Ontario is Canada's most populous province, with an estimated 12.28 million people in October 2003, or 38.7% of the population. Quebec is second.
Their ``about'' text begins ``En la ONCE siempre hemos sido un grupo de personas muy transparente,'' which means `at ONCE we have always been a very transparent group of people.' This explains immediatamente why I had so much trouble seeing them, though detecting what is transparent is perhaps less of an incremental handicap for the very blind.
Anyway, the at-ONCE collocation doesn't correspond to a pun in Spanish. ONCE, read as the ordinary word meaning `eleven,' requires plural agreement, making puns on the singular acronym troublesome to construct. ``At eleven PM,'' for example, is ``a las once de la tarde.''
The technical destinction seems to be that while aguardiente originally meant rum, it now refers to any distilled liquor, while ron still refers exclusively to distilled liquor made from sugar cane.
Anyway, it was never very clear to me what the beer was for, since the purpose was to get drunk. (Mixing different kinds of alcoholic drinks is also reputed to cause worse hangovers, but I can't say I've performed properly controlled studies of the phenomenon.) Then (April 17, 2008) I read the following (a column by Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ, entitled ``Hillary and Obama in Small Town [sic]''), which I think may explain it.
So it came to pass last Saturday night, in what is surely the most preposterous photo-op in campaign history [what, not tank-bobblehead Dukakis?], Hillary Rodham Clinton of Wellesley and Yale was pounding down Crown Royal whisky from a shot glass at Bronko's bar in Indiana. A friend emailed that if she really wanted to win Pennsylvania, she would have drunk some of the draft beer in her left hand, dropped the shot glass into the mug and slammed that back. But hey, her heart was in the right place.
``One man's Mede in another man's Persian.'' A play on this proverb, alluding to the sloppy conflation of the two peoples by Herodotus.
To get some idea of the floruit of this term, I did searches of all years (to 2006) in the LION database (350,000 works of English and American poetry, drama, and prose, and 175 full-text literature journals). Five poems turned up -- one in each of the years 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996 (posthumous), and 1997 -- that had ``the one?off'' (first three instances) or ``a one?off'' (last two), with ``?'' normally a hyphen, though a space or other punctuation would yield a hit. They were all by authors in Britain or some kind of British orbit. (In chronological order they were: Seamus Heaney, Irish; Iain Bamforth, say Scottish; Kamau Brathwaite, let's say Indonesian, since that might piss him off, although he was born in Barbados and slowly discovered his African spiritual roots, because he used a virgule instead of a hyphen, and anyway poets deserve no mercy, in fact, let's make Seamus Heaney an Englishman; Donald Davie, English; Edwin Morgan, Scottish.) There were no hits in the drama or prose categories. (There were various false positives like ``will cast such a one off'' in prose literature of the 16th and 17th cc.)
I thought to add this entry only because I had happened across another instance in a July 15, 1948, letter from the American novelist John O'Hara (to James Thurber; see the Selected Letters of the latter, p. 95). O'Hara wrote: ``Fletcher Markle has been trying to get the radio rights for a one-shot of [O'Hara's novel Appointment in] Samarra.'' (He priced it much dearer than the show could afford, because they had made a botch of his novel Pal Joey a year or two previously.)
And then, of course, there's the circuit...
Strictly and generally speaking, ONU is not the translation of ``Oh noooo!'' At least, it wasn't.
The Security Council is called Consejo de Seguridad, and I suppose the General Assembly is Asemblea General, but I don't recall.
The six official languages of the UN are English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic (since 1974), and Chinese, in order of decreasing likelihood of the corresponding initialisms being included in this glossary.
) in your character set, oo may have to do. A
Stammtisch FDT.
- FAQ: Is infinity odd or even?
- Short answer: Infinity is not an integer, and does not
obey the same mathematical rules as integers. For example, any
finite number added to infinity yields infinity. In particular,
- Long answer: Hmmm, hard to say. Some days it is and some days it isn't. It depends on the weather.
- No.
