and development issues.
- Bob EDWARDS
- Bob Edwards is an NPR Radio program host, and he's written a couple
of books about other radio personalities: Fridays with Red: A Radio
Friendship (2000), and Edward R. Murrow and the Birth of
Broadcast Journalism (2004). Red Barber was born Walter Lanier
Barber. Somebody please suggest an edifying radio personality subject
to Mr. Edwards.
- Bob EGGelton
- See the Nigel SUCKLING subentry.
- ATOM EGOyan
- I guess that Atom is more likely to be the Armenian form of
Anthony than to have any relation to atom, from the Greek meaning uncuttable. (Atom Egoyan was
born in Egypt to Armenian parents, and
raised in Western Canada.) He is a director,
scriptwriter, and actor, sometimes all three in the same movie. Like
the early Woody Allen minus the jokes. Like the later Woody Allen. A
lot of Egoyan's movies are autobiographical and feature his wife
(sometimes playing his wife, as in ``Calendar''); ``A Portrait of
Arshile'' features him, his wife, and his son. Some of his movies are
entitled ``an Ego Production.'' Woody Allen's movies used to feature
his current love interest, often as his on-screen love interest.
``The Sweet Hereafter'' (1997; director and scriptwriter): 112 minutes
- Jean-Yves EMPEREUR
-
Archaeologist who found a necropolis in Alexandria. (Alternate
site here.)
- Michael ENDE
- Author of a children's book entitled The Neverending Story.
(In German, die Ende is `the end.')
Marginal case: see the fellow van den Ende (`of the end') in the He entry.
For another terminal name, see Davis.
- Daniel ENGLAND
- A spokesman for the Episcopal Church (the US member of the Anglican
Communion).
Another name-appropriate church spokesman: GOODNESS.
- Christopher ENGLISH
- A professional translator who attended Oxford and Moscow
Universities and has worked as a translator and teacher in the USSR,
US, and Kenya. As of 1998 he was working in Zimbabwe. As a verb, the
word English means to translate into English, as English did
many of Gogol's works (including Dead Souls: A Poem, mentioned
at the Russia entry).
- James F. ENGLISH
- A professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
- CLARK KENT Ervin
- He was the inspector general of the US Department of Homeland
Security from 2003 to 2004 (and of the US State Department from 2001 to
2003). As of 2009 he is the director of the Aspen Institute's
homeland security program.
- FAIR PLAY, S. Car.
- Home of Brenda Phenis. She and seven others were arrested on
August 21, 2001, on charges of rigging a promotional game sponsored by
McDonald's. The scam was organized by a security employee at the
company that produced the tickets and game pieces for McDonald's. The
conspiracy would recruit shills to pose as random winners and kick
back most of their winnings to the organizers. McDonald's (which was
involved only to the extent of cooperating with the FBI in catching the bad guys) ran various games
over six years, with prizes ranging from a
free drink or order of fries to cars,
vacations, and ``a million dollars'' (over time) in cash. The games were a great success
for McDonald's in a mature, saturated market (there may be something on
this at the KFC entry), typically giving sales
a temporary 5% fillip each time. The games were based on familiar
themes such as the 1996 Summer Olympics, the TV program Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire, and the board game Monopoly. ``Go To
Jail.'' Eventually, at least 21 co-conspirators were charged, but they
were scattered around the country to make things look legit, and I'm
not aware that they came from places that were so aptly named.
- Jonny FAIRPLAY
- This is a television actor whose real name is Jon Dalton. He
appeared in the 2003 CBS reality show ``Survivor: Pearl Islands.''
Casting actors in a ``reality show'' would not appear to be strictly
according to Hoyle, but I guess it's okay because they're real actors
(as opposed to ordinary people, who wouldn't be qualified to appear in
a reality show because they're not real actors -- they're only acting
like actors playing the role of ordinary people).
Fairplay earned his place in this glossary at the Fox Reality Channel's Really (yes, really) Awards on October 2, 2007. Danny Bonaduce (age 48) was on stage when Fairplay (33) walked on uninvited and made a ``derogatory statement,'' according to the police report. Fairplay jumped on Bonaduce and ``wrapped his arms and legs around the suspect and thrust his pelvis into the suspect's body'' while the audience booed. The ``suspect'' was Bonaduce, who threw Fairplay over his shoulders.
Fairplay was a survivor but he landed on his face, and he said later that he underwent 2½ hours of dental surgery. Poor baby! He said he had only given Bonaduce a hug, one of his signature moves as a performer. Moves in what kinds of movies, I wonder. The DA's office declined to prosecute, citing insufficient evidence of intent to injure, and the fact that Fairplay ``initiated contact and acted offensively.'' Bonaduce's ``actions fell within the realm of self-defense,'' according to Deputy DA Jeffrey Boxer, who needs another apposite turn in the public eye to earn a glossary subentry of his own. Why is the WWE sitting on its hands?
Bonaduce was a child star on ``The Partridge Family.'' In 2005 he starred in the reality show ``Breaking Bonaduce,'' but that's not how this one worked out.
- Christopher FARAONE
- Professor of Classical Languages and Literatures at the University
of Chicago. Faraone is Italian for `Pharaoh.' As of this date (2001.02.23),
Christopher A. Faraone is chair of the Classics Department.
- MIA FARROW
- Stop me before I adopt again! Fourteen children, not counting
Woody. (Mía is `mine'
[belonging to me] in Spanish and, give
or take an accent, in some other Romance languages as well.)
- FAULSTICK and Son
- A business that does septic-system work. (I saw a billboard
advertisement for them, traveling southbound on SR-33 in Pennsylvania
in November 2009.) The adjective faul in German is a cognate of
the English word foul, with a similar range of meanings. The
noun Stick is a dialectal form of Stück, meaning
`piece.'
[Yeah, there's a verb sticken usually meaning `embroider,' cognate with English stitch. Note that stecken (meaning `put'), the obvious cognate of the English verb stick, is (at least now) a regular verb, so there are no stem changes into stick....)
- FAUX-PAS-BIDET
- Here is something I read in The Red Orchestra: The Anatomy of
the Most Successful Spy Ring of World War
II, by Gilles Perrault {tr. Peter Wiles} (Simon & Schuster,
1969), p. 6.
By 1929 there were three thousand rabcors [workers operating as amateur press correspondents] in France, some of them employed in state arsenals or in factories where war materials were manufactured. The ostensible purpose of their contributions to the Communist press was to denounce the poor working conditions to which they were subjected, but they could hardly do so without supplying bits and pieces of information about the work itself. The more revealing articles were never published. They were passed to the Soviet embassy in Paris, which forwarded them to Moscow. If a given rabcor seemed well informed on a subject of really worthwhile interest, an agent would call and question him until a complete picture had been built up.
This highly profitable organization functioned with undisturbed efficiency for three whole years. In February, in 1932, a denunciation was laid before the French police. Despite this lucky break, it took the superintendent in charge of the case -- a man with the disquieting name of Faux-Pas-Bidet--more than six months to dismantle the network. His reports are unsparing in their praise of the spies he was endeavoring to track down. ...
Now, as the author of the French original well understood, Faux-Pas-Bidet is more than a merely disquieting name. An approximate English equivalent might be `Misstep-Chamberpot.' It is an exceedingly unlikely sort of name. Author Perrault seems to suggest that this is the person's real name, possibly his hyphenated last name. If he knew the real name and deliberately withheld it, that would be a bit disingenuous. If he didn't know the real name, then it probably means that his comments on the reports are second-hand. If he knew that this is the man's real name, then it's hard to square with what Trotsky wrote in his 1930 autobiography (Moia zhizn), recalling events of 1916 and 1918.
Here is an English translation by, umm, it's not clear. It was published by Pathfinder Press in 1970, and it has an introduction by Joseph Hansen -- an admiring reminiscence of his days on L. D. Trotsky's staff during the last years in exile in Coyoacán, Mexico, with a few little jabs at Trotsky's biographer Isaac Deutscher. Trotsky lived another eleven years after finishing his autobiography, and he had a secretariat that regularly translated his work in a sequence of multiple drafts critiqued in detail by Trotsky (see the obvious entry), so perhaps the translation was a team effort by his staff.
For much of his life, Trotsky was an inconvenient foreigner seeking safety and freedom away from a Russian dictatorial government (Tsarist, which he sought to overthrow, or Soviet, which he at one point had at least the second-greatest role in preserving). In 1916, Trotsky was dumped at the Spanish border by the French police. He traveled to Madrid, where he was soon arrested. One is struck by the bourgeois courtesy of the French and Spanish police that L.D. describes. Like a number of other communists who suffered at the hands of the GPU, he also used the old Tsarist secret police as a standard of incivility against which to castigate others by invidious comparison. On the way from Madrid to Cadiz, he asked the agents escorting him how they had come to capture him so quickly. They readily volunteered that a telegram from Paris had alerted them to a dangerous anarchist (sic) in their country. Trotsky writes
In all this the chief of the so-called juridical police, Bidet-``Fauxpas,'' played an important part. He was the heart and soul of my shadowing and expulsion; he was distinguishable from his colleagues only by his exceptional rudeness and malice. He tried to speak to me in a tone that even the Czar's officers of the secret police never allowed themselves to assume. My conversations with him always ended in explosions. As I was leaving him, I would feel a look of hate behind my back. At the prison meeting with Gabier [a French socialist L.D. met while under house arrest in Madrid], I expressed my conviction that my arrest had been prearranged by Bidet-``Fauxpas,'' and the name, started by my lucky stroke, circulated through the Spanish press.
Less than two years later, the fates willed me an entirely unexpected satisfaction at M. Bidet's expense. In the summer of 1918, a telephone call to the War Commissariat informed me that Bidet--the Thunderer, Bidet!--was under arrest in one of the Soviet prisons. I could not believe my ears. But it seemed that the French government had put him on the staff of the military mission to engage in spying and conspiracy in the Soviet republic, and he had been so careless as to get caught. One could hardly ask for a greater satisfaction from Nemesis, especially if one adds the fact that Malvy, the French minister of the Interior who signed the order for my expulsion, was himself soon after expelled from France by the Clémenceau government on a charge of pacifist intrigues. What a concurrence of circumstances, as if intended for a film plot!
When Bidet was brought to me at the Commissariat, I could not recognize him at first. The Thunderer had become transformed into an ordinary mortal, and a seedy one at that. I looked at him in amazement.
``mais oui, monsieur,'' he said as he bowed his head, ``c'est moi.''
Yes, it was Bidet. But how had it happened? I was genuinely astonished. Bidet spread out his hands philosophically, and with the assurance of a police stoic, remarked ``C'est la marche des évènements.'' Exactly--a magnificent formula! There floated before my eyes the figure of the dark fatalist who had conducted me to San Sebastian: ``There is no freedom of choice; everything is predetermined.''
``But, Monsieur Bidet, you were not very polite to me in Paris.''
``Alas, I must admit it, Mr. People's Commissary, sorry as I am. I have thought often of it as I sat in my cell. It does a man good sometimes,'' he added significantly, ``to get acquainted with prison from the inside. But I still hope my Paris behavior will not have any unpleasant consequences for me.''
I reassured him.
``When I return to France, I will change my occupation.''
``Will you Monsieur Bidet? On revient toujours à ses premiers amours.'' (I have described this scene to my friends so often that I remember our dialogue as if it took place yesterday.) Later Bidet was allowed to go back to France as one of the exchange prisoners. I have no information as to his subsequent fate.
(At this point, L.D. returns to continue the story of his passage through Spain. I'll mention some of this at the Cuba entry, eventually.)
- Cecil FIELDER
- In his
entire
major-league career in the US, Cecil (pronounced with a short-e, as
in Cecil B. DeMille) Fielder played first base in 905 games, third base
in 7, and second base in 2. Well, I guess that at least counts as
fielding. He was a designated hitter in 535 games, and he did play in
the outfield in one game for Toronto. He left Toronto after four
seasons to play the 1989 season with the Tigers of Hanshin in Japan's
Central League. For the next few seasons he played with the Tigers of
Detroit. Cecil's son Prince has been a first-baseman and occasional
designated hitter in his own major-league career. (He's in the NL, so
opportunities to be DH are limited.)
- Blake Fielder-CIVIL
- One-time husband of troubled singer (that was the standard
description) Amy Winehouse. I haven't
followed his story very closely, but when I first wrote this bit, in
early February 2008, he was in jail awaiting trial. He had first been
charged with intentionally inflicting grievous
bodily harm on pub landlord James King, June 20, 2007. In November
2007 Fielder-Civil was arrested on a charge of trying to pervert the
course of justice in that case. (He was alleged to have offered King
money to drop the allegation against him and flee the country. Reports
varied regarding whether King had accepted the bribe. In the US, at
least, it is often relatively easy to earn conviction on such ancillary
charges, and the penalties can be more severe than those for the
original crime, even if there was no original crime. Just ask Martha
Stewart.) I don't know what ever came of those charges.
There were no charges against Fielder-Civil or against Winehouse arising from their alleged violent fights in August 2007, but there was periodic drama afterwards. When Amy Winehouse died in July 2011, he was in prison at the beginning of a 32 month sentence for burglary and possession of an imitation firearm. He was denied release to attend the funeral.
He was released at the end of July 2012, and a few days later overdosed and was hospitalized, spending more than a week in a coma. His mom claimed that he hadn't been able to have his phone in prison, and that on his return home he came across an old handset with messages from Amy, including one in which she said she'd like to be godmother to his son Jack -- born in spring 2011. This, his mom claimed (according to the Daily Mail, anyway) pushed him over the edge. It just goes to show what I've always said: voicemail is the source of all the trouble in the world. But the thing that strikes me about this whole knot of people is how family-oriented they are. I mean that all most sincerely. Or almost sincerely. Their parents are always being quoted in the tabloids about how it was someone else's fault, and now we have this godmother thing.
It turns out that the coma that got Blake hospitalized was only due to an alleged drug overdose, and he came out of it. He gave an interview to The Sun after being released (from the hospital, that is). He said that he had been relieved to learn from the coroner's report that Amy hadn't died of a drug overdose, because it was he who had introduced her to drugs. I'm sure he meant alleged drugs.
- Bruce FIELDS
- Manager of Toledo farm team (triple-A) who was named hitting coach
of the Detroit Tigers on Oct. 9, 2002.
- Guy FIERI
- Mr. Fieri is a celebrity chef, or at least a restauranteur with a
TV gig. Here's an excerpt from
a
report in the NY Daily News:
The Food Network star, known for his creative facial hair, over-the-top personality and love of diner food, was attending a bash at New Orleans's Second Line Studios when bouncers denied him entry beyond the velvet ropes, Us Weekly reports.
Fieri responded by causing a scene, bystanders said. He was then ejected from the venue.
...
``He didn't have the right bracelet, and nobody in New Orleans knows who anyone is,'' one partygoer explained.The Italian surname Fieri is simply the plural of the surname Fiero. In principle, the plural is supposed to indicate a noble family, but the frequency of -i names is suspicious. The word fiero is cognate with the English word `fierce.' That's also what it means in Spanish. In Italian it means that and more. The principal senses now seem to have to do with pride. It means either `proud' or `disdainful.' Ultimately, these f-words are derived from the Latin ferus, meaning `wild animal.' (Source also of the English word feral.) For something about f-words describing not-very-wild animals, see the ferrous entry.
- Pontiac FIERO
- A car sold in the 1984-88 model years. It was a mid-engine sports
car with a lightweight, magnesium-alloy engine. The car had a famous
tendency to catch fire. You might have thought, after the disaster
that race cars had with lightweight magnesium-alloy wheels, that a
lesson would have been learned. I just wish I hadn't just told you the
real meaning of the word fiero above.
- David FIGMAN
- A food inspector in NYC. An article on food inspection in the May
22, 1969, New York Times, on page
49, quoted Weems L. Clevenger, director of the New York district of the
FDA, to the effect that 65% of all food
imported by the US entered through the port of New York City. The article included a picture
with this caption: ``Peter Giambalvo, holding jar, and David Figman,
drawing samples from barrel, prepare to make test of olives newly
imported from Spain.'' The scene is on a quay with rows of barrels on
their sides; the men are wearing hardhats but no safety glasses. From
the splatter on the side of their barrel, it seems part of the test was
sqeezing the olives to bursting. (Well dammit, I'm sure on some other
days he tests figs. I don't give a f... if you believe it or not!)
- Dr. Bernard FISHER and Dr. Roger POISSON
- According to a report in the New York
Times, 4 April 1994, (page A12) Dr.
Fisher is [was?] the world's authority on the treatment of breast
cancer. Someone found something fishy in the work of Poisson, and
Fisher was removed from the headship of his study group amid
accusations that he suppressed evidence of scientific fraud (falsified
data) by Dr. Poisson. A cause célébrée in Canada.
Need I point out that poisson is French for `fish'? Of course not, that would be an insult to your learnedness, your sophistication.
This entry is under reconstruction.
- RICHard FLORIDA
- Florida is director of the University of Toronto's Martin
Prosperity Institute. He was interviewed by Kurt Badenhausen (German
for `bath houses'; I hope he wasn't taken to the cleaners) for
Forbes. The title of the resulting article was ``You Are Where
You Live.''
- J.E. FORCE
- Coeditor with S. Hutton of Newton and Newtonianism: New
Studies (#188 in the series Archives Internationales D'Histoire
des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas,
from Kluwer Academic Publishers).
- Rob FORD
- From time to time I have looked for a good pretext for putting
something in this glossary about former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, and as
you will see below, I still haven't found one. But this is an
emergency, so we're temporarily lowering our editorial standards.
In May of 2014, Rob Ford was still mayor of Toronto, but was in rehab. He was either in rehab for an alcohol problem that leads him to make mistakes like smoking crack cocaine while someone takes video of the event, although he doesn't have a crack addiction, or else he was in rehab for various addictions. His stories vary in each retelling -- not because he's trying to put a bad picture in the best light possible given the evidence that has already come to light, but because -- because he's a natural-born entertainer, that's it.
Anyway, on May 20, Ontario Provincial Police stopped his SUV (hey -- an acronym: gimme credit). It was a black Escalade: a Cadillac! An arrest was made on charges of ``impaired driving and driving with more than 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.'' That is more loosely described as ``0.08% blood alcohol concentration'' [by weight], since the specific gravity of blood is only slightly above that of water -- typically no more than about 1.06. The overformal description of the alcohol concentration is in striking contrast to the informal ``driving and driving'' locution, which is unusual in legal language.
Now where were we before getting off on that interesting tangent? Oh yeah -- the SUV. The driver arrested for drunk-driving the Ford Cadillac was Lee Anne McRobb, apparently someone the charming Ford met while in rehab. Ford himself was reportedly not at the wheel or even in the vehicle at the time. A day later, Rob's brother Doug Ford said he'd never heard of the woman before, and that he was having trouble getting in touch with his brother. However, McRobb was never charged with theft of the car. (I'm not saying she should've been!)
Reporters also spoke with Rob Ford's lawyer, whom they surely have on speed-dial. The lawyer, Dennis Morris, was evidently giddy with relief at the novelty of hearing about lawbreaking his client was connected with but not guilty of: ``This is all news to me. I know nothing about it, but I wouldn't know why I should, because he's not involved in any way!'' I see no reason to disbelieve that his further elaboration of these comments was rendered unintelligible by his giggles.
Doug Ford is not just the then-mayor's brother. He is also a T.O. councillor and the campaign manager for his brother. The emergency I mentioned earlier involves Doug.
As one or two of my fellow Americans might be aware, later today (October 19, 2015), a federal election will be held in Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, is campaigning with Rob Ford. This would be something like Jeb Bush reaching out to Donald Trump for his support and the votes of ``Trump Nation,'' if Trump were a notorious crack-head instead of a notorious every-day-is-a-bad-hair-day-head. (Yes -- reaching out. Harper held the Fords tight at arm's length. A cynical balancing act. I'm not trying to be judgmental or anything, okay? I don't have a Labrador retriever in this fight.)
Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau leads the Liberal Party, whom polls (which history suggests are more accurate than a coin flip) tout to come out on top in today's contest. Justin's famous dad overcame baldness, but Justin's own hair has also been in the news in the final days of the campaign. No time to discuss that almost equally important matter now.
This glossary is many people's main source of news about Canada, so it was imperative that I further crush the following recently broken news. In a CTV News interview on October 15, Doug Ford recordedly said the following:
You know something, I'm tough on crime too and I think it's essential. I know one thing, it wasn't Stephen Harper sitting around a table smoking a joint at a dinner party like Justin Trudeau was, so I find it pretty hypocritical.
I am torn on this. On the one hand, I think it's wonderful that he thought of using the word ``hypocritical.'' Also, the idea of a single individual ``sitting around a table'' is very girthful, more like Rob or Doug than Stephen or Justin. And maybe he did suggest, equivocally, that ``crime [is] essential.'' I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on that one. On the other hand, Doug's use of the word ``like'' is just another nail in the coffin of ``as.'' Well, at least everyone had a good laugh.
A future episode of this entry will mention that Henry Ford founded the original Cadillac company.
- GENE FOSTER
- Biologist who gathered DNA evidence
(Y-chromosomes) all-but proving that Thomas Jefferson knew his slave
Sally Hemmings extremely intimately. This research was published in
Science two days before the midterm US elections of 1998, which
were widely interpreted as a referendum on actions taken and to be
taken regarding President William Jefferson Clinton, who had
been demonstrated, using DNA evidence, to have known one of the White
House interns extremely intimately.
- MEGAn Denise FOX
- Another of her nicknames, besides Mega Fox, is Foxy Megan. In 2008
she was voted ``the sexiest woman in the world'' by readers (perhaps
the term is meant loosely) of FHM, despite
having a literary but ugly tattoo on her right shoulder. (It reads
``We Will All Laugh At Gilded Butterflies.'') Fox is her maiden name;
maybe the next fox is a cousin.
- Tommy FOX
- Around 11 pm on Wednesday, October 1, 2008, Tommy Fox was driving
home from his job in Dover, Tennessee, when a beautiful red fox ran out
in front of his (Tommy's) GMC
Jimmy and got run over. Tommy got out and
picked up the fox, figuring he'd take it home and cut off the tail to
keep as a souvenir. He'd have been better advised to perform this
operation in the field, or to have been driving an honest pick-up
instead of an SUV.
As he drove on, Tommy Fox heard the fox reviving in the back seat. He looked around for a way to keep the fox from biting him, and as he was thus distracted, his SUV crossed the centerline, went into a ditch, and flipped over (and stopped). One Fox suffered minor injuries and was treated at the scene; another fox was found dead in the SUV. I guess we know who was wearing a seat belt.
The precise cause of death of the fox was not determined. Dale Grandstaff, a wildlife officer with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, explained to the Leaf Chronicle (an appropriately sylvan name) that fox tails ``are real bushy and pretty and thick this time of year.'' He also explained that foxes don't like to be caged, especially when they are alive, according to the deadpan report in the Leaf Chronicle. (The story was also reported on <FOXNews.com>.)
- Vivica A. FOX
- Just do an
image search. Yeah, it's her real name.
- Peter FRANCE
- A professor at the University of Edinburgh, he edited The New
Oxford Companion to Literature in French (1995).
- Chuck FREEBY
- The surname is pronounced identically with ``freebie.'' Mr. Freeby
is involved in charitable fundraising through raffles and auctions in
the Mishawaka-South Bend area of Indiana, serving as a public spokesman
and auctioneer, among other things. In March 2008, for example, he was
involved in House Raffle 2008, a benefit to raise money for the Healthy
Family Center and Women's Care Centers of the
SJRMC. Well sure, you have to buy a
ticket. But if you win, it's as close to free as you're likely to get.
- Walt FREESE
- Chief Marketing Officer of Ben and Jerry's, the ice cream
manufacturer, from 2001 to 2004. On December 1, 2004, he assumed the
position of CEO, which is expanded ``Chief
Euphoria Officer'' at B&J.
- Sigmund FREUD
- In German, the verb freuen means `to make happy,' and there
are various related words. Die Freude is `the joy.' (The
surname is related, but in a nonstandard dialect or an archaic
spelling.) Freud, of course, tried to help people whose principal
complaint was ~ sowieso ~ unhappiness.
(FWIW, Sigmund is a popular old name meaning `defender of victory.' This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but the folks who came up with it are no longer around to explain what they had in mind. I imagine one could come up with obscure connections to psychoanalysis, or with connections to the obscurity of psychoanalysis, but I won't. There comes a point where, if you're willing to accept any tenuous connection, then the fact of a connection existing becomes insignificant. It's like the freshman exercise of discovering the phallic symbolism of everything that isn't perfectly spherical: if everything except a basketball is ``phallic,'' then ``phallic'' is meaningless.)
- FREUDENSTADT
- A city in the southern German state of
Baden-Württemberg. The city name can
be translated as `Happy Town.' (See FREUD
above.) On March 21, 2008, a woman driving on a street in the
Freudenstadt area
skidded in the
snow and rammed a tree. The car was totaled, but the woman walked
away unhurt. News reports credited her own homemade birthday cake with
cushioning her landing and saving her life. As a bonus, I imagine, she
doesn't have to eat the cake. News reports listed her age as 26, but
in the circumstances, they should at least have clarified whether she
had just turned 26, or was still 26 going on 27. Police also credited
the airbag with helping to protect her. I want to see pictures of
this. Where was she carrying the cake?
- FRIEDRICH I and FRIEDRICH II
- This is a German name formed, as was typical of Germanic given
names, as a compound of two parts. The -rich, related to
English -ric and -rick, and Scandinavian -rik, and
means `ruler' of some sort. It's cognate with German Reich
and reich (`rich'), and other words you can think of, and is
probably derived from Latin rex
(`king') or Celtic rix or both. The first part is related to
the modern German word Frieden, which means peace, so the name
appears to mean something like `ruler of peace.' In fact, both
etymologically and historically it means something a bit different.
The modern German word Frieden comes from the Old High German word fridu, which meant something like `protection or shelter from armed attack.' Consider the kind of world, 1500 years ago, where it was handy to have a compact word for this concept. Are we better off now? Give me 500 words by tomorrow. Anyway, the only extant English words related to this root seem to be belfry (originally a kind of shelter for besiegers or besieged) and afraid (from the cognate Late Latin fridus, fridum). (The Latin word pax, similarly, meant not only `peace,' in various senses of the English word, but also `pact.'
The irony, if you chose to see it that way, is that this name that (now at least) suggests peace was popularized by the highly successful Holy Roman Emperors Friedrich I Barbarossa (there's some stuff about him at the linked entry -- you just gotta drill down, as the suits say) and his grandson Friedrich II. There is a certain aptness in the name, however, because international politics in the Middle Ages was a game of shifting alliances and frequent treacheries, and what the alliances offered and the treacheries withdrew was often protection from armed attack. The first two Kaisers held the title 1154-1190 and 1220-1250. Both Friedrichs played the game quite successfully, and the subsequent popularity of the name Friedrich in German, and its adoption in other languages, is laid to their success.
- Charles and Stephanie FROMM
- A couple who were fined $300 for hosting Bible studies in their
home without obtaining a special permit. They live in the city of San
Juan Capistrano -- in storied Orange County, California, of all places.
A religious legal non-profit group, the Pacific Justice Institute
(PJI) has taken up their cause, saying the
fine was a violation of religious freedom. Fromm (in German,
like frum in Yiddish) means `pious.'
Cathy Salcedo, a spokeswoman for the city, stressed that local authorities were not trying to prohibit home Bible study, but that the Fromms had transformed a residential area. Their Bible study group meets on Sunday mornings and Thursday afternoons with up to 50 persons, ``with impacts on the residential neighborhood on street access and parking.'' Brad Dacus, an attorney for PJI, said the Fromms live in a semi-rural area and have not caused any parking problems for neighbors.
- David G. FUBINI
- A director (as of 2006) of McKinsey & Company, Inc., United
States/Boston Office. Fubini's specialty is post-merger integration.
He's done a lot of this as leader of the firm's Worldwide Post Merger
Practice, so he's been involved in multiple integrations. He must have
considered interchanging the order of integration.
The famous mathematician Guido Fubini (1879-1943) is known for theorems about multiple integration. Specifically, he proved theorems concerning the conditions under which interchanging the order of integration does not change the result of the (multiple) integration.
- Ann M. FUDGE
- Executive vice president of Kraft Foods, Inc. (as of April 2000),
and president of the company's Maxwell House and Post Division. The
Maxwell House Division sells Maxwell House, Yuban, and General Foods
International Coffees brands; the Post Division offers Grape Nuts,
Shredded Wheat, Honey Bunches of Oats, and Pebbles (that's a brand
of cereal, not the contents, I'm pretty sure). Through a licensing
agreement, Maxwell House also markets and distributes Starbucks
brand coffee in grocery stores.
On April 17, 2000, she delivered Skidmore College's Harder Lecture (named after F. William Harder).
- Jim FURLONG
- President of the Racecourse Owners Association (ROA).
A furlong, I don't have to tell you, is an eighth of a mile.
The furlong was supposed to represent a reasonable distance for an animal to pull a plow before taking a rest, and hence is a fairly appropriate measure for horseraces.
- Sandra GAL
- In November 2011, GolfDigest.com inaugurated an oddly unisex
Hottest Golfer contest. The selection process was based on some sort
of match play. Unlike the LPGA or, for
practical purposes, the PGA,
this contest was apparently not sexually segregated. Gal, 26, won the
final playoff in January 2012 to become the Hottest Golfer. She won by
a large margin -- won it running away, you might say, but for this
sport and this context I'd say she won it ``walking away.'' Sandra Gal
had won her first LPGA title in the 2011 Kia Classic.
She actively recruited voters on Twitter for Golf Digest's contest. That seems pretty unsportsmanlike to me. A downright Mulligan, frankly. Mr. Rickie Fowler, her competition in the final round, seems to have taken it in stride.
FWIW, Gal is German, and not Gal is not an ordinary word in the German language (but see gal and GAL).
- Luis García DE LA HUERTA
- In 1790, García published Discurso
físico-anatómico sobre las plantas
[`Physical-anatomical discourse on plants']. García's full
surname, García de la Huerta, means `Garcia of the [Kitchen or
Herb] Garden.'
[Huerta comes from the Latin hortus, `garden.' The gender flip was presumably intentional -- it's a standard way to indicate a slight shift in meaning. The male gender of the Latin original is preserved in the Spanish huerto, `orchard.' It's not certain whether the word orchard itself is also derived from hortus (as the first element in a compound with the Germanic yard).]
- Morton S. ``Mort'' GARSON
- In 1974, he composed the electronic music score for the 18th Annual
Grammy Award-winning Best Children's Recording of The Little
Prince narrated by Richard Burton. Okay, ``the little prince'' is
more of a diminutive man than a boy (garç), exactly, but
the following tips it in, since garson is sort of an English spelling
of the French word.
Garson was born (1924) in New Brunswick, and that is the only province of Canada that has (since 1969) bilingualism written into its provincial consitution. Roughly a third of 'Wickers are Francophones, and New Brunswick has the closest balance between English and French of any Canadian province or territory. In all the rest, French or (usually) English is overwhelmingly more common than the other. (This is true somewhat differently in Nunavut: a large minority speak English at home and a majority speak an Inuit language. Or ``speaks,'' if you prefer.)
- Shawn GAUNT
- A coach in Notre
Dame's Strength and Conditioning Department.
- James Paul GEE
- An education professor at the University of Wisconsin, who
concludes (presumably on the basis of the sort of ``research'' that is
done in ed schools) that the latest
generation of video games (i.e., from around the turn of the
century; ``Rise of Nations,'' ``Age of Mythology,'' "Morrowind,'' and
``Grand Theft Auto'' are praised -- what about AoW?) are in some ways more educational than
time spent in the classroom. (Perhaps this result is slightly
dependent on what clown is standing at the front of the room.) He's
written a book called What Video Games Have to Teach Us About
Learning and Literacy.
