Note that pissed (without the particle) is equivalent to pissed off in the US, but means `inebriated' in Australia. (That's most of the difference between American and Australian, as explained below.)
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
u and
v before the seventeenth century has made it difficult to
determine when the vee sound was lost in English pronunciation.
On a related note, Shoko Asahara, the guru leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, sold his used bathwater to his followers for about US$200 a bottle. It was one of the few beverages he allowed them to drink (his blood, at $10K, was another), but at least he called it `miracle pond.' Related information at this LPF entry.
Also, the dominant powdered coffee creamer is called ``Creap.''
The word poco is a Spanish adjective that means `little' in the sense of `not much' but not in the sense of `small.' It precedes and modifies a mass noun. The sense of `little' appropriate to a count noun is expressed by (the inequivalent) pequeño or chico (as in diablo pequeño or even pequeño diablo), by a diminutive ending (the most natural choice in this case -- diablito) or by a combination, the diminutive ending modifying the noun, the adjective, or both (as in diablito chiquitito, one you might encounter in a children's book). There is a very large number of such quantifier endings, but their use is subject to a mix of fashion and tradition, and not many rigid rules, so they provide plenty of nonce words like diablecito.
A few European languages -- Spanish, Italian, Polish, that I know of -- that have found themselves a bit short of words have gone the way of multiple endings. Often a diminutive or augmentative form of a word takes a specific new meaning. Thus, in Spanish, where la caja is `the box,' el cajón is not `the large box' but `the drawer.' This has the diminutive form el cajoncito (`the little drawer'). For ``large box,'' I recommend caja grande. For a slightly more complete list of forms, see the ppp entry.
=cut at the end. The pod2x directory contains programs to extract
the documentation and convert to HTML, FrameMaker,
a Unix man page, TeXinfo, or plain text.
(Of course, the word port itself is a specialization of the original meaning `door.')
- A blend of poetry and taster, suggesting a person of refined, if possibly synesthetic, taste.
- A contraction of poet and taster, suggesting one of
the following:
- A poet and connoisseur: a poet with refined culinary appreciation.
- A person who tastes poets.
- A person who tastes poets as a chick sexer sexes chicks, detecting and possibly sorting poets by what the poets' tastes are.
It used to be possible to define the poetaster briefly as a bad or poor poet. Things have gotten so bad, however, that the traditional poetaster should now be regarded as a noble paradigm to be exalted above the ordinary run of what are now loosely regarded as bad poets (or even poets). The traditional poetaster is ``an inferior rhymer, or writer of verses; a dabbler in poetic art'' (Webster's Revised Unabridged, 1913) or a ``writer of insignificant, meretricious, or shoddy poetry'' (American Heritage, 2000). What is implicit in these typical definitions is that the productions of a poetaster are poetry. Spilling ink at random across a page may be bad (we don't have an entry for modern art yet), but it is rarely bad poetry. In order to produce bad poetry with any degree of consistency, one must have some notion of what poetry is.
In short, the old poetaster was a poet, if a bad one. The writers of what is passed for poetry today are non-poets. They think that poetry is prose typeset in unjustified lines.
In ``Notes on Prosody,'' an appendix to his translation (1964) of Eugene Onegin, Vladimir Nabokov wrote this to begin his discussion of feet:
If by prosodies we mean systems or forms of versification evolved in Europe during this millennium and used by her finest poets, we can distinguish two main species, the syllabic system and the metrical one, and a subspecific form belonging to the second species (but not inconsistent with certain syllabic compositions), cadential poetry, in which all that matters is lilt depending on random numbers of accents placed at random intervals.[If all this species/subspecific talk seems misplaced, recall that Nabokov was an accomplished butterfly taxonomist.]
A fourth form, which is specifically vague and is rather a catchall than a definite category (not yet having been instrumental in producing great poetry), takes care of unrhymed free verse, which, except for the presence of typographical turnpikes, grades insensibly into prose, from a taxonomic point of view.
As you can imagine from the definition, it's hard to get poetry published -- the linotypists rebel at the waste. It's easier to have it broadcast, particularly if it's written in a commercial genre (see the 43 beans entry for an example). Despite the low rates of emission, it is nevertheless necessary to protect the population at large from exposure to harmful poetry. (To understand the danger, carefully view the Arnold droppings at the touchstone entry. And that is mere poetastry.) For this reason, the public-safety agencies of the government work to prevent poets from earning more than a pitance. (If they had money, they would publish their work as magazine advertisements.)