- Long answer: Hmmm, hard to say. Some days it is and some days it isn't. It depends on the weather.
J. Wallis introduced the symbol in De sectionibus conicis [`Of conic sections'], Oxford 1655.
Whenever I see this initialism (which is not often, but is too often), it reminds me of TomJoad. In Grapes of Wrath++, he executes destructor calls on a couple of Person instantiations, and declares a static method for ooppressed Ookies.
They spoke Oompa-Loompish in the old country, where they were preyed upon by hornswogglers, snozzwangers and whangdoodles, lived in tree-houses and subsisted on green caterpillars. Now they speak English and eat chocolate, but they still maintain their traditional costume. See chapter 16. No apparent connection with Oompa bands.
Robert Lynd (Y.Y.) published an essay called ``Out of Print.'' (It is chapter VIII in his 1923 collection The Blue Lion and Other Essays.) He begins with the following observation, which may at first puzzle the modern author.
There is a pleasure in seeing a book, if it is one of one's own books, going out of print. It encourages a faint hope that, even if one allows for the numerous people who have bought it by mistake, a man or woman here and there may have actually liked it.
In Lynd's day, a book went out of print when all the printed copies had finally sold out. It was a kind of sales milestone. No longer. Technology has made small printing runs and multiple printings cheaper. So books tend to go out of print more quickly, and when they do it just means that demand fell. In addition, the philosophy, the ``business model,'' of publishers has changed.
Until some time in the 1960's, successful publishers made most of their money (when they made money) off their backlists, so books tended to stay ``in print'' longer than they do now. The entire business was ``inefficient'' in economic terms. Printing houses ran as something approximating charities, and editors were poorly paid. (Like Ivy League professors in the old days, they might be presumed to be independently wealthy.) In the early 1960's some, uh, media companies began to think that ``properly'' run, the old houses might actually yield reasonable return on investment.
They started to buy up the old houses, and eventually the business was run by businessmen instead of book people. To their accountants, the costs of storage seemed to loom large. Also, changes in US tax law (particularly the way that depreciation is calculated on unsold books) effectively penalized the warehousing of slow and sporadic sellers, and fiction profits began to be dominated by a few big names. (It should be noted that the US book market has an unusual sales arrangement. Unsold books can be returned to the publisher for a refund. This concession-like arrangement was conceded by publishers during the Great Depression, and they were never able to roll it back.)
(The story at university presses was different but probably not better. There was a great expansion in the number of university presses to go with the increasing expectation of published research from professors. Then along about the 1980's or 1990's, universities began to expect their academic presses to sell some of this academic dust to the public and turn a profit.)
The enormous bookstores (Crown and Barnes & Noble, and Borders) put a large fraction of their small competitors out of business in the 1990's. Now as an oligopsony (and in B&N's case as a publisher -- hello, vertical integration) they have the leverage to reduce publishers' profit margins. I'm sure there's more to it, but these changes are often cited as contributing factors in the decline of the book industry in pre- and early internet days. Anyway, what happens to a title now is that as soon as sales flag it is remaindered to discounters or mulched. (Sometimes this can be handled very poorly. A friend of mine now retired from the book business told me about one book that was used for a large sociology course at some university. The course was only offered once every three years, and the company wouldn't store them that long, so after two years they'd mulch the unsold copies, and the next year they'd do a new print run. The three-years thing does sound a bit odd, but I can believe that a regular course rotated instructors, and every three years or so a guy would teach it who wanted that one book. Of course, if it had been a small-enrollment course, that guy would have been SOL, which is about what OOP often means to an instructor.)
An ad for Loome Theological Booksellers asserts that ``99.9% of the books ever published are now out-of-print,'' but immediately concedes that ``[o]f course, most books ought to be out-of-print. They weren't very good when they were first published; they haven't gotten any better with age.'' Then they go on to offer themselves as a solution to this nonproblem. Among the nonlamentable nonlosses that they can make nongood, one example they list is that ``not less than 241 different books on the life or thought of [Karl] Barth [1886-1968] have been published,'' yet only 16 remain in print. I'm flabbergasted. They buy and sell used books.