In a July 9, 2003, CNN/Money article by Chris Morris, Gee is quoted explaining that there ``was a push to put thinking principles in schools in the 1980's,'' but that ``... in the 90s, though, we made a real return to 'skill and drill' and we lost this way of having people think in complex ways. ... Games recruit a deeper way of thinking.'' (One of these days when I'm feeling appropriately low, I will add an entry on ``critical thinking skills.'' For now let me just say, ``the blind leading the deaf.'')
- Rudi GERNREICH
- In German, gern means `glad' and `gladly,' and reich
means `rich' (or `richly') and also functions as a suffix meaning
`-rich' or `-ful' (the cognate -voll has similar meaning). I
haven't checked yet to see what meaning this surname was understood to
have, but one could interpret gernreich as `joyful' or as `happy
to be rich.'
Rudi Gernreich (1922-1985) was a famous, controversialist designer of clothes, and ``joyful'' seems like a fair description. Playful might be better. I don't know how rich you can get making clothes only a model would dare to wear. In 1964, he came out with the monokini, a one-piece topless bathing suit intended to be worn by men or women who had shaved off all head and body hair. From the posed pictures of that time, it seems clear that it was easier in those days to find models, female as well as male, willing to pose topless than any models willing to shave off all their hair. The monokini was the centerpiece of Gernreich's famous UNISEX Project. (Well, the idea of ``unisex'' clothing was famous, his UNISEX Project less so.)
- Alice GHOSTLEY
- She first appeared on television
in 1953. From what I recall of TV image quality even in the 1960's,
she probably appeared ghostly at the time, but so then did everyone
else. (Her first ``notable TV guest appearance,'' according to IMDb, was on
` ``Studio One'', a
dramatic ``anthology series'' that ran 1948-59. She appeared on May
18, 1953, in an episode entitled ``The Laugh Maker.'' This was one of
four episodes starring Jackie Gleason, and as of mid-2004, all of the
comment on this series at IMDb is about these).
Alice Ghostley is best remembered for her role on the long-running TV show ``Bewitched'' (1964-9, the Dick York era, and 1969-72, the Dick Sargent years). There she played ``Esmerelda'' from 1969 to 1972. She had an earlier guest appearance there, 1966, as the klutzy maid Naomi in episode 53: ``Maid to Order.'' The Esmerelda character, which appeared in fifteen episodes, was a bumbling witch.
(I've also seen the character name with the more usual ``Esmeralda'' spelling, but I couldn't account for the widespread use of the triple-e spelling if that had not in fact been used in the credits.)
- Dana GIOIA
- Dana Gioia is reportedly a poet and, as of November 2007, chairman
of the US National Endowment for the Arts. In Italian, gioia
means `joy.' For anyone in the US who appreciates poetry, these are
anything by joyful times. Most people who think they write poetry have
the notion that poetry is maudlin bad prose set with a ragged right
margin. Rhyming, to say nothing of rhyme schemes, cramps their
``style.'' But they don't have an aggressive objection to meter --
they are simply nescient.
Three well-known US authors died in 2007 -- Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, and Norman Mailer. The AP sent out a chin-scratcher on this for November 15, 2007. The item included the intriguing observation that ``Vonnegut was the American Mark Twain.'' This was attributed to Mailer's literary executioner -- sorry, that's executor. For the first time ever, I actually felt a little sympathy for Mailer.
Gioia was quoted in the article on the subject of Vonnegut's greater popularity: ``First of all, Vonnegut's funny, and humor has a broad appeal.''
- JUST GJESSING
- A Norwegian professor of statistics, probably. Well, maybe just
possibly. I did find an intriguingly titled article (``Unusual
Solvent'') by a J. Gjessing (who works in Sweden) and
P. J. Tomlin in the British Journal of Anaesthesia
[vol. 49, no. 9, p. 954 (1977)].
More recently, one Just Gjessing wrote a review of ``Resource Communities, Settlement and Workforce Issues'' for the Dutch publication Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie [vol. 81, no. 5, p. 393 (1990)]. As of this writing (July 2001), JG is a professor emeritus at the Geography Institute at the University of Oslo.
I originally read about the statistics professor Just Gjessing in a statistics book and figured it was probably a joke. From this entry in a Science Jokes page, it seems at least to be a very popular joke.
- Dr. DORE GOLD
- As of May 2016, he's the Director-General of Israel's Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. (He's not the actual foreign minister; that hat is
worn by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.) He has held a variety of
positions in many Israeli governments, most of them diplomatic or
advisory. This item is here in case he ever gets the Finance Ministry
portfolio.
Yeah, in 2009 he debated South African Justice Richard Goldstone. (The subject was the U.N. Gaza Report, of which Goldstone was lead author; the venue was Brandeis University.) That doesn't meet our exacting standards for irony.
- Michael GOLD
- Author of a 1930 memoir of growing up on New York's East Side. It
went through eleven printings in that year alone: Jews Without
Money (New York: International Publishers). Nazi Brown Shirts
broke into the home of a German friend of his when she was translating
a chapter of the book, and they had a laugh about it before arresting
her (for her politics). Gold's book itself is a bit less... edifying,
as we say, than Harry Golden's memoirs (mentioned at the
yard sale entry).
- Paul M. GOLDbart and Nigel GOLDENfeld
- Editors, with David Sherrington, of Stealing the Gold: A
celebration of the pioneering physics of Sam Edwards (Clarendon,
2004). If the front matter of the volume explained the title of the
book, I missed it.
- Robert J. GOOD
- A Stammtisch member. That is, a member of the alpha chapter of
the SBF.
- Bob GOODENOW
- Executive Director of the NHLPA during
the NHL lockout that began in 2004. For
years the NHLPA, Bob Goodenow at its head, insisted that a collective
bargaining agreement that contained a salary cap was absolutely
unacceptable. In February 2005, in a desperate last effort (and not
quite the first effort) to salvage a severely truncated season, the
union proposed a $49 million soft cap (teams to be taxed for exceeding
it). The owners immediately made a counteroffer of $42.5 million.
Negotiators for the two sides met two days later and were somehow able
to avoid bridging the difference. It seems there was no deal that was
good enough for both sides. (Enow is an older variant of the
word enough. It's just a little short.)
NHL Commissioner Gary BETTMAN will eventually get his own subentry. Business is a kind of gambling, but in the short term the lockout was a sure thing: the league knew what it wouldn't spend and what revenues wouldn't come in, and on balance the loss was smaller than it stood to be if there was a season. (Yeah, yeah: there was the unrealized loss of franchise value, but that represents an estimate of long-term profitability, which was going down the toilet anyway.) Until Bettman gets his, just let me note that everybody who ever cared became disgusted with both sides in the dispute. I don't want to disappoint my fans, so I'll eventually find a way to line up with the general view that both sides deserve blame. It won't be hard.
- James GOODNESS
- Spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, New
Jersey. (As I write this, Summer 2003; who knows how long Goodness
will last?)
Another name-appropriate church spokesman: ENGLAND.
- Liz GOODYEAR
- On August 1, 2008, the New York Times ran a story on its
front page entitled ``In Strangers, Centenarian Finds Literary
Lifeline.'' It was about Liz Goodyear, 101 at the time. Either the
NYT was kicking off a celebration of Slow News Month, or it was taking
a (front) page from its superior rival, the Wall Street Journal,
which has historically put non-newsy or off-beat stories on the front
page. (This particular idiosyncracy seems to have subsided slightly
in the Murdoch regime.) Sure, we're talkin' below the fold, but
still...
It seems that all her years have been good, in retrospect: ``I think I only remember the amusing things; I don't remember any depressing things,'' Ms. Goodyear said in an interview. ``I think I just put them out of my mind. I know everybody has things that they want to forget, but I dont even have to forget. I just dont remember.''
- Joey GOODSPEED
- Fullback at the University of Notre
Dame, class of the year 2000.
- Edward GOReY
- His illustrations were not gory at all, yet the aptness of his name
is undeniable. See the What
horrible Edward Gorey Death will you die page.
Gorey's middle name was St. John. Didn't St. John lose his head?
- Billi GOSH
- Vermonter Billi Gosh attended (was going to attend, anyway,
according to the AP item mentioned below) the 2008 national convention
of the Democratic party as a ``superdelegate.'' That's someone who
attends ex officio. She (or whatever -- the article didn't
indicate) had declared herself (or whateverself, mutatis
mutandis) as a supporter of Hillary Clinton's bid for the
presidential nomination. Gosh was quoted in an AP article on
superdelegates that went out February 22, 2008:
``As superdelegates, we have the opportunity to change our mind, so she's just connecting with me,'' Gosh said. ``I couldn't believe she was able to fit in calls like that [in]to her incredibly busy schedule.''
Gosh, that's super!
- Shigeki GOTO
- A professor
in the Department of Information and Computer Science at Japan's Waseda
University. He has written a number of textbooks on LISP and PROLOG.
These languages lacked goto at a time when most languages had goto.
- MENTOR Graham
- A schoolteacher of Abraham Lincoln.
- Burleigh GRIMES
- He was a professional baseball player from late in the 1916 season
until 1934. His nickname -- it seems that all ballplayers had
nicknames then -- was ``Ol' Stubblebeard.'' Maybe he acquired this
nickname in his later years; early pictures show him cleanshaven.
Anyway, the beard isn't what got him into this section of the glossary.
Grimes was a pitcher who threw the spitball. In 1920, major league baseball banned the spitball, but grandfathered-in seventeen established spitball pitchers. Grimes was only 26 at the time, and he was the last of those to retire, making him the last pitcher in the bigs officially allowed to throw that filthy pitch. (I wish I could add that he was burly too, but according to this online Baseball Almanac stat sheet, he was 5'10" and weighed 175 lb.)
- Goran GROSSKOPF
- Head of Tetra Laval, probably the world's largest liquid-foods
packaging company. Grosskopf means `large head' (in German).
The connection here is not just with ``head'' but with ``liquid-foods packaging'': the German noun Kopf, meaning `head,' and the English word cup, meaning `cup,' are both early borrowings of the Latin cuppa, meaning `cup.' It is supposed that in German, the word came to be used metaphorically, the skull or head being a sort of receptacle for the brain. (For more on the food angle, see the BRAINIAC entry.) A likely story, sure. Maybe the medieval Germans did what the Scythians were reputed to have done, and made cups out of skulls no longer serving (one hopes) their original owners.
There's a further fluid-container connection, which you'll probably regret my mentioning, but it's all in service of a pun. The most common kind of pathologically large head (back before this was reliably diagnosed and treated) was hydrocephaly (physicians now prefer the term hydrocephalus), called ``water on the brain.'' This is an intracranial accumulation of CSF, usually caused by spina bifida or some other ventricular block. Hydrocephalus in infants can cause rapid skull expansion and a small face. In adults, with the skull not able to expand, neurological dysfunction may be a greater danger, but the really extreme intellectual deficits occur with a pathology known as a ``swelled head.''
A man whose surname can be parsed to mean about the same thing as Grosskopf was Robert Grosseteste. He was a scholar at Oxford in the first half of the thirteenth century, remembered today (especially thanks to the encomia of Roger Bacon) for his early advocacy of the experimental method in science. He was also a philologist -- a careful one by the standards of his time -- and he wrote on a wide variety of scientific, philosophical, and ecclesiastic topics. He was a renaissance man somewhat avant la lettre. I suppose you might say he had a capacious mind.
- John GROUND
- A judge of the Ontario Superior Court. On Thursday, November 8,
2001, he granted temporary protection from creditors to the airline
Canada 3000. The next morning before dawn, the airline grounded its
fleet. (We have a list of other interesting
judge names.)
In court the airline was represented by Bill Burden, who explained that the airline was suffering under the weight of ``a downturn in the economy and we've got the events of Sept. 11 and most recently the [decline] of the Canadian dollar, [which] affects this organization's ability to pay some of its American lessors.'' Canada 3000 had indicated that same Thursday that it would continue flying.
- LUCIO Gutiérrez
- In 2000, he led a rebellion that forced
Ecuadoran President Jamil Mahuad out of
office. Two years later, Gutiérrez was elected president on a
populist, anti-corruption platform. Starting in December 2004, when
Congress restructured the nation's Corte Suprema de Justicia,
replacing 27 of its 31 justices, there were growing, and increasingly
violent, street protests demanding the resignation of essentially the
entire government (all three branches). In early April 2005, former
(ousted and exiled) president Abdala Bucaram reentered the country,
leading to intensified protests. The situation came to a head on April
19 and 20, in a rapid cascade of events whose precise sequence I
haven't sorted out yet. Opposition members of Congress became
convinced that President Gutiérrez had to be ousted immediately,
and they met at the downtown offices of
CIESPAL to do it.
Constitutionally, the legislators ought to have followed an impeachment procedure. Given the exigencies of the moment, however, they followed the creative suggestion of Congressman Ramiro Rivera, who moved that since Gutiérrez had not complied faithfully with the responsibilities of the presidency, he was effectively absent. Thus, acting under the clause of the constitution allowing Congress to replace a president who abandons his responsibilities, they declared the office vacant. Debate took less than an hour, and the vote was 62-0. (The full Congress, the country's unicameral legislature, has 100 members.) Congress replaced Gutiérrez with the vice-president (who had come to be a political opponent of the president after their ticket was elected). In 1997, when this sequence of brief governments began, President Bucaram had been ousted for ``mental incapacity.'' The details in this paragraph don't really have much to do with the anyone's name, but I find them amusing and you should too.
Meanwhile, ex-president Gutiérrez ordered ex-president Bucaram out of the country. Adm. Victor Hugo Rosero (did the country run out of Spanish names?), head of the joint chiefs of staff, announced that the armed forces were withdrawing their support for the ex-president. That evening, Gutiérrez abandoned the presidential palace by helicopter, and there were conflicting reports of where he was seeking political asylum. Acting Attorney General Cecilia Armas issued an arrest warrant for Gutiérrez for his alleged role in violently suppressing the recent violent protests across the country. (Cecilia is the female form of Cecil, a Latin name meaning `blind.' Armas is just Spanish for `weapons.' The Attorney General heads the ministry of justice. Justice is traditionally represented as a woman wearing a blinder and carrying a sword. She also carries a pair of scales, which I suppose could serve as a blunt instrument.)
The only reason I put this subentry in is that Lucio is an Italian given name pronounced in that language as lucho is pronounced in Spanish. The Spanish word lucho means `I fight' or `I do battle,' and many news reports described President Gutiérrez as ``embattled.''
The successor of Gutiérrez, his former vice-president Alfredo Palacio, didn't make to the palace that day. He and a large number of congressmen were stuck in the CIESPAL building where the Congressmen had held their vote earlier. (It's a lovely building, by the way, and there's some irony in the name.) The building was surrounded by protesters, who chanted ``Acabamos con el presidente, ahora vamos por el Congreso!'' (`We're done with the president, now we're going for the Congress!') Amid chants demanding the dissolution of Congress, congressmen who tried to leave the building were attacked and pelted with heavy objects.
All these events took place in the nation's capital, Quito. One doesn't usually think of it in this context, but the word quito in Spanish means `I take away.' (I suppose that to an ignorant Anglophone, it looks like it means `I quit.') In a country on the Equator that is named for it, perhaps these names should be taken seriously.
- BARBARA HALL
- Look, this list is beginning to get long, why don't you visit the
99 entry for more information.
- D. C. HALL
- A professor in the Electrical
Engineering Department at the University of
Notre Dame.
Douglas C. Hall is a member of the Devices and Materials Group (DMG). In the analysis of electronic devices and materials, it is general practice to distinguish two fundamental kinds of simple signal: sinusoidally varying in time (alternating current -- ``A. C.'') and constant in time (direct current -- ``D. C.'').
A useful probe of conductivity properties is the Hall Effect, named after its discoverer Edwin C. Hall. The Hall effect is frequency-dependent, although the low-frequency Hall effect is substantially constant and most directly useful for determining carrier density in ordinary conductors. Hence, one often distinguishes DC Hall effect and AC Hall effect.
Just down the hall from D. C. Hall's office is that of Alan Seabaugh -- A. C. Seabaugh. Between their offices is that of Robert L. Stevenson.
- H. E. HALlam
- Author of ``Saltmaking in the Lincolnshire Fenland during the
Middle Ages,'' Lincolnshire Architectural and Archaeological
Society, New Series, v. 8 (196), pp. 85-112. Hals,
combining-form halo-, of course, is Ancient Greek for `salt.'
Hmmm, well, FWIW, Hals is German for `neck'...
- BILLINGS LEARNED Hand
- Well, he was certainly learned. Although he is best remembered
outside the legal profession for his strong support of free speech, he
earned a spot on our list because he applied his learning to the
economic analysis of torts. He was the Richard Posner of his day, but
a better writer and more influential. Here is some of his opinion in
United States v. Carroll Towing, 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1947). The case
involved a claim for damages incident upon a boat-owner's failure
successfully to secure his vessel at harbor.
[T]he owner's duty, as in other similar situations, to provide against resulting injuries is a function of three variables: (1) The probability that she will break away; (2) the gravity of the resulting injury, if she does; (3) the burden of adequate precautions. Possibly it serves to bring this notion into relief to state it in algebraic terms: if the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B < PL.
The judge was usually referred to as ``Learned Hand.'' (We have more on unusual judge names.) Learned Hand had a less-well-known cousin, also a judge, named Augustus Noble. Over the course of many years they served together on two different courts. They probably enjoyed a situation requiring them to be called by more than just their surnames.
- Oscar HASSENTEUFEL
- The surname is evidently intended to suggest the phrase ``hasse
den Teufel'' (`hate the devil'), just as the more common surname
Hassenpflug is understood as ``hasse den Pflug'' (`hate
the plow,' nickname for a lazy farmer). Oscar Hassenteufel is a
Bolivian jurist. (We list other unusual
judge names.)
He was appointed to Bolivia's highest court (la Corte Suprema de Justicia) at the beginning of 1993 or thereabouts, and became president of the court (something like chief justice) in mid-1999. At the beginning of January 2001, he resigned for health reasons. He explicitly denied that his resignation was due to political pressure or any other reason; over the last two months of 2000, he had been the target of criticism from his colleagues, for his lenience with the Consejo de la Judicatura, an administrative and disciplinary body subordinate to the Judiciary.
Since at least July of 2001 (last checked July 2005), he has been a member of CNE.
- Michael HASTINGS
- Well, if the verb were haste instead of hasten, then
the surname would mean ``hastenings.'' In an article posted to
the web at 12:28 PM EDT, June 28, 2012, Michael Hastings reported
that ``CNN News Staffers Revolt Over Blown Coverage'' (yeh, that's the
article title), a couple of hours earlier. It wasn't about anything
that happened on a basketball court (the NBA finals ended days before)
but in the US Supreme Court. The CNN
``team'' judged incorrectly, as they heard the beginning of the
majority decision, that (as widely expected) the individual mandate (a
requirement that everyone buy health insurance) in the 2010 Health Care
law was ruled unconstitutional. They relayed the guess to an on-air
face, who announced it at 10:07 AM, and CNN rushed into online and
cable print. The definite retraction came at about 10:14. The
Hastings article contained quotes from half a dozen newspeople.
[Both CNN and Fox News drew the same erroneous conclusion when Justice John Roberts, reading the majority decision he had written, declared that the mandate was unconstitutional as an act regulating interstate commerce (i.e., Congress did not have the power to impose the mandate under the powers granted it by the Commerce Clause of the US constitution). However, the majority decided that the penalty for not obeying the mandate should be regarded as a tax, and that this was constitutional under the powers of Congress to impose a tax. (Probably 8 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices -- many suspect 9 of 9 -- understood how stupid this reasoning is, since it gives the government the power to compel anything, so long as the penalty for not doing it can be regarded as a tax.) I don't know why CNN got more criticism than Fox for jumping the gun.]
- ERNEST HEMingway
- When he was a boy, it was not uncommon to dress young boys in
girls' outfits (with girls' hairstyles in the bargain). However,
Ernest's mother Grace liked to pass off Ernest and his sister
Marcelline as identical twins. This occasionally meant that Marcelline
wore boy's overalls, but usually it was Ernest's gender that suffered a
bender. As an adult, his nickname among friends was
``Hem.'' Why do I also write Ernest
in all-caps? Well, we all know ``The Importance of Being Ernest.''
Marcelline, Grace Hall Hemingway's first child, was born January 15, 1898. She was held back from entering grade school so that she and Ernest (born July 21, 1899) could be together in the same grade. In 1917, Ernest was rejected for service in the US Army on account of a vision problem. In order to get in on the action (WWI), in early 1918 he lied about his age to join the Red Cross and drive ambulances for the Italian army. He gave his birth year as 1898, and ever since then many biographies have been getting it wrong. It's odd -- you wouldn't imagine that the Red Cross records or eligibility rules would be many biographies' source for his vital statistics.
Grace Hemingway seems to have made a project of getting her children confused, or making them confusing or something. The fourth of six children was named Madelaine and used the nickname ``Sunny.''
- HEMLOCK Hall
- On the ides of March 2005, the address of the Philosophy Department
at Mansfield University became Third Floor, Hemlock Hall, Mansfield
University of PA, Mansfield, PA 16933.
No, Julius Caesar wasn't a professional philosopher.
- Sir Henry HEAD (August 4, 1861-October 8, 1940)
- A
neurologist. The Head-Holmes
syndrome, named after him and Gordon Morgan Holmes, would have been a
more interesting name if his collaborator had been named Gorgon Mordan
Holmes. Alas. It's also known as ``Head's syndrome.'' Uh, oh yeah --
about the syndrome itself: sensory changes produced by brain lesions,
and correlated with the locations of the lesions.
- Richard HELL
- One of the founders of the punk rock movement. Credited with
creating the anti-disco style of clothing and the "Please Kill Me"
tee-shirt concept. Oh yeah, he also wrote some songs -- like that
matters or anything. Anyway, he doesn't really belong here, because
his real name is Richard Meyers -- Hell is just a stage name, and there
is no ex post facto destiny (at least not yet). The real reason
for this paragraph is to point you to the
CBGB entry.
- John HELMER
- ``Now in our third generation of family ownership, we feature one
of the largest selections of hats and caps in the Pacific Northwest.''
- ART HERTZ
- A past president of the Orange Bowl game. Interviewed November 9,
2002, when Notre Dame was about tenth-ranked
in the polls with a 9-1 record, he explained why the bowl would like to
invite Notre Dame to play even if it ended the season 10-2.
``We have to put asses in seats. Notre Dame will fill us up. The way the system is now, if we don't sell our tickets [a mere $100 a pop], we're in the hole.''
Those few of you who wonder why ``Art Hertz'' is listed here probably think that football is all about brains -- mental alertness and a healthy lifestyle and such. In fact, there's an art to it.
- SUE K. HICKs
- He was named after his mother. That's right, a boy named
Sue. Obviously, he had to become a country lawyer, and he
did. But he is not remembered for a civil suit. Sue K. Hicks was the
attorney who organized the prosecution team for the Scopes trial (see
TSTA).
As a circuit judge in 1957, he presided over the trial in which William Tines was condemned to death. Tines's execution in 1960 was Tennessee's last until 2000.
The song ``A Boy Named Sue'' was written by Shel Silverstein and popularized by the late great Johnny Cash. It is often claimed that Sue K. Hicks was the inspiration for the song, but I haven't read anything definite. Silverstein died in 1999, so it's conceivable we may never know. We have more on unusual judge names.
This is probably the right place to mention Eugène Sue. He was a French limousine liberal -- a socialist with family money. Well, he wasn't a red-diaper baby. Apparently his views evolved. He eventually wrote a lot of soppy serial novels. He used the pen name Marie-joseph Sue -- now how smart is that?
- HIPPOLYTUS
- A son of Hippolyta (an Amazon queen) and Theseus (the guy who slew
the Minotaur). The Greek -lytus comes
from luein, `to loosen.' (The alliteration in the translation
is a consequence of the fact that the Greek and English words are
cognates back in Indo-European [IE].) This
guy needed to loosen up. In the prologue to the eponymous play
Euripedes wrote about him, Aphrodite scolds.
Now, is this stupid or what? But wait -- it gets worse!
The hippo part of the name means `horse,' of course, and no one can talk to a... Oh, sorry, got carried away there. The combined name thus suggests someone who breaks horses. Instead of fulfilling that destiny, he was pulled apart by horses, on orders of Poseidon.
(I think that pulling apart by horses captured the medieval imagination. I've seen the trope in one or two medieval stories, but the usual means of execution was hanging.)
- Douglas HOGG
- British Agriculture Minister during the beginning of the Mad Cow Disease crisis (vide
BSE).
A hogg, in case you don't know, is a sheep. The BSE outbreak probably began because brains (along with other unsalable bits) of sheep infected with scrapie were ground up and added to cattle feed.
In 1802, James Hogg (probably no relation) and Walter Scott met. They shared a passion for the culturally rich Borders that was their home, for poetry, and specifically for the rich poetry of the Scots language. Hogg (1770-1835) and Scott (1771-1832) began a friendship that lasted the rest of Scott's life. Scott was middle-class and correct, while Hogg was usually poor and unapologetically earthy, and they lived in a time and a place where class counted for much. (Hogg's day job was shepherding.) Hogg even wrote, in his Familiar Anecdotes of Sir Walter Scott, that his acceptance by Scott's very status-jealous wife was somewhat exceptional. Some of Scott's other, ``classy'' friends did not stop at mere disdain, but deliberately misquoted and misrepresented Hogg's literary output in their reviews. It's well known that fear of legal and other reprisal is the reason that so much writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth century was published over pseudonyms. People tend to forget that much of that feared retribution would have been completely justified. [For another example, see this bit from Matthew Arnold.]
The Scott scholar Ian Duncan suggests [ftnt. 35] that the character of the homonymous Gurth in Scott's Ivanhoe is modeled on Hogg. Gurth becomes the loyal feudal follower of the knight Ivanhoe, evidently reflecting Scott's feudalistic ideal of his own relationship with Hogg. The character Gurth is a swineherd.
- Lauren HOHL
- Hohl is a German adjective meaning `hollow,' obviously
cognate with English `hollow' and `hole.' The usual German word for a
general sort of hole is Loch, though various other words are
used, such as Höhlung. The word Höhle means
`cave.' The surnames Hohl, Höhl, and Höhle
were originally given to people who came from places whose topologies
could be described vaguely as such: hollows, depressions, narrows, etc.
Ms. Hohl is (as of May 2007) an assistant education director at Colossal
Cave Mountain Park, and guides tours of the cave.
- Walter HOHMANN
- The German word hoh is a variant of hoch, meaning (and
cognate with) `high.' Historically, the spelling was especially common
in the area between Bamberg and Würzburg. Someone named Hohmann
would likely be descended from someone in that area who was tall or
lived in a high place. Walter Hohmann, a professional architect,
re-earned the name by becoming space-travel royalty, a member of the
International Space Hall of Fame (in New Mexico) inducted in 1976. His
highness was concerned with interplanetary travel. In 1925 he
published a small book entitled Die Erreichbarkeit der
Himmelskörper; it was translated
as `The Attainability of the Heavenly Bodies' (Washington, D.C.:
NASA Technical Translation F-44, 1960).
One particular problem considered in the book was that of the powered space flight maneuvers needed to transfer a satellite from an initial circular orbit to a higher-altitude final circular orbit in the same orbital plane. His low-energy solution to that problem is known as the Hohmann transfer maneuver. (Hohmann believed that his proposal was a minimal-energy transfer, but in some cases bi-elliptic transfer is more efficient.)
- Paul HOLDENGRÄBER
- He's the Director of Public Programs at the New York Public
Library, as of 2010.
- D. HOLZ
- A German researcher in wood materials. In German, Holz
means `wood.' I already pointed that out at the Holz entry, and I even gave you a little
reminder nudge at the Lou (Holtz) entry, but
I have to repeat it because you evidently haven't been paying
attention. I swear, I don't know why I even bother!
I noticed D. Holz because of an article he published in the journal Holzforschung (Forschung means `research'): ``Tropical hardwoods used in musical instruments -- Can we substitute them by temperate zone species?'' (vol. 50, #2, pp. 121-9). The answer is: only to a limited extent. Tropical woods are strong.
- Dwight HOOKER
- A photographer
for Playboy.
I have been asked what connection there might be between this person's surname and his profession. One is that the word pornography is ultimately derived from the Greek porne, `prostitute,' and graphein. Less literally, hookers and pornographers both work at the nexus of sex and money.
- Bernard HOYLE
- Coeditor of British Economic Performance, 1880-1980
(London; Dover, N.H.: Croom Helm, ©1984). (The famous authority on games was
Edmond Hoyle, born in 1672. He's dead now.)
I hope I can eventually remember why I put this entry in here.
You know, this is really starting to bother me. It probably had something to do with the earlier Hoyle's unquestioned authority, which led to the expression ``according to Hoyle'' meaning perfectly in accord with the accepted rules.
- Isaac HULL
-
Captain Hull was the first commander during war of the
USS Constitution,
a frigate of the U.S. Navy that was built in Boston, 1797-98. The
Constitution seems to have a good one. She had a running fight
for three days and nights, July 17-20, 1812, with five British vessels,
but escaped. One of those five, the Guerrière, she
captured on August 19, and she captured the frigate Java on
December 29. On Valentine's Day 1814, she captured the Picton.
For her various exploits, the Constitution earned the nickname ``Old
Ironsides.'' (She was a wooden ship, of course, and still is.)
- Walter HUNT
- Designed the first repeating rifle in 1849. The same year, he
invented the safety pin.
- FREEDOM A. HUNTER
- It seems he was hunting around for a way to lose it. Freedom
Hunter, age 18, somehow came into possession of the driver's license of
Tim Holt, and of the checkbook of a couple whose name was not reported.
(All persons and events mentioned were in Lincoln, Nebraska.) Hunter
wrote out a check for $275 from the couple to Tim Holt, and went to a
drive-up bank window to cash it using Tim Holt's license as ID. The
only problem: Tim Holt, who had reported the loss of his driver's
license, was Hunter's teller at the bank. Holt called police as Hunter
waited for the cash. Hunter was eventually found guilty in Lancaster
County District Court of attempted second-degree forgery, and sentenced
to six months in jail.
The crime took place on June 28, 1990, and Hunter was sentenced the following January 31. Hunter was represented by the public defender, so possibly the sentence amounted to time served awaiting trial. I don't know; the only report I could find of this interesting case was an AP wire story the day after sentencing. The case is mentioned (with fewer details) in Roland Sweet's Law and Disorder: Weird News of Crime and Punishment (Signet, January 1994), p. 35.
- DR. IN HUR
- Dr. Hur (full name: In Haing Hur) is an obstetrician and
gynecologist who practices in Anaheim and Garden Grove, California.
His name and profession have been featured on The Tonight Show with
Jay Leno.
- Charles HURT
- As of this writing (May 7, 2008), Hurt is D.C. Bureau Chief for the
New York Post. Following Hillary Clinton's disappointing
returns following presidential nomination primaries yesterday (in North
Carolina and Indiana), an
analysis column was published under Hurt's byline, entitled ``Stick
a Fork in Her -- She's Done.'' Yes, it's hackneyed, but anyone named
Hurt gets extra credit for using it.
Although I didn't block-capitalize Charles above, I'd like to add that a charle is a kind of hard hooked burr, kind of like a heavy gumball seedpod. Unfortunately, I don't know this to be particularly true in any known language. On the bright side, there are plenty of languages I don't know about.
- Ibrahim SAVED Soliman Ibrahim
- His curiosity killed this cat, but saved many more. Ibrahim was a
crewman aboard the Egyptian merchant vessel
Wabi Alaras, and he was doing a little courtesy or business freight on
the side. His ship was in Brazil, next stop
Canada. In Brazil an unidentified person gave
him a suitcase to take to Canada. Ibrahim opened it in his hotel room,
became acutely and severely ill, and died on April 11, 2003. Reuters
reported that several health workers who discovered the body were
evaluated at a hospital after becoming sick, but as of April 27 they
were out of danger. Brazilian authorities are 90% certain the suitcase
carried anthrax. In the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, RCMP
Inspector Dan Tanner said ``there is absolutely no criminal or
terrorist threat to Canada.'' I guess he figures that next time the
terrorists will be more careful and transport it safely to its
target in the US.