Despite government efforts, some poetry manages to slip through. Here is the accident report from one such instance [described in translator David McDuff's introduction to Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1975), p. x.]:
Mandelstam's first poems date from 1908. There seems to have been some conflict between the poet and his mother about what course his life was to take, she preferring for him some securely established career to the life of a writer or journalist. Sergei Makovsky, the éminence grise [very appositely, this is Russian for `grisly imminence'] and editor of the literary journal Apollon, describes in his memoirs how one day the eighteen-year-old poet and his mother appeared together in the offices of the journal. Mandelstam's mother at once began to ask Makovsky to read her son's poems and to tell her if he saw any talent in them; she would agree to her son's continuing to write poetry only if Makovsky gave the seal of his approval. Makovsky says that he read one or two of the poems, did not find them particularly attractive, and was about to terminate the interview with some piece of formal politeness when he read in the young poet's face ``such an intense, agonized beseeching, that I immediately somehow gave in and went over to his side--for poetry, against the skin trade,'' and that he solemnly declared to the mother: ``Yes, madam, your son has talent.'' After this there was nothing left for Makovsky to do but print the poems so insistently offered him. This was Mandelstam's literary début.
k = [H+] [OH-] ,
where k is about 10-14 at room temperature, so that
pH + pOH = 14.
More at the pH entry. I mean, why should I repeat myself?
Among the regional languages of Spain, probably the one that most closely resembles Portuguese is Galician (called galego in Galician and gallego in Standard Spanish). The last time the Portuguese-speakers held a major international convention to hammer out a standard spelling of Portuguese, they invited a delegation of Galician observers. Nevertheless, Galician is closer to Spanish than to Portuguese. I mention it, however, because of an intriguing item I found in a list of English faux amis in Galician that occurs in a Galician Wikipedia page. The word is absolutely, which is translated as totalmente, completamente. The contributor of this item expects the English word to be misunderstood as meaning en absoluto, which would have to be rendered as `not at all' or `absolutely not' in English.
Just to be clear and thorough: Galician en is a preposition like English `in,' used here to make an adverbial from the adjective absoluto. The Spanish adverb absolutamente, which means `absolutely,' does not seem to occur in any similar form in Galician. The best source I have handy for Galician is the Diccionario de Usos Castellano Gallego edited by Xosé María Freixedo Tabarés and Fe Álvarez Carracedo (Madrid: Editoriál AKAL, 1985), which translates Spanish terms into Galician. There, absolutamente is translated as ``inteiramente [`entirely'], de todo en todo.''
This entry is a spin-off of the ou entry. Maybe you want to go back and refresh your memory.
More later. I want to add something to the Cu entry.
My informant on the subject of the Romanian language and I have been talking about her discipline off and on for at least a couple of weeks. She's pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science, and her area of concentration is international politics. She just came by and said she realized that in all this time she had neglected to mention the best book that she knows of in her discipline: Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, by Graham T. Allison and Philip Zelikow (xv+416pp.). She was not aware that this is the second edition (1999) of a book that was first published in 1971 by Graham Allison alone (xii+338 pp.). I haven't had a look yet.
Poland is a kind of experimental theater of nationalism. Poles had already tried the more common experiments, like existing without any territory, so to top it they tried shifting their borders a couple of hundred kilometers west on a moment's notice. (In Transylvanian dance, this is known as the ``Time Warp.'' It is explicated in the documentary ``The Rocky Horror Picture Show.'') Similarly, other countries, like Ireland and India, have already tried having official languages that no more than a small minority can speak. Attempting to break new ground, and because virtually all Poles maintain to foreigners that they speak Polish, they have established dialects, so that you can fail to speak Polish in two or three different ways, automatically! In addition to eastern and western alleged pronunciations, there is also a special dialect ``spoken'' in the Gdansk area. Back in the eighties, they tried to get together an army to make the Gdansk dialect a language. This effort broke down, but they ended up forming an independent trade union that eventually led to the first peaceful surrender of power by an established communist government in Europe. All because of linguistics.
And Australian! Oh, man, don't get me started. It's not a dialect at all, just an advertising gimmick that got out of hand. (Rather like the joke called C.) ``Australian speech'' was invented by the tourist office many years ago, after a marketing study to determine what kind of accent and colloquialisms are thought colorful by people who don't already think that koalas are cute enough to visit. (That ``billabong'' stuff? First they invented the vocabulary, later they developed folklore around it.) Anyway, the subsequent advertising campaign was so successful and memorable that they've had a struggle to keep up appearances ever since. In the run-up to the 2000 Olympics, they spent millions on a campaign to teach the locals how the accent is supposed to go. Anybody who couldn't get the hang of it had to relocate out of the Sydney area for the duration. (Normally, Australians just talk like everybody else.)