That reminds me -- you remember Bargain Books, the discount bookstore (you guessed this, right?) that I mentioned back at the adult education entry? The store sells remaindered titles, many of them from academic publishers. It's owned by a former college professor. Specifically, he was a theology professor. His chain has an unusually good selection of theology books.
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Usage note: the initials O.P. after a name is used both by Dominican Roman Catholic priests and by women and non-priest men in the religious Order of Preachers. (A similar practice applies to S.J.)
I notice that the pseudonymous author of Promptorium parvulorum (1499), mentioned at this entry, is described as ``Galfredus Grammaticus dictus, frater Ordinis S. Dominici.'' Draw your own conclusions.
They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.
For more on Shirley Temple, see YSO.
``... a national trade association representing more than 500 small, independently owned local exchange carriers (LECs) and their affiliate telecommunications companies.Primarily serving rural areas of the United States and Canada, these commercial telephone companies and cooperatives range in size from fewer than 100 to as many as 100,000 access lines and collectively serve more than 2.5 million customers.''
The usual approach in photolithography uses a binary pattern (i.e., mask opaque or clear), and OPC is done by adding or subtracting serifs of window area. This causes further unevenness away from a bend, that must be compensated by higher-order serifs, leading to a kind of diminishing ripple of correction moving away from any bend.
As a practical matter, most open-channel flows of interest are macroscopic. More specifically, they are in channels wide and deep enough that the flow is turbulent. (The parameter that determines whether flow is turbulent or not is a `dimensionless group' called the Reynolds number, Re.) Ordinarily, the most important dimensionless group characterizing open channel flow is the Froude number (Fr, q.v.).
``Open conduit'' and ``open-conduit flow'' ought to be equivalent to ``open channel'' and ``open-channel flow,'' but the former terms are rare. Funny how the semantic field divides up. Channel became a dead metaphor for a broadcast frequency band and more recently for internet data streams that function similarly. Both channel and conduit are metaphors for paths by which information flows in human organizations (e.g., ``the proper channels,'' ``back channels,'' ``a conduit for information''). (See also back-channel.)
The words channel and canal both translate into Spanish and French as canal (which is also used both for TV channel and water channel). For a related confusion, see the Mars entry.
Réseaux d'Observation des Maladies et des Epidémies. The French part is roughly `disease and epidemic monitoring networks.'
Only recently, librettos for Puccini's operas became available in paperback.
The name opera is simply the Italian word for `work.' It is singular (the plural is opere, I guess). For more on this, see the opus entry.
Oh, well, alright: buffa is supposed to be farcical, rather than merely amusing or unraucously comical. Enlightened now?
A number of years ago, my senior colleague G. Mahler composed a work that was largely classical (as opposed to quantum) mechanical and described this opus as opera buffa. This is all true.
I just noticed that thin horizontal line in my screen. It's distracting.
In French, opera buffa is called opéra bouffe. It's an interesting situation, since the original Italian essentially means `Frog Opera,' I think. Well, it means something related to frogs, anyway.
Early in his career, Clint Eastwood acted in a lot of spaghetti westerns. (For Sergio Leone? You could look it up. At IMDB.) Westerns are also known as horse opera. If they'd been made in France instead of Italy, they might have been called opéra boef.
Okay, now I'm really going away.
Soon. Possibly it bears mentioning that westerns are also called ``oaters.'' Not that I've ever heard anyone call them that, but it's one of those crossword-puzzle words -- nonexistent but plausible. You notice how movie horses never eat? I guess the forage in Hollywood is not tasty. Probably laced with too many recreational chemicals. (You say you have seen movie horses eat? Bullshit! If that's so, then where do they put it? Because movie horses certainly don't shit.)
All these years later, it occurs to me that the only reason I started to write this entry was to provide a cross-reference to the Berlioz entry, a link for which I ended up forgetting to include until now. In order not to have a one-sentence paragraph, I'll add that Russian opera is mentioned at the entry for the Judgment of Paris.