- Richard H. IMMERMAN
- Richard Immerman is professor in the Department of History at
Temple University. The plain sense of immerman[n] in German is
`forever man,' which seems pretty appropriate for a historian. (In
fact, the surname is really just a Herkunftsname, a
`place-of-origin name,' for someone from a region that was known as
Immer, and that place name apparently had no etymological connection
to the adverb immer.)
- Richie INCOGNITO
- A very offensive player for the NFL's St. Louis Rams. I never
heard of him before either, and I probably wouldn't recognize him out
on the street. When he was released by the Rams on December 15, 2009,
the most recent file photo available was from September 27. (Okay,
weak, I'll try to come up with something better.)
- Gary INK
- Research Librarian for Publisher's Weekly.
- INSEIN Prison
- A Myanmar military-run prison in the suburbs north of Rangoon.
More than a third of webpages containing the text ``Insein Prison''
contain the text ``notorious Insein Prison.'' Yes, it is pronounced
``insane.'' Myanmar, as you know, is Burma. Rangoon, as you probably
don't, is now supposed to be known as Yangon.
- DURK JAGER
- President and CEO of P & G. He makes it into the nomen est
omen list on account of P & G's acquisition, announced August
1999, of Iams Pet Nutrition Co. Iams is the second-ranked premium
pet-food maker in the US (see IAMS).
Durk Jager is Dutch, and in Dutch jager means `hunter.' It's a
cognate of the German word Jäger (`hunter'). If you wanted
to give the game a sporting chance, you might hunt with a dirk.
At the time of the corporate acquisition, Jager owned two cats and two dogs, to the extent that one can be said to ``own'' a cat. He noted that more households have pets than children [by chronological rather than emotional-maturity definition, I assume]. According to P & G, on average, pet owners spend over $150/yr. on health and nutrition products for their pets, and only $60 on laundry products.
- Benjamin JEALOUS
- Jealous was named president of the NAACP on May 17, 2008, assuming
office the following September. Aged 35 at the time of appointment, he
became the youngest person ever to be president of the then 99-year-old
organization. He is a fourth-generation NAACP member. He began
working on civil rights when he was 14 and helped organize voter
registration for Jesse Jackson's presidential bid. (It reminds me of
my cousin Victoria, who grew up in Los Angeles. She was handing out
Democratic Party campaign material at some mall when somebody called
her a ``communist.'' She had to ask her dad what that meant.)
- Warren STEED Jeffs
- Leader (``prophet'') of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, estimated to have at least 40 wives
and 60 children. When he was arrested in late August 2006, he was
wanted on various charges, including two counts of rape as an
accomplice, for his role in arranging an underage marriage. The
following (from Shakespeare's ``Venus and Adonis'') is not meant to
disparage the seriousness of those charges, but only to serve as a
reminder of some connotations associated with the word steed:
The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens: -- O, how quick is love! --
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove:
Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust. - WAYLON Jennings
- An Old Dog who doesn't
wail but howl.
- Derek JETER
- As of this writing (late July 2013) he's the New York Yankees' star
shortstop (DL) and team captain. In 1996, at the
end of his first year as a regular starter (he had played 13 games in
1995 in place of injured SS Tony
Fernández), he was the unanimous choice for the
AL Rookie of the Year, and in 18 seasons
(all as a Yankee), he's been an All-Star 13 times. Jeter is a
French verb meaning `throw,' of course.
- HRISTO Jivkov
- The Slavic countries that were proselytized mostly by Orthodox
(Eastern) Christianity now use the Cyrillic alphabet (an alphabet not
invented by St. Cyril or his brother Methodius). That alphabet is
based most directly on the Greek alphabet, and the title of Christ is
written with letters corresponding to chi and rho, as in the original
Greek. In fact, if you ignore an occasional vowel diacritic and accept
the lunate sigma, Christ is written as in Greek: Xpictoc (as close as I
can get without fooling with fonts). That's the spelling in Serbian,
Bulgarian and Russian, and probably most of the Cyrillic Slavic
languages I didn't check.
However, although chi in Ancient Greek had a ``hard'' (an aspirated) k sound, in Slavic languages the derived letter represents an aitch, and is typically transliterated by "k" or "kh" in English. In Croatian, which is written with Roman characters, Christ is Krist (Croatia was proselytized by the Western church). In addition, the alternate Hristos is recognized in Croatian; it's the standard Roman spelling of the Serbian word (normally written in a slightly extended Cyrillic).
Hristo is essentially the Slavic version of English `Chris.' Hristo Jivkov plays Pilate in Mel Gibson's ``The Passion of the Christ.''
Note, BTW, that various Slavic languages have another aitch sound. The letter derived from Greek gamma, which was devoiced into the Roman c (originally with a uniformly ``hard sound'' -- unaspirated k), was devoiced differently for Cyrillic orthography. The Cyrillic letter we recognize as a gamma is pronounced like our aitch in Russian and Ukrainian. So the name Igor is pronounced ``EE-hore'' in the places where it is most common. (The same gamma letter occurs in the usual Greek loan words where we use g, and leads to a common feature of the Russian accent in Western languages.)
- SAMUEL JOHNSON, Jr.
- Not in any known way a relative of the British poet and
lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson of England, this Sam Jr. was
author in 1798 of the first dictionary compiled in America, A
School Dictionary. [It wasn't a pen name either.]
(See also the just coincidence
entry.)
- Lord Justice JUDGE
- Sir Igor Judge first served as a high court judge of the
Queen's Bench Division in 1988. Since 2005 he
has held the office of President of the Queen's Bench Division.
Cf. Lord Justice Laws. (We list
other striking judge names.)
- R.KANE
- A philosophy professor at UT Austin. He is the author of Free
Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1994), and The Significance of Free
Will (1996) and editor of various Oxford University Press volumes
on the philosophy of Free Will.
- Neel KASHKARI
- An assistant secretary in the US Department of the Treasury who in
October 2008, at the age of 35, was selected to head the Office of
Financial Stability. That is, he was placed in charge of a $700
billion rescue of financial institutions. It's sort of a
cash-and-carry deal.
- John Harvey KELLOGG (Feb. 26, 1852-Dec. 14, 1943)
- The surname, which is now most commonly spelled Kellogg and Kellog,
is attested in older records as Kelhoge, Kelehoog, and Kyllehog (in
order of increasing antiquity). If the compound had evolved as its
elements did in the language, it would be killhog. The name means
butcher. My source for this is A Dictionary of English
Surnames, by P. H. Reaney and
R. M. Wilson (Routledge, 1991), but the etymology does not appear
to be controversial. The same source mentions Killebole and Kilfole as
parallel but does not translate them. Presumably they mean kill-bull
and kill-fowl. The OED2 has none of these,
but does give various definitions for kill-cow as a person who cows
others, a butcher, and related others. OED
doesn't normally define proper nouns (unless they are used
attributively, say), but that shouldn't be such a factor.
John H. Kellogg is probably the best known Kellogg who ever lived, especially as the Kellogg-Briand Pact fades into history (leaving behind nothing but Nobel Peace prizes for Frank B. Kellogg and Aristide Briand). John Harvey Kellogg was a vegetarian, and a physician in charge of a Seventh-Day Adventist sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. (It's now called the Battle Creek Health Center, and no longer associated with the SDA. Also, Kellogg was excommunicated.) There he developed nut and vegetable products for the patients. He did not invent cornflakes; his cornflake innovation was to serve them for breakfast. John Harvey's younger brother W.K. (Will Keith, who also lived over 91 years: April 7, 1860-Oct. 6, 1951) co-founded a company with his brother, to manufacture toasted cornflakes for former patients and even a few other interested parties.
John Harvey had the majority share, but he distributed shares to other physicians at the Sanatorium. Bad move. While brother John (are you sleeping?) was visiting Pavlov in Russia, brother W.K. bought up enough shares from John's fellow physicians to take a controlling interest. (I imagine this sort of thing happened during the dot-com boom too, when many start-ups paid their employees in shares.) Once W.K. got control, he changed the company name to W.K. Kellogg Company. The box lost the silly sanatorium picture and got W.K.'s signature in exchange. They started adding sugar and making money, and later offered some other dry breakfast cereals.
A former patient, C.W. Post, afterwards went into the same business. (Yeah, there's some name stuff happening there, but we have high standards, so he won't get his own entry.) I seem to recall there were some alleged-violation-of-nondisclosure sorts of issues between Kellogg and Post. Can't we all just be friends?
- Sevan KEVORKIAN
- The famous Kevorkian is Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan euthanasia
advocate and activist also known by the nickname ``Dr. Death.'' (Yes,
he advocates euthanasia in other places than Michigan as well. I just
wrote that sentence that way to save space and time, see?) A retired
pathologist, Dr. Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder in
1999 for assisting in (by his own count, more than 130) suicides. He
was released on parole after eight years. He has said that the terms
of his parole limit his ability to discuss medically-assisted suicide,
but they apparently don't prevent him from saying that he did nothing
wrong and that assisted-suicide should be decriminalized. I guess he's
not allowed to give how-to information. [He has other stuff he can
talk about. He thinks Nazi Germany comes out well in a comparison with
contemporary America. He favors elimination of all restrictions on
posession and carrying of fully automatic weapons (okay, maybe this
isn't so ``other'') and he urges people not to vote because the voting
system is imperfect (this wording is perhaps a bit milder than his).
He has an interestingly expansive take on the Ninth Amendment, too.] A
lot of people who favor euthanasia would probably like to see him put
away (again) for enthusiasm.
Sevan Kevorkian, late of San Diego, Ca., was someone else. Not a known relation of the doctor, he nevertheless was also unusual, and he could probably have used some how-to information from that doctor. Oddly, however, things eventually sort of worked out. You could move the ``oddly'' around in that sentence and see how that works out. On Saturday, January 26, 2008, his girlfriend found him (Sevan, in case that was unclear) hanging unconscious from what I would call a hanger rod in a closet of his apartment. She cut him down and revived him. This was not a Snow White moment; Kevorkian was apparently unhappy about his revival. He attacked his girlfriend and started pulling her around the room by her hair. The scene attracted the attention of a neighborhood couple that was parking at a nearby curb. The man climbed into the apartment through a window to stop the assault and put Kevorkian in a carotid restraint (a/k/a ``sleeper hold''). A picture accompanying one news report showed that Kevorkian, age 36, had a thick, football-linemanish neck. Nevertheless, he lost consciousness again and was taken to a hospital, where he died five days later (11:58pm, Jan. 31). The good Samaritan who intervened in the altercation will be charged with second-degree murder for assisting in Kevorkian's Rube-Goldberg suicide (no, no, just a joke, of course... I hope).
- Turi KING
- A team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester announced
on Sept. 12, 2012, that they had dug up what they think might be the
lost remains of King Richard III. He was the last English king to die
in battle (Battle of Bosworth Field, 1485). It is hoped that some DNA
can be recovered from the skeleton, and for comparison a DNA swab has
been obtained from a direct descendant of Richard III's elder sister --
a 17th great grand nephew. Presumably they'll look for an mtDNA match.
Turi King is leading the DNA analysis.
- KISSIMMEE, Florida
- Take a guess, then see the AANR entry.
- Klaus-Dieter KLASS
- An entomologist at the Zoological Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark.
The insects as a class constitute the Class Insecta within the
standard taxonomy (for more on these hierarchical schemes, see King Phillip came over from German
shore, which isn't far from Denmark). Within this there are two
subclasses: wingless (Apterygota) and winged (Pterygota). (``Winged''
means that during some stage they have structures corresponding to
wings, or that they are apparently evolved from such animals; it
doesn't mean they can fly.)
Until 2002 there were only three orders within Subclass Apterygota: Archaeognatha (commonly: the jumping bristletails), Monura (extinct), and Thysanura (the common bristletails: silverfish and firebrats). Silverfish are commonly found in the basement of my old house.
Since 1914, no new insect order had been added to the 33 known within the entire Class Insecta, until Oliver Zompro, a graduate student at the MPI Plön, tried to classify an Eocene-era wingless insect encased in amber. He eventually found two similar museum specimens and suspected they were part of a new order. He sent them to Klass, who agreed. Order Mantophasmatodea of Subclass Apterygota was announced in April 2002. Before the year was out, living members of the order had been identified in Namibia, South Africa, and Tanzania. (They didn't get around much, did they?)
- ABEL KLEIN
- Abel Klein is professor in the Mathematics Department at
UC Irvine. I don't know that his first name
isn't biblical, but it would be cool if he was named for two
mathematicians. His work is in mathematical physics, but if he worked
in a physics department it would be called condensed matter physics.
That's okay; the great mathematician Felix Klein was planning to be a
physicist until he got dragooned into completing the geometry text of
his recently deceased dissertation advisor. It would be even cooler if
Felix's Klein group had been named for
Abel Klein, since it's Abelian. Old joke, no doubt.
- KLEIN group
- The Klein group is a group in the technical mathematical sense. It
is also known as the Klein four-group, as it has four elements. It was
named the Vierergruppe (German for `four-group' and origin of the
common symbols V and V4 for the group) by
Felix Klein in his 1884 book Vorlesungenüber
das Ikosaeder und die Auflösung der Gleichungen vom fünften
Grade. (`Lectures on the Icosahedron and the solution of Equations
of the Fifth Order.')
The Klein group is the smallest noncyclic group, and klein is the usual German word for `small.' Somewhere I need to mention that the mathematician Klein who is generally known as Felix Klein was named Christian Felix Klein at birth, and doing so here keeps the count of my violations of the no-single-sentence-paragraphs rule small.
- Barbara KNAPP
- Knapp is pronounced ``nap.'' She was taking one on a couch in her living room on April 20, 2012, when Erica McCaffery crashed her car into Knapp's house and killed her. On the way in, McCaffery's car hit a fire hydrant at the corner of Corby and Twyckenham, in South Bend, Indiana. The fire hydrant flew through a wall of the home and out the other side; the house has since been torn down. McCaffery appeared to have been racing another car. The two cars were side-by-side moving westbound on Corby Boulevard when the other car turned onto North Twyckenham Drive. (McCaffery, regretably, only turned southwest.) McCaffery and her passenger were found lying on the front yard with non-life-threatening injuries; Knapp was found under the car and rubble from her half-collapsed one-story home, and pronounced dead at the scene. The crash also killed one of Knapp's dogs. Another was found uninjured, cowering under a bed. The car was an Oldsmobile Aurora, but the crash took place at 1:30 am.
- Yoshio KOINE
- Editor in Chief of Kenkyusha's New English-Japanese Dictionary, 5th edn. Hey, Japanese is Greek to me.
- KOMPOT
- A Cambodian province. A 2009 Fox News slideshow (still accessible as of 2012), based on Reuters reporting, was entitled ``Crazy Cures From Around the World.'' The ninth item, which I won't describe, has this caption: ``Cambodia villagers collect the urine of a cow believed to have healing powers in Kompot province, about 62 miles [editor's note: that's very roughly 99.78 kilometers; you're very welcome] south of the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. Belief in the supernatural healing powers of animals such as cows, snakes and turtles is relatively common in Cambodia, where more than third of the population lives on less than $1 a day and few can afford modern medicines.''
In the West, by contrast, there are no crazy cures. Already in the twentieth century, for example, tuberculosis was prevented with synthetic cures. (I've temporarily misplaced a link to a Edward Lovett's hand drawn map, showing 60 places around West London where you could -- in 1914 -- buy necklaces of blue (and also some yellow) beads to protect against TB.
Incidentally, if you're thinking that cow piss could never pass for compote, you're thinking along the wrong lines. As the Wikipedia Compote entry used to warn: ``Not to be confused with Kompot.'' Fwiw, the dish (more like bowl) that my South American family calls compota is even more liquid than the Polish Kompot.
- Carmen KONTUR-Gronquist
- A shapely resident of Arlington, Oregon. A fitness buff, she had a picture taken that shows her attractive profile (this happens to be a principal sense of Kontur in German) outlined against the open driver's-side doorway of a firetruck, wearing only a black bra and panties, and a navel stud, and perhaps some sensible black shoes and socks, though that wasn't in the picture. Around the end of 2007, hard-copies of some of her pictures, which had been taken three years earlier, reportedly on some other town's firetruck (this was something people wanted to know), started to circulate around town. At that time, she posted the picture described above in her MySpace, um, profile, and it made national news in early January 2008.
Also at the time, she was the mayor of Arlington. Arlington had a population of about 500, so it's fair to say that the constituents she upset were village people (just not The Village People). Anyway, there was a recall election in late February, and she lost her job by a vote of 142 to 139. An opinion widely bruited about the blogosphere is that ``they're'' fake (not the pictures). I guess the voters wanted a mayor they could believe in. (But I say, if they don't come off with the bra, that's real enough. Go to the entry for pancreas -- located just below the bra -- for Jean Kerr's relevant thought on this matter.)
The mayor position is unpaid. She also worked as a bookkeeper for the local fire department, managed the rural health clinic office in town, and was a lifeguard at the town pool.
- Alfred M. KRIMAN
- Almost arrested once, in 1972. (Not counting the time I was stopped by plainclothesmen in Florence.) I could still get in trouble just explaining why (the other time).
- Victor KUTZ
- A guy who works in movie production. He's the only person I can find whose role in a production was ever listed as first second assistant director.
- Michael LACKLAND
- President and CEO of The Lackland Companies starting in May 1, 1994. He worked his way up some in the business, so I presume it's a family business that he did not found. He is also a primary shareholder of Lackland Self Storage, which operates self-storage facilities. Self-storage is used by people who lack the land, or at least the space, to keep all their property.
Most of the Lackland facilites are in New Jersey, the most densely populated state and the state which, as of 2010, had achieved the highest per-capita property-tax collections in the US. (It's just behind first-place Texas in average property-tax rates, but Texas has lower average property values. Texas also has no state income tax.)
- KYLE LAKE
- A late pastor of University Baptist Church, near Baylor University. Despite the learning-related context, Rev. Lake did something that seems quite stupid. While standing inside a baptismal font, in water up to his shoulder, he grabbed a microphone and electrocuted himself. He was pronounced dead shortly afterwards at Hillcrest Baptist Medical Center. Live and learn, as they say. Pastors at University Baptist Church routinely used a microphone during baptisms. The woman Lake was baptizing was not injured. This happened on October 30, 2005, before a morning congregation of 800, in Waco, Texas.
The name Kyle is derived from a Scottish topographic term meaning narrow strait or channel.
- Charles LAMB
- Charles Lamb was born in London in 1775. His father was both clerk and valet to a barrister called Samuel Salt.
Charles grew up to become a writer of poetry, plays, an influential book of dramatic criticism, and various other now-forgotten works. His least-forgotten work was a series of essays for the London Magazine, published from 1820 to 1823 under the pen-name Elia.
Probably the best-remembered essay of Lamb, published in 1823, was the evidently self-serving (or is that self-preserving?) A Dissertation upon Roast Pig.
- Chris LANDSEA
- A scientist with the NOAA. In the July 2006 issue of sciency rag Discover, he was described as a ``science officer [yes sir!] at the National Hurricane Center.'' Cf. William Seaman.
- Eugenio LA ROCCA
- As of Summer 2005, La Rocca was superintendent of Rome's monuments.
In Italian, the noun rocca (plural rocche) originally meant `rock,' from the Latin rocca. In that acception, the word has been replaced by roccia (from French roche). Rocca now has a principal acception derived from an earlier transferred sense of `fortress, stronghold.' That broad sense (along with the earlier sense of `rock') is found in Dante, and Rocca is the first element in many old place names. (All these Romance rocks are of female gender, by the way.)
Current usage is a bit narrower: a rocca now describes a fortress built on high land, or the highest local point, and protected by steep walls or rock faces. Rocche are found in population centers founded a long time ago, and in Italy that's a long time ago indeed.
As a technical term (that is, senso stretto), a rocca refers to military architecture of the Renaissance -- fortified works generally more squat and more massive than medieval castles.
(Florence's Belvedere was built at the end of the cinquecento -- completed 1595. It was originally named Forte di S. Maria; it quickly got its popular and current name from its great view of the city from a point high above the Arno. Its walls have slanted but steep bastions. I don't know what they did wrong -- maybe the villa in the middle looks too daintily out of place. Anyway, it's usually called a forte, less often a fortezza. In 1951, the Italian Army transferred it (back, I guess) to the city government, and after restoration it opened to tourists in 1955. When I visited in 1987 or so, I looked down one of the walls and saw some guy tending a little microfarm that abutted the fort. You know, maybe it's not entirely a bad thing that Europe is headed for negative population growth, crowded as it is.)
The word rocca has other, mostly attributive senses. A homograph of the word is discussed at the Rock entry. Also worth mentioning is the noun phrase rocca forte, commonly contracted (roccaforte). This tends to be used more loosely, and may be translated `stronghold.' It may refer to a fortress, or to a walled, fortified, or naturally protected city, and the term is usually used figuratively. The regular plural is roccheforti (or rocche forti); interestingly, the variant roccaforti is common when the term is used figuratively. Yes, we have a Roquefort entry.
- Bernard F.LAW
- Head of the archdiocese of Boston from March 1984 until December 2002. Elevated to cardinal (cardinality?) in 1985. For decades before then, priests in his diocese who had been accused of child sexual abuse were repeatedly suspended, sent for treatment, and then returned to minister and teach the love of God in different parishes. Archbishop Law continued this established practice.
In 1992 there was a spectacular scandal involving sexual abuse by Rev. James R. Porter. That year a national meeting of US bishops acknowledged that mistakes-were-made in handling abuse cases and announced a new policy of openness in dealing with allegations. In January 1993 Cardinal Law implemented what he described as a rigorous new policy to remove dangerous priests from service.
The Roman Catholic Church does not have an FOIA, so determining who knew what when is a bit difficult. In the case of one priest, Paul J. Mahan, a Boston Globe investigation (reported Feb. 19, 2002) found evidence that some of the psychological evaluations finding that Mahan was incorrigible and likely to reabuse were known to Law many years before Mahan was finally defrocked in 1997. With Mahan as with many others over the years, when the Boston archdiocese would finally stop recycling a sexual predator through different parishes, Law defrocked him but avoided getting the organs of state law involved. However, this was perfectly legal: the Massachusetts laws that require most other caregivers to report incidents of sex abuse to police for possible prosecution specifically exempt clergymen. Thank God -- otherwise Law might have gotten in trouble with the law!
The problems that eventually brought him down in 2002 began in the first year of the rule of Law. They centered on John Geoghan, a priest who was accused of molesting boys. Following the accusations, Law moved him to a new parish in September 1984. In 1998, Geoghan was defrocked. The Boston Archdiocese has been negotiating with upwards of 450 of his victims, and by December 2002 its accountants recommended that the archdiocese file for bankruptcy, since it doesn't have the 100 million dollars needed to pay the negotiated settlements. More later.
SatireWire noticed the irony of Law's name also.
- Billy LAWLESS
- As of 2007, Lawless is a Chicago-based ``immigration rights organizer.'' That means he agitates so that people illegally resident in the US (``undocumented'' aliens) may become legally resident.
- Lana LAWLESS
- She used to be a cop. There are probably a lot of cops named Lawless, because Lawless is not an unusual name (e.g., see Billy LAWLESS, supra). As Lana explains, ``For 18 years, I was a cop for the city of Rialto, one of the most violent cities in Southern California. I worked the gang unit. I had a very tough and mean exterior. People didn't want to mess with me.'' However, she ``was compassionate inside. I always let the gay guys go; they had enough drama in their lives.'' That was all back when she was a burly man. Then she put some ``drama'' into her own life, by going from burly to girly. She had her gender surgically ``reassigned,'' as the expression goes.
She also had the associated hormone therapy, of course. ``I am a woman,'' insisted Lawless, who adopted her new name from classic-movie star Lana Turner but declines to discuss her previous name. ``I've lost muscle mass. I don't have big guns [biceps]. They give you a drug that stops you from producing testosterone. Your muscles atrophy. In about seven months, I went from 245 pounds to 175 pounds. I've gained back a little bit, but I feel like I don't have any power.''
The reason for her insistence is that on October 22, 2008, she won the World Long Drive (women's) Championship at Mesquite, Nevada. Lawless doesn't sound as powerless as she claims. Lawless is open about her gender history (I guess ``sexual history'' wouldn't quite capture the idea). In 2005, the USGA approved transgender involvement in golf competition. Various rules were devised to govern transgender golf competition, and Lawless was required to provide doctor reports, lab results showing that her hormone levels were within normal female limits, and had to submit to onsite testing. Still, this is much like deciding to allow participation by people who have used banned steroids -- the steroids in this case are natural, but even after they have been flushed, many of their effects remain.
Let's put it another way. Women who used to be men probably represent a tiny fraction of women who play golf (or tennis, for that matter). That even one should win a women's world championship suggests that such women are statistically over-represented, which is as much as to say they have a systematic advantage. Lana Lawless didn't break any rules or laws. What some may regard as ``lawless,'' at least relatively so, is the situation itself. Less than a month after the Lawless win, the situation (the women's division championship) itself went out of existence. For the official explanation, see the entry for WLD Champion.
- Lord Justice LAWS
- Sir John Laws is a lord justice of the Court of Appeals in the UK. He served as a high court judge of the Queen's Bench Division from 1992 to 1998. It seems the UK makes special efforts to keep this kind of work in the family; cf. Lord Justice Judge. (We list other noteworthy judge names.)
- PAGE LAWS
- A professor of English at Norfolk State University (NSU) since 1987. Her graduate degrees are in Comparative Literature, from Yale University.
- Nancy LAYTART
- After working there for twenty years as a waitress, Nancy Laytart bought the Original Pancake House in South Bend in 2001.
- Dr. M.D. LEARNED
- A very learned fellow, though not a medical doctor. Here are some highlights and honors from his life (you can probably skip the first item):
On Tuesday, October 18, 1898, at 8 pm, memorial services were held in New York in honor of Prince Otto von Bismarck, who had died the previous July 30. They were held at the Metropolitan Opera House, with the assistance of Madame Johanna Gadski, soprano. Participating in the services were the Liederkranz and Arion Societies, and the United Singers of New York. The service was followed by a torchlight procession that lasted from 10 pm to midnight. Here is the price of seats, as given in the classified ad in the October 17 New York Times:
Orchestra Chairs . . . . . . . . . $2.50 Orchestra Seats . . . . . . . . . 2.00 Dress Circle . . . . . . . . . . 1.50 Balcony . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.00 Family Circle . . . . . . . . . . 0.50 General Admission . . . . . . . . 1.00 Boxes, 6 Seats . . . . . . . . . . 25.00 Boxes, 4 Seats . . . . . . . . . . 15.00The headlined eulogies were delivered by Prof. Marion Dexter Learned (in English) and by the Hon. Carl Schurz (in German). Learned's talk was reported in detail; Schurz's talk was described in brief generalities.On July 9, 1900, Prof. Marion D. Learned was elected president of the National German-American Teachers' Association.
On December 15, 1900, when the College Entrance Examination Board of the Middle States and Maryland made public the Board of Examiners for 1901, Prof. M.D. Learned of the University of Pennsylvania was named as the chief examiner for German. I'm sure you want to know the whole list of chief examiners. You can find it at the CEEB entry.
In 1909, a special Report to the New York Times, dateline May 1, Berlin, reported that Prof. M.D. Learned of the University of Pennsylvania and Prof. E.T. Pierce, President of the California State Normal College at Los Angeles, were visiting Berlin. It was noted that Prof. Learned had been honored with an invitation to deliver one of the lectures at the previous week's annual celebration of Shakespeares's birthday, held at Weimar by the German Shakespeare Society.
You know, if you only came here following a link to the stuff about Professor Learned, you should scroll back up a bit and read about Nancy Laytart. I think that's pretty cool, and it's more recent. See also Billings Learned Hand.
- William S. LEARNED
- This Learned was born in Alpena, Michigan, on June 5, 1876. He doesn't seem to be any known relation of M.D. Learned (supra), but he also went to Germany to do graduate work (that was where to go) and he was also involved in standardized testing (this was rather less common).
``William S. Learned served the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as a staff officer from 1913 until his retirement in 1946. During the third of a century of his professional labor as the `Scholar of 522 Fifth Avenue,' he participated in generously financed exploratory research as a member of the foundation's Division of Educational Enquiry. ... His reputation was most widely based on his work as founder and director of the Graduate Record Examination....''
The quoted text is from page 9 of Paul Douglass's Teaching for Self-Education As a Life Goal (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1960), a biography of Learned.
- Friedrich LESSER
- Known as the king of physico-theology during its heyday (1730's to 1760's). His Lithotheologie [`Stone Theology'], a heavy tome published in 1735, burdened the reader with over 1300 pages. It explored the ways that stones -- even though we humans misuse them -- allow us to marvel at God's wisdom. His Insectotheologie (1740) accomplished the experimental confirmation of divine wisdom on the basis of entomological speculation. You may be able to guess the punch line of Snail Theology (1744), Lesser's 984-page joke.
Physico-theology was essentially worthless, and Lesser gave much more of it.
The comparative and superlative (nonabsolute) forms of adjectives present an interesting asymmetry: these forms are thought of as expressing ``more'' of the same, even when the same expresses a notion of less (privative). This is explicit in the periphrastic forms: longer is more long, but shorter (less long) is also more short. Fewer are less than few, but more few. (If you already knew what I meant, then what I wrote won't have confused you.)
- Julian L'ESTRANGE
- Author of a small book entitled The Big Book of National Insults, which consists mostly of quotes from literature and public affairs in a jingoistic or xenophobic vein. The first section dedicated to aspersions against a specific country is that for France, naturellement.
The copyright is assigned to the publisher, and one might wonder whether the author name is a pseudonym. The introduction, however, is subscribed with the author's name and an unnecessarily specific address in Greater London. Moreover, the same author is credited (I think that's the word) with other works, including at least one book of sports insults, and The Big Book of Sex ``Quotes'': 1001 Quips and Quotes.
- CARMELO LETTERE
- The illustrator of Giambattista Basile's The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones (a translation by Nancy L. Cannepa of Basile's Pentamerone). In Italian, Lettere means `letters,' and caramello `caramel, candy,' so with a little license, ``carmelo lettere'' can be read as `I candify letters.' And what the heck, Basile wrote in the Neapolitan language anyway.
- Randy LIGHTFOOT
- American bowler. He won the Masters tournament in 1981.
- Sandra Ramsey LINES
- A document expert and fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. (She was in the news in September 2004. The CBS TV show ``60 Minutes'' produced memos purported to have been written by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, one of George W. Bush's commanders in 1972 and 1973. They were quickly and widely denounced as forgeries, and Lines was hardly the first to do so, but she has the name.)
- Damon LINKER
- As of early 2009, Linker writes a blog for The New Republic. Like most blog postings, his contain links.
Linker also serves as a kind of human link -- between political journals that don't have a lot of contributors (or past contributors) in common -- because he's a political turncoat. Linker has had essays published in Commentary, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, journals with great prestige on the political right. He was also published in the Wall Street Journal, whose editorial staff leans right. From May 2001 to February 2005, he worked at First Things, an important politically conservative monthly with an emphasis on religion, first as associate editor and then as editor. Then in 2006 he published The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege. I don't think he's welcome at his old haunts any more.
- IRA LOSS
- A securities analyst! On May 11, 1999, he provided the New York Times quotation of the day:
``Just as there is a lifelong search for the fountain of youth, there is a lifelong search for an easy way to lose weight.''
He was commenting on the prospects for the then-new diet drug orlistat (brand name Xenical), which had recently been approved for sale in the US. Loss, with HSBC Securities, said it had ``the potential to be a Viagra-type product in a different field.''