You know, I once got an email protesting that czczy doesn't have four or more consonants (presumably because cz is a digraph representing what the writer regards as a single consonant). My correspondent's problem was that she was taking this entry seriously--er, I mean too seriously, er, too literally, yeah, that's it. Obviously I meant either that Polish has words with four or more letters together that represent consonants, or I was thinking of the ch sound the way it is represented in the IPA, or in German and Catalunian orthography: as a t sound followed by a sh sound.
People say that if you look long enough at a correctly spelled word, even when you know it is correctly spelled, it can start to look odd or wrong. That must depend on the word; it seems likelier to happen with ``weird'' than ``and.'' But viewing this phenomenon another way, it suggests that we don't easily notice spelling oddities when we are habituated to them. For example, in German it takes four letters (tsch) to spell the sound of cz in Polish. (It also takes four -- dsch -- to represent the sound of j in English. Hence, they write Dschungel and Dschihad for what we write more compactly as, uh, `tropical rain forest' and `no comment.') Even taking ``consonant'' in a narrow sense, English and German have some fairly dense clusters of them.
A word commonly used to exemplify English consonant clustering is ``strengths,'' which really only has three initial and three final consonant sounds. I thought of this recently when I bought a book by mistake. There was a used-book sale at an online bookstore I use, and as the sale was about to end I noticed a book that intrigued me: ``Rechtsprache in der Frühen Neuzeit.'' That was either the title as I misread it or as someone mistyped it, and it means `Proper [presumably German] Pronunciation in the Early Modern Era.' When it arrived, I discovered that the title begins with the word Rechtssprache. With the extra s, it's actually a book about legal language in the early modern period, and considerably less interesting to me. The chtsspr string represents six distinct consonant sounds (again three final ones, from the first syllable, and three initial ones, from the second). Even in not-very-careful speech, you can hear the difference between this s and ss: The s preceding the p has a sh sound, and the s that may precede it has an s sound.
The confusion ultimately arises from some of the multiple meanings associated with right. Recht is an adjective meaning, among other things, `right, correct' and also a noun meaning `right, law.' The extra s in the second case is a genitive inflection, related to 's in English.
Und die Moral von der Geschicht?
Two ``right''s can make a wrong.
King divided the various classes into two large categories: those ``increasing the wealth of the country'' and those ``decreasing'' it. For a household to increase the wealth of the country, in this context, meant for it to have expenses smaller than income. Those who relied on poor relief, charity, and theft to, so to speak, balance their books, were in the decreasing-the-wealth category. It's an interesting terminology, because it confronts us explicitly with the idea that income to a person is a measure of the person's contribution to national wealth. On this reasoning, if I went to Las Vegas and hit the jackpot, I'd suddenly become a major benefactor of the country. (Come to think of it, I might suddenly become reacquainted with some long-forgotten good ol' buddies who thought just that.)
In an agrarian economy, where a large portion of the food is grown by individual families for their own use, where much cloth is homespun and bread home-baked, etc., and where much trade is still based on barter (i.e., rather literal ``trade''), it is very difficult to assign monetary value to the flows of goods and services. With all that said, his results can be surprising to a reader in our time, because King estimated more than half the population as ``decreasing the wealth of the country.'' Equally surprising, or at least corroborative, is that neither he nor his contemporaries found this surprising. When Cervantes in the sixteenth century, and Disraeli in the nineteenth, wrote that the poor and the rich constituted two distinct nations, they were describing salient and substantial realities of their times. In Gregory King's time, he estimated the two nations' populations at 2,675,500 (``increasing the wealth'') and 2,825,000 (``decreasing''). More of Gregory King's findings are discussed at the UOSA entry.
I originally planned to make this contrast exhibit A of a ``consistency check'' entry, since the differences in the percentages found by the two polls seemed far too large to be explained by any reasonable estimate of the random measurement uncertainties. However, it seems the Rasmussen poll was conducted on the evening of August 22, at the end of a week of public speculation about whom Obama would choose. During that week Biden was widely touted as the or at least a front-runner for the nod. So perhaps many people made up their minds about Biden during the last few days of media coverage.
So it's really not so interesting. Especially now, years later. But I hated to discard the entry after all that exhausting work, so here it is.
At a seminar given by the late Mr. Gallup, I learned that many of the polling organizations use presidential polling as a kind of loss-leader -- demonstrating their capabilities, accuracy, utility at a loss they can recoup with the business they attract as a result. Since that time (1980), though, things may have changed. There's a lot more polling, for one thing, and a lot of it is conducted by organizations that primarily serve political campaigns.