OPIE is now on web, so you don't need
to snailmail or phone their offices at
Alexandria, VA 22314
+1 (703) 549-7600
They apparently don't deal in snow blowers.
In the US, there's no acronym for the general concept.
See also the ABPT entry.
Note: the views expressed in this glossary do not necessarily reflect the opinions of OPRAF.
... the black lady who is alternately fat and thin, I forget her name.
In an act of sublime revenge, Oprah started a monthly book club. Okay, not quite monthly. According to a People magazine profile of various of the lottery winners, I mean authors of selected books, it's about nine books a year. Come think of it, that might be monthly if you don't count the TV off-season.
Okay, Oprah quit that; it was increasingly difficult to find books she felt ``absolutely compelled to share.'' A victim of her own unrealistically high standards, I guess. Others are rushing to fill the literary void. Kelly Ripa is starting something similar (``Reading With Ripa''), which will concentrate on commercial fiction. (Kelly Ripa is the woman who plays the TV role of Regis Philbin's wife or granddaughter on ``Live With Regis and Kelly.'') The Today Show and USA Today are starting book clubs, too.
Further update: according to the books page at Oprah.com, ``When the book club ended a year ago, I said I would bring it back when I found the [sic] book that was moving...and this is a great one. I read it for myself for the first time and then I had some friends read it. And we think [Steinbeck's East of Eden] might be the best novel we've ever read!''
I wasn't sure where to mention it, so this could be as good a place as any: Regis Philbin is an alumnus of the University of Notre Dame.
Ops was female, although it wasn't necessary specifically to point this out explicitly. I'm paid by the word; she was the goddess of abundance -- the personification of ops, Latin for `might, power,' in particular `power to aid.' The very antithesis of oops! (Oops! I meant antithesis oopis -- gotta use the genitive.)
This reminds me of sheep. To determine if a sheep is pregnant, you (or perhaps someone more experienced) insert(s) a tube to listen for something called the `winds of pregnancy.' No joke. That's all I remember from a book about Basque folkways. That, and the look of helpless concern on the inverted ewe's face. Another contribution to research at the crucial nexus of language and pregnancy is the shacked up entry.
South of Basque country in Spain is Catalonia. Orwell's book based on his Spanish Civil War experiences there is called Homage to Catalonia, and marks a turning point in his politics. Catalan, by Alan Yates and Carter Brown, published by Teach Yourself Books, London, 1975, offers translations for phrases that you might find useful. Among them:
I am prepared to raffle the goat.
It is sobering to contemplate the improbable series of misadventures and diminishing fortunes that would take one to the brink of uttering this phrase. (On the other hand, if it were late November 2008 and you were Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, you could probably use a few different ways to say ``I am prepared to raffle the Senate seat that has been held by President-elect Barack Obama.'') Wikipedia has a meat raffle entry.
Catalan, by the way, is an international language. It's the local language in the Sardinian city of Alghero.
Sir Boss: "What do you know of the science of optics?"
Applicant: "I know of governors of places, and seneschals of
castles, and sheriffs of counties, and many like small
offices and titles of honor, but him you call the
Science of Optics I have not heard of before;
peradventure it is a new dignity."
Sir Boss: "Yes, in this country."
[ 29 ]
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court (1889), ch. 25.
Most related words that come from Latin contain the root oper-. The reason is that opus is a third declension noun, indicated ``opus, -eris'' in traditional dictionaries. Most of the related words and declined forms of the noun are based on the modified root represented by the genitive form operis. Romance languages use noun forms based on a collapsed case structure, and the standard form of a noun is usually based on an oblique case. Hence the derived form in Italian: opera. If you simply voice the stop consonant and lose the unstressed middle vowel, you get the Spanish cognate obra. (English uses, as a rule, whatever forms it pleases, usually from more than one language. Hence opus, operation, operetta, et ceterra.)