- LOST City
- On January 3, 1970, a meteorite was seen over a large area of the US. Its fall was the first to be recorded by the Prairie Network, a NASA-funded system of 16 cameras that had been operated by the Smithsonian Institution's Astrophysical Observatory since 1964. The path was photographed by two of the cameras (Hominy, Oklahoma, and Pleasanton, Kansas). A trajectory and impact point were estimated from these, and six days later Gunther Schwartz, the field manager of the network, found the meteorite... near Lost City. The meteorite, which turned out to be an H5 chondrite, weighed 21.6 pounds (at ground level). It was estimated to have had a mass of about a ton when it entered the atmosphere. On January 17, Richard Halpain, a farmer near Tulsa, Oklahoma, while looking for a lost calf, found a small rock that seemed to be charred. That turned out on analysis to be a ten-ounce fragment lost by the same meteorite.
Lost City is a reasonably well-defined place, about 45 miles east of Tulsa, OK. But if you went looking for a city there you might indeed conclude that it was lost. Lost City is not an incorporated municipality and as such has no official boundaries. It is the name of a locally commonly recognized little concentration of human population, and the US census bureau defines its boundaries for statistical purposes. Within the 23.3 square miles of that CDP, the 2000 census gave a population of 809.
- Christopher LOVE
- Grief-stricken after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this alleged 43-year-old from suburban Philadelphia emailed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein urging him to set aside his differences with Washington and join a US-led coalition against ''terrorism, hunger and strife in every country.'' Love is a software engineer, but he didn't actually get ahold of Saddam's email address. He emailed the Iraqi News Agency, which agreed to pass the message along. Love received a reply from Saddam on October 18 (Reuters did not report the return address) calling him a ''brother in the family of mankind'' and expressing condolences for the victims of the attacks. The pitiless torturer, mass murderer, and ruthless dictator also wrote: ''God has created us and to Him we return. May God give you a long life.''
Sometimes love is not all you need.
- Jane LOVE
- Barnes & Noble's religion-book buyer. She was quoted in an April 16, 2009, Time magazine article on the latest ``Romance Fiction Trend: Amish Love Stories.''
- Dr. Susan LOVE
- Susan Love, MD, is president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation. What with Dr. Phil and Dr. Ruth already out there (not to mention Dr. Romance... at the Desirable Men entry, for example), this title might be misunderstood -- especially as the good doctor has a book out called Dr. Susan Loves Breast Book. Oh wait, got that wrong; it's ``Love's Breast.'' No confusion is possible, then. Dr. Love has a project going called ``Love/Avon Army of Women,'' to recruit at least a million womens willing to consider participating in surveys and other breast-cancer research.
- Mildred and Richard LOVING
- An interracial couple from Virginia who married in D.C. at a time (1958) when interracial marriage was illegal in their home state. After they returned to Virginia, they were arrested, pled guilty to violating an anti-miscegenation statute, and were given one-year prison sentences suspended on the condition that they leave the state. They settled in D.C., but eventually their case became the nucleus of a class action supported by the ACLU: Loving v. Virginia. The case reached the US Supreme Court, which unanimously overturned their convictions and found the Virginia laws to be in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The Romans could have told you: amor vincit statum virgineum.
Virginia, of course, was named after Elizabeth I -- ``the virgin queen.'' In the 1960's or 70's, the state of Virginia began an advertising campaign to promote tourism with the slogan ``Virginia is for Lovers.''
- Wanda LUCK
- On Sunday, March 29, 2009, one Robert Stewart of Carthage, North Carolina, went on a shooting spree at a local nursing home (Pinelake Health and Rehab, specializing in Alzheimer's care), killing seven residents and a male nurse and injuring several others. The carnage would probably have been much worse at the 110-bed facility, but police officer Justin Garner responded to the emergency call and won a gunfight with Stewart. (Garner was shot three times in the leg and Stewart took at least one bullet in the chest; both survived.) There might possibly have been fewer innocent casualties had someone on the staff had a gun.
Anyway, Wanda was very lucky not to have been there at the time, because it seems she may have been a target. She and her husband Stewart (the same) were recently estranged, and she was a CNA on the staff at the home.
- Karl LUEGER
- The German verb lugen, `to peek, spy' (cognate with English look) gave rise to surnames Luger (see next) and Lueg. It is probably also the origin of the less common surname Lueger. The plain sense of the common noun Lueger (or Lüger) in modern German, however, is `liar' (from the verb luegen or lügen, cognate with English lie).
In 1900, Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna. He was the first European politician to gain significant office with a prominently antisemitic campaign.
- Georg LUGER
- In German, lugen is `to peek, spy' (cognate with English look). A Luger is either someone who peers from a hidden place (Leuer, which means and is cognate with `lair') or the place itself. (The surname Luger is usually regarded as being derived from the latter sense.) Georg Luger designed semiautomatic pistols, manufactured from 1900 on, with 7.65 and 9 mm bores. The Luger P-08 (first manufactured in 1908) was the German army's standard sidearm during both world wars.
- August Marie Louis LUMIÈRE:
- /* Make believe this is a switch statment and fall through */
- Charles Antoine LUMIÈRE:
- /* Make believe this is a switch statment and fall through */
- Louis Jean LUMIÈRE
- Charles Lumière ran a photographic firm in Lyon, France, and his sons August and Louis worked for him there, as a manager and a scientist, resp. After their father retired in 1892, the brothers worked on the new technology of projected motion pictures. (Specifically, externally projected motion pictures. The Edison kinetoscope was a peep show.) The Lumière brothers were not the first to invent such devices, and Maximillian Skladanowsky was the first (beat them by almost two months) to charge admission to view projected movies. However, the Lumières' cinématographe was much more practical than Skladanowsky's Bioskop, and it was their device that inaugurated the successful commercialization of projected movies. (There is also some question whether the Lumières' cinématographe was the same as the cinématographe patented earlier by Léon Bouly.)
Lumière means `light' in French. It's not entirely relevant to the people described in this entry, but I feel like pointing out, that lumière in French has a range of meanings similar to that of `light' in English. In particular, it refers both to light of the sort that always travels at the speed of light, and to lights that are relatively stationary and emit light of the other kind. There is also, in English, what one might regard as a semantically offset ambiguity in the word lamp, which conventionally refers to an device that provides light, but may refer more specifically to the light source that is part of the device. Anglophone lighting engineers have a solution to this problem: they use the word lamp only for a light source, and they use the French word luminaire for a lighting unit, including one or more lamps as well as the housing and related paraphernalia. For a bit more on the semantics, see the LUZ item below.
- JESUS LUZ
- That's Spanish for `Jesus Light.' I am sorry to note that luz (in both Spanish and Portuguese -- like lumière in French, vide supra) only has the meaning of `light' in the sense of visible electromagnetic radiation and in closely related senses, and not in the sense of unheavy or unserious. That's too bad, because something like ``Jesus Lite'' would be a very apt name for an idol of any sort who had a close relationship with (not just any Italian madonna but the) Madonna (neé Ciccone), a woman old enough to be his mother.
Madonna, as you probably know, is an adherent of a Hollywood variant of Kabbalah, and Kabbalah is a Jewish thing. So the old Material Girl has a lot in common with the Virgin Mary, who was Jewish (and probably still is, by some accounts, though she is getting on in years) and had a boy named Jesus. Jesus Luz, a Brazilian model, dated Madonna from the end of the (US) fall semester until around spring break, when she announced the break-up during a ten-minute chat with fans on Twitter. (No, I don't think he's still in school. He was 22 in most reports, though one of his former girlfriends was still 18 when her opinions of the Madonna fling were published.)
- MACARTHUR
- The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awards no-strings-attached fellowships to people it deems impressively worthy. Informally, these are known as the MacArthur ``genius grants.'' For the nomen ain't omen content, please proceed now to the invisible ink entry.
- James E. MADDUX
- Chapter two of Handbook of Positive Psychology, ed. C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (Oxford Un. Pr., 2002) is his article ``Stopping the `Madness' : Positive Psychology and the Deconstruction of the Illness Ideology and the DSM,'' pp. 13-25.
- Three SHEPHERDS of MAD River Valley
- Not a person, not even three persons, but an ill-omened name nonetheless. A facility in Vermont identified only as ``plant number 50-50'' (sounds iffy to me) produced specialty cheese under the name ``Three Shepherds of Mad River Valley,'' using milk from sheep later suspected of having been infected with a sheep version of Mad Cow Disease. [That would normally be scrapie, which is not known to be contagious to humans, but it might be some new transmissible form (TSE). See also Douglass HOGG.]
- STAFF Sgt. Michelle MANHART
- A drill sergeant in the US Air Force was demoted to senior airman and removed from extended active duty (reverting to Air National Guard status) after posing nude and in uniform in a six-page pictorial, as they're called, in the February 2007 issue of Playboy magazine. Commenting on these actions to the AP on Valentine's Day 2007, she said ``disappointed in our system'' and that ``they went too far with it.'' She was shown in uniform, yelling and holding weapons under the headline ``Tough Love.'' Other pages showed her partially clothed and nude. After the issue was published in January, Manhart was relieved of her duties pending an investigation. She soon received a letter of reprimand. She claimed that she was ``told'' not to talk to the news media; an Air Force spokesman said that she was ``not prohibited'' from talking to the media.
As of this writing, she is trying to resign from the National Guard, and looks forward to pursuing a modeling and entertainment career. She used the future subjunctive in commenting that ``my family is going to stay here, but I do have plans to pursue anything that comes my way, whether it be in LA or New York or Hollywood.'' Thirty-year-old Manhart has two children; her husband is also in the military. Manhart disappointed grammarians, who had started to become interested, by continuing thus: ``As far as moving on in my life, I'm happy. I hope this works out for my family and me.''
- Jerome G. MANIS
- Co-editor, with Samuel I. Clark, of a collection of gassy essays called Man and Society: An Introduction to Social Science (New York: Macmillan Co., 1960, when Manis and Clark were associate professors at WMU).
- Harvey C. MANSFIELD
- Author of a book entitled Manliness. Mansfield argues that manliness is an underappreciated virtue. His idea of manliness, by the way, is not mastery of the manly arts (you know -- things like opening jammed jam jars, carving the turkey, fixing the nuclear reactor). He means something like ``confidence in the face of risk.'' (Oddly enough, unreasonable confidence is known as ``cockiness,'' iirc.) Anyway, he surely knows whereof he speaks: he's a conservative professor of government in the belly of the leftist beast (Harvard U.).
- Father MARCOS A. MARCOS
- Marcos is the Coptic form of English `Mark.' St. Mark evangelized in Alexandria (which had a very large community of Hellenized Jews) and is regarded as the founder of the Coptic Church. Father Marcos (I hope that familiarity is not too presumptious; if it is, I'll use Father Marcos instead) has kicked around -- he was at the St. George Coptic Church of Greater Philadelphia at one time, but is now, appropriately, Hegomenos at a St. Mark's Coptic Orthodox Church (this one in Toronto).
This name and that of former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali suggest to me that repeated name elements are a relatively popular style among Copts, but I'm not sure. All I can add is that Boutros is the Coptic form of Peter (Greek Petros), and that Boutros Ghali (born 1846) was a Coptic statesman. His assassination on February 21, 1910, ``sparked serious quarrels between Copts and Muslims, lasting throughout the years before World War I'' according to the article on him in (by Doris Behrens-Abuseif) in the Coptic Encyclopedia (ed. Aziz S. Atiya).
There is also a Bishoy (Metropolitan of two or more places I can't parse in Egypt; read it yourself) who is listed by Amazon.com as an author named ``Bishoy Bishoy Nicola.'' I suspect that this is just another instance of Amazon.com's mangling of author names, and that other on-line bookstores are following Amazon's lead error, but I don't plan to order the book to find out. His original name was Makram Eskander Nicola, and he was named Toma El-Souriani upon consecration as a monk. He received a number of promotions, mostly reportedly against his will, and at some point became Bishop Bishoy, before being elevated to the rank of Metropolitan.
- Javier MARISCAL
- He is the illustrator of a new (in 2008) edition of Simone Ortega's 1080 Recetas de Cocina (`1080 Recipes'). According to a <CasaDelLibro.com> newsletter advertising it in July 2008, this is the best-selling cookbook in Spain. This edition features 500 original drawings and 104 color photographs and, as always, an author with a French given name.
When I first saw the ad with Mariscal's name highlighted, my immediate thought was that mariscos (loosely `shellfish') are a popular food in Spain. The word marisco is a nominalized old Spanish adjective meaning `marine.' The word mariscal is not. It's another French loan, this one of maréchal. The DLE, the TLF, and the OED all agree on a Germanic origin with the ultimate sense of `horse servant.' The marshal has evidently come up in the world, over the past couple of thousand years. Perhaps I should mention that the Spanish are sort of the Chinese of Europe: they're, um, gastronomically adventuresome. So if we adjust the sense to `horse server,' we have a more legitimate instance of nomen est omen.
[The common Germanic etymology of marshall, maréchal, and mariscal will be more intuitive if you remember the English word mare. The Latin word mare, as discussed at the mar entry, gave rise to various other words besides marisco. A more precise definition of mariscos would be `marine invertebrates, especially edible crustaceans and mollusks.']
- Jose MATADA
- Matar is the infinitive form of a Spanish verb and means `kill.' The related word matanza is a noun whose meanings partly coincide with those of the English noun `killing.' The feminine form of the past participle, matada, functions primarily as an adjective, with some extensions of meaning beyond `killed.' (For example, the adjective sense of `boring' is attested in Cuba and Costa Rica.) If the word matanza did not exist, matada might well have a few of its noun uses. Nevertheless, matada does have one widely used noun sense, attested in Cuba, El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela and regarded as a colloquialism: In those places it means a violent blow or fall.
Jose Matada of Mozambique (if you're good I'll look up the meanings in Portuguese) was a landing-gear stowaway on a Heathrow-bound jet in September 2013. He fell out when the plane deployed its landing gear on approach, at an altitude of 2000 feet. [Reports of such incidents often include phrasing like ``fell to his death,'' but the conditions at cruising altitude are vicious -- temperatures of around -48 deg. F and pressures of about 0.3 atmospheres at 30,000 feet, according to the FAA -- so only that minority who aren't crushed to death in the machinery and don't freeze to death or suffocate from the low oxygen pressure may die by hitting the ground fast. The rest are dead on arrival. I figure the ones who fall out near the destination are more likely to be the ones who died en route anyway.]
- Shawnta M. McBRIDE
- On September 9, 2004, when Shawnta McBride married Robert K. Konaido, she kept her maiden name. Between the following October 25 and June 6, 2005, she remarried five times at the Gwinnett County Courthouse in Metro Atlanta, allegedly neglecting to divorce (or kill or whatever) any of the husbands. On October 11, 2006, warrants were issued for her arrest on five counts of bigamy and false swearing. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution later reviewed state marriage records and discovered another couple of marriages, one each in Cobb and Fulton. It was reported that the ``motivation for McBride's alleged numerous nuptials [was] unclear.'' However, Lorraine Stafford, Gwinnett's Probate Court administrator, noted that of McBride's six grooms at Gwinnett, four were born in Ghana, one was from Morocco, and one was a London native. As of July 2008, she was apparently still on the lam.
Gwinnett had some other bigamy cases in 2006 that issued in the arrests of two men in September. Over the course of half a year Alvin Lorenzo Murdock allegedly took six brides. Another, William James (``Woody'') Fairley, married eight women over one year in Gwinnett alone. Mr. Fairley, a cook in College Park, Georgia, married at least twice more in Cobb County. Gwinnett issues close to 4000 marriage licenses a year, so the three separate magistrates who each married him twice in Gwinnett might be excused for not recognizing that Fairley, a 6-foot, 230-pound man with a thin mustache, was a ``regular.'' Of Fairley's ten wives, six were from Ghana and the others were from Cameroon, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. They ranged in age from 28 to 45.
``Green-card marriages'' are not unusual, of course, but the usual pattern seems to be for a broker to charge between $2,500 and $6,000 to match an individual US citizen, single, with a foreigner (often from Ghana) seeking sham marriage and permanent residence.
- Donald A. McQUARRIE and PETER A. ROCK
- Professors at the University of California at Davis, and coauthors of a college textbook published by W.H. Freeman and Co., New York. Alas, it's an introductory chemistry textbook. It doesn't say much about rocks or petrology or quarries, but it does have the necessary elements.
- Kendrick MEEK
- A US representative from the state of Florida, he ``inherited'' his seat from his mother Carrie.
- Dr. Terry MEEK
- I would hardly mention this moderately common name were it not for the fact that he teaches chemistry in the same school where someone with the slightly more common name of Coward (Mr. Adrian Coward) teaches computer programming. (The school is UWI.)
- The MENNINGERS
- Dr. C.F. Menninger, and his sons Drs. Will and Karl Menninger, were among the pioneers of psychiatry in the US, and in 1925 founded the Menninger Clinic outside of Topeka, Kansas. (The clinic has evolved into a number of related institutions.) The meninges are the three soft membranes that envelop the brain. Drs. Roy W. Menninger and W. Walter Menninger (``Dr. Walt''), sons of Will Menninger, continuted to lead the Menninger clinic.
- Gordon Kenneth MESSENGER
- An officer in the Royal Marines. In late 2009 he was promoted to the rank of major general and achieved his life's nominal destiny by being appointed lead spokesman on British operations in Afghanistan. Cf. Larry Speakes.
- John MILES
- He won the Boston Marathon in 1926, as an unknown, and again in 1929.
- Joseph-DÉSIRÉ Mobutu
- In French I suppose désiré is the past participle of désirer, `to want,' so the name Désiré is a gerund meaning `the one who is desired,' or, um, `wanted one.' The person who originally bore this name eventually adopted a longer one:
- Mobutu Sese Seko KUKU Ngbendu wa za Banga
- I'm not really sure what parts of the name to highlight here, because I lack the knowledge requisite to perform a lexical analysis. This is the name that Joseph-Désiré Mobutu adopted around the time that he renamed the Belgian Congo Zaïre. The Congo River became the Zaïre River, but since the (former French) Congo is on the right bank of the river, it's not so surprising that that renaming didn't take so well. The name Zaïre was apparently based on a Portuguese version of a local name of the river. All non-native place names were also changed; the capital's name changed from Leopoldville to Kinshasa. Christian given names were also banned. Part of the national rebranding (an ``authenticity'' campaign) was the replacement of Monsieur and Madame by Citoyen and Citoyenne. This last bit is not entirely innovative. The French Revolution adopted the same language reform, and until that revolution really started to bare its fangs, it was a popular fashion in New York City to use the appellations Citizen and Citizeness.
Mobutu made some other cosmetic changes, the most immediately visible one being the proscription of formal civilian Western attire in favor of a tunic outfit called l'abacost (q.v.). (On the subject of cosmetic changes, incidentally -- skin lighteners were illegal.)
The most fateful changes he made were not, however, qualitative innovations. He and his mismanagement team, as we might say, were corrupt and economically disastrous for the country in the usual ways, only more so. Apparently the word kleptocracy was specifically coined for his régime. He was usually aligned with the West during the Cold War, though he effectively played the two sides. In his early days he is reputed to have played informant to Belgian intelligence, the French were a solid ally, and he usually took the US side in the regional skirmishes of the Cold War. He was rewarded with foreign aid, at least. Therefore, all the bad stuff he did was the fault of the US, and if it hadn't been for the CIA, the former Belgian Congo would today be an advanced industrial democracy.
Anyway, enough trivia. The new name that Mobutu adopted for himself (Sese Seko...) was typically described in news reports as having the official or usual translation `the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake' (with some variation in tense and hyphenation). In case that looks embellished, I've also encountered `the earthy, the peppery, all-powerful warrior who, by his endurance and will to win, goes from contest to contest leaving fire in his wake.' I should probably leave it at that, except to say that in May 1997, as a rebellion led by Laurent Kabila chased him from power, his own elite guard, left behind, fired on the cargo plane he used to flee the country.
But I just can't leave well enough alone. I'd figure that the official translation, if there really was one, would be into French first. French newspapers, it turns out, generally gave the official translation as `l'homme qui vole de victoire en victoire et ne laisse rien derrière lui.' English of that would have to be close to `the man who flies [or flees] from victory to victory and leaves nothing behind him.' Considering the thorough three-decade-long looting of the country, the ``flees ... and ... leaves nothing behind him'' was not far off the mark. Even the little economic infrastructure left behind by the Belgians was mostly allowed to fall into disrepair, and nationalization of foreign-owned businesses scared away foreign investment (duh). And when he left, of course, it was indeed a great victory -- for his decades-long adversary Laurent-Désiré Kabila. If there is in fact a single word that might be translated both rien (`nothing') and `fire,' it might be ashes.
It would probably help to know what the source language was, so it might help to know that Mobutu was a member of the Ngbandi tribe. I see the word Ngbendu as part of his name. Perhaps some variable interpolation took place in the translation process. That might begin to explain the alternate translation that was often given: `the rooster in the farmyard who covers all the hens' (`le coq de la basse-cour qui couvre toutes les poules').
- P. Moitrel d'ELEMENT
- An eighteenth-century chemical researcher. Despite the auspicious name, he's not widely remembered. He doesn't have an entry in even one of the dozen or so major encyclopedias I checked. (That's not to say I didn't learn anything useful. I learned that the mathematician Abraham de Moivre was born to Protestant parents in Vitry, France, in 1667, and took refuge in England after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and I learned that la Enciclopedia Italiana treats i and j as equivalent in alphabetization. Just to be sure, I went ahead and discovered that Dirk van Delen was a Dutch artist, main entry under Deelen, Dirk van.)
Anyway, here's what I glean from Chronologie der Naturwissenschaften, ed. Karl-Heinz Schlote (Verlag Harri Deutsch, 2002): in 1719 Moitrel d'Element described techniques for working with gases over water. According to A Short History of Chemistry, by J.R. Partington (various publishers, 3/e 1957; Dover reprint 1989): ``The manipulation of air over water was described by Moitrel d'Element in 1719.'' Neither source gives his first initial. (I found that here; for 3000 euros I can buy a book that contains various texts of Moitrel as an appendix.) Apparently his work was entitled La manière de rendre l'air visible and republished in 1777.
- Chris MONEYMAKER
- (Real name: Christopher Brian Moneymaker. His friends call him ``Money.'') He earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Tennessee, then a master's degree (in what and from where I don't know). He was working as an accountant and playing in online poker rooms, and the prize in one online tournament was a $10,000 buy-in to the World Series of Poker. His father Mike Moneymaker and a friend really named David Gamble put up some money to cover the cost for the trip in exchange for a portion of his winnings. At the age of 27, he won the 2003 WSOP ($2.5 million).
- MONKEY BUSINESS
- The name of a boat. Senator Gary Hart of Colorado was photographed there with a woman not his wife in his lap.
- Nate MONTANA
- Nate Monanta is the son of Joe Montana, standout quarterback at the University of Notre Dame and Hall-of-Fame quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. The son also played quarterback and also went to Notre Dame. At the end of the fall semester of his junior year he was far down the QB depth chart at ND and transfered (begining of 2011) to the University of... Montana. (He was red-shirted as a freshman, so as a ``senior-to-be'' he has two years of elibility remaining. The quarterback position is open at Montana because starter in 2009 and 2010, Oregon transfer Justin Roper, exhausted his eligibility.)
- HUGH MOORE
- Author of a book of poems entitled The Invited Guest (Williamsville, Ill.: H. Moore [hmmm], 1994). Invited by whom?
- HUGH MOORE of Carrington, Foster County, North Dakota
- The University of North Dakota, Extension Division, has this archival material: essays written by Hugh Moore, of Carrington, Foster County, N.D., for correspondence courses in American government and introductory poetry. Fifty items. Anybody is allowed to visit the Department of Special Collections at UND and just look at it.
- HUGH MOORE (1887-1972)
- In Easton, Pennsylvania, there's a Hugh Moore Park. The Lafayette College Libraries, in the same town, are home to a ``Hugh Moore Dixie Cup Company Collection'' of archival material spanning the years 1905-1986. The ``bulk 1910-1955'' material occupies 42 linear ft. (39 record cartons, 6 oversize boxes, 7 file drawers). But does it come with a convenient dispenser? The material ``[d]ocuments the corporate history of the Dixie Cup Company and the role of its president Hugh Moore, a pioneer in the paper cup and vending industry.''
Easton was Hugh Everett Moore's home from 1947 until his death in 1972, age 85. Moore got into the paper cup business the same way Kellogg got into the breakfast cereal business: practical idealism. Moore was in his second year at Harvard in 1907 when he became interested in an idea of his brother-in-law Lawrence Luellen: to replace the common (unsanitary!) tin dipper with water vendors and individual paper cups. He gave up his newspaper job and dropped out of Harvard the next year. You can make money selling water.
He married in 1917 and had two sons (one named Hugh). From the 1940's to the 1960's he was heavily involved with Planned Parenthood and other organizations that oppose population growth.
- HUGH MOORE (1808-1837)
- Author of Memoir of Col. Ethan Allen, containing the most interesting incidents connected with his private and public career (Plattsburg, N.Y.: O.R. Cook, 1834). Okay, I'm not getting it.
Hugh Moore was also editor (1833-4) of the Burlington (Vermont) Sentinel.
- L. HUGH MOORE, Jr.
- Author of Robert Penn Warren and History; the Big Myth We Live (The Hague: Mouton, 1970 [1971]). I still don't get it, but I think I can see a pattern developing.
He also coauthored A Concise Handbook of English Composition (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972) with Karl F. Knight.
None of this is really as funny as I feel I had a right to expect.
- Bryan Scott MORON
- On January 4, 2008, he allegedly lost control of his truck and struck a mailbox, then a house. Moron, of Burleson, Texas, failed sobriety tests at the scene, and his blood alcohol level was recorded as being above twice the legal limit for driving. He was arrested at the scene. He was also alleged to have been driving at a high rate of speed when the accident occurred. To be fair, there are plenty of other stupid things he might have done.
- Ciriaco MORÓN Arroyo
- Author of The Humanities in the Age of Technology (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Univ. or Amer. Pr., 2002). Morón is a MOULDS
- Richard Moulds is the author of chapter 3 in the second volume of Cognard: ``Design and Stress Calculations for Bonded Joints'' (pp. 197-231).
One set of meanings of the word mould (spelled mold in the US, but R.J. Moulds is British) have to do with giving form. One who molds gives shape, paradigmatically to a viscous substance that subsequently hardens into the imparted form. Moulds's chapter is concerned with bonding by adhesives which are applied in viscous liquid form and subsequently harden. Moulds is concerned specifically with how the geometry of the bond -- the way the bond is molded -- affects the strength of the bond.
- Lorenzo MUSIC
- He was a voice artist and a musician. Okay, okay, he was also an actor, writer, and producer. And I have to admit that he wasn't born ``Lorenzo Music.'' He was born ``Gerald David Music.'' He changed the name for spiritual reasons that I don't plan to understand.
- MUTTWA
- This appears to be a blend -- a ``port man tow,'' I think they call it -- of mutt and fatwa. I'm not going to spoil it for you here. When you're ready, go to this paragraph of the AAA (for animal-assisted activities) entry.
- Frederic NAUSEA
- In the space of five years he participated in the Diets of Nuremberg, Ofen, and Speier. The next item also concerns diets.
- Marion NESTLE
- Chairwoman of the Department of Nutrition Studies at New York University.
That was according to a New York Times Magazine article of March 10, 1996, pp. 37ff: ``The Morality of Fat,'' by Molly O'Neill, p. 38. Update June 2007: It's now the ``Department of Nutrition and Food Studies,'' and Marion Nestle is currently the Chair.
- Friedrich NEUE
- Neue is `new' in German. (It's one of the various inflected forms of neu.) Friedrich Neue wrote Formenlehre der lateinischen Sprache (`Morphology of Latin'), first published (by H. Lindemann, at Stuttgart) 1861-1866. It wasn't a new topic.
- Jay NEUGEBOREN
- Neugeboren is `newborn' in German. In 1985 he published Before My Life Began: A Novel.
- Erine NEVERSON
- Are you sure you want to read this? This is a rather sad story.
In a New York Daily News exclusive (July 15, 2002, cover and p. 7), she is quoted as saying ``I want my son off the street, but I don't just want him in jail. He deserves worse than that ... the death penalty.'' Her son Andre Neverson, one of ten siblings, allegedly shot his older sister Patricia in a dispute over money. Andre called their father to tell him he'd never see his daughter again. ``He can't be my son and kill my daughter,'' said Denzil Humphrey.
- Peter NEVILLE
- Author of Appeasing Hitler (MacMillan Pr. Ltd., 2000). Neville Chamberlain was the British prime minister who appeased Hitler in the run-up to WWII. The best-remembered bit of appeasement was the last: in negotiations at Munich, he and the French agreed that Hitler could occupy the Sudetenland -- the Bohemian part of Czechoslovakia with a large German population (many of them German Jews trying to escape Nazi persecution). In return, Hitler promised that he would not seek to expand further. (He promptly expanded further.) Peter Neville's book is not about Neville Chamberlain. Instead, it is a defense of Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador in Berlin during the height of that policy. The book is subtitled ``The Diplomacy of Sir Nevile Henderson, 1937-39.''
On page xii, Neville points out that in 1986, historian Edward Ingram ``compared Henderson's lack of competence and professionalism with that of Shirley Temple Black.'' STOP RIGHT THERE! Praise by self-evidently misguided criticism. Case closed.
- NO-DONG
- A North Korean intermediate-range missile. When first tested in 1991, it reportedly had a range of 565 kilometers. Since then, its range is believed to have been continuously increased. In 2004 it stood at between 1200 and 1500 km. I'm not exactly sure yet why I've put this item in, but I'm sure I'll think of something.
- J.F. von der NULL
- Null was a Viennese banker. (Null is the standard way of saying `zero' in German.)
- Keith NULL
- A QB out of West Texas A&M who was taken by the Saint Louis Rams in the sixth round of the 2009 draft. Starting in place of injured quarterbacks Marc Bulger and Kyle Boller, he made his NFL debut in the Rams' thirteenth game and twelfth loss (this one 7-47) of the 2009 season. Null's jersey number was 9; 0 usually follows.
The Rams were obviously ``struggling,'' as they call it, and had been for a few years. It would be petty of me to wallow in this if I didn't didn't point out that, although Null's rank among all those who have ever played in the NFL is in five digits, to reached that level of play is an enormous achievement, and his college record in the Lone Star conference was epic, but now I have so it's okay. Null tossed five interceptions in his first game, but closed out his season (four starts) with only nine, and a won-lost record of 0-4. He was picked up by the Carolina Panthers the next year and actually made it on to their active roster. He never played in any more professional games, though, so he never endangered his record of zero wins.
- David R. OBEY
- Rep. David Obey (D-WI) is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee as of 2009. The US Constitution (Art. I, Sec. 7) requires that all revenue bills originate in the House of Representatives. Who pays the piper calls the tune. (Yeah, yeah, appropriation isn't taxation; it's still a very powerful committee.)
- ODYSSEY
- Jim Lovell, Commander of Apollo 13, selected names for the manned portions of the spacecraft: ``Aquarius'' for the LM (see Aqr) and ``Odyssey'' for the command module (the capsule). As explained on p. 87 of Lost Moon (details at Aqr entry), Lovell chose the name Odyssey ``because he just plain liked the ring of the word, and because the dictionary defined it as `a long voyage marked by many changes of fortune' -- though he preferred to leave off the last part.'' The voyage of the Odyssey turned out to be more difficult and eventful than expected.
- Apolo Anton OHNO
- A five-time (ahead of 2010 competition) Olympic medalist in the sport of short track speedskating.
- OLD
- Oxford Latin Dictionary. Wait -- the antiquity gets worse. As the entry explains, the dictionary is focused on classical Latin -- Latin that is relatively old.
- MIDORI ONO
- Midori is `green' in Japanese. (At least it can be -- the name is written in hiragana.) Ono is a `small field.' The person bearing this name is an agricultural biologist, Ph.D. from Univ. of Nebraska, dissertation on insect resistance to pesticides. Not a relative of the next Ono, AFAIK.
- Yoko ONO
- Another musical innovation? Oh noooo!
This is an example of her nonmusical work.