(Many of the organizations, or the principals of those organizations, tend to work primarily for candidates of one or the other major US party, hence the R's and D's below.)
A kind of metapoll site is <PollingReport.com>, which collects in a single place the results distributed free by many of the best-known news and polling organizations. Notably absent from this collection are the results obtained by Rasmussen. (The omission is not explained, but it may be a judgment against Rasmussen's automated-voice polling methods. In the end, Rasmussen had the most accurate overall and state-by-state predictions of the presidential vote in 2004.) The RCP website posted similar collections during the election year 2004, yet as late as February 2005 it had barely started comparing polls for the 2006 races and had few polls for the 2008 presidential contest. Nothing at all for 2010, and that was less than six years off! (No, I'm not a political news junkie. I'm a political news junkie in denial.) Electoral-Vote.com has a Democratic tilt and the focus you would guess from the domain name. That site also offers largely meaningless linear least-squares fits (three-month baselines!) to state polling data. It's good someone is doing this, and it's very good not to be the one wasting his time doing it. The relatively nonpartisan National Journal used to have good content but eventually made most of its site accessible by subscription only, so I've eliminated links to their site.
The list below is mostly of organizations or temporary collaborations set up for the US election cycle in 2000 (subsequently updated in a haphazard manner). Sometimes different groups collaborated in polling but did separate analyses; sometimes a news organization joined with two political pollsters, choosing one Republican and one Democratic in an attempt to balance out the biases. The most closely watched contest in 2000 was, of course, that for the presidency. In the event, it was too close to call, and most pollsters had more or less predicted that.
One organization that deserves to be singled out for special recognition is the infamous Rupert Murdoch's Fox ``News'', pretty much universally recognized to be slanted to the Republican side. Why can't he just toe the liberal line like the rest of the media?! Mr. Murdoch craves respect, but he doesn't understand that not everyone is as simple as the people he targets as audience. Oh, we've added another Murdoch-related entry.
- ABC News Poll Archive.
- American Research Group. I'm not entirely sure if this is the same company as the American Research Group that was acquired by Global Knowledge Network.
- American Viewpoint (R).
- CBS News.
- Gallup. Founded
as AIPO, q.v. On March 21, 2006,
the Gallup organization announced that it would end its 14-year
relationship with CNN when the current
contract ended in June 2006. In a memo to his employees, Gallup CEO
Jim Clifton praised the past relationship with CNN, but said ``it is
not the right alignment for our future,'' because ``CNN has far fewer
viewers than it did in the past, and we feel that our brand was getting
lost and diluted.'' Calling the memo ``unprofessional'' and ``in every
respect untrue,'' CNN claimed Gallup was ending the partnership because
``the CNN brand was so dominant that Gallup wasn't getting the
attention for the polls that they wanted.'' Gallup also announced that
it planned to continue its relationship with USA Today; Gallup was in
discussions with other polling services and planned to announce a new
partner soon.
According to Steve O'Brien, a senior advisor to the Gallup Poll, ``we just decided it was time for us to get involved in producing and distributing our own content.'' He also said that Gallup planned to enhance the video capabilities of its website and to show the kind of lengthy pieces that are difficult to do on television. - GSG -- Global Strategy Group (D).
- Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research (D).
- Harris.
- Hart Research (Peter D. Hart (D) and Robert M. Teeter (R); does presidential polling for NBC.) (Garin-Hart-Yang (D)).
- ICR -- International Communications Research.
- JM&A -- John McLaughlin & Associates (R).
- LA Times.
- LSPA -- Lake Snell Perry & Associates, Inc. (sic, D).
- Netpollster (online polling arm of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence).
- Opinion Dynamics. (Does presidential polling for Fox.)
- Pew.
- The Polling Company (R).
- POS -- Public Opinion Strategies (very R).
- Public Agenda.
- Rasmussen Reports.
- Roper.
- SRBI.
- Strategic Vision (R).
- SurveyUSA. (SurveyUSA is admirably and unusually open about its polling procedures, and apparently it has good reason to be open its results. At this page, SurveyUSA has various statistical comparisons demonstrating that in 2008, its polls are among the very best. [When I visited on April 14 (a week before the Pennsylvania primary), the latest comparisons were based on polls by 38 organizations for contests held up to 8 pm ET 02/20/08. SurveyUSA had a self-reported median error to that point of 2.0, and an average error of 4.12, based on 26 contests it had polled. They did less well in subsequent polling, but they went ahead and 'fessed up. When I visited on June 15, they had integrated the results for contests up to May 6, and a total of total of 41 polling organizations. Based on 33 contests polled, their median error was 3.0 and their average error was 4.52. It's important to note that in comparisons by either measure, they were bested only by organizations that polled fewer than a quarter of the contests SurveyUSA did. This is important because the large number of occasional pollsters is bound to include some that get lucky. For example, the three pollsters with smaller median errors than SurveyUSA each conducted only two polls.)
- TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence and its TIPP (Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics).
- TTG The Tarrance Group (R).
- USA-Today/CNN/Gallup. Well, this is a very old link, though not a dead one. Gallup (vide supra) decided to break off its collaboration with CNN in 2006, but continued to work with USAT.
- Voter.com/ (defunct after 2000).
- Washington Post.
- Wirthlin Worldwide (R).
- Yankelovitch Partners.
- Zogby International. In early
2004, this organization is doing the most extensive (publicly
available) polling of the campaign for the Democratic Party
presidential nomination.
Zogby International is a New-York-based polling organization of John Zogby, an Arab-American of Lebanese Christian (I presume Maronite) descent. He does political polling for Republicans. His brother James Zogby is a lobbyist and director of the Institute of Arab-American Relations in Washington. During the 2000 election campaign, James was employed by the Democratic Party as Advisor on Minority Affairs. According to Al Ahram Weekly for Nov. 28-Dec. 4, 2002, he published numerous articles in the Arab press, cautioning Arab leaders against the prevalent sanguine assessment -- until September 12, 2001 -- of George W. Bush as sympathetic to Arab interests.
The Zogby website has links you can follow to purchase services of the company. The linked texts suggests different ways Zogby polls can be helpful. One text reads ``Have a candidate who needs to know where they stand?'' (Granted, there is a more innocent interpretation.) (They probably knows where they stands on pronoun issues, without even knowing it.)
A couple of university-based regional pollsters:
- Marist
- Quinnipiac University Polling Institute (BTW, that's pronounced ``KWIN-uh-pea-ack.'')
Pol. Sci. is a formal abbreviation. Informally, ``Poli Sci'' and ``poli-sci'' are used, with variable punctuation and capitalization, and the pronunciation ``Polly Sigh.''
``Police Science'' doesn't seem to have an abbreviation, sir. Cf. Poly Sci.
Maybe an example would be helpful (from Yeats):
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book.
Polysyndeton is a good thing to have when the comma-producing nations form an export cartel. Cf. asyndeton.
Eric Idle (Monty Python emeritus) published The Road to Mars : A Post-Modem Novel in 1999. You need to know that authors normally have little or no influence on the cover art their publishers select. On the cover, the subtitle is shown on a paper tape being pulled out of the red planet by the sort of hand that might appear in the Monty Python opening, closing, or in-the-middle credits. On the paper tape, Post-Modem is written in ALL CAPS! Grumble. The man has been ill-served by agents. His last regular acting gig was on the Brooke Shields vehicle Suddenly Susan (I understand it was supposed to be a comedy) shortly before it was canceled, leaving Eric idle.
Visit this postmodernism generator for a completely original pomo essay, complete with footnotes, generated while-U-wait. Hey look, we've got our own stretch of pomo entries starting at postmodern.
What a complete idiot I am! All these years I've been calling it a ``pom-pom''!
It's mentioned in at least one of the Harry Potter books, in a non-holiday context.
I guess ponnus is a second-declension masculine noun in Latin.
The Irish word pus (`lip, mouth') is used in the US and Ireland as a slang word with various senses that may be summarized as `unhappy mouth or face.' It may mean an `ugly face,' or a `glum or angry face' (sourpuss more often refers to a person than the face) or `frown,' or it may, in the OED's efficient description, refer to ``the mouth or face (considered as the object of a blow).''
In Hebrew, panim (stress on second syllable) is `face.' (Masculine, plural in form, construed singular -- a curiosity discussed at the chaim entry.) In Yiddish, the word is rendered in the Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation. In particular, the vowels are different (just as Yisrael in Modern and Sephardi pronunciations is Yisroel in Ashkenazi) and it is stressed on the first syllable. I've encountered it as a neuter singular, and pronounced something like ponum. ``Das busche ponum'' is `the shamed face.'
The US Postal Service is not and has not been a member organization. Why did I even wonder?
Anyway, Rover Dangerfield is a Bassett hound, and the animated feature didn't get much respect. I suppose the breed was chosen to suggest the, ah, body style of Rodney, but the dogs that really don't get any respect are poodles. They tend to be regarded as at least somewhat ridiculous (because they are). As it happens, I had already been planning to put in a poodles entry because I noticed that I had two books that mention poodles in the title:
- When Did Wild Poodles Roam the Earth? by David Feldman.
It's another in the author's ImponderablesTM series.