Since you asked... the particular oblique form that was the model for the later collapsed or simplified case structure was typically the ablative or accusative. These cases had more functions than the dative, and prepositions (real prepositions) in Latin only took accusative or ablative objects. Starting from the ablative turns out to work better for Spanish. I think starting from the accusative works better -- i.e., gives a better fit to the forms that actually occurred -- for French. The difference is slight, especially when you remember that final em's weren't being pronounced in post-Classical Latin, and that anyway a lot of final syllables died in the creation of Old French.
Vide A. Offner, Optical Engineering, 14, p. 130 (1975).
A couple of sites are WORMS and Michael Trick's Operations Research Page.
State named after the spice oregano. At least, that's a better theory than any offered by niggling etymologists.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Oregon state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
The charges included taking bribes (e.g., free labor and materials from construction businesses in exchange for intervening on their behalf with federal regulators) and kickbacks ($200,000 total; $2500 per month from his administrative assistant alone), illegally requiring his congressional staffers to pitch in on his boat and his farm (literally in the latter case, with pitchforks), ordering a staffer to destroy evidence, and cheating on his taxes (yawn).
Traficant served as his own attorney in the trial. It's a truism that a lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, but Traficant is not a lawyer. Anyway, the same fool had beaten the rap in 1983. He convinced a jury that he took $163,000 in mob money as part of a one-man undercover operation he had been running as Mahoning County sheriff. He had earlier achieved folk-hero status by his refusal, as sheriff, to evict out-of-work steelworkers who couldn't pay their bills. The acquital apparently cemented his reputation, and he rode the ensuing wave of popularity into Congress the next year. (The IRS is not bound by the findings of a mere criminal court, however, and they garnisheed his wages for $108,000 that a tax court decided he owed on the $163,000 in bribes he didn't declare. And this can't be double jeopardy, since the US constitution says that mustn't happen.)
Upon conviction on all ten criminal charges in 2002, the 60-year-old Traficant faced up to 63 years in the slammer, plus various fines. Federal guidelines recommend something in the neighborhood of five to ten years in such cases, and prosecutors in the case recommended that he do at least 7 1/4 years. Such precision! The judge rounded that up to eight years when he sentenced Traficant on July 30.
Here is one of the less creative examples of Traficant's color. It involves the then House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. Democrats were in the minority from 1994 to 2006. By the time of Traficant's conviction, Gephardt (D-Mo.) had already pointedly stopped referring to Traficant as a Democrat when speaking with reporters. Perhaps that had something to do with Traficant having voted in 2001 for Republican J. Dennis Hastert (Ill.) rather than Gephardt to be House Speaker. (One factor may have been his fellow Democrats' beginning to distancing themselves as his prosecution grew imminent.) In the normally party-line vote, Traficant's break with his party had no effect. However, the Republicans' margin in the House was only five votes, and it was feared on the Democratic side that his symbolic vote signalled a readiness to vote with the G.O.P. and weaken Gephardt's bargaining power. The party refused to give the nine-term Trafficant a single committee assignment. On a related note, Traficant often called colleagues ``Mr. Chairman'' even when they didn't head a committee. I suppose it was easier than remembering who did.
Gephardt suggested privately to Traficant that he resign. (This was apparently before the conviction; after the conviction, Gephardt called publicly for his resignation.) According to Roll Call, Traficant's reaction was to call for Mr. Gephardt to perform a reproductive act upon himself. A potentially reproductive act, I suppose. In principle, perhaps. Okay, here's a tiny-bit more creative: late in the 2002 trial, he said of the prosecutors, ``They have the testicles of an ant.'' I suppose at least some of the prosecutors would have to have been all male, if this remark was supposed to have some exculpatory value in Traficant's defense. Perhaps he planned to reveal the prosecutors' plans for the formic gonads, but didn't get a chance. U.S. District Judge Lesley Wells ordered Traficant to sit down and gave him another of her scolding lectures.