- Our Mother of SORROWS Church
- At the end of January 2002, the Catholic Diocese of Tucson settled eleven lawsuits. The suits had been brought by men who had alleged that as boys (mostly in the 1960's and 1970's; one case from the 1980's) they had suffered sexual abuse at Our Mother of Sorrows. Four priests were named as abusers in the cases, which began to be filed in the 1990's; the diocese was accused of being aware of some of the abuse and taking no action. The two priests still surviving in 2002 had been suspended in 1991 and 1992. In a rare action requiring Vatican approval, in 2004 they were laicized -- ``defrocked,'' in the unfortunately apt conventional term. (The only one of the four who was also accused of sexual misconduct with an adult has the surname Teta, which means `teat' or `tit' in Spanish.)
The sorrow doesn't end there. At the time the laicizations were announced, a number of lawsuits were still pending; in September 2004, the diocese filed for bankruptcy, saying it needed court protection because of legal costs from sexual abuse lawsuits.
- Josh OUTMAN
- A professional baseball pitcher. He reached the bigs in 2008. In 2008 and 2009, he played for the Oakland A's. I can't give details of his career in 2010 and later years, because I'm writing this in 2009, so those are ``out years.''
- Larry PAGE
- Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin founded Google. Chances are, you found this page using Google.
- Susan PAGE
- Author of The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book (New York: Broadway Books, 1997) and other books.
Not to be confused with Francine Prose.
- PARACELSUS (1493-1541)
- Paracelsus was the name taken by Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, a name which merits its own separate discussion. The name Paracelsus is intended to mean `the equal of Celsus.' The reason this is ironic is that Paracelsus spent much of his (chemically) sober time vehemently denouncing ancient physicians like Celsus, and eventually Paracelsus himself came into ignominy, even among most of his own students.
Paracelsus was the first enthusiastic champion of ``better living through chemistry,'' During his journeyman years, he took an interest not only in matters directly of medical importance, but also in mining. See Agricola.
- Ambrose PARE
- A celebrated barber-surgeon who served kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III... of France. [Pare was actually Paré, which has many meanings (among them `pared,' though only in certain animal contexts). I'm going with the English.
He is often described as having been a keen observer, and he left many colorful writings. Here is his description of a comet that appeared in 1528 (when Paré himself was about 18) quoted in English translation by Robert S. Richardson in his The Fascinating World of Astronomy (McGraw-Hill, 1960), pp.162-3:
This comet was so horrible and frightful, and produced such great terror among the populace, that some died of fear; others fell sick. It appeared as a star of excessive length and of the color of blood; at its summit was seen the figure of a bent arm holding a great sword in its hand, as if about to strike. At this point there were three stars. On both sides of the rays of this comet were seen a great number of axes, knives, spaces colored with blood, among which were a great number of hideous human faces with beards and bristling hair!
(Italics in Richardson.) I wouldn't cut any of it.
- Sigfrido PARED Pérez
- Vice Admiral Pared was the Director General of Migration (the top immigration official) in the government of the Dominican Republic, as of January 2011. He was in the news because of criticisms by Amnesty International and other groups (usually unnamed, but including the Jesuit organization in D.R.). They criticized the Dominican Republic for resuming enforcement of its immigration laws a year after the most recent major Haitian humanitarian disaster. (That would be the earthquake of January 2010, unless you count the cholera epidemic that had so far killed 3000 in Haiti and sickened 150 in D.R. The main stated motive for renewed enforcement was the desire to quarantine that epidemic.) Pared said that the crackdown was urgent because a massive entry of Haitians always occurs in January. (It wasn't stated explicitly, but the impression was given that Haitians come in larger numbers then because they can blend into the increased traffic of Dominicans returning from vacationing in Haiti.) Anyway, pared is Spanish for `wall.'
- Roger PARENT
- A trustee of the South Bend (Indiana) Community (public) School Corporation.
- Johnny PAYCHECK
- He was born Donald Lytle, and recorded under another name or two. It's hard not to suspect that the Paycheck name was an attempt to cash in (sorry) on the name of fellow country superstar Johnny Cash (just as the name ``Chubby Checker'' was created in conscious imitation of ``Fats Domino'') However, the story goes that he took the name after a heavyweight boxer, best known for being knocked out by Joe Louis. Run that by me again? The name also resembles his family's original Polish name. (This last does in fact account for many Paycheck surnames.)
As far as pop is concerned, Paycheck was a one-hit wonder in 1978 with the name-consistent ``Take This Job And Shove It,'' but his usual work is considerably bluesier, reflecting his life, which has given a lot of material for both blues and reflection.
- Marie PEACOCK
- A naturalist with the St. Joseph County Parks.
- Arthur Stanley PEASE
- A prolific author, known among other things for his work on ancient plants. The word pease is an ancient, or least old, name for the plant we now call pea.
The 1951 issue of HSCP was devoted to this scholar, and a list of his publications found there includes ``List of Plants on Three Mile Island,'' in Appalachia, vol. 12 (#3), pp. 266-76 (1911). The Three Mile Island he investigated is not the famous one in Pennsylvania but the one in the Lost River region of Maine that was owned by the Appalachian Mountain Club, based in Boston, that published Appalachia. Information on Three Mile Island is available online.
In volume 15 of HSCP (1904), pp. 29-59, he had article entitled ``Notes on Some Uses of Bells Among the Greeks and Romans.''
- Edward PEASE
- Once the secretary of the Fabian Society. See the GBS entry to understand why you are ROTFLYAO. See pease, please, if you require further food for thought.
- James CASH PENNEY
- Founder of J. C. Penney, Inc. Ka-ching! Compare Prices and save!
What is it about the name Penny that seems so inadequate that it must be buttressed with an explanatory word? The secretary at Bond's (James Bond's) home office was Miss Moneypenny.
- Roy O. PENNINGTON
- Pennington was with the Parker Pen Co. Ltd. (Parker of Canada, headquartered in Toronto) for a ton of years. Almost twenty-five years, in fact. He was president when he retired in May 1959. He was replaced by Philip Hull, who had been a vice prsident of the Parker Pen Company in Janesville, Wisconsin, since 1953. Pennington stayed on as a consultant in Canadian affairs.
- Laura C. PEPPER
- Mrs. Pepper was once head of the Consumer Section in the Marketing Service of the Canadian government's Department of Agriculture, in Ottawa. I really don't know much else about her besides the fact that she was an associate delegate to the Conference of the FAO, Ninth Session, held in Rome, November 2-23, 1957. (Three weeks! Ahhh -- dem wuz de days for guvumint jobs.)
We were throwing out a block of earnest booklets of good advice called Better Buymanship Series, published by Household Finance Corporation and edited mostly by its Consumer Education Department (some, like #8, ``Better Buymanship, Use and Care: Furs, are credited to the Department of Research). Generally speaking, I feel better if I can salvage some utterly valueless datum out of any printed material before it is recycled, and I noticed that Mrs. Pepper was acknowledged as a consultant for the booklets ``Money Management: Your Shopping Dollar'' (copyright 1950 HFC) and ``Money Management: Your Food Dollar'' (copyright 1951 HFC). She was already chief of the Consumer Section in those years. She was even acknowledged in the 1947 ``Better Buymanship, Use and Care: Dairy Products'' (another from the Research Dept.). She had the same job title, but HFC listed her then as at the ``Dominion Department of Agriculture.'' The reasons for this, if any, are probably lost to history, but history doesn't seem very concerned about the loss.
Proof that if you make a good name for yourself, you can have a sixteenth minute of fame. You can hear her voice here. She says ``toh-maahh-toe.''
- Paul PIERCE
- Boston Celtics star who was attacked by three men at a bar in 2000. He suffered a collapsed lung after being stabbed eight times (he was also hit on the head with a bottle).
- Arthur PIGou
- An economist who developed the concept of economic externalities and proposed taxes to address the problem of negative externalities. Such taxes are called Pigouvian or Pigovian taxes.
- Robert E. PIKE
- Wrote a classic book of New England loggers' lore entitled Spiked Boots (self-published, 1956). He went on to write the definitive history of the New England logging industry Tall Trees and Tough Men (1967). Died 1997, age 92; obit in the 1997.08.11 NYT.
A pike is basically a pole with a sharp end, possibly barbed. If you knew anything about medieval warfare, you wouldn't have to ask.
- David PLOTZ
- He wrote a five-screen article for <Slate.com> entitled ``An American Barbecue Pilgrimage.'' The slug was ``What 15 Barbecue Meals in a Row Did to My Digestion.'' He ate them in seven days; his ``lower intestine ground to a complete stop,'' and he had a slight pain in his chest. In Yiddish, plotzen is `to explode.' In English the word is typically used in humorous hyperbole; e.g., ``if I eat any more I'll plotz.'' (The word is onomatopoetic, first attested in German in 1320 or earlier, as a noun for a rapid, generally loud movement. The only survivals in standard German are the adjective plötzlich, `suddenly,' and its derivatives. The word Plötze, for `red carp,' is an unrelated Slavic loan.)
- Cardinal POLE
- Mary I of England during her brief reign (1554-8) temporarily reestablished Catholicism in England, and she made Pole her archbishop of Canterbury. The first to be burned at the, uh, stake was John Rogers, close assistant of William Tyndale's (see WTT). About 300 other Protestants followed, including 5 bishops, 100 priests, and 60 women. Many others went into exile or hiding. Mary I was her father's (Henry VIII's) daughter, and this persecution was surely unobjectionable if turnabout be fair play. Whatever the case, about 1500 monks, nuns, and friars had survived the Protestant reigns. When Pole tried to restore monasticism, he discovered that fewer than 100 of these (about 6.7%, MoE 2.6%) were willing to return to celibacy.
- David POLING
- A pollster [coauthor with George Gallup, Jr. of The Search for America's Faith (Nashville: Abingdon, 1980)]. Probably has bad spelling. We also serve a barge pole entry.
- Steven J. POPE
- Chair (in 2002, anyway) of the Theology Department at Boston College (a Catholic school).
- Dale PORCH
- A Denver man who worked for the Regional Transportation District, Porch was dropped off at home after working the graveyard shift, where he dropped on his own front porch and eventually died.
Porch, 46, might not have died had his collapse occurred any other time of year. He died on Friday, November 2, 2012. When the mail carrier came by that morning, he saw Porch on the steps of his porch but mistook him for a mannequin left over from Halloween. Porch's grown son found him an hour later, around noon, but efforts to resuscitate Dale Porch were unsuccessful. The family speculated that, had the mailman called for help, he might have survived. They noted that the body was still warm at noon. But, FWIW, if his was any normal kind of graveyard shift, and if the ride home was not extravagantly delayed or long, then he had probably been lying on the porch for a couple of hours before he was ignored by the postman.
- R.E. POWERS
- R.E. Powers discovered two Mersenne primes, the 10th and 11th in the series of Mersenne primes. The Mersenne primes are prime values of Mersenne numbers, and the nth Mersenne number is one less than the nth power of 2. The primes discovered by Powers corresponded to the powers, i.e., the exponents, n = 89 and 107. He discovered them in 1911 and 1914, and they were quite a feat of human computational power: they were the last Mersenne primes to be discovered by direct manual (as opposed to, you know, digital) computation.
- Donald POPADICK
- This item is not exactly NSFW, but if LOL is inappropriate where you are reading this, then steel yourself.
On April 29, 2014, Donald Popadick was arrested for exposing himself. Initial reports (see CTV here and Globalnews.ca here) did not detail which part of his anatomy he exposed, but the act was alleged to have been performed at Mooney's Bay Park (in Ottawa, Ont.), so I think we have the main possibilities, er, covered. Also, the news was tweeted for the Ottawa Police Service by Sgt. Iain Pidcock. I'm going to call that a hat trick.
Canada's National Post took the lead in investigating the onomastic etymology. According to a report posted that evening:
Although it is difficult to determine the exact national origins of the name, it bears a close similarity to Popadić, a village in central Serbia.
FWIW, final ć in Serbo-Croatian is pronounced like an English ``ch,'' but in my experience -- in the US, but I suppose it's a general Anglophone pattern -- the common -ić ending (originally patronymic) is often mispronounced ``-ick.'') I can't parse the village name Popadić entirely, but in the languages of European nations that are traditionally Orthodox Christian, as well as in Hungarian, names that begin with p-o-p usually refer to the common word pop that means `priest' in Slavic languages (from the Greek word pappas, `father,' originally better translated `dada' or `papa' -- also the source, via Latin, of `pope' in English).- John H. POYNTING
- Recognized in 1884 that E × B is a measure of electromagnetic power flux density. I.e., it is a vector pointing in the direction of electromagnetic energy flow.
You could use a pole to point, but a pike would be more intimidating.
Another point about 1884 is that in that year, the Washington Monument was capped with a pyramid of cast aluminum. That monument is far the highest structure in the area, so it must function as a lightning arrestor. That represents a lot of electromagnetic flow too.
- Bill PRESS
- A liberal radio talk-show host. More at 11.
- Sol and Robert PRICE
- Father and son (resp.) who founded a low-price outlet (a big-box store) called ``Price Club'' in 1976. Details at this PriceSmart page. For another instance of chain-store-founding nomen est omen, this one traditional-style retail, see J.C. Penney.
- Gavrilo PRINCIP
- The man who murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. After the suicide of the Emperor's only son, Crown Prince Rudolph in 1889, the line of succession of the Austro-Hungarian Empire shifted to the Emperor's brother, Archduke Charles Louis. The death of Charles Louis in 1896 made his son Franz Ferdinand next in line to the throne, effectively the crown prince. Hence, in 1914, a man who was named `prince,' but who was not, murdered a man who was not named `prince,' but who was. Chiasmus caused WWI. FWIW, Gavrilo is a form of the name Gabriel, an archangel.
(If you want to get technical, ``crown prince,'' as an ordinary compound noun rather than as a royal title, is applied to a male heir apparent, and not necessarily to a male heir presumptive. Franz Ferdinand was only heir presumptive: Emperor Franz Josef, who turned 84 in 1914, had been a widower since the 1898 assassination of Empress Elizabeth. If he had sired a son, that would have trumped [not a technical term here] the archduke's claim.)
It seems to have become something of a tradition for Habsburg royals to be predeceased by the violent deaths of their partners. Crown Prince Rudolf shot one of his mistresses to death before killing himself; it was reportedly a suicide pact. Gavrilo aimed for Franz Ferdinand but shot his wife Sophie in the abdomen first; the second shot mortally wounded Franz Ferdinand.
Gavrilo Princip was a member of the Black Hand, a terrorist group that sought unification of Slavic peoples in a greater Serbia. Why does this sound familiar? Anyway, Princip and the other assassins (one lost his nerve, the bomb of a second bounced clear and exploded under another car in the motorcade, others bided their chance) all were given cyanide capsules. In those days, the suicide component of terrorism was explicitly understood as a precaution to protect the secrecy of the rest of the terror group, or infrastructure, as we now say.
- Arthur Norman PRIOR
- A New Zealand philosopher generally credited with the invention of tense logic.
Tense logic dines on operators such as `It will be the case that' in the way that modal logic sups on `It must be the case that.' If you don't know what modal logic is, then this is probably not much help. Okay look, it's like this: in traditional logics, concepts of time occur in the propositions, which are timelessly true. For example: it is always true that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49 BCE. Temporal logic can qualify truth values in time, and consider the question whether it is true in 50 BCE that Caesar will cross the Rubicon. I don't know; it seems pretty obvious that this kind of logic can only be approximately coherent. As we have known since 1905, ``before'' and ``after'' are not attributes solely of the events they describe, but also of the observer -- the frame of reference. [For example, if your July 1, 52 BCE (the kalends of July) coincides with Caesar's kalends of July, 52 BCE (i.e., if you two synchronize your water clocks then), but if you happen to go off and approach the speed of light shortly thereafter (a constant acceleration of one g starting in August will do nicely), then Julius will cross the Rubicon long before 49 BCE, your time. (Of course, in your frame of reference July was Quintilis and August Sextilis; but in Caesar's, Quintilis became Julius no later than 44 BCE.)] In other words, relativity makes virtually any proposition that is not true a priori undecidable in a tense logic with only two truth values. I suppose it must be fun as a mathematical exercise, at some time. Sometimes it's called temporal logic. (Maybe you should see the entry on modal logic after all.)
The first significant presentation of a tense logic was in Prior's Time and Modality (Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1957). One of Prior's main expositions of tense logic was Past, Present and Future (Oxford: Clarendon Pr., 1967). Prior died before his Worlds, Times and Selves was published in 1977. He died too early -- aet. 54 (born 1914, died 1969). Come to think of it, so did Caesar: the March he died was in 44BCE, so he died before Sextilis was Julius. It wasn't called 44 BCE either. You know, this isn't logic; this is just making unnecessary difficulties.
One of Prior's more generous contributions to my amusement was published in Analysis, vol. 21, #2, pp. 38-39 (December 1960). The title was ``The Runabout Inference-Ticket,'' and he commented (I mean: it is true now that he commented then) that he (I think it was him) was ``much helped in [his] understanding of the notion by ... some notes of Mr. Hare's.''
Later in the same volume (pp. 124-8), J. T. Stevenson replied with ``Roundabout the Runabout Inference-Ticket.'' Is it too late to give these people a speeding ticket?
- JEUNE Pritchard
- She's in broadcast journalism. I'd like to tell you how long her candle has been burning, but the effort to find that out isn't worth it. You'll have to draw your inferences from the following.
The movie Journey among Women was released in 1977. Here's a bit of Australian government-sponsored synopsis: ``In the earliest years of Australian settlement, Elizabeth Harrington, a high-born and headstrong young woman (Jeune Pritchard) helps a group of convict women to escape constant rape by their jailers.'' Also, Pritchard was doing rock music reporting at least as far back as 1973, when she interviewed Lillian Roxon. Roxon died young, FWIW, later that year. (To be fair, she had already been in declining health before the interview.)
- Laron PROFIT
- A basketball player who starred at the University of Maryland in the mid-1990's and made it into the NBA.
The Einstein's-birthday edition of the Atlantic (well, it was dated March 14, 2012) had an article by Patrick Hruby entitled ``Basketball Players of the NCAA, Unite!'' Hruby made the case that the college basketball players are sorely exploited and should strike for fair compensation. The only NBA player interviewed for the article was Profit, and one can't help wonder if his name hadn't something to do with that. He was quoted saying ``We never talked about a strike, but we used to have the whole compensation discussion. We're the ones in practice, going through drills. But it's the coaches making millions--not only off their university contracts, but also through shoe deals and talk shows. Meanwhile, we were getting penalized if we took an extra pair of sneakers.''
- Francine PROSE
- Her Guided Tours of Hell was published by Metropolitan in 1996 or 1997. In a short review for the 1997.02.10 Newsweek, Laura Shapiro says it consists of two novellas described as ``buoyant'' descriptions of ``dark nights of the soul in Paris and Prague.'' That would sound oxymoronic to anyone but a sadist. Anyway, I don't think Prose is a pseudonym.
Not to be confused with Susan Page.
- WILL PROSPER
- A former RCMP officer who became a community organizer in the immigrant-rich area of Montreal North. Gosh, those community organizers are everywhere. Prosper was a candidate for the Québec Solidaire party in the 2012 Quebec elections on September 4. In the event, Prosper did not prosper, but his party doubled the number of seats it would hold in the next provincial legislative assembly (called the National Assembly of Quebec) -- soaring from 1 to 2 (out of 125). The two co-leaders of the party, both running in Montreal, each won their ridings. Next time they should make all their candidates co-leaders. Then they will prosper. (Sorry. Had to do it.)
- PROTAGORAS
- Ever been to Speaker's Corner (by Marble Arch)? I've seen him there. At least I think it was him. It was Greek to me.
- James PRYOR
- A philosopher at NYU. On May 22, 2006, at the University of London, I'm quite certain he gave a talk entitled ``Hyper-reliability and Apriority.'' Cf. Prior entry.
- Richard QUICK
- Coach of the US women's 1996 and 2000 Olympics swim teams.
- Randolph QUIRK
- Coauthor with Sidney Greenbaum of A Student's Grammar of the English Language. I could probably have finished the subentry at that sentence, but I noticed that the copyright page contains the following line:
© S. Greenbaum, R. Quirk, G. Leech, J. Svartvik 1900
(The book is essentially an abridged version of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), on which the authors had worked in collaboration with Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartik. I assume the 1900 is just a typo -- possibly the fault of the Chinese printer.)
- RACE Street
- It dead-ends just behind the police station in Mishawaka, Indiana.
- GILDA RADNer
- Born on June 28, 1946. On July 1, 1946, the US conducted an atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll. The bomb was named ``Gilda'' after the motion picture in which Rita Hayworth played the title role. (It was in the film noir genre.) The movie was filmed in Argentina, whose name means `[of] silver.' The name ``Gilda'' suggests gilded. (No, I don't know whether the movie played a role in the naming of Gilda Susan Radner.)
``Rad,'' ``radn.,'' ``rad-n'' and similar forms serve as abbreviations for ``radiation,'' which killed over 300 experimental animals and sickened many others in that test at Bikini. FWIW, Gilda Radner's ultimately fatal cancer was treated with radiation therapy (as well as chemotherapy).
The rad is also a unit of radiation exposure. If the test animals had been men then rem might have been a more informative unit (rem stands for ``Röntgen-equivalent man'' -- a measure of radiation exposure computed with an energy- and particle-dependent scaling). If Gilda had been a man, it's not likely that she would have died of ovarian cancer. (I know this is in poor taste, but we artistic types must have our liberty. It's edgy humor. She'd have appreciated that.)
- MOHAMMED RAGE
- Well, he's not unusually angry, that I know of, but he does have a grievance, it has something to do with the religion of Mohammed, and he's with a bunch of people with blood on their hands. You can guess his line, but probably not correctly. Give up? I know, you probably have some other guesses. Give up. Current events furnish a lot of ideas. No, no, still wrong. I say: give up!
Okay, it's this: Rage (I don't know how that's pronounced) is a community leader with the Omaha Somali-American Community Organization, and he's serving as an advocate and spokesman for Muslim workers at the JBS Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Grand Island, Nebraska. In September 2008, those workers sought break times to allow prayer at sunset during Ramadan. I infer that some accommodation was made, as some non-Muslims were claiming that their Muslim co-workers were getting preferential treatment. There were walkouts during the week of September 14, and Rage said that nearly 200 Somali Muslims have been fired. At the time, the company was confirming 86 firings.
- Tom RAKEWELL
- An eighteenth century rake in Pamela. Nomenclature is destiny remarkably often in seventeenth and eighteenth century fiction. Incidentally, Pilgrim's Progress was the first book (apart from the Bible) to be translated into a Dakota language after missionaries had developed a writing system for it. (Don't look too hard for connections here. I just personally happen to associate Pamela and Pilgrim's Progress, mostly because I read them at about the same time. That's how it goes.)
- RAPIDES Parish
- According to The Trucker (``America's Trucking Newspaper'') vol. 13, no. 16 (July 31-August 13 edition), this county (Louisiana counties are called parishes) has the most expensive speeding tickets in the US. Going 65 in a 55 zone costs $171 (including court costs).
- RAT
- Recovery Accountability and Transparency. There's a RAT, actually a RAT Board, in the ``Recovery'' bill that was passed by the US Congress in February 2009. It didn't sneak in on its own, like any ordinary self-respecting rat. It was snuck in. Read more at the RAT entry.
- Romuald RAT
- The first photographer at the scene of Princess Diana's fatal car crash in a Paris tunnel. While still there, he sold the exclusive UK rights to the pictures to the Sun over the phone, for 300,000 GBP. He then tried to, in his words, ``do something positive'' (for the victims!) by shooing away other photographers. Mr. Rat made the phone deal with Ken Lennox, the Sun's picture editor, who agreed in principle pending receipt of the pictures. At the time, Mr. Rat reported that Diana looked lightly injured. The Sun cancelled its agreement when Diana's death was announced. Alas, as Mark Anthony eulogized, the good that princes do is oft interred with their bones.
- Tom RATH
- A Republican functionary from New Hampshire. He was appointed by the Bush #43 White House to lobby Republican senators on behalf of unqualified Supreme Court justice nominee Harriet Miers. ``Lobby'' is not quite the right term, of course; Rath's task was to advise the senators that they would feel the wrath of the White House if they opposed her nomination. Rath is an old-fashioned spelling of the German word now spelled Rat, meaning `advice.'
- [ALTO REED]
- This name is here only because this is where you might think to look for it, but it's not an instance of nomen est any kind of omen. It's a stage name. Alto Reed is the long-time saxophonist of Bob Seger's Silver Bullet Band. He's done other work for which he is less well known, always with a tenor or alto sax. The saxophone is a reed instrument. His official website is a myspace page. His real name is Tom Cartmell.
- MARC RICH
- A rich fugitive from the law. He made the news in the closing hours of the Clinton administration by earning a pardon the old-fashioned way -- by paying influence brokers and raining charity on unsuspecting marks who responded with ignorant character references.
- JUSTIS Ellen RICHERT
- The offstage name of Barbie Cummings. What she does with the stage name, as she explained to the Tennessee state trooper who pulled her over for going too fast, is ``make dirty movies.'' The officer, whose nickname is ``Randy,'' expressed regret that he hadn't gotten into that line of work. He might as well give it a shot now (sorry), since he lost his gig with the highway patrol.
When he asked her if she had any drugs in the car (a pink Honda Accord), she admitted that she had some ``happy pills.'' (As she explained on her blog later that evening, she would take one or two of these sometimes before going to a club.) Many news reports describe the pills as ``illegal narcotics'' and also as ``prescription pills.'' Possibly they were prescribed in some way to someone, and possibly they were narcotic, but Justis and the Department of Safety definitely agree that they were illegal, and there was no mention of drugs in the citation resulting from the traffic stop.
According to her blog (taken down shortly after this story broke) or to the video interview she gave to the Knoxville News Sentinel, he pointed out to her that a drug charge would prevent her from traveling out of state. She started crying and explained that she has to commute to Los Angeles for her work. (According to an article I read in the early 1990's, the industry is actually concentrated along Van Nuys Boulevard north of the hills, but I guess such precision is not required. I think the article was written by Shere Hite and appeared in the Atlantic; will check.)
That was not the end of his investigation. Indeed, his probe expanded. Back in the squad car, he checked out her website and they watched sex videos on a laptop computer. His laptop.
He eventually decided to toss her pills in the brush by the side of the road. Mr. Romance also asked her, ``What does it cost for someone like me to get anything like you?'' I'd like to mention here that Richert is a form of the name Richard, but it is also possible to construe it as `enriches.' [That is the meaning of the German word reichert. If the verb were conjugated with a stem change (and historically perhaps it was), that would likely be spelled richert.] Many news reports described Justis (i.e., ``Barbie Cummings'') as a ``star'' of pornographic movies. (I think that articulates with ``starlet'' or ``co-star'' in less X-ly rated movies. If they use the missionary position, I suppose this is a supporting role. Sorry, sorry -- I couldn't restrain myself.)
Later, they went to a secluded place outside the car, where she thanked him for not giving her a ticket for the drugs. In her words ``I offered him an oral favor as a nice gesture.'' (We're not talking about a mint candy here.) Also, she (he, in some reports) apparently took video of this gesture, and she posted stills on her blog. Then, ``[h]e called me the night after it happened and asked if he could tell some of his co-workers and give them my website. [I can't give a rational explanation for this.] I said sure.'' Maybe she should have said ``You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law....''
The traffic stop took place on May 7, 2007. The next day an internal complaint was filed against the trooper. Talk about moving fast! On May 24, the trooper (James ``Randy'' Moss -- I was holding back on the full name until I could think of a way to wedge in a rolling-stone-gathers-no-moss angle, but I didn't get lucky) received a letter of termination; charges were pending. A week later, he was allowed to resign rather than be fired, and it was reported that he would not be charged for throwing out the ``small amount of drugs.''
Justis said she planned to appear in court to address the speeding charge (92 in a 70 zone; she was hurrying to her aunt's house). You know, if you contest the charge and the citing officer doesn't show up, you usually get off, in a manner of speaking. Contrariwise, if you don't show up to contest the charge, then you don't, even if the citing officer has been terminated. That's apparently what happened to Justis when she failed to appear for her hearing on June 29; she consequently had to pay her $159 speeding ticket, within two weeks. Some 16 other motorists did show up, however, and had their tickets dismissed.
After Moss resigned, other women (none of them porn stars) came forward with allegations that Moss had behaved inappropriately during traffic stops; in many instances he had reportedly asked to see their breasts. Look, I know this is a pathetic entry, but you don't have to read it. The DA was said to be planning to file misconduct charges although some of the complaints were said to be too old to prosecute. Not all, however. In October 2007, Moss was arrested after a grand jury indicted him on 10 charges related to his traffic stops. The charges included tampering with evidence, official misconduct, and official oppression. Moss was booked into the Wilson County Jail and later released on a $2,500 bond. The following January, he agreed to a plea deal which keeps him out of jail if he stays out of trouble during a term of probation (this is a typical ``diversion'' agreement).
- Eugenia SALZA Prina RICOTTI
- Author of L'arte del convito nella Roma antica: con 90 ricette (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1983). [In a fairly literal translation, the title reads `The art of the banquet in ancient Rome, with 90 recipes.']
Salza is a fair pun on salsa, the Italian word for `sauce.' The word ricotti (I don't know in detail about the surname) is virtually the same as ricotta: both can be translated as `recooked,' `reheated,' `annealed' vel sim. (The -i is the typical plural male ending and -a the singular female. The distinction is not reflected in translation, of course, because each English adjective has a single form that agrees grammatically with any noun. The -i at one time functioned as a nobility marker in Italian surnames.) Ricotta is made by reheating whey.
- Don RIETH
- According to the Rieth-Rohrer-Ehret Funeral Homes homepage, ``In 1963 Bob [Ehret] opened the Rieth Rohrer Ehret Funeral Home in Goshen [Indiana] with the help of Don Rieth & Wally Rohrer. In 1967 he acquired the Lienhart Funeral Home in Wakarusa.'' Interesting how the name ordering went. Anyway, judging from a radio ad I heard, the surname Rieth is pronounced ``wreath.''
- J. Thomas RIMER
- Coauthor, with Robert E. Morrell, of Guide to Japanese Poetry. (Rhyme plays a relatively minor role in Japanese poetry.)
- CLAY RISEN
- He wrote an article for Popular Science magazine entitled ``How To Build A 2,073-Foot Skyscraper: Inside the construction of the Shanghai Tower'' (all capitalization sic, from the webpage). [Article posted March 11, 2013; from the URL I suppose it appeared in the February issue.]
- Roach BOMB
- A roach bomb, or cockroach bomb, is a fumigation device. The name was chosen, so I understand, because after it has taken effect the roaches are supposed to be lying around dead, looking as if a roach-worldly bomb had been set off.
The fumigation involves a propellant, and the propellant is typically violently combustible. Here are a few unplanned ignition experiments involving these devices.
In 1946-47, Tennessee Williams wrote ``A Streetcar Named Desire'' while living in a third-floor apartment in the French Quarter of New Orleans. On March 12, 1995, a woman who had just rented the apartment set off six aerosol cans in the 8-by-10-foot kitchen (recommended treatment is one can for a 20-by-30-foot room). The fumes were apparently ignited by the water-heater flame. The tenant suffered cuts and bruises in the explosion, as did a passer-by who was struck by a falling door.
On December 13, 1995, a homeowner performed this standard experiment in absentia. He left his home in Cessnock, near Sydney, Australia, after setting off a roach bomb within. When he returned later that evening, the house had burned down. On the 30th of the same month, in nearby Burwood, a woman placed a bomb in a cupboard in her laundry room. Fumes leaked out and were apparently ignited by the nearby water heater. Senior firefighter Mick Holton was quoted as saying ``[i]t literally looked like a bomb had gone off.'' Pest control expert Shane Clarke was quoted as saying that such explosions were ``reasonably common.'' (I suppose this depends on what you think is reasonable.) Burwood Fire Brigade had once earlier responded to an explosion that occurred when a roach bomb placed in the back of a truck was apparently set off by the heat of the engine.