(Another one is Do Penguins Have Knees? Penguins are sort of
avian poodles, gracefulness- and respect-wise.) Feldman or one of his
researchers posed the poodle question to the biology department at
UCLA, and making a reply was delegated to
Nancy Purtill, an AA there. She
wrote: ``The general feeling is that, while there is no such thing as a
stupid question, this one comes very close.'' Then she explained the
obvious. Even people who ask questions about poodles get no respect.
Sally Kinne, of the Poodle Club of America, Inc., noted that the earliest certain depictions of poodles in art date from the fifteenth century. (In work by Albrecht Dürer, of all people. I never figured him for the late medieval Norman Rockwell.) The word poodle is a transliteration of German Pudel, short for Pudelhund. Hund, of course, means `hound, dog.' Pudel is a pool of water, cognate with English puddle. The verb pudeln is `to splash [around] in the water'; pudelnass means `dripping wet.' The poodle was originally bred as a water retriever. (Water retrievers don't retrieve water, you understand; they retrieve in or from the water. Everything about poodles is ridiculous.) I guess that poodles, like penguins, seem better adapted in the water. Anybody can seem awkward when out of his element. (For a riverine version of a similar concept, see the fünf entry.)
When I was a little boy in Argentina, I was at first taught Spanish and German (my mother's mother tongue), until it was clear that English would be a higher priority (we were emigrating). My mother claims that the decision to finally stop teaching me German came when we were walking one day, and as she was trying to remember the German word for puddle to warn me, I walked into the puddle she was going to warn me about. - Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, by Ben Watson. The book actually has a lot of thoughtful references to poodles. I'm going to have to get back to this entry later.
Rodney Dangerfield's last movie, incidentally, was Angels with Angles (2004), in which he played the role of Dog, er, God. The angles/angels pun, incidentally, is literally ancient.
As it happens, there's also a small town named Poo in Spain -- it's on the northern coast, about 3 km from Llanes. In English, poo evokes the childish or euphemistic term poo (approximately equivalent to poop, but the use of poo as a verb is very childish). It also evokes Pooh, as in Winnie-the-Pooh. POO or OOP -- either way it sounds faintly ridiculous.
Wherever in this glossary I write ``according to Pool'' vel sim., I am citing this book. My own complaint about the book is that there's not enough about what Jane Austen or anyone else did eat or drink, even at Charles Dickens's limited level of awareness. I could say that there's too little about food for my taste. Well, I could say it, but I wouldn't. I'd only say it if I were willing to perpetrate a distasteful pun. You can trust me. (Write it? That's something else altogether.)
To be fair, Pool does drop some comments on drippings into three different places in the book (see the glossary as well as the index). And in the section on dinner parties, there's half a paragraph on the food. It reminds me of James Davidson's celebrated Courtesans and Fishcakes (1998), punnily subtitled ``The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.'' In the introduction he writes (p. xix):
While scholarly attention has been distracted elsewhere, some extraordinary gaps have been allowed to open up in our knowledge of ancient culture and society. The lack of work on Greek heterosexuality and (until recently and outside France) ancient food are [sic] particularly striking. ... Anyone with time on their hands and a desire to make a substantial contribution to human knowledge will find few more promising areas of investigation than Greek bring-your-own `contribution-dinners', Attic cakes, the `second' dessert table, the consumption of game, gambling, perfumes, flower wreaths, hairstyles, horse-racing, pet birds and all the various entertainments of the symposium, including slapstick, stand-up comedy and acrobatics.
It might also be the point, in the sense of purpose of or reason for, a purchase. That kind of point is rare, however.
The Protean semantic range of the word pop may suggest many explanations of how it came to name an art genre, but the origin of the name is certain. Richard Hamilton (born Feb. 1922) is considered the father of Pop Art, and the name arose from his most famous picture, Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?, a collage of modern consumer advertisements and artefacts (Hoover vacuum, sofa, TV, comic strip) and images of the body-beautiful. One figure holds a lollipop inscribed with the word ``Pop.''
Hamilton went on to design the cover of the Beatles' ``White Album'' in 1968.
This comprehensive glossary contains yet more information on corn at high speeds.
In Spanish, maíz and choclo are both used for corn (in the American sense). Pop is not a word in Spanish; in Argentina (though not much elsewhere) popcorn is called pochoclo.
It doesn't give me a real good feeling, when I read the words ``food product.'' Why can't they call them ``foods''? Is there something about these ``products'' that makes them food-like, but not quite completely foodful?