Incidentally, if the ant-testicles comment tickled some brain cell off in a corner of your brain somewhere, it might have been because of Fred Allen's famous comment -- ``You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood and put it into a flea's navel and still have room left over for three caraway seeds and an agent's heart.'' (I've seen various versions of this, and perhaps more than one is correct, but I very much doubt the versions that involve eight caraway seeds -- that's an exageration.) Fred Allen broadcast his humorous remarks on his own radio show from 1934-1949. Traficant broadcast his best material from the House floor (1985-2002), making frequent reference to his anatomy and necessary bodily functions, and to ``Star Trek.'' His speeches usually ended with the line ``Beam me up.''
That reminds me, since this is the orbit entry, that I should circle back to the point. Under House rules in effect at the time, a felony conviction triggered an automatic investigation by the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (the ``Ethics Committee'' for short). [Under current rules, the House doesn't wait that long any more.] A subcommittee was named, a set of charges was drawn up (closely paralleling the criminal counts), Traficant was given a chance to respond on July 15, and on July 18 the committee unanimously recommended his expulsion. A report on The Hotline the next day collected Traficant quotes from other news sources, including this comment about members of the [news] media:
Many of them are so dumb they could throw themselves at the ground and miss.
That would be an eccentric orbit. This bit was harvested from <CNN.com> on July 18, and appeared elsewhere. (I first found it in Ted Reuter's 449 Stupid Things Democrats Have Said, p. 85.) Traficant was expelled by the House on July 24.
Like any comedian, Traficant recycled his material. (See the boobs entry for another example of material that may have been recycled.) In researching this here orbit entry I discovered that in June 2000, he made a floor speech about the US Supreme Court. Here are some excerpts, in the same order in which they were quoted, from the Washington Times of June 22, 2000.
The Supreme Court says pornography is OK and it is OK to burn the flag, that communists can work in our defense plants, that it is OK to teach witchcraft in our schools and that it is OK for our students to write papers about the devil.
But the Supreme Court says it is illegal to write papers about Jesus, it is illegal to pray in school, and now the Supreme Court says it is even illegal to pray before a football game. Beam me up.
I thought the Founders intended to create a Supreme Court, not the Supreme Being. Think about that statement. I yield back a Supreme Court that is so politically correct they are downright stupid, so stupid they could throw themselves at the ground and miss.
Oh, and, one last thing about the events of 2002. The ethics committee recommended expulsion rather than lesser penalties such as censure or reprimand because of ``the gravity of the offense from the gentleman from Ohio,'' in the words of Rep. Howard Berman of California. Gravity is the force that keeps moons and planets in orbit, of course, but never mind. This conventional Congressional use of ``gentleman'' reminds me of an amusing incident (it's amusing now, anyway) from the time shortly after my mom and her family emigrated to Bolivia. Her stepfather never mastered the Spanish language in its entire subtlety, and at that time he had already not mastered Spanish. (I recycle my material too.) So one day when somebody was trying to break into their house, he called the phone operator and reported, ``¡Un señor quiere entrar en nuestra casa!'' The operator responded, ``Entonces déjelo entrar.'' Except for the critical words, the quotations are approximate, and I'm sparing you the German accent. Anyway, the first sentence means: `A gentleman wants to enter our house!' To which the reasonable response was `So let him in.'
Actually, that reminds me of another true story, involving a restaurant owner and one of his most valued employees. I won't identify these persons any more precisely because, you know, someone might get in trouble. The employee didn't speak much English in those days, so the owner took the trouble to mine a Spanish dictionary for some useful words. One of the words is querer, `to want.' (This verb occurred above in the phrase ``quiere entrar,'' `wants to enter.') So when the owner wanted this employee to come help him, he would say ``[nombre del empleado], te quiero,'' meaning `[employee's name], I love you.'