- ORAL Roberts
- Legendary televangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University. ``Fill in the information below, paying careful attention to the prayer request section. When you have completed the form, click on the `Send Prayer Request' button at the bottom, and your request will be forwarded to Oral and Richard Roberts.'' (I think I found that page in the 1990's some time. I thought it was pretty funny at the time, but in 2008 I saw similar advertisements by the Catholic University where I work. This year I bought a house; I had probably better search the yard for a St. Jude statue buried upside down, before it finds my lawn mower.)
With Billy Graham and Rex Humbard, Oral Roberts was one of the great pioneers in televangelism. It was Roberts who made the great discovery that people are more willing to cough up money for big bricks-and-mortar projects than for things like money to stay on the air. Hence, Oral Roberts University and its ``Prayer Tower,'' and an ambitious building campaign that included his City of Faith Medical and Research Center, founded in 1981 and closed or repurposed in 1989... In the 1980's he was hamstrung by something like a Laffer curve for charitable donations: to increase contributions, he started devoting a larger fraction of his air time to schnorring, until the whole show was nothing but a hectoring appeal for money. This from a fellow who had pioneered the use of secular entertainers to hook audiences. From 1980 through 1986, Roberts lost 59 percent of his audience. In the late 1980's he also suffered from the general erosion of, uh, faith, due to the scandals swirling around various other televangelists.
A nine-hundred-foot vision of Jesus had assured him that the medical center would be finished, and a message from God told him that ``the'' cure for cancer would be found there, but faith was not enough: he needed money, and in 1987 he announced that if he didn't raise $8 million quick, God would ``call me home.'' (He made other, similar appeals, on TV and by mail. Televangelists never ask just once.) He eventually was called home -- at least he departed -- on December 15, 2009 (Cupcake Day). According to ORU's page about him, at the time of his death he had ``13 grandchildren, one of whom is in heaven...'' Certainty is one of the benefits of faith.
Back when I was in grad school, one of the Dans I knew in the Music Department was a composer -- named Dan. It seems that one of his life-changing experiences was working as a clerk in a bookstore. It was not a university bookstore. Guns and Ammo was popular there. One day someone came in wanting a copy of ``Oral Roberts' Rules of Order.'' He was bound to be disappointed.
- ALEXa RODRIGUEZ
- A thirteen-year-old girl from Bristol Connecticut who was attacked by a red-tailed hawk while on a school tour of Fenway Park, the home field of the Boston Red Sox. Her scalp was bloodied, and she was taken to a hospital by ambulance and released later the same day (April 3, 2008). A teacher who chaperoned the class trip said that Alexa was ``a little shaken,'' but not seriously injured.
The hawk, whose mate flies the official team colors, is clearly an avian member of Sox Nation, and was evidently confused. The hawk meant to attack Alex Rodriguez (``A-Rod''), a star Yankees hitter. The hawk had attacked a photographer in the park a day or two previously. I wonder what's going on at the Seattle football field.
According to wildlife officials, the hawk has built nests in the park since 2002, though there the hawk had not laid a (literal) egg until 2008. This is not a picture of reproductive success. A single egg was found in this year's nest, which was located in an overhang near the stadium's press booth. The nest and the egg were removed ``in hopes of keeping the hawk away.''
- ROE Effect
- ``Roe,'' like ``Doe,'' is a fictitious surname used in courts to preserve the anonymity of vulnerable parties and when a proper name is not known. The famous case of Roe v. Wade was a class action with ``Jane Roe'' as lead plaintiff against Henry Wade, the Dallas County (TX) district attorney charged with (in the sense of being entrusted with the responsibility of) enforcing Texas abortion laws in Jane Roe's jurisdiction. He was the same DA who had earlier prosecuted Jack Ruby for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald (before Oswald could be prosecuted for the murder in Dallas of US President Kennedy). I believe you may be able to find some information on the web regarding Roe v. Wade. The case was appealed up to the US Supreme Court, where a 7-2 majority decided, among other things, that an implied right of privacy in the US constitution guaranteed the right of women to choose an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. (Since that time the Supremes have ruled in about one abortion case per year; the resulting penumbra of a shadow of law is not easily summarized without undue burden to myself.) The decision made abortion legal and eventually fairly widely available throughout the country. (It had already been legal in a growing number of states.)
[The Jane Roe in this case, Norma McCorvey, revealed her identity publicly in the 1970's when she wrote an autobiography (I Am Roe: My Life, Roe v. Wade, and Freedom of Choice). This apparently made it easy for her to get work at clinics where abortions are performed, a step up from the bartending and carnie work the ninth-grade drop-out had been getting before. She was working at a Dallas women's clinic when the pro-life group Operation Rescue moved its offices next door. She struck up an acquaintance with Rev. Phillip Benham, Operation Rescue's national director, whom she would meet when she went outside for cigarette breaks. Eventually she became a born-again Christian and a pro-life activist.]
The Roe v. Wade decision had many political effects. One intriguing effect is a demographically mediated backlash. It seems reasonable to assume that women who are pro-choice will be more likely to take advantage of the abortion option opened by the decision, and would therefore have fewer children, on average, than they would have had otherwise. The Roe Effect (or better Roe Effects) refers to the electoral consequences of that demographic shift. The earliest effect is that relatively liberal ``blue states'' will tend to have a lower rate of natural increase than otherwise, lowering their electoral clout in the House of Representatives and in the Electoral College (see EV). If one assumes not unreasonably that the children of conservative parents (or socially conservative parents, or at least pro-life parents) are more conservative than the aborted children of pro-choice parents would have been, then a second effect is that the electorate as a whole, in all states affected by the Roe v. Wade decision, drifts further right, or less far to the left, than it would have absent that decision.
The nomen est omen aspect of this is just that the named effect arises when large numbers of potential offspring are prevented from entering the population. Roe are fish eggs, and as caviar and similar foods, they are also prevented from maturing. (Of course, they are normally harvested before fertilization.)
- Lillian ROXON
- Well, she doesn't anymore, as she died in August 1973, but otherwise the name is rather apt, and long antedates the term ``rock music.'' She was sometimes described by the epithet ``Mother of Rock Journalism,'' and Robert Milliken's biography of her had the title Lillian Roxon, Mother of Rock (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2002). A documentary film written and directed by Paul Clarke had the more felicitous title of ``Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon.''
Roxon was born Liliana Ropschitz in Alassio, Italy, on February 8, 1932. The family immigrated to Australia in 1937 to flee fascism and antisemitic laws. In November 1940 the family Anglicized their name to Roxon. The name was little Lillian's suggestion. She became a journalist, and from the late 1950's was a New York-based correspondent for various Australian publications, becoming the first full-time female employee at the Sydney Morning Herald's New York office. During the 1960's she became interested in rock music. She became part of the rock music in-crowd and wrote serious rock music criticism when I suppose that may have been a rare thing. (Maybe it still is.) In 1969 she published her now famous Rock Encyclopedia. It was republished in 1971, and posthumously in 1980 with revisions by Eddie Naha. Finally in 2013 I bought a copy for a dollar, hence this note.
- COY J. RUSH, Jr., David L. RUSH, Eric Soller, R. Gunner DeLAY, and M. Jered Medlock.
- Partners in the law firm of Rush, Rush, and DeLay, with offices in Paris... Arkansas. Also in Fort Smith and Ozark. They handle both civil suits and criminal defense, and for all I know they have served as outside counsel to prosecutors.
There's an ancient legal maxim that ``justice delayed is justice denied.'' The idea is partly codified in statutes of limitation and in laws requiring that arrestees be charged or released in a timely manner. There are also stipulations in some laws that defendants pleading certain extenuations must announce their intention within a certain period of being charged. For statutory reasons like these, both defense and prosecution (or plaintiffs) often want to act quickly at the beginning of a legal proceeding. That's two ``rushes.'' On the other hand, once the technical requirements have been met, the reality of the maxim would seem to dictate that any party not interested in justice would prefer delay. Delay as a defense strategy is described by Arthur Train in his My Day In Court. That's one ``delay.'' (The main cause of delay seems to be the bottleneck of packed court dockets. But maybe this isn't the law firm's responsibility.)
- Laura SAFE
- Laura Safe is a morning newsreader at a radio station in Birmingham, England. On January 16, 2013, she was walking down some steps while texting her boyfriend, and did not fall down the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs, she continued texting as she walked to the edge of a canal and fell in. She was rescued immediately. She was quoted in The Sun: ``I thought ice on the canal was pavement because it looked dark in the corner of my eye,'' she said. ``I heard a man call out `stop' to me and I looked up at him, but it was too late by that point.'' She was not hurt, and while trying to avoid falling she did manage to save her handbag and mobile phone. She got a lot of ribbing, and later even she twittered ``Oh dear. I should really be called Laura UNsafe after the day I've had! Lol.'' This isn't fair. Okay, so she ended up cold, wet, and ridiculous -- but she and her precious effects were safe.
It surprises me that no one suggested that perhaps there ought to be a barrier there. It reminds me of a book by Daniel Patrick Moynihan with the somewhat apposite title of Traffic Safety and the Health of the Body Politic (1966 -- possibly his first). I don't have the book to hand, and I'm paraphrasing roughly from memory, but in it he commented that with millions of cars on the road, collisions are not accidental -- they're statistically inevitable.
- Eliza Mary Ann SAVAGE
- Miss Savage was a dear friend of Samuel (``Erewhon'') Butler, and the model for angelic Alethea Pontifex in his The Way of All Flesh. In a letter to him on Sept. 15, 1877, she wrote
And now, my dear Mr. Butler, let me give you a little good advice. If you wish to make yourself agreeable to the female sex, never hint to a woman that she writes or has written `with care'. Nothing enrages her so much, and it is only the exceptional sweetness of my disposition that enables me, with some effort, I confess, to forgive this little blunder on your part.
He could have used this Apology Letter Generator, or maybe flowers. There has been much speculation about why they didn't marry, and whether either of them wished they had. Apparently Butler felt that he was expected to make a proposal, but he didn't want to. He made a lot of excuses to himself about it, and after she died he set aside the Way manuscript largely because it called up painful memories of Miss Savage. One of his last literary acts was to assemble and edit his correspondence with her; Way was published posthumously. To the extent that anyone can say this for anyone else, it seems fair to say that he loved her. It was suggested by some that he didn't ask because she wasn't pretty (litotes alert).
The following appears in Hesketh Pearson's Bernard Shaw (1942), p. 310:
A strange lady giving an address in Zurich wrote him [Shaw] a proposal, thus: `You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to produce the most perfect child.' Shaw asked: `What if the child inherits my body and your brains?'
Interestingly, this seems to repudiate Shaw's neo-Lamarckianism (expounded in the preface to ``Back to Methuselah''). Samuel Butler also had heterodox ideas about inheritance and evolution, which Way was intended to illustrate.- LINDA SCHADE
- Linda is `beautiful [female]' in Spanish. The German words related to the root schade- all have to do with some kind of harm, as discussed at schade and subsequent entries (Schaden and Schadenfreude). (First two of those links still to come, but soon.) The word schade is also the form of two conjugations of the verb schaden, `to harm.' One occurs in the indicative mood: ich schade means `I harm.' German also has a ``weak subjunctive'' that is used for a kind of streamlined quoting that looks more like paraphrase. To illustrate the use, I give three ways of saying the same thing in German, with translations to English (the last uses the weak subjunctive form schade):
er sagt ,,ich schade'' he says ``I harm'' er sagt dass er schadet he says that he harms er sagt er schade he says he harms
In the US presidential election of 2000, Democrat Albert Gore won a thin but clear popular majority over Republican George W. Bush. Ralph Nader, as the Green Party standard-bearer, ran a distant third. Still, he received far more votes than any other third-party candidate, and far more than the margin of difference in votes between Bush and Gore. It is reasonable to suspect that if Nader had not run, a large majority of the votes cast for him would have gone to Gore. One percent or so of the votes cast for Nader would have given Gore Florida and the election. (More on this at the EV entry.)
In 2004, Linda Schade was a spokeswoman for Ralph Nader's presidential exploratory committee. On February 20, a Friday, she announced that on NBC's ``Meet the Press'' the following Sunday, Nader would ``be discussing his role in the presidential election.'' She said that ``[h]e's felt there is a role for an independent candidate to play.'' Spoiler.
Of course, if you were for Bush, this was beautiful. The following Sunday, to no one's surprise, Nader announced that he would run.
- FRANCESCA Schiavone
- On June 5, 2010, she became the first Italian woman to win a Grand Slam title in tennis. She did it at the French Open.
- Gina SCHOCK
- Born Regina Ann Schock. Best known as the long-time drummer for the Go-Go's. (The original drummer, when this girl group formed in LA in 1978, was Elissa Bello; Schock replaced Bello in the summer of 1979, was drummer until the group disbanded in May 1985, and has played drums in all or most of the reunion tours.) According to a concert review by Joseph Szadowski in the June 14, 2011, Washington Times, Go-Go's guitarist Jane Wiedlin has called her ``the `thumpiest' drummer in the world.'' (I can't find this anywhere else; perhaps Szadowski heard it directly from Wiedlin. My own vote, at least among groups with female lead vocalists, would go to Alex Cooper, drummer for Katrina and the Waves.) Anyway, if Schock plays any of those new-fangled electronic percussion instruments, more power to her, so to speak.
- Karl SCHWARZschild
- The name means `black shield' or `black sign' in German. Karl Schwartzschild is best known for discovering a solution of Einstein's field equations of general relativity. The solution describes an uncharged, non-spinning black hole.
- William SEAMAN
- A professor of fisheries and aquatic sciences at the University of Florida and associate director of the Florida Sea Grant College Program. Cf. Chris Landsea.
- DICK SEED
- A physicist involved in fertility research. Proudly acknowledges the term eccentric. Announced in January 1998 that he wanted to clone a human. Didn't say which one, at first, then said he would clone himself first.
- John SHARP
- Author of Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Step by Step.
- SHIVA
- This is one of the holy trinity (any resemblances to Roman Catholicism are completely coincidental) of Hindu gods -- Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu. As any standard text will tell you, these correspond respectively the creator, destroyer, and preserver gods (a+, a, and a+a) (e.g., Sakurai: Advanced Quantum Mechanics, p. 27). I don't know about the others, but it seems apparent that Shiva, the destroyer, got his name from the seven-day Jewish mourning period known as Shiva. [Actually, my grandfather was born in the shtetl of HaShevata, but the only apparent connection is the number seven.] For another completely fatuous Indic-Semitic connection, see the Halaka entry.
Incidentally, many westerners who encounter the creator-destroyer-preserver description may wonder why the big cults worship Shiva and Vishnu, while Brahma (creator) gets short shrift. It may be helpful to rephrase things thus:
Brahma ==> Manufacturer
Shiva ==> Recycler
Vishnu ==> ReuserYou're welcome, I'm sure.
- Frank SHORTER
- A runner who specialized in the longer events -- mostly the 10,000 meters and Marathon.
- James T. SHOTWELL
- A peace activist whose influence (along with others') issued in the Kellogg-Briand Pact (a/k/a Peace Pact) of 1928. Eventually, most militarily formidable countries signed it. (The US Senate ratified it with reservations.) Although the Pact text does not contain the term ``self-defense,'' it was understood to outlaw only wars of aggression and not self-defense.
French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand had already shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1926 with German FM Gustav Stresemann. [Briand and Stresemann had negotiated the Locarno Pact in 1925. (That was a non-aggression pact between their two countries; Briand got to sign it as French Premier late in 1925.)] In 1929, US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg got his own Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Paris Pact.
In 1931, Japan invaded China. Japan was a signatory to the Paris Pact, and was consequently in violation of international law! The Paris Pact has no enforcement provisions.
- Mark SHUTTLEWORTH
- A South African millionaire who paid about $20 million to ride a Soyuz rocket to the international space station Alpha and stay for eight days. On April 25, 2002, he became the second space tourist (the first was California equity fund manager Dennis Tito). Okay, he didn't take the shuttle to the space station, but the parts from which the station was assembled were largely brought up by shuttle.
NASA doesn't like this little side business of the Russians, because it makes it too obvious that an astronaut is basically a ``man in a can'' or ``spam in a can'' (the original form and the coiner of the expression are uncertain; the Chuck Yeager character speaks the latter form in The Right Stuff). Carrying tourists takes the glamour out of it, makes it look like something even a septuagenarian ex-Senator could do without endangering his health. Mark was probably shuttle-worthy too.
- Scott SICKO
- ``Some people will think I'm absolutely out of my mind, and I understand it,'' said Sicko to Mark McGuire of the Albany (New York) Times Union. They were speaking on Saturday, April 24, 2010, after the NFL draft had ended with Sicko, a tight end at the University of New Hampshire, not drafted. What many people thought was crazy, just literally mentally ill, was Sicko's decision not to pursue his options in the NFL as an undrafted free agent, given that a number of teams had expressed interest and that Dallas had assured him that he was likely to earn a spot on their roster.
- Jaime LACHICA CARDINAL SIN
- Archbishop of Manila from 1976 until his death in 2005. He used to greet first-time visitors to his home in Manila with the words ``Welcome to the house of Sin.'' Why didn't he say ``of Cardinal Sin''?
Arguably the most influential bishop of the post-Vatican-II era in Asia, Cardinal Sin played a major role in bringing down two Philippine presidents. (That sounds better than it looks.) In both cases, their successors were women. La chica means ``the girl'' in Spanish.
- Jean-Michel SIX
- As of late 2011, Six was Standard & Poor's chief European economist. Starting in early 2009, European leaders had a series of summit meetings to solve sovereign debt problems in the euro-zone. In December 2011, Six commented that ``[a]fter a series of `final' summits, it would be nice this time to have a real `final' summit.'' A New York Times editorial on December 9 began, ``We're losing count of how many European Union summit meetings have ended with `historic' agreements...'' The number was five.
- Pamela SKILLings
- A career coach and the author of Escape from Corporate America (2008). (Her blog here.) The word skill occurs a little less often than I would have expected in the many interviews she has given. Anyway, here's a quote for the sake of the entry:
In order to position yourself for a career change, you have to understand how to communicate the value that you can provide in a new role. What are the existing skills and qualifications that you can leverage? What are some possible weaknesses and how can you present them in the best light? Why should an employer or investor want to ally with you and your brand?
- John SKIPPER
- Skipper is a captain of the entertainment industry. The official bio at ESPN (viewed November 2017) describes him ``taking the helm as ESPN president and co-chairman, Disney Media Networks on January 1, 2012....'' Sorry, I couldn't resis adding the italics.
- SLAGTERSNEK
- On March 9, 1816, on a hastily-erected gibbet, five Boers condemned to death by the British colonial government were hanged at Andrew's Post in Slagtersnek. It wasn't a straightforward execution. On the first drop, only one of the men died. The other four men's ropes broke and they fell to the ground. The gathered crowd, which included relatives forced to attend, called the rope breaks a sign from God and pleaded for the lives of the survivors to be spared. The government's agents, Cuyler and Stockenström, did not have the authority to commute the sentences. They also didn't have any spare rope, so the broken ones were knotted together somehow and eventually all the condemned men were hanged.
Slagtersnek means `butcher's neck' in Afrikaans. The Afrikaner side in that war memorialized the events of Slagtersnek as a war atrocity.
- Frank G. SLAUGHTER
- Frank Gill Slaughter seems to have been his real name, and he wrote books with titles like The Thorn of Arimathea (subtitled ``a novel of the days following the Crucifixion'') and A Savage Place.
- Kevin M. SLOWEY
- Kevin Slowey is a pitcher. He went to Winthrop University after high school, and entered the Minnesota Twins farm system via the 2005 amateur entry draft. He was brought up to the majors for the 2007 season. I'm still trying to find the ``slow'' angle. He's not particularly a change-up pitcher... yet. Going into professional baseball straight from high school is the fast track.
- Bradford D. SMART, Ph.D.
- Author of Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People (Prentice Hall, 1999). His The Smart Interviewer: Tools and Techniques for Hiring the Best came out in paperback in 1990. Excuse me, but this is even more disgusting than Ashley Brilliant.
- ADAM SMITH
- This is a proleptic entry. The late 20th-c. author of various books and articles on economics who publishes under the name ``Adam Smith'' is not an instance of nomen est omen. Instead, he is George J. W. Goodman, who first used that pseudonym for a column in New York magazine in 1966. (Goodman was a co-founder of that magazine as well as of New West and New Jersey Monthly, and he has been a member of the Editorial Board of the New York Times. Some egregious New-ness.)
- R.E.F. Smith
- Professor Robert (``Bob'') E.F. Smith of Birmingham University (in the U.K.) was the author of over ten major books, including A Russian-English Dictionary of Social Science Terms (London, Butterworths, 1962). It's found in the reference section, where the cataloguing labels on the bindings begin with ``REF.''
- Jeff SMOKER
- A Michigan State University quarterback who had a substance-abuse problem reportedly requiring in-patient treatment during November 2002. His substance problems that fall ``coincided'' with a dreadful season. (I guess it was a ``coincidence,'' neither the QB's problems nor the team's problems affecting the other.)
- SNEEK
- The name of a Dutch town sixty miles northeast of Amsterdam. A resident of that town, a twenty-year-old hacker who goes by OnTheFly, was arrested Valentine's Day 2001 on charges stemming from the Anna Kournikova computer virus.
- Peter SNELL and John WALKER
- Olympic track stars for New Zealand in the 1960's and 70's. In various Germanic languages, snell means `fast' (cognate of German schnell). (The word snail has an unrelated etymology.)
Snell won gold in the 800 meters at the Rome Olympics of 1960, in record-setting time. He successfully defended the 800-meter title at Tokyo in 1964 and went on take gold in the 1,500 meters as well.
- H.A. and Sidney SNOW
- In 1928, the Snows made a documentary about an Arctic expedition. Some of the least important details that you could imagine -- and yet survive to tell the tale -- are dumped in the GWN entry.
- WINDOW SNYDER
- Window Snyder is a computer security expert who works on Windows systems. As a Microsoft security strategist, she was responsible for security sign-off on Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Windows Server 2003.
Traditionally, protection against sophisticated forms of crime has required the kind of expertise found mostly among the criminals. For example, forgers and con artists are among the best detectors of forgery and fraud. Thus, law enforcement and private security organizations regularly turn to, or try to turn, criminals and former criminals. (Sometimes this can be quite problematic. It can create legal incentives for making progress in illegal activities.)
In computer security, although the legal issues are occasionally cloudier, it is also common to hire foxes to guard the henhouses. Window Snyder is one such fox, and she has been particularly involved drawing hacker expertise into the security community. The surname Snyder is one form of the common Germanic occupational name meaning `tailor,' written Schneider in German. Literally, the word means `cutter,' and that's a fair synonym of hacker. In September 2006, Mozilla Corp. hired Snyder to lead the efforts to secure its open-source software, particularly its Firefox browser. The principal strategy that she mentioned, when her appointment became official, was cutting: removing old code whose cost in vulnerability is greater than its value in functionality. I despise that. It's the same philosophy that has turned cars into nannymobiles. You can't do anything unless it's something that a designer decided millions of other users would also want to do.
- Brenda SONG
- Born Brenda Julietta Song. I guess she's known primarily as an actress, but she's done some singing. I've never heard her, but according to her IMDB bio, she has a trademark husky voice. Okay, I have now seen her in a YouTube video; so now I guess I know what ``husky'' can mean. But the important thing is that she makes it possible to say "Song sang," "Song sings," and even "Song sings a song" and easily make sense. And if you can't hear the capitalization, that makes it mildly intriguing.
- George SOROS
- A very rich investment manager turned philanthropist.
Sôrós means `heap' or `pile' in Ancient Greek. On
the other hand, sorós, with the first vowel an omicron
rather than an omega, was `vessel.' Mostly it referred to a cinerary
urn, and it was used as a nickname for old men and women (examples
occur in the writings of that funny dead white guy Aristophanes).
George Soros turned 74 in 2003.
Actually, George Soros was born George Schwartz. (In Hungary, so maybe that was György Schwarcz or Swarcz or similar.) When he was a boy his parents changed the family name to the vaguely Hungarian-sounding name Soros. George's dad was an active Esperantist, and in Esperanto the word soros is the future tense of the verb `to soar.' What is this, a hat trick?
- David SOUTer
- Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court. This pun works best if you don't palatalize the word suit.
- Kevin SPACEY
- In the 2001 movie K-PAX, he plays the lead role of Prot, a patient at a mental hospital who claims to be from the distant planet K-PAX. He doesn't look alien... He's beginning to convince his psychiatrist (Jeff Bridges playing Dr. Mark Powell).
(This is a 109-minute remake of the 105-minute Argentine movie Hombre Mirando al Sudeste (1986) [`Man Looking Southeast']. (I know, I know -- ``so what?'')
- David SPADE
- An actor who played the title role in a 2001 movie entitled Joe Dirt. It was rated PG-13 for dirty language (``crude & sex related humor, language''). A spade is an implement for moving dirt, but as Spade shares writing credit for the movie, this is not a clear-cut case of nomen est omen. The promotional posters showed Joe Dirt holding a wet-mop. The Joe Dirt character is a janitor with a dream to find the parents who abandoned him at the Grand Canyon when he was a child.
- Larry SPEAKES
- Speakes graduated with a BA in Journalism from Ole Miss in 1961. He worked in journalism (mostly editing and managing) until 1968, when he found his metier as press secretary to Sen. James Eastland (D-MS). After working as a coordinator in Eastland's successful reelection campaign in 1972, Speakes started working in the executive branch. He mostly held press-secretary positions with Republicans in or running for executive office. (He worked for a private PR firm during the Carter administration).
James Brady was President Reagan's first press secretary; he was crippled in the assassination attempt on Reagan on March 30, 1981, and was unable to return to work. However, he retained his title, and Larry Speakes filled in, handling daily press briefings under the job title of ``Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Press Secretary'' (from June 17, 1981) and then ``Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy Press Secretary'' (from August 5, 1983, until January 1987, when he resigned and was succeeded by Marlin Fitzwater).
- Aaron SPELLING
- This is sort of a borderline case. One of the shows he produced, Charmed, has some spell connections. It's mentioned at the alternate Spelling entry. On the other hand, Spelling was so prolific that it's probably not statistically significant. When Charmed began it was only one of eight of his shows on TV (in production; say nothing of reruns).
- Margaret SPELLINGS
- A Texas educrat chosen by Pres. G.W. Bush to be US Secretary of Education in his second term. She succeeded (spelled, if he should return) Dr. Rod Paige (pronounced PAGE), another former Texas educrat, who served in that post in Bush's first term.
- Irving SPIKES
- Running back for the Miami Dolphins for the 1994 to 1997. In his four-season career he had eight touchdowns. I can't find video of any of those, so I can't say whether he spiked in the NFL.
Spikes have sharp points, like pikes.
- Dr. Peter SPILLETT
- A senior employee of RWE Thames Water, the London water supplier and one of the largest water utilities in the world. As of 2003, as Climate Change Client Manager for UK Water Industry Research, one of his main responsibilities is to find ways to conserve water resources.
When I get around to finding out what RWE stands for, I'll mention that in its own entry. Another water utility is Vivendi, mentioned at the A&M Records entry.
- SAM SPRING
- The 2020 winner of the Analyst of the Year award of (UK) Association of Mining Analysts. He works at Ocean Equities. Well (I wrote well), the water from some springs empties into the ocean.
That reminds me, and you'll doubtless be interested to know, that the German morpheme cognate with the English suffix -some is -sam, as in the word langsam, `boring.' That reminds me of a Feb. 1861 diary entry of Dimitri Mendeleev (yeah, the periodic table guy): ``I was forced to talk to Germans. Boredom.'' No disrespect to Mr. Spring, BTW. The stream of consciousness meanders where it will. Often it doesn't even reach the sea. The -dom suffix in English corresponds to -tum in German.
The German cognate of sea is interesting enough to have its own entry in this glossary (low bar, I know). That entry will say: Die See (i.e., See as a feminine noun) is `the sea, the ocean'; der See (masculine) is `the lake.' (See is pronounced ``Zey,'' approximately.)
- PRIMUS ST. CROIX
- A man arrested in May 2000 for vandalizing statues at several Roman Catholic churches in Brooklyn over the previous year. He said God had told him to do it, and cited the biblical commandment against graven images as a motivation of his sledgehammer protest against idolatry.
In Aristotle's model of the universe, a concentric sequence of ``crystalline'' (hard transparent) spheres held the planets and turned them around the earth (at the center). The rotation of the various spheres in this Russian-doll model was driven by the outermost sphere, which was turned by a ``prime mover.'' When Aristotlian philosophy was ``rediscovered'' and reintroduced from the Moslem world in the latter half of the Middle Ages, Christian theologians syncretized this model, making of the outer sphere heaven, and of the prime mover God.
- Fortney Pete STARK
- Stark is a German adjective meaning `strong,' but the English sense of the word seems apposite as well. One Friday, July 18, 2003, in the US House of Representatives, a Ways and Means Committee mark-up meeting became very heated. In the course of bitter partisan maneuvering, Rep. Pete Stark (D-Hayward, CA) objected when committee chairman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield, CA) tried to cut short the formal reading of a contentious pension bill. (This was important, but the reasons don't concern us here.) In reaction to the Stark outburst, Rep. Scott McInnis (R-CO) reportedly muttered ``shut up.'' The quoted words, though plausible and not denied, afaik, do not appear in the meeting transcript. According to some reports, Stark had been giving his uncomplimentary opinion of the intellect of Scott McInnis. The transcript did record the Stark reply:
You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp? Come on. Come over here and make me, I dare you. You little fruitcake. You little fruitcake. I said you are a fruitcake.
Later, on the House floor, McInnis (age 50) stated that he had interpreted the Stark remarks as ``serious. I considered the threat a bodily threat.'' McInnis is a former state trooper, so he might have some relevant experience to back up the claim. Denying that his remarks had implied a threat of physical violence, 71-year-old Stark said:
I'm an elderly gentleman. I haven't been in a fight involving bodily contact in sixty years. Look, I fall trying to put on my underwear in the morning.
- WILLIAM STEVENSON
- Author of A Man Called Intrepid (1976), about the British counterintelligence chief William Stephenson who was based in New York City during WWII. Stevenson is Canadian. He's not related to Stephenson.
- Alfred E. STOCK
- Stock (1876-1946) was a German chemist who in 1919 published a suggestion for the naming of ionic compounds. He suggested that when the cation is an ion of a metal with two or more possible valences (besides zero), the name of the metal should be followed by the (nominal) positive charge on the cation in parentheses. Thus, Fe2O3 would be iron(3)-oxide and FeO would be iron(2)-oxide, instead of ferric oxide and ferrous oxide respectively. The main advantage and disadvantage of the system is that it helps simpletons to understand and do chemistry.
Some German commission took up the suggestion in 1924, but recommended the use of Roman numerals instead of Arabic, and a space instead of a hyphen (but, just as in Stock's suggestion, no space between the first parenthesis mark and the name preceding it). Hence, CuO is copper(II) oxide (instead of cupric oxide). Stock's simple system is congenial to German, which resisted the adoption of Latinate chemical terminology. Sadly, the system has come into general use.
It's hard to think of something more embarrassingly trivial to be famous for, and Stock's name has been deservedly condemned to the immortality of faint praise. The clumsy practice (in the form recommended by that German commission) is sometimes referred to as Stock's system or the Stock System. More frequently, the Roman numeral is referred to as the Stock number.
- James STOCK
- Chairman of Harvard's Economics Department, as of 2008.
- Clayton Frank STOKER
- After a night of drinking that began on July 27, 2002, Johnny Joslin, 20, and Clayton Frank Stoker, 21, were seated at a table outside a trailer park. It was Sunday morning, and they were in a heated argument about religion, specifically over which of them would go to hell and which to heaven (they apparently didn't expect to meet in the hereafter). Stoker, a Johnson County (Texas) corrections officer, said he would settle the argument, went into a house and returned with a shotgun. (This sounds like it was scripted. Was the presence of the necessary house introduced earlier in the story?)
Stoker loaded the gun and placed it in his mouth. Then Johnny Joslin pulled the gun out of Stoker's mouth, saying ``if you have to shoot somebody, shoot me.'' The shotgun discharged, hitting Joslin in the chest and killing him. Stoker was arrested and charged with murder in the first degree.