Reverend Jackson was writing under the title ``False piety is wrong cure for Dems.'' The article didn't mention the junior Senator from Jackson's state of Illinois, Barak Obama. In a widely-discussed speech in D.C. the previous March 28, Obama had urged Democrats to pretend to respect voters' religions even though they think it's silly superstition, although he didn't say it quite that way. Instead what he did say was that he was a believing Christian, which I suppose you could interpret uncynically. After all, what motive would the senator have for insincerity besides the desire for success in politics? So Jesse was probably not taking a dig at Barak. After all, what motive would he have for insincerity?
The word poppycock had gotten prime TV exposure during the debate between Democratic Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman and his primary opponent Ned Lamont. Maybe Jesse heard it there. (This analysis is reminiscent of one way that scholars used to try to order Shakespeare's plays: they'd assume that he played one of the parts of each play, and that the words he memorized for that part would crop up unusually frequently in the script for his next play.) The day after the debate, Lieberman campaigned at the Athenian Diner...
He laughed along as DeLauro and a few other friends at the Athenian tried to cheer him up and cheer him on, poking fun at Lamont's use of the word poppycock in the debate, a term conveying his Wasp-millionaire [WASP sic] upbringing. ``Lamont's a pup, momma's little rich boy,'' chimed in one Lieberman friend.[This is from an article by Meryl Gordon (``Joe Lieberman's War'') for New York magazine.]
I hope they criticized Lamont's awkward use of it as common noun: ``He brings up a lot of poppycock about the days when I was on the Board of Selectmen, the Board of Finance.'' You have to be careful about the quantifiers you use. A praecisio like ``that's so much poppycock'' works, but ``too much poppycock'' inappropriately suggests that there is an acceptable quantity or level. ``A lot of poppycock'' is not as bad, but it implies that there could be ``just a little poppycock.'' At least he didn't make it countable. Play it safe: use the word as an interjection.
One of these days I'll have to track down Jesse's use of ``blasphemy'' in connection with MLK, Jr., and a California ballot proposition back in 1996 or so.
Our pork-rind information is at the cracklings and SFA entries.
The mealy look of men today is the result of momism and so is the pinched and baffled fury in the eyes of womankind. I said a while ago that I had been a motherless minister's son and implied that I had been mauled by every type of mom produced in this nation. I pointed out that the situation was one on which the moms would try to fix their pincers. I did not bother to prod at any misgivings they might feel about what the rude minister's boy, trained in snoopery by the example of the moms, might have found out about the matriarchy and its motivations through hanging around sewing clubrooms, hiding in heavy draperies, and holing up in choir lofts. Rather, I let any moms and adherents of momism who may be reading this slug along in the happy belief that, whether or not I knew it, they had got me off base.
Now, really.
Some of the doting ones, ready to write off all I have said if I will only make up and shove myself back into the groove for them, are now about to be clipped--but good. For, by a second contumelious revelation, I have caught onto all of middle-aged, middle-class, earth-owning Mrs. America that I happened to miss in the portieres. Hold your seats, ladies. I have been a clerk in a department store. Not merely that, but I have been a clerk behind the dress goods remnant counter. And not only that, but I have served and observed the matriarchy from the vantage point during sales. If there is a woman still on her feet and not laughing, nab her, because that will mark her as a ringleader in this horrid business.
(This is from p. 199 of Generation of Vipers, in the famous or infamous chapter 11, ``Common Women,'' All italics above are in the original.)
Here in this secluded, out-of-the-way part of the glossary, I am prepared to make a private admission: when I created this site, it was intended as a joke, the absurdity lying in the ostentation of creating an internationally accessible resource for a rather local and really completely informal lunch group. Having seen multiple home pages dedicated to the little hamlet where I grew up (which don't even mention me), as well as the site linked from the current entry, I have learned that on the web, nothing is too insignificant to present to an international audience.
True
is higher than the voltage level for False.
Note that ``higher'' is greater in the algebraic sense (more positive or
less negative). Cf. negative
logic.
An exception to this definition might be G. Gordon Liddy. For him, a power-on self-test would be holding his hand over a lit candle.
A deltiologist, a practitioner of deltiology, is someone who collects postcards.
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This definition was promulgated and even grudgingly approved at one time during Stammtisch. But by the very nature of language, we recognize the indeterminacy of the Stammtext, so this definition may no longer be, in that lovely Watergate expression, operative. After all, when I wrote above that the definition was ``grudgingly approved,'' it must be admitted that what I really mean is that the others were eating and didn't want to open their mouths to object. Table manners do make rhetorical cowards of us all. Or something like that, I'm sure.
For more on how a random comment is enacted into iron Stammtisch law, see the document on governance.