That ought to remind anyone of Alexander Bell's famous telephone message [to his own assistant in another room] on March 10, 1876. (``Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.'') Here there was no language difficulty, but there had been some communication difficulty. The message is described as the first transmission of a complete (and comprehensible) sentence. However, that doesn't mean that the ability to send an intelligible message had been impossible before that date. Bell's attorney had filed a patent application on the previous St. Valentine's Day (so appropriate), and the patent had been granted three weeks later, on March 7 (those were the days). Apparently Bell had been working to improve his invention without actually being set up to transmit a message. (I suppose he mostly just talked to himself over the phone to see how well it was working, but I'll have to look into it.) The famous first message was sent ``accidentally.'' The first public demonstration of the telephone took place before a meeting of the AAAS in Boston the following May 10.
Ah -- the mystery of the name is solved! Orchard Place Airport was built by the federal government in 1942 for use by the nearby Douglas Aircraft plant. It was declared surplus in 1946 and deeded a thousand acres to the city. As a civilian airport it was known as Chicago Orchard Airfield and Douglas Field (hence the O - R - D). In 1949, Chicago renamed its older airport Midway Airport, in honor of the Battle of Midway, and named the new airport O'Hare Field, in memory of Medal of Honor winner Edward ``Butch'' O'Hare, a navy pilot killed in action in the South Pacific.
- The Most Noble Order of the Garter
- The Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle
- Order of Merit
- The Most Honourable Order of the Bath (three classes)
- The Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George (three classes)
- The Royal Victorian Order (five classes)
- The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (five classes)
- The Order of the Companions of Honour
- The Distinguished Service Order
- The Imperial Service Order
Incidentally, ``Quakers'' is a name, initially somewhat pejorative, that was eventually adopted by a religious group called the Society of Friends. The Shakers came by their name in similar fashion. In Israel (.il), members of the ``secular'' majority (i.e., those with lax religious observance) call the ultra-religious haredim, which translates roughly as `tremblers.' I think that's still pejorative.
A number of apparently for-profit organizations now have .org URL's (I'll let you find them).
The idea of dividing compounds into organic and inorganic was introduced by Léméry in his Cours de Chemie (1675). There the compounds which are created by reactions in the mineral world were classed as inorganic, and those which were known to be created only in the animal and vegetable worlds were classed as organic. (This is not exactly how the distinction was originally formulated, but it is effectively what we now understand the distinction to have been.) It was eventually found that all organic compounds so defined happened to contain carbon, although some inorganic compounds (note: by the original definition) also contained carbon.
Organização Regional Interamericana dos Trabalhadores,
Organisation régionale interaméricaine des travailleurs.
(Best guess expansions reconstructed from English.) Spanish, Portuguese, and French, resp., `Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers.'
Our colleague Nihar is from Orissa, giving us an opportunity to test the strength of the indoctrination on an otherwise intelligent victim. The hold that this fantasy has on him was strong. He insists that the Oriya alphabet is essentially the same as the Sanskrit (Devanagari) original, and that the horizontal line across the top was left out historically for practical reasons: back when the writing was on organic material, straight lines that ran along the underlying grain could destroy the wood or leaf being written on. [This is obviously false, because that story was made up to explain the absence of horizontal lines in runes (see thorn entry). Nihar probably borrowed it. For similar instances of borrowing, see the Shiva entry. If you get so far as to follow the Halaka link, note that in Orissa, Halka is pronounced more like Haluhka.]
Over the very same beer (Honey Brown, mostly) that discovered Nihar's hopeless indoctrination, we pondered the secret of gupta.
Cf. ouro.
The orrery caught people's imaginations because that was precisely what they lacked. For an allusion to orreries, see the Dickens excerpt at the v.a. entry.
Look, I don't make this stuff up, you know. I'm not that creative. Dan (a fellow who co-stars in the Berlioz entry) worked in a book store where someone actually came in and asked for ``Oral Roberts' Rules of Order'' by name. (You'd have known that if you'd followed the Oral-Roberts link.) I wish Dan had asked the customer to describe the book first.
There used to be a song, surprisingly not popularized by Dean Martin, that began ``How dry I am.''
There is an older German word, cognate with Dutch oorete and the English word ort. For a crumb more on that, see the miga entry.