By now perhaps both have figured out an answer to the question. The reason I put this entry here is that I immediately thought -- ``he's stoking the flames of hell!'' Well, not really in those words: if you pay close attention, you'll notice that thoughts aren't necessarily verbal. But mainly I thought, this should go in the glossary. Where? Since you're going to read the glossary straight through anyway, you shouldn't mind particularly where. It's not as if I interrupted the train of thought you had about Stevenson that you didn't want to forget when you read about Stone, huh?
And now for something completely related. Previous laureates are an important outside source of Nobel prize nominations. That doesn't work so well with the Darwin Awards, partly because they are so often awarded posthumously. (Only the living may be nominated for a Nobel, although posthumous awards are allowed.) I have a candidate or two for the Darwin.
Okay, update on that. Darwin Awards has considered my submission and informs me that ``unfortunately'' -- oh, no! Rejected! I missed the cut. Not good enough for the Darwin's high standards of low inteligense. The ``moderators'' (their scores may still be on-line) were blasé, dismissive, and univocal (scored ``Definitely Toss''), and frankly cruel. What have they got against alcohol-assisted stupidity!? After all, it takes some native stupidity to get staggeringly drunk! I'm sorry, I---I'm feeling a bit low now. Rejection is so hard! It's so belittling to have one's submission turned down without a second thought. I mean really--what qualifies them to decide what is deeply stupid? Are they stupid or something? Pthah! Stupidity stumbles onward! Real stupidity will triumph in the end.
- Fred STONE
- Fred Stone played the Scarecrow in the first theatrical production (1902) of L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900). According to Mark Evan Swartz's Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz on Stage and Screen to 1939, (Baltimore and London: JHU Pr., 2003), p. 71, Stone
... took great pride in his ability to remain absolutely still for the duration of Dorothy's song, which often included several encores. One reviewer noted that ``when Mr. Stone is first lifted on the stage and leaned against the stile very few believe that the figure is that of a live man. They think it to be a rag dummy, a veritable scarecrow, and nearly all of those in the audience who are witnessing the extravaganza for the first time are convinced that this manikin will presently be replaced, to the accompaniment of some hocus-pocus, by the real man so essential to the play. Thus, when Dorothy rubs the magic ring and the figure exhibits signs of life there is a gasp of astonishment all over the theatre.''
Fred Stone wrote an autobiography entitled Rolling Stone (NY: McGraw-Hill, Whittlesey House, 1945). There (p. 133) he described his difficulties in the premiere, when he spent eighteen minutes with his weight balanced on the side of his ankle. Only the prolonged applause of the surprised audience gave time, as he leaned on Anna Laughlin's Dorothy, to lose the numbness so he could perform his dance.
Stones come in plums, don't they? The source for the linked entry is p. 65 of the Swartz book.
- North STONINGTON
- The town where, in July 1994, Connecticut state troopers raided a vacant storefront to seize plants they thought were marijuana, but which turned out to be oregano, apple mint, and other herbs hung out to dry.
- Louise STORY
- A New York Times reporter from at latest April 2004 to at least June 2007. Before that, she worked at the Boston Globe.
- Mark STORY
- A sports columnist with the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. (At least as of mid-2009.)
- Nathan STRANGE
- A young man from England who became the first European to train as a sumo wrestler in Japan. (This was some time before 2002.) He left the program after a year.
- John F. STREET
- A former city council president of Philadelphia, PA, Street was elected mayor in 1999 and reelected in 2003. By law the mayor is limited to two four-year terms, so after January 7, 2008, he was out on the street. (He was succeeded by Michael Nutter. I know Pennsylvania is famous for crazy place names, but this is ridiculous.)
- Eduard STUDY
- A German mathematician who worked on the theory of invariant ternary forms, spherical trigonometry, and hypercomplex numbers. I don't know how he came by a French given name and an English surname; he was born in Coburg in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, so there's an English connection of sorts (see UK entry for some clarification).
- DANIA Suárez
- A Colombian prostitute currently (April 2012) at the center of an scandal involving a US security detail. The accused men -- 12 Secret Service agents and 11 members of the military -- were in Cartagena, Colombia, to protect President Obama at an OAS meeting April 14-15. They arrived some time before the president, and were replaced and sent back stateside hours after the president's arrival late on Friday the 13th.
Apparently some members of the security detail hired prostitutes; others have been accused of interfering with an investigation. Interfering with a criminal investigation is generally illegal (and often easy to prove), irrespective of whether any crime has been committed (something Martha Stewart won't forget next time). Prostitution is legal in parts of Cartagena.
The way the scandal got started is that there was a dispute between Dania and her customer over her agreed price. (Surprisingly, despite their usual reflexive allegeds and allegedlies, the US media seemed to take at face value Miss Suárez's claim that they had agreed on a price of $800. Journalists can be amazingly naive.) She called the cops, and the dispute is said to have been settled for about $200. It does not seem to be disputed that she did call the cops, so I suppose this all took place in a part of Cartagena where this sort of thing is legal. (Indeed, failure to pay for an illegal act is unlikely to be a crime, since contracts for illegal activities are not enforceable, though the IRS may still seek its cut. Still, it's not a good situation to find oneself in, if the verbal contract itself was criminal.) One week later, about half of the accused Secret Service men have been more or less involuntarily separated from their jobs, and the investigation continues.
In Spanish, Dania is pronounced like daña. (There might be a distinction in some dialects, but it would be an exceedingly fine one.) Daña means `she harms' or `he harms.' (Or `it harms.' Spanish is a pro-drop language; a third-person singular pronoun is implied by the verb form.)
(Incidentally, Cartagena is the Spanish name of Carthage -- transfered to the New World in the usual way.)
- Kieran SUCKLING
- A spokesman for the Center for Biological Diversity, a lobbying group that opposes the rights of people whose property is being squatted on by the unfit in the struggle for survival of the fittest.
- Nigel SUCKLING
- An author of, or more precisely the text content-provider for, illustrated books about mammals.
- The Book of the Unicorn.
- Year of the Horse (May 2003) and Year of the Goat (May 2003).
- The Boris Vallejo Portfolio, Superheroes: The Heroic Visions of Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell, Hard Curves: The Fantasy Art of Julie Bell, and similar books in which human animals are depicted with their teats at the very least discernible.
Oh, alright, he also did stuff like Year of the Dragon: Legends & Lore (May 2003). It's perfectly understandable, of course, that he did text for The Book of Sea Monsters and for other books illustrated by Bob Eggleton, who naturally draws reptiles, dragons, birds, and hybrids of these.
- Andrew M. SUM
- A Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. Bottom line, baby!
- Michael SUPERMAN
- Mr. Superman, 62 at the time, and his wife Alice, reported a house invasion. I happened to see this in the Los Angeles Times of March 11, 1976, in a tiny item on page B2. (No, I was looking for something else.) They were at home in Long Beach, California, with a visiting friend (Martin Cohn, 24, of Santa Barbara), when two ``grubby looking'' armed men burst through the door and bound the three of them with adhesive tape. The robbers took $4000 in cash and $5300 in jewelry. After they left, according to the version of one reporter (writing for some publication whose morgue I don't have access to), Superman called police after belatedly bursting his bonds faster than a speeding bullet. Must've been a bad-krypronite day.
I wonder if this is the same Michael Superman who was a ``Fuller brush [door-to-door sales]man'' in the Los Angeles area 20 years before. Art Ryon had a jokey column in the LAT entitled ``Ham on Ryon.'' The lead item on Nov. 11, 1957, reported this (p. B5). In December 2011, there was an attorney Martin Cohn practicing in Santa Barbara.
- Chris SUTTILE
- Lisa Lombardi wrote an article entitled ``Don't say this on a first date'' that appeared in <yahoo.com> courtesy of <match.com>. She asserted that ``most of us know'' the big no-no topics like felony record. She wanted to dig deeper: ``But what about the more subtle subjects you're best not broaching right off the bat? We polled both experts and real men and women about the other deal-breakers...''
One of the ``real men'' she quoted in the article was ``Chris Suttile, a single guy in Chicago.'' The subtlety he was quoted as an authority for was that of not talking about plans to have children. (I believe hurried discussions of contraception may be permitted, however.) Anyway, sottile and sutil are `subtle' in Modern Italian and Spanish, resp. I haven't the time to check now, but if there isn't some Mediterranean speech (probably an Italian variety) in which suttile means or meant `subtle,' I'll eat my granola.
I'm not sure if this is a pseudonym. Another person quoted is ``Maria Amor of San Diego,'' but the rest have unremarkable names.
- Jimmy Lee SWAGGART
- A blend of swagger and braggart?
He's a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis, a singer and piano player like him. Well, like him in general. Jerry Lee Lewis's career nosedived when it was revealed that he had married an adolescent cousin. Jimmy Lee Swaggart's career nosedived when it was discovered (October 1991?) that he had been patronizing a prostitute.
- Robert SWEET
- The US federal judge presiding over civil suits brought in 2002 and 2003 against McDonald's, which claim that McDonald's food has more calories than one would expect. We have more on unusual judge names.
- Wladyslaw SZPILMAN
- A composer of popular songs and a performer on Poland's state radio, Szpilman wrote The Pianist, basis of Roman Polanski's movie of the same name. Szpilman is the Polish spelling of a Yiddish name meaning performer. (In German, Spieler is `player.') To be precise, Szpilman's memoir was published as Death of a City in 1946, and was republished as The Pianist in 1999, a year before Szpilman's death. It was made into a movie once, or perhaps better said twice, before the child-molester grabbed it. The first version was called Warsaw Robinson. It was suppressed by the Communist authorities (by the way, there's no more nomen-est-omen irony in this entry; I'm just adding fiber), who were unhappy with its unfavorable portrayal of Ukrainians. It was rereleased in an improved version with Soviet soldiers liberating Warsaw. (There might be some irony in the timing of that event.)
- Noboru TAKESHITA
- My friend Yoshi wondered why American newsfaces always pronounced this Japanese prime minister's surname ``tah-keh-shta.'' The normal Japanese pronunciation has even stress, and the vowel after sh is not elided. It's interesting that the effort to sanitize the name in English led to the introduction of a consonant cluster (sht) that is more unusual in English than in Japanese. [The sequence shuta, as in shutaisei (`identity'), is pronounced with a u that ranges from weak to virtually absent.]
In 1987, Takeshita and two other close supporters of Kakuei Tanaka -- Shin Kanemaru and Ichiro Ozawa -- took over control of Kaku-san's machine. [It was an essentially typical patronage-and-power political machine. Goodies for the folks back home included roads and bridges, and getting the route of the bullet train to go through his district. Tanaka was Japan's Finance Minister (1962-1965) and became Prime Minister in 1972. The Lockheed bribery scandal forced Tanaka out of office in 1974, but he maintained effective control of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) even as he faced indictment, trial, conviction, and extended appeals (on those and other corruption charges). His machine continued to dominate Japan until 1993.]
The troika of Takeshita, Kanemaru and Ozawa staged their internal coup while Tanaka, in addition to his legal troubles, was ill. Takeshita became PM in 1987, but resigned under pressure due to scandals in 1989. He was arguably Japan's worst post-WWII PM (a distinction for which there is substantial competition).
(FWIW, Kanemaru had become the new don in 1987, a role he played until he was arrested for tax evasion in 1992. That left only Ozawa, who turned reformer, and for the first time in 1993 the LDP lost a national election.)
(Interestingly, Tanaka rose to the top of Japanese politics despite having only an elementary-school education. Most Japanese PM's have been college graduates -- many from the University of Tokyo, Japan's most prestigious university. On the other hand, Taro Aso (LDP), who served as PM from September 2008 to September 2009, came to be ridiculed for misreading common kanji in his own speeches. His given name Taro became a schoolyard epithet meaning `stupid.' Taro is a common given name, so this likely won't last.)
- TELLER
- As explained at the NFN entry, that's now legally his entire name. Teller is the half of the off-kilter performing duo Penn and Teller who never or almost never speaks.
- Eugene TERRE'BLANCHE
- He founded a white supremacist party of South Africa, the AWB, and was its leader until his assassination in 2010. (In news reports over the years, his surname appeared in the forms Terreblanche, TerreBlanche, and Terre'Blanche. I guess the former are regularizations for the latter.)
- Georgia TESTA
- Executive secretary of the Aristotelian Society (a UK society of philosophy so clever it'll make your head hurt, and not even in a good way). Testa is Italian for `head.'
- LIONEL TIGER
- The given name Lionel, be it noted, is from a medieval diminutive of the Middle English nickname Lion or the Old French name Léon, according to Hanks and Hodges. [I think the accent is a modern innovation, though.]
Dr. Lionel Tiger is Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University.
- William A. TILLER
- He wrote a book entitled The Science of Crystallization: Macroscopic Phenomena and Defect Generation (1991). P.W. Bridgman developed some of the most important techniques of crystal growth (including two which now bear his name -- ``Horizontal Bridgman'' and ``Vertical Bridgman'' technques -- described in Tiller's book). If you don't use some kind of bridge, then another way to get across the water is by boat.
- Fr. Tomás de TORQUEMADA
- The surname is a contraction of Torre quemada, Spanish for burnt tower. Thousands of his victims were burned ``at the stake'' -- a tower of fire. The Catholic Encyclopedia contains an evil entry describing his activities in defense of the one true faith:
``Whether Torquemada's ways of ferreting out and punishing heretics were justifiable is a matter that has to be decided not only by comparison with the penal standard of the fifteenth century, but also, and chiefly, by an inquiry into their necessity for the preservation of Christian Spain.''
In 2000, Pope John Paul II apologized and said it wouldn't happen again.
- Madelyne Gorman TOOGOOD
- A woman who slapped and punched her four-year-old daughter in the parking lot of a department store on September 13, 2002. Before beating the child inside the SUV, she looked around apparently to see if anyone was watching. But she was caught anyway. When she turned herself in to Mishawaka, Indiana, police on September 21 to face felony battery charges, she said she made ``a mistake.'' Of course: she forgot about the department-store surveillance camera.
- Robert TOOLS
- In July 2001, Tools became the first person to receive the AbioCor artificial heart (manufactured by Abiomed Inc. of Danvers, Massachusetts). He died five months after the surgery. (The AbioCor is not the first artificial heart by a long shot, but it is the first to be completely internal: it's the size of a softball and battery-powered, and no wires or tubes protrude through the skin.)
The English word organ is derived from the Greek word organon, which means `tool.'
- Dr. TOOTHACRE
- This fellow practiced dentistry in South Bend for a number of years, I am assured by Chuck and Mary. I think he must have retired some time ago; detailed information about him is not readily available on the internet at this time. Since I live in the South Bend area, I suppose I ought to scrounge up some details for the higher good. Mary also says she once worked with a Fred Trout at the Bodine Fish Hatchery (a salmon and trout hatchery; see BSFH.
There is a website <http://toothacre.com/> ``[f]or resources and information on Arm pains and Pain'' including toothache. They also have surname links. I feel like I've been set up for a trip to the Twilight Zone.
- John TORY
- A conservative politician in Ontario. The name is such an egregious instance of nomen est omen that by the time he was elected leader of the PC party in September 2004, it no longer merited a joke. The conservative party (name as of 2008: Progressive Conservatives) was disappointed in the 2007 provincial elections (no, I don't recall any details). Many expected or wanted him to offer his resignation shortly afterwards, but he didn't. Ever since then, Tory's leadership of the Ontario party has been described with words like ``embattled.'' The party will hold a convention in London on February 23, 2008, a couple of weeks from this writing, but I probably won't come back and update this entry. It seems no one else has wanted the job enough to challenge him for it, and he's planning to hang on with a bare majority in an up-or-down vote called a ``leadership review,''
- Sean TRENDe
- A blogger on political races at RCP.
- Robert TROUT
- Defense lawyer for William Jefferson (not W.J. Clinton, just W.J.). Back when he was a US congressman, William Jefferson was caught on video with his hands in the metaphorical cookie jar. Specifically, the FBI taped W.J. accepting a briefcase with $100,000 at a Pentagon City parking lot. The money was supposed to be used to bribe the Nigerian Vice President. How appropriate.
William Jefferson's nickname when he was a congressman (and a member of the House Ways and Means Committee) was ``Dollar Bill.'' Several members of his former staff are in prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy. A businessman has already pleaded guilty to bribing him. It's reported that there are tapes of W.J. soliciting bribes. It would appear that the feds have the goods on him, but what seems likely to really ice the case -- the icing on the cake, so to speak -- was the discovery of $90,000 of that $100,000 in a nonmetaphorical freezer at W.J.'s D.C.-area residence. The money (in marked $100's) had been divided up into chunks, wrapped in aluminum foil, and stuffed into nonmetaphorical but possibly symbolic boxes of Boca burgers and Pillsbury pie crusts. They say the four-and-twenty blackbirds were a political metaphor, but exculpatory stories about that green are even harder to swallow.
Trout are famous for swimming against the stream and almost dying in the effort, but this case may require more than your run-of-the-water-mill fish ladder. At the start of his opening statement on June 16, 2009, Robert Trout remarked to the jury, ``I almost think I should begin with a joke about cold cash or frozen assets.'' It'll be a historic tragedy if it turns out that the freezer didn't have any fish. I hope full details come out during the trial. (Boca burgers are ersatz meat made from milk and vegetables, and probably taste better than paper. US paper money is printed on an ersatz ``currency paper'' that is about 25% linen and 75% cotton, plus some red and blue synthetic fibers, but no one has claimed that those $100 bills were also counterfeit, despite the unreal safebox.) At the start of the trial, it looks like the defense is going to be that when he wasn't drunk or making inadequately documented and implausible but perfectly legal transactions, W.J. was, okay, doing a lot of things that were tasteless, maybe even unkosher, but not quite, technically, letter-of-the-law illegal. Sure, you'd have better odds against dam-riding grizzlies, but you can't always have your choice of venue.
(Just for balance, and not to have egg-beaters on my face in case of acquittal, I should point out that despite how bad a lot of W.J.'s videotaped actions apparently look, the prosecution has its own obstacles. For one thing, sting operations arouse some skepticism in juries, and the feds' original star witness, the woman who gave W.J. that $100,000, will not be testifying for the prosecution. No reason for this decision has been made public. It does prevent the prosecution from introducing into evidence unrecorded conversations between her and W.J., but a lot of their conversations were recorded. Another problem for the prosecution is that W.J.'s alleged crimes are not simple quid pro quo bribery, but rather a form of influence peddling. Essentially, he traded on his connections in West Africa, offering to grease the skids for business transactions with money to be funneled through companies owned by his family.)
- TURKEY
- The first West Asian country to suffer fatal cases of bird flu in humans (in 2006).
- Jeffrey UNDERCOFFER
- A Secret Service agent. (Testified July 17, 1996 before House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, along with John Libonati, director of the [executive branch] Office of Inspection and Congressional Affairs, and fellow Secret Service Agent Arnold Cole.)
Undercoffer was assigned by the White House to review FBI background files on aides seeking permanent White House passes.
- UNO
- Uno is a dog, specifically a beagle, though he does resemble 2008 Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. He (Uno) competed in the Westminster Kennel Club show in New York City's Madison Square Garden in February 2008. On February 12 he came in at numero uno in the hound group. He was the first beagle since 1939 to win the hound group and thus reach the wonderfully portentious-sounding ``final ring of seven.'' (Huckabee lost all his contests on February 12.) The next day he (Uno) won ``best in show.'' It was the first time in the 102-year history of the competition that a beagle had won it all.
- KEITH URBAN
- A country singer. The irony of the surname is obvious; the possible appropriateness of the given name not. Keith was a Scottish surname before it began to be used as a given name. It referred to lands in East Lothian that bore that name, probably derived from a Celtic word meaning, appropriately, `wood.' A wood is country enough. Then again, maybe it was destined to refer to the fact that he got Nicole Kidman with child, years after Tom Cruise gave up trying.
- VAGUE
- See the leverage the synergy entry.
- R. VALID
- Roger Valid's 1981 book, Mechanics of Continuous Media and Analysis of Structures, sounds like an engineering book, and indeed, Dr. Valid is among other things an ``[e]ngineer graduate of the École Centrale de Paris,'' according to the title page. And in engineering one is not concerned so much with precise validity as with robust reliability. But alarm bells go off in the mind as one reads Valid's preface, which begins with this claim: ``This is a course on Mechanics and Mathematics.'' What's he trying to pull?
As W.T. Koiter explains in the introduction, ``Professor Valid [uses] modern coordinate-free analysis in the mechanics of continuous media. The approach is typical of a French school of applied mathematics and engineering science. Professor Germain's eloquent recommendation to engineers in his preface to the original French edition of this work therefore applies even more strongly outside France.''
Prof. Germain (in the ``foreword'' of the English edition) is concerned because ``the reader who takes up the book without being familiar with the concepts and notations that Roger Valid handles so masterfully will find this ... perhaps a little disconcerting at first.'' Germain's task is to convice this reader that the mathematics is germane to his problems, and that Valid's is a valid approach to his problems.
(Don't tell me I'm stretching things too far. The book is all about elasticity!)
- Dr. John W. VALLEY
- A professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
- VECTOR
- At the end of the 1950's, San Francisco emerged as the center of the US counterculture, when that counterculture was the Beat Generation. Increasing police raids on gay bars, peaking in 1960, and action by the Alcoholic Beverage Commission to revoke the bars' licenses, led to the largest homosexual-rights movement in US history. That movement had an organization called the Society for Individual Rights (I'm not aware that it was abbreviated SIR) and a periodical called Vector.
Twenty years later, San Francisco became one of the centers in the epidemic of AIDS, whose spread was facilitated by gay bars. A vector, in biology, is a disease-transmitting organism (as opposed to a vehicle, which is inanimate).
- SKIP VIRGIN
- A viral immunologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Virgin and his colleagues have conducted studies which demonstrate that infection with certain herpes-like viruses can improve immunity to dangerous diseases like plague (at least if you're a lab mouse). The work is described in the May 17, 2007, issue of the journal Nature.
- Ngan Thi BICH Vo
- A waitress at the Hawaii Cafe, a nightclub in Garden Grove, California. Vo, 20, was at work there on the evening of Monday, August 16, 2004. Some time after 11 PM, she called her boyfriend, who was at another nightclub. According to Garden Grove Police Lt. Mike Handfield, Vo told him she felt two customers had insulted her by tugging on her skirt and trying to flirt with her. She was very upset, and apparently she ``asked him to intervene.'' Later the two men, regulars at the nightclub, bought her a rose and apologized. It was apparently too little or too late. Around 1 AM, a man entered the crowded restaurant, walked past four tables, and shot the two men at point-blank range.
- Steven VOLK
- Author of ``Class, Union, Party: The Development of a Revolutionary Union Movement in Bolivia (1905-1952),'' Science and Society vol. 39, pp. 26-43 (Spring 1975).
Das Volk is German for `the people,' but has a narrower, somehow more political connotation than `people' can have: das Volk refers to an ethnos, a particular people connected by a common culture or nationality. In English, you can use the null article to remove this particularity: a phrase beginning ``people say'' or ``people are'' is clearly general, and if a particular group is meant, the restriction must be indicated by context. To get the same generalizing effect in German, you have to switch words and begin ``die Leute sagen'' or ``die Leute sind.''
(The German word Volk is cognate with the English word folk, of course, and they are pronounced similarly. In particular, the German v is pronounced like an English f, and the vowels are close enough, considering the variation in vowel pronunciation across dialects. The main difference is in the l, which is clearly articulated in German, but ``dark'' in English.)
- René VOLTZ
- A researcher into the properties of electrons in solids. For example, he wrote ``Thermalization of Subexcitation Electrons in Dense Molecular Media,'' chapter 3 of Excess Electrons in Dielectric Media, edd. Christiane Ferradini, Jean-Paul Jay-Gerin (CRC Press, 1991), pp. 75-104.
- WACO, Texas
- I'm convinced that the news media, as well as people living in surrounding communities, have been mispronouncing its name.
Oh, the 100,000 good people or so of Waco want you to know that they're only responsible for Baylor University (a/k/a Harvard of the Southern Baptists, also ``Thee University''). Still, if you go the seat of McLennan County, you might as well also visit the former site of the Mount Carmel compound of the Branch Davidians in nearby Elk (five miles east of the Waco city limits) or the ranch of US President George W. Bush in Crawford (ten miles west of the city limits). Then again, better not.
Waco also has an M&M candies facility and a Haircolor Headquarters. ``Headquarters'' -- nice pun, but overly militaristic overtones and highlights.
Comedian Steve Martin grew up in Waco -- need I say more? Okay, more at the Hfuhruhurr entry.
- RICHARD WAGONER
- Chairman and CEO of GM's North American Division from April 2005 until March 2009, when he was fired by the president of the US, of all people.
A wagon is a wheeled vehicle without the power to propel itself. That seems pretty significant right there. A wagoner is a wagon driver or, as the OED has for its first definition s.v.: ``[o]ne who has charge of a wagon as driver.''
The name Richard was introduced into Britain by the Normans. It is composed of the roots ric (`power') and hard (`brave, strong').
- John WARRINGTON
- Author of The Gallic Wars, a translation (1954) of Julius Caesar's De Bello Gallico.
- John Gibson WARRY
- Author of
- Warfare in the Classical World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Weapons, Warriors and Warfare in the Ancient Civilisations of Greece and Rome (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), frequently reprinted.
- Alexander's Battles 334-323 BC: Conquest of the Persian Empire, Vol. 7 (London:Osprey Publishing, Ltd., 1991)
- Alexander the Great: His Armies and Campaigns 334-323 BC (London:Osprey Publishing, Ltd., 1999)
- RICH WAS
- Yes, fortune is fleeting, so you should buy insurance. Rich Was is (you knew I had to write that) a State Farm insurance agent in South Bend, Indiana. "Rich Was" is what I see on all the signs and his unsolicited mail, etc., but he signs a longer name that ends in ``Jr.'' So Rich Was was and is.
- Walter WASHINGTON
- The first mayor of Washington, D.C. Also the first black mayor of Washington, DC. But not the first black mayor of a city in the US South, because Washington didn't have a mayor until 1975, following the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which was enacted in 1973. The first black mayor of Chicago, elected in 1983, was Harold Washington.
- WATERTOWN, Massachusetts
- On May 1, 2010, a water main break in Weston, Massachusetts, caused 64 million gallons of water to be lost from fresh-water reservoirs that supply Watertown. In order to continue providing water for firefighting and sewage (doesn't this remind you of Gulliver in Lilliput?), the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority had to substitute untreated water from backup reservoirs and issued a boil-water order.
Historic Watertown, on the Charles River about 6 miles northwest of Boston, has a population of almost 33,000 and thus represents more than 1% of the population served by the main and affected by the boil-water order. What, you were expecting maybe 2%? See the Detroit entry.
One week later, it is believed that the break was caused by the failure of a 15-foot-long, one-ton metal ``clamp'' (a/k/a a Brico coupling). It affected Boston and 29 of its surrounding communities, including Brookline and Swampscott.
- EVELYN Waugh
- His given name is pronounced ``EE-veh-lin'' or ``EE-v'lin.'' (Waugh rhymes with law.) Born in 1903 the second son of Arthur Waugh, brother of Alec Waugh; he was the father of Auberon Waugh. They should have stuck with A-names. (In fact, they did: Evelyn Waugh was christened Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh.) In 1928 he married Evelyn Gardner. Not surprisingly, it didn't work out. In 1930, Evelyn and Evelyn Waugh were divorced. (Many who oppose gay marriage on religious grounds like the slogan ``God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.'' Had to mention that.)
Hey, hey, Paula!
In 1937 he married a woman whose last name was Herbert. Two years later, Laura (neé Herbert) and Evelyn were not divorced. At this time he was Catholic. It's good he had waited until 1930 to convert: in those days, it was pretty hard to get an annulment -- it was until death did you part (and then I suppose you could be a bigamist in the afterlife).
He seems to have had a bit of a self-destructive impulse. In 1925 he tried committing suicide by swimming out to sea, but he was stung by a jellyfish and turned back. In 1939, Waugh (full name Evelyn Arthur Saint John Waugh) used his political connections to get into the Royal Marines, and eventually transferred to an Army commando unit.
- Leslie D. WEATHERHEAD
- Author of The Christian Agnostic (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1965). He seems to have been unusually open-minded. When you move your library, arresting volumes sometimes fall out. Maybe some day I'll skim this one more thoroughly.
- Edward WEEKS
- Weeks was editor of The Atlantic Monthly for many years. He started as an assistant editor for the journal in 1924. So far as I can tell from the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, his first published article (in 1927) appeared in The Atlantic Monthly. That year also, when he was still a reader and assistant editor, he recommended Ernest Hemingway's short story ``Fifty Grand'' for publication. The story, which had been rejected by The Saturday Evening Post, Cosmopolitan, Collier's and Scribners, was Hemingway's first in a national publication.
He was editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press (the magazine's book-publishing arm) from 1928 to 1937, and moved back to the magazine in 1938 as its ninth editor and, by the time he retired in 1966, its longest-serving one. After his retirement in 1966, Weeks served as consultant and senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press until 1987 and continued writing. After retiring from this active retirement, he was editor emeritus at the Monthly and Press. He came in to work until two days before he died (Saturday, March 11, 1989) age 91.
- Anthony WEINER
- Weiner up-ended and probably ended (so it seems as of this writing, June 9, 2011) his career as a member of the US Congress (D-NY) by misdirecting a photograph of his tumescent member, publishing it to a large group of Tweet readers rather than sending it privately to his intended destination, a woman other than the one he was married to. (No, she wasn't his urologist either.) His surname is retrospectively ominous in both German and English.
In English, of course, (you already know everything articulated in this and the next paragraph) the Wiener surname is pronounced ``WEE-ner,'' presumably because in English, ei and ie are not usually distinguished except as misspellings. (That is, if either order is correct in the spelling of some word, then a spelling with the other order usually represents a recognizable misspelling rather than some distinct word or intended pronunciation distinction. There's a rule about it. Typically, the exceptions are recent foreign loans like lei.) In fact, weiner is a common-enough misspelling of wiener that it might be deemed an acceptable variant. (For example, googling on <<+wiener "hot dog" -anthony>> (the plus sign mostly prevents Google from returning pages that only have the weiner spelling) yields ``[a]bout 3,880,000'' ghits, while doing the same with weiner yields ``[a]bout 1,480,000.'')
Weiner is an informal name for a hot dog (a/k/a frankfurter), and is also, for obvious reasons, a (somewhat childish) euphemism for penis. (Yes, yes, I do parenthesize (quite) a lot, and my parenthesizing of modifiers is almost idiosyncratic. I can't help it -- I'm a dick.) The various euphemisms and dysphemisms for penis are also widely used as pejoratives. Under the circumstances, reportage and comment on the long-drawn-out Weiner story featured a lot of punning and references to punning (or to the commenter's meritorious abstinence therefrom, etc.). Even the ``wee nerd'' pun gets a few ghits with this story.
In German, wiener (capitalized only as a noun) means `Viennese,' and wiener Würstchen can be translated literally if awkwardly as `little Vienna sausage' or `Vienna sausagelet.' In the usual way, Wiener alone is understood (in appropriate contexts) to stand for wiener Würstchen. Also in German as in English, Würstchen, Wiener, and Frankfurter are among the vulgar synonyms for Penis. (In the German Sprachraum, a frank is normally all-pork, while a wiener is pork-and-beef.) In German, however, ie and ei have different pronunciations and are carefully distinguished, so the pun on Weiner's name does not work the same way.
Weiner is a common surname in Germany, an old contracted form of Wagner, which still means `wagon-maker' in southern Germany. There is an unrelated root in the verb weinen, which means `weep' and is cognate with the English whine. From this verb one has Weiner again as a common noun meaning `weeper.' In the June 7 news conference at which Rep. Weiner first admitted that it was indeed he who had sent the offending picture, he dabbed theatrically at his eyes and perhaps shed a genuine tear for his damaged and endangered political career.