(Just for the record, I should mention that attempting to assess literature while ignoring anything that may be known of the author outside the text is an older approach than postmodernism. It was introduced seriously by the ``New Critics'' early in the twentieth century. But don't take my word for it.)
This is a pretty bad entry, conflating 1959 Chomsky and 1960's Derrida. Until I repair it, let's just observe that writers interested in [postmodern critical] theory are generally committed to a profound scepticism about language and even truth. In the first instance, this leads to a lot of scare-quoting, used as a kind of apology for employing clearly problematic or discredited terms (e.g., the last word of the preceding sentence is written with quotes: ``truth'').
Part of the postmodern program is to subvert or transgress (favored term) the perceived illegitimate (no quotes there) ``author(ity)'' of writing by exposing the (supposed, by postmodernists) contradictions of its distinctions. This motive leads to a wearying wariness about perfectly innocent words, and ignorant on-the-fly etymological comment (``herstory''). Postmodern writing is winkingly playful, attentive to often weak or recherché puns which are usually more distracting than amusing, let alone enlightening. This is an easy game to play. For example, the word coercion appearing in an ordinary English sentence would be replaced by the phrase in(tension)al coercion in pomo English (the parentheses do appear in P. Eng.).
The scepticism is also more deeply problematic in undercutting the authority (excuse me, I meant ``(author)ity'') of the critic's own writing. This leads to an excessive degree of self-reference in postmodern writing, to sloppy solipsism. (By the way, have you visited our postmodern glossary entry? It's quite clever.)
Link here on a good day for annotated Modern Major-General stuff.
Like all texts so far studied, however, the explicit portion is finite; a limit point is reached. In the case of Stammtisch, that's usually around 12:30. We deconstruct the text, bus our trays, and soon we have a gut feeling -- a visceral feeling perhaps: it is something we sense within ourselves -- that the food is pretty post-structural as well, and we go off in search of other texts. Maybe the text will be minimalist in respect of, like, written words (TP scroll), or perhaps there will be time to pick up the New York Times, which if you don't want to pay a premium isn't to be had on campus until noon at the earliest.
Stammtisch is a serial, however, with reentrance. Though we deny the text this afternoon, tomorrow we eat again. Riverrun.
[Note: I have made the easy assumption above that the finiteness of the Stammtext implies its boundedness. All those who are working through this glossary as part of a mathematics course should prove an appropriate extension of the Heine-Borel theorem. You may assume lunch is compact before digestion.]
On-line, you can learn what it is and have a short tutorial courtesy of P. J. Weingartner. There's also an FAQ. Adobe itself has a ``Q & A''-style advertising page.
There are some tutorial materials available in German at the University of Zurich's Postscript Corner, with an emphasis on color.
So far, the best on-line tutorial in PostScript programming that I've seen is by Lance Lovette and Marshall Brain. [Which reminds me, did you know that this glossary contains some evidence for the hypothesis that Nomenclature is Destiny?]
Of course, there are also archived FAQ's.
In the early days of laser printers (from the mid '80's), there were two dominant command languages in which laser printers understood instructions: Epson and Digital proprietary. Today, the two dominant languages are PostScript and PCL.
In current usage, it suggests a degree of logical rigor. I'd like to adduce an early example from the writings of Robert Malthus, since the chasm is particularly wide between the imaginary rigor he postulated and the reality of his failure. I can't do it, however, because as far as I can recall he used the word postulatum (and the plural postulata).
There is not much distinction in meaning today between axioms and postulates, but in Euclid's geometry there was a consistent distinction that was eventually expressed in Latin by the opposition of axiomata (yeah, I think Latin used the Greek plural) and postulata. (I have yet to track down what word corresponded to postulatum in Euclid's Greek.) In English versions of Euclid, the postulates were originally called petitions. (As should be clear from the discussion above, the two words once had a substantial overlap of meaning.)
The old distinction in geometry (still to be found in textbooks at the end of the nineteenth century) was simply this: an axiom was a general statement admitted to be true without proof, while a postulate was an axiom about a construction.
The first three postulates in Book I of Euclid's Elements [of geometry] were simply assertions that certain constructions were possible (that a straight line can be drawn between any two points, etc.). The most famous postulate of Euclid's geometry was the fifth. In his own formulation, it amounted to this: given two lines on a plane, both crossed by a third, if the interior angles on the one side of the crossing line amount to less than two right angles, then the two straight lines, if extended indefinitely, themselves also cross on that side of the crossing line.
Euclid's lines were what modern geometries regard as line segments -- that is, as segments of lines, the latter being conceived as infinite in ordinary plane geometry. (This modern notion of a line is a slight further abstraction from the physical notion of a line or straight path which motivates the geometrical abstraction