[Obsessive detail, representing some of my research: You won't find Weiner in most German or German-English dictionaries. The Grimm has an entry with many examples of its use, however, as well as an entry for the female form Weinerin. A synonym that usually does get an entry is Weinende (same form for male and female). One reason that the common noun Weiner may not get an entry while Weinende does is that Weiner is regularly formed from the verb, using the productive ending -er (like whiner from whine), and German dictionaries tend not to define such regular derivations unless the meaning or usage is somehow other than what one would expect. In contrast, a construction from the adverb, like Geweinde, may or may not be accepted, so an entry for that is warranted. A possible second reason may be that Geweinde has become more common than Weiner. (It's hard to tell from ghits: even if the common noun Weiner were 70 times as common as Geweinde, it would still represent only 1% of the total Weiner ghits, most of which are for the surname or misspellings of Wiener. The inflected forms -- Weiners and Weinern -- are similarly swamped.) Fwiw, my mom doesn't recognize Geweinde and considers Weiner the translation of weeper, but she hasn't resided in Germany since 1938. She does wonder if there is a meaning of Weiner related to Wein (`wine'). The Grimm managed to uncover one such instance from the year 1470.]
- WHIG
- White House Iraq Group. A task force created by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. in August 2002 and charged, according to the Washington Post, with the task of 'marketing' the war in Iraq to the public.
- Walter WHITE
- Chief secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1929 to 1955, and during that time one of the most prominent black civil rights leaders in the US.
- Sheldon WHITEHOUSE
- Democratic senator from Rhode Island, as of 2010. They say that every morning 100 US senators look in the mirror and see a future president (unless a seat is vacant).
- V. B. WIGGLESWORTH
- In 1980, Wigglesworth published an article entitled ``Do insects feel pain?'' in the journal Antenna (vol. 4, pp. 8-9).
If you're interested in this subject, you should see the minireview by C.H. Eisemann, W.K. Jorgensen, D.J. Merritt, M.J. Rice, B.W. Cribb, P.D. Webb, and M.P. Zalucki, ``Do insects feel pain? - A biological view,'' in Experimentia, vol. 40, pp. 164-167 (1984).
- Amy WINEhouse
- A singer-songwriter who lived the blues. The most celebrated track from her five-Grammy-winning 2006 album Back To Black was titled ``Rehab.'' In 2007, her press was dominated by her bulimia, violent drunken fights with her husband and fans, and her problems with drugs (pot, cocaine, heroin, and more exotic items, in various combinations) and alcohol. Well-wishers suggested she stick to booze.
On July 23, 2011, she was found in her apartment -- dead at age 27. Everyone seemed to agree that the Winehouse death had to do with alcohol... somehow. There were reports that she had gone on (and perhaps after) a fatal binge, but family and close friends claimed the opposite: that her doctors had advised her to cut down slowly on her heavy drinking, but that she could only quit cold turkey. (Not wild turkey -- to only have quit that would have been incremental.) The day before she died, her doctor gave her a clean bill of health. Her parents, boyfriend, and manager all believed she had died from quitting too abruptly. It gives fresh meaning to ``physical dependence.'' Toxicology results eventially showed that her blood alcohol level was five times the legal limit for driving. I'm sure her family and friends would all insist that she wasn't driving at the time, but the coroner ruled that she died from drinking too much alcohol.
- Bill M. WISE
- Compiler and copyright holder of The Wisdom of Sam Ervin (NYC: Ballantine Books, 1973). A politician is deemed wise principally for the virtue of expressing forcefully the opinions one agrees with. Sen. Sam Ervin, Jr. (D-N.C.) became famous as chair of the Senate committee that held hearings on the Watergate Scandal. Information brought out in those hearings eventually forced President Richard M. Nixon to resign from office (the first US president to do so) in 1973. In particular, it came out (initially in answer to a routine question, in a staff interview with a White House employee who was to testify) that conversations in the White House Oval Office (the President's ceremonial and actual office -- how inconvenient) were secretly recorded.
Ervin became known for the homespun, common-sense indignation he expressed at Executive-Branch activities revealed in testimony before his committee. Conveniently, the president in office was of the opposite party, posing no partisan restraint on his wit. Ervin was known primarily for his wit (in the modern sense of humor), and only secondarily for his wisdom. Bill Wise's book demonstrates in detail just how imaginatively Ervin expressed his unimaginative opinions.
Whodunit Math Puzzles is a children's book by one Bill Wise (illustrated by Lucy Corvino). If this is the same Wise, he seems to have a thing about the intelligence gathered by criminal investigation.
A William Wise wrote the children's book Dinosaurs Forever (illustrated by Lynn Munsinger). The novel The Tail of the Dragon was written by Robert L. Wise and William Louis, Jr. Wilson. Only Wise is credited on the cover. The other fellow, regardless his connection with the book, is not some Wilson who was named after William Louis, Jr. It's just amazon.com's weird way with names. Similarly, Stephen R. Wise has contributed a volume to a series of books edited by ``William N., Jr. Still.''
- Timothy Peter WISEMAN
- A much-published classicist, whose books are copiously footnoted. See, for example, Catullus and his world: a reappraisal (Cambridge U. P., 1985). Chapter 1, entitled ``A World Not Ours'' is about the nexus of sex and violence in Roman thinking.
- James D. WOLFENSOHN
- Head of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005. His surname means `Wolf's son.' He has had almost a child's eagerness to please, becoming a very popular president, at least within the organization.
They say the child is father to the man. In March 2005, Paul Wolfowitz was nominated and confirmed as Wolfensohn's successor. Wolfowitz is a family name equivalent to Wolfensohn, a patronymic constructed using a Slavic rather than Germanic suffix. Of course, it's written using the letter w to represent a sound normally written with a vee in English, because its original Latin-character spelling was in German and Polish. In German, incidentally, the word Witz means `joke,' cognate with English wit. (I'm sorry, I've exceeded my quota of ``the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce'' citations. You'll have to find a more complete description deep inside the pea entry or the Charlie's Angels entry.)
With the nomination of Wolfensohn to replace Lewis Preston as president of the World Bank in March 1995, US Pres. Clinton disappointed environmentalist and development groups that had hoped he would pick W. Bowman (``Bo'') Cutter, a top White House economic advisor. (Since you ask, Cutter was deputy head of the White House National Economic Council, with responsibility for trade policy and international economic issues.) Wolfensohn, who had little experience in the development field, made the case that he would be a cutter of superfluous World Bank staff. (Sorry, I can't cut out the superfluous punning stuff.) The following May 5, the Wall Street Journal reported that ahead of his June 1 start, ``fear'' gripped the World Bank: ``he is seen at the 9,000-employee institution as a cost cutter.'' Looks now like he went native.
The wolf was native to the forests of Europe and (or including) Britain, and was a common basis for names. Wolfgang is still a common German given name. The Latin word for wolf was `lupus,' whence Spanish lobo and the English surname Lovell (the -ell is a diminutive ending). A Lovell is mentioned in this glossary in connection with Odyssey.
Incidentally, another candidate passed over for the WB post in 1995 was Lawrence Summers, US Treasury Dept. undersecretary for international affairs and a former World Bank chief economist. His cause had been backed some US Treasury and senior World Bank officials. I don't know how disappointed Summers was at the time, but he went on to become a president anyway -- of Harvard University. His tenure there was characterized by sober attempts to just, you know, like, suggest that maybe some tenets of political correctness might not, ah, be entirely, uh, fact, and by his subsequent desparate and spineless apologies. After five years as president, he resigned (as he announced on February 21, 2006) or was forced out, effective the end of the 2005-6 academic year.
- Tiger WOODS
- Plays golf well enough to have his own home page. Probably more than well enough. Drives with the woods, not into them.
- William WORDSWORTH
- I am at a loss for what to say.
But Gerard Baker is not. Gerard Baker is better known as the US editor of the Times of London, but the following is from a column he contributed to the American political magazine The Weekly Standard, May 22, 2006: ``...Prescott [see Prezza], 67, a brutish former seaman with a capacity to mangle the English language that makes George W. Bush sound like Wordsworth, had been exposed as having an affair with a jaunty 43-year-old lass who worked in his office.''
- N.T. WRIGHT
- Author of The New Testament and the People of God, (London: SPCK, 1992) and (Minneapolis: Fortress Pr., 1992), and generally speaking a famous and respected name (I mean in the synecdochal sense) in Biblical studies. The N.T. in Wright's name stands for Nicholas Thomas, but it is abbreviated on the covers of his books.
As of summer 2002, he's working on a series of Bible commentaries, one for each book of the bible. These were originally intended to replace, but will now be published along side of, the old Barclay commentaries.
- Dennis H. WRONG
- Author of Power: Its Forms, Bases and Uses (Harper/Colophon, 1979). The book ``presents a detailed analysis of the elusive concept of power in social theory...'' What more would you need to know?
- Malcolm X
- For apt nomen-est-omen information on this individual, as well as X. J. Kennedy, see the chiasmus entry.
- VIKTOR Yanukovych and VIKTOR Yushchenko
- The two candidates in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004 who won the most votes (but no majority). Both claimed victory in the subsequent run-off.
- Tanya ZUCKERBROT
- ``Tanya Zuckerbrot, MS, RD is a nutritionist and the creator of `The F-Factor Diet,' an innovative nutritional program she has used for more than ten years to provide hundreds of her clients with all the tools they need to achieve easy weight loss and maintenance, and improved health and well-being.'' She has a regular feature on the Fox News Health Blog called ``Tanya's Tasty Tips.''
Zuckerbrot is a German word literally meaning `sweet bread,' but like the English sweetmeat, it applies to any sweet delicacy -- candy, candied fruit, sweet pastry, whatever. Just like the word sweetmeat, Zuckerbrot has gone somewhat out of use. Konfekt and confectionary are more common. The English word sweetbread, of course, is something else again.
Zuckerbrot survives as a common surname and also in the stock phrase ``Zuckerbrot und Peitsche,'' meaning `carrot and stick.' (Peitsche, as you recall from reading Nietzsche, means `whip.') The German version strikes me as more pointed.
- Charles ZUKER
- The modern German word for sugar is Zucker (see preceding entry), and Zuker is a variant of this (probably from before orthographic regularization, but possibly from transliteration into English).
Charles Zuker is a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2001, he announced an important research finding concerning sugar: while there are more than 30 genes coding for bitter receptors in human taste buds, and a corresponding large number of different bitter receptors, there is only a single gene and a single kind of receptor for the sweet taste. Biochemists at Senomyx, a company cofounded by Zuker, eventually demonstrated that the two subunits of the sweet receptor each has a separate binding site. (This accounts for a synergy effect: a mix of sweeteners tastes sweeter than equivalent larger amounts of either one separately.)
Back in June or July 1999, most of the wait staff at the local Denny's quit about all at once, and service declined to abysmal. They were so short of personnel that they couldn't man their third shift (10pm-6am). When I came back a couple of months later, the only person I recognized was a cop, a fellow regular. When I told the seater ``one non'' he asked ``you mean nonsmoking?'' Still getting the kinks out. (Actually, they never got the kinks out.)
(Some time later, Val took third shift at the Hollywood Diner, my next regular spot, and I asked her what had happened that all the waitresses and the waiter had quit Denny's. She explained that they got a new night manager, and that manager would stay in the back office, supposedly doing books, and never help out in front no matter how heavy the traffic got. That occasional help had made all the difference.)
Surveys continue to report that a declining minority of Americans smoke, but you wouldn't guess it from 24-hour restaurants. I guess it's a class thing. The dives are all-smoking, whether the law allows it or not. The nicer sort of all-night diners are at most one-third non-smoking. Even allowing for the fact that smokers stay longer and that some nonsmokers accept seats in smoking sections, the clear majority of 3AM clientele smokes.
Seaters should seat the don't-cares in the part of smoking adjacent to nonsmoking; that would help.
When Robert was visiting from the Democratic People's Republic of California, he was shocked to learn that we ``still'' have nonsmoking sections here in the red state of Indiana. He hadn't realized that smoking was still permitted at all. I should have told him not to worry -- that most of our restaurants don't have nonsmoking sections. Then if he never read this entry, he might remain blissfully unaware of what that meant: that you can nonsmoke (or smoke) anywhere you like. And another thing if you visit -- if you forgot your motorcycle helmet, don't worry your head about it. (I don't think that's why it's called a ``red'' state.) (Starting April 10, 2006, however, most restaurants in this county (St. Joseph) are nonsmoking.)
For much more on this, much of it speculative but all of it just fascinating, see a couple of postings from the Classics List: (1) (2)
In fact, nonce means, essentially, this once, the present occasion, and the phrase ``for the nonce'' originally meant something more like ``just this once'' or ``as a one-off.'' The word nonce arose from an ignorant analysis of the Middle English phrase for then once, in which then was a dative singular form of the article the. (Cf. German ``für den eins.'')
This faulty analysis is evidently a problem particularly with the nasal en. Other examples can be found at the adder entry.
The term was invented by Ben Bradlee, managing editor of the Washington Post during that newspaper's investigation of the Watergate scandal. If you remember the value of aitch-bar-cee in folksy units, then you'll find this mnemonic useful for remembering the time of the Watergate scandal.
There was widespread feeling among the nobility that Japan needed reform to create a more national -- centralized and integrated -- government. In October, one of Japan's feudal lords (daimyo) formally requested that the shogun resign his powers. Shogun Keiki resigned in November, in the full expection that this was a formality preceding his appointment as the head of a new government. Instead, I decided to take a break from writing this glossary entry. Can you stand the suspense? You know, all I wanted to do here was insert a little item of interest, and I find myself having to write a thumbnail summary of the Meiji restoration just so it makes sense. So what I'm going do is put the motivating quote in now, and if it doesn't resonate yet, you can come back later and read the context I haven't written yet.
Reporting from Yokohama in March 1868, A. R. C. Portman wrote Secretary of State Seward:
The real sovereign of this country is not the Mikado ..., neither is it the Tycoon; .. the ruler is the Spirit of Evil, which appears to be all powerful, and to control every nobleman in this country.(Spirit, not axis. That came later.)
R. B. van Valkenburgh, the American Minister (viz. ambassador) to Japan had proclaimed US neutrality in the civil war and refused to allow delivery of a naval ram, the Stonewall, that had been purchased by the shogunate. Portman approved the decision and wrote that
in view of the utter unreliability of the ruling classes in Japan, such terrible engines for mischief as ironclads should never be permitted to get into their possession. ... The supply of rifles cannot well be stopped... that of ironclads, I sincerely hope, may not be a difficult matter, as they can only be built in the United States, England, and France.
It is also useful because it gives us an excellent replacement for the hopelessly unscientific-sounding term ``meaningless sex.'' And after all, if sex is meaningless, then it has no meaning. So its meaning is no. What part of no don't you understand? Obviously, this is completely incoherent.
I was first dazzled by this new term when I spied, sitting enticingly on a shelf, Men and Sex, ed. Levant and Brooks, pressed tightly on either side against other objectified collections of murdered tree. I had a somewhat uncontrollable urge to forcefully wrest this book from its accustomed shelf, subject it to my Male GazeTM, and break its weakly resisting spine. This might have been a more exciting sentence if English had grammatical gender, but in the gendered languages that I could translate this to, books are male or neuter, and I don't want to go there. And I did so. (I mean I did wrest, subject, and break. Pay attention!)
I decided to apply my google ability to see what I could learnity, and I foundity Masculinity, Spirituality, and Sexuality: The Interpreted, Lived Experience of the Traditional Age College Male, by William C. Schipper, O.S.B. (June 30, 2007). Y'know, if it were just some Jesuit I wouldn't care, but a Benedictine? Oh, I get it -- it's the whole traditional celibacy-and-guilty-wanking thing. Alright then. The document is a Ph.D. dissertation, with the usual ``submitted in partial fulfillment'' boilerplate (mhmm...). However, the top line of the title page is not the title but the words ``Project Demonstrating Excellence.'' That's a pretty high standard, or a risible boast.
Schipper writes that
Levant (1997) presents a convincing argument about the destructive results of what he calls ``Non-relational sex'' or physical sex that is motivated primarily by lust, with little relational intimacy and a minimal connection with the object of desire.
I infer from this that Ronald F. Levant, co-editor of Men and Sex, gets credit for inventing this term. Unfortunately, our library does not have this excellence-demonstrating project, so I can't determine what ``Levant (1997)'' is. (Which reminds me: what makes people give their children the initials ``W.C.''? And see what happens when they do?) My guess is that ``Levant (1997)'' is either ``The Masculinity Crisis,'' Journal of Men's Studies, vol. 5, pp. 221-231, or Men and Emotions: A Psychoeducational Approach, Newbridge Assessment and Treatment of Psychological Disorders Series (New York: Newbridge Communications).
It's exciting to know, or hear it claimed, that we are making real progress in the field of psychology, discovering things no one was ever able to believe.
The new term became common in the 1980's or so, and typically referred to people who were permanently employed for a while after graduating from high school before continuing their education as college undergraduates.
A discussion of nuclear mispronunciations, which have been perpetrated by many US presidents from Eisenhower on, was the subject of a ``Fresh Air'' commentary by Geoff Nunberg in October 2002. An amateur but useful discussion can be found at the Random House Word-of-the-Day feature for April 14, 2000.
Jimmy Carter, who had more marbles in his mouth than in his brain, pronounced the word as ``nookyer.'' He was often described as a nuclear engineer.
You can learn a little about the intellectual context of this intellectual word for the sphere of intelligence at the biosphere entry. The word is constructed from Ancient Greek roots. The word (and the scientific-vocabulary morpheme) sphere comes from the sphaîra, originally meaning `ball.' The first root in noosphere is nóos, meaning `mind,' which is related to the common British English word nous, q.v.
Out of the Noösphere (Simon & Schuster / Fireside, 1998) is subtitled Adventure, Sports, Travel, and the Environment: The Best of Outside Magazine. As you may guess, Outside is something of an intellectual's magazine for not-so-intellectual pursuits. I first learned of it on the (Greek and Roman) Classics mailing list, where Mark Williams, a professor of Classics at Calvin College, pointed out an article of interest in the December 2000 issue: ``Columnist Mark Jenkins writes of kayaking the Dardanelles and visiting Troy and Gallipoli, among other sites. His travelling companion seems to be up on Herodotus. The article is available on-line....''
NORA explains the change on its About Us page:
NORA was established in 1985 as the National Oil Recylers Association with the primary mission of fighting the hazardous waste designation of used oil [ah-ha] and aided in the development of the EPA's used oil management standards.
The name was later changed to NORA, An Association of Responsible Recyclers as the business functions of the membership grew. Today, NORA represents the leading liquid recycling companies in the following area: used oil, anti-freeze, oil filters & absorbents, parts cleaning, waste water and chemicals.
FWIW, here's the mission statement (circa 1997): ``To encourage and promote the proper recycling of used oil, oil filters, used antifreeze and other automotive and industrial materials through education and the development of legislation and regulations at the Federal, state, and local levels which will protect human health and the environment.''
<AllBusiness.com> serves a page with some quantitative detail on NORA.
You know, how much one knew or knows about weapons systems has a great deal to do with how tight-lipped the various military organizations have been. The depth of NORAD's hole in Colorado was better known than, say, the name of NORAD's Soviet counterpart (PVO Strany). Hence the following.
In prefaces or acknowledgments, authors normally dish up mostly thanks. An exception is Nigel Calder, in the ``Author's Note'' (pp. v-vi) to Nuclear Nightmare:
Custom allows me the privilege of thanking the BBC and the many other people who have made this book possible. The reader would be misled, though, if I gave the impression that cooperation was fulsome everywhere that Peter Batty and I went while we were investigating the subject of nuclear war for the BBC and its coproducers. The British Ministry of Defence and the U.S. Navy evaded our interest in their nuclear affairs by simple procrastination. The French Ministry of Defense, on the other hand, was very quick to say no to our request. The Israeli government was silent. The White House was very cordial until we asked awkward questions. Our varied and often promising efforts to secure a Soviet spokesman were systematically blocked. Individuals who had important things to say in private often declined to repeat them for the record.That makes me appreciate all the more those who were eager to help. Among the warriors, special thanks are due to the U.S. Department of Defense; to the U.S. Air Force and its Strategic Air Command, North American Air Defense Command, Space and Missiles Systems Organization, and the Tactical Air Forces in Europe; to the U.S. Army, particularly V Corps and its Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment; and to the German Ministry of Defense. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe were as helpful as secrecy and political inhibitions allowed. ...
He also thanked various people and nongovernmental and nonmilitary governmental organizations. I haven't really given very much information about NORAD, have I? Oh well, there's a bit more at the DEW Line entry. [The primary source for that entry is the Encyclopedia USA, a comprehensive but incomplete (and possibly abandoned?) effort. That entry cites various articles in Aviation Week & Space Technology (and its predecessor Aviation Week) as main source.]
The relative social prestige of selected occupations is reported in General Social Surveys 1972-1996: Cumulative Codebook (Chicago: NORC, 1996) on pp. 1077-1085. The results are about what you'd guess (so we won't list any), and yet they're interesting anyway (so tough).
After the post office confused itself and convinced the phone company that I had moved away, I had to resubscribe for phone service. Checking to see if I qualified for DSL self-installation, the customer service representative (saleswoman) listed possible equipment that I might currently be using. When she mentioned rotary phone, I guffawed. She told me some people still use that. Okay, it was still new forty years ago.
I probably shouldn't be mentioning that here -- this file is pretty bloated already.
Apparently, it refers in part to the directionless, surrealistic search of the befuddled hero/common man around the country for a fictional character. [In Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet (Act II, Scene II), Hamlet is quoted as saying: "I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."] The archetypal hero only finds a resolution to his disorientation and troubles by traveling from New York to Chicago by train and then flying north by Northwest (Airlines) to South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, a northwesterly trajectory. The allusion to traveling 'North' by Northwest (airlines) seems to be the most probable explanation for the film's title. [At various stages of the script, the original working titles were Breathless, In a Northwesterly Direction, and The Man on Lincoln's Nose.]
The square-bracketed material is in the original review, and not placed there by me. If you're an adult who reads English, you shouldn't need a gloss explaining who wrote Hamlet. The actual direction (along the straight -- i.e., great-circle -- route) is closer to west than westnorthwest, let alone ``northwesterly'' or plausibly ``north.'' Moreover, the direction from Chicago to Rapid City is not described as northwesterly in the movie itself...
A referendum on May 22, 1998 ratified the Good Friday Agreement, and the following June 25, the first elections were held, seating ``moderates'' as the largest parties on both the ``nationalist'' and ``unionist'' sides. (See SDLP and UUP.) The assembly was suspended a few times. The fourth time was in October 2002. A year later, the British government announced elections for November 26, 2003, in which the largest parties were ``hard line.''
No part of New York State is ever referred to as ``North York,'' which is just as well because then North York might be confusingly close to North York.
The above statements are geographically more exact if one takes ``North'' as geomagnetic North (a bit to the west of true north, from Toronto), because whoever laid out Lake Ontario was not a big fan of rectilinear coordinates.
You wouldn't think this would be a very challenging canine vocation, given the size of an elk (a small moose) and the splat they probably make on landing, and you'd be right. Norwegian Elkhounds are mutts that dropped out of bird-dog school.
``NOS'' is sometimes interpreted as ``New Old Stuff.'' ``NOS'' has also been interpreted as ``Never Out of Stock.''
One obsolete-parts dealer for Harleys is actually called NOS Parts. Hey, get a load of the next entry, nudge, nudge.
It's been suggested to me that the trademarked name NOSCAR involves some kind of pun. Oh, I get it! It's a pun on Oscar, the Sesame Street character. Oscar performs with somebody's arm up his ass. (It's the arm of Caroll Spinney. Get it?) He spends most of his time in a garbage can and his trademark song is ``I Love Trash.'' Appropriately, he has no nose. He also has a pet orange worm named Slimey. Despite a lifestyle that would seem to predispose him to disease, and despite having Caroll Spinney's hand constantly performing operations on his head, he doesn't seem to get sick. (He only seems to suffer from dyspepsia, but in his case the condition is not a disease. Grouch is his species.)
Perhaps I should have realized that the signs weren't official from the fact that they faced the road instead of the traffic. In a way I do feel vindicated: those black-on-orange ``END CONSTRUCTION'' signs always strike me as signs of protest.
The Portuguese have been much more cooperative, giving us a present-tense indicative in the third person plural: notam, `they note.' (You know who ``they'' are.)
Oh, Rome did offer something in the way of a noun -- notam, the accusative of nota, -ae, a `mark.' But what can you do with that? It's hard to indicate case distinctions with English nouns unless you use phrases, like veni, notam vidi, volavi. (`I came, I saw the mark, I flew.')
A more specialized (talmudic use) of notarikon is for a mnemonic word constructed from the initials of key words. I.e., an acronym constructed mostly as a memory aid, and possibly not meant to signify anything in se. For a recent example from medicine, see JONES. Other, classical examples, mostly spurious (CABAL, NEWS), can be found in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (s.v. notarikon).
Cf. backronym.
- University of Notre Dame du Lac
Famous for football. Near South Bend, IN. - University of Notre Dame Australia
Has an affiliation with ND in Indiana, which they abbreviate NDUS. ND Australia is a Roman Catholic university under trustees appointed by the Archbishop of Perth. It was established by an act of the Australian Parliament in 1989, but is not a government agency. - Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix (FUNDP). University of Namur, in Belgium.
- Notre Dame College of Ohio
Catholic liberal arts college for women offering 36 majors in day, evening and weekend programs. In South Euclid (near Cleveland). - Notre Dame College of Manchester, NH.
- Athol Murray College of Notre Dame in Wilcox, Saskatchewan (SK).
- College of Notre Dame of Maryland, a four-year Catholic liberal arts college for women in Baltimore.
- College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.
- Notre Dame College -- Dhaka, Bangladesh
- Notre Dame University (Lebanon). ``NDU.''
- Notre Dame of Cotabato Cotabato City, Philippines). A Marist Brothers school (F.M.S.) since 1948.
- Notre Dame Women's College of Kyoto (Japan).
But people who wear ``Notre Dame Engineering'' tee shirts all seem to be Notre Dame Engineers. Like it's not a popular spectator sport or something. I suppose it could be worse: I don't see anybody wearing ``Notre Dame Sociology'' or ``Notre Dame Theology'' tees (with or without collar). To be more precise, I don't see any of them in the computer lab at 3 AM, but that must be a representative sample, after all.
From Chuck Shepherd's online autobiography, January 2002:
I'm now 56 years old, in good health, live in Tampa, and work harder than I should in pursuit of my mission to monitor a civilization in decline, generally working every day until I get dizzy. But when I'm tempted to slow down, I just remember: No, the millions and millions of judgment-challenged people in the world are not taking time off; they're still knocking themselves out committing weird news; and I must persevere.
SBF salutes Chuck Shepherd.
German doesn't have this problem, because adjectives are adjectives are Adjektive and nouns (nouns substantive) are Hauptwörter.
The French word that translates noun is nom, and it has undergone an evolution parallel to that of the English word, so it is also a synonym of its earlier qualifier substantif (which is still used).
French also has a word numéro which, like the Spanish word número, occupies only part of the semantic field covered by English number: the Romance words are used to mean `numeral' but are not normally used in an expression like ``a number of [countable things].'' For the latter sense of English number, French has nombre.
In Spanish, you would be more likely to use the word cantidad (i.e., `quantity') for that sense of the word number, but Spanish does have a word nombre, which means ... `noun.' In Spanish, the common terminology broke differently, and it is standard to refer to nouns (in the modern sense of the word) as substantivos. Adjectives are adjetivos. A proper noun is un nombre propio, literally `a name of [its] own.'
In this glossary, we generally use the word noun in its modern sense, and the word substantive where confusion or discomfort might arise for someone familiar with both words. One of our peer information content providers, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) used sb. for nouns substantive in the first edition, but since OED2 (1989) has conformed with our general practice (using n.).
Let me think. I'm not articulate enough to just toss off a complete entry in one editing session.
Various definitions of noun are offered, typically elaborations of the idea that roughly, a noun names a thing. The most fundamental problem with any such definition is that essentially all it does is substitute more undefined terms (name, thing) for the term noun. The search for more fundamental definitions in terms of concepts that by some magic require no definition is chimerical, a symptom of a fatal disease called philosophy. Any productive approach to grammar abandons such essentialist definitions and states facts about the relations among different concepts. For example, one may say about a noun that it is the kind of grammatical object that may serve as the subject of a sentence. This is not a very effective approach from a philosophical perspective, but that is a nugatory criticism, since there are no ultimately successful approaches in philosophy. The point of identifying operational or relational facts about terms that remain undefined is that by accumulating enough such facts, one learns what one needs to know. This is the scientific approach. A physicist does not waste effort in defining what mass, force, position, and time are, in any deep, fundamental way -- except to state precisely some of their relations (Newton's laws, say) and some approximate facts about particular masses, forces, etc. (e.g., an equivalence principle between inertial and gravitational mass, Hooke's law). When you can measure and make accurate predictions about the objects of your study, you eventually come to see fundamental definitions of an essentialist sort as superfluous. Indeed, insofar as such definitions go beyond what is measurable or somehow observable, they are metaphysically uncertain.
In the process of nailing down physical law or grammatical practice, the terms one finds convenient to use are not uniquely determined by the phenomena described. In his famous Lectures in Physics series, Richard Feynman noted that he was using the term action in a different sense than was traditional, because the new definition was more convenient (not more correct). The new sense has stuck.
The older sense of noun was especially appropriate for Greek and Latin, where noun and adjective declensions are closely related, and where adjectives can very easily become substantives. English uses little inflection, and words promiscuously change their function among verb, adjective, and noun roles, so suppressing or subordinating the distinction between adjectives and substantives gains one less. Moreover, attributive nouns (adjectives coined from substantives) function slightly differently than native adjectives. Hence, the shifted sense of the word noun has some practicality. For a study of how inconstant have been the ``parts of speech'' in English, and how various their definitions, see English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800, by Ian Michael (CUP, 1970).
The French word nous is pronounced like the Yiddish word nu, a word so wonderfully expressive that it is almost devoid of meaning.
The most famous literary disambiguation-by-nickname, of course, was of the Samuel Butlers: Samuel ``Hudibras'' Butler (1612-1680) and Samuel ``Erewhon'' Butler (1835-1902). The latter is better-known today for ``The Way of All Flesh.'' Novels wear better than utopian visions, perhaps.
Ancient journalistic conventions decree that ``respectable'' papers cannot break gossip stories, but must wait until NOW or some other bottom-feeder has broken the story, whereupon the story can be carried not as gossip but ``as reported in the racy British tabloid News of the World.''
It is not possible to confuse NOTW with NOW.
During the long period when O. J. Simpson and the murder of his ex-wife were in the news, the National Enquirer reporter who was covering that story (with great success and accuracy) went around speechifying to this effect, and also arguing that nevertheless, to the public at large there was not a great difference between the quality papers and the supermarket-distributed cat-box liners (not his wording).
The technique of using a bold or bolder newspaper as an excuse to introduce discussion of a taboo topic is not limited to respectable papers. At one point, in the stiflingly corrupt and coercive Japanese Diet, Takeko Doi broached debate of a topic (I think it was the Recruit scandal) via the back door of discussing how its appearance in US newspapers [stage direction: hold up front page of NY Times] was affecting the international perception and reputation of Japan. Japanese newspapers are not bold.
When nitrous oxides are present in the atmosphere, they react with the oxygen present and establish a multicomponent equilibrium (solar radiation catalyzes the reactions). In the higher temperatures of summer, the equilibrium shifts toward NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), which gives smog its characteristic brown color. All the oxides dissolve in water, and when it rains they come down as more or less acidic rain (depending on the gas mix; each oxide forms its own acid, but nitric anhydride, which would give a very strong acid, has a very low concentration at ordinary pressures). The main source of acidity in acid rain is sulfur oxides.
![[Image: Robert Noyce photo]](images/Noyce.gif)
Portrait at right is courtesy of Chuck Gathard, taken in 1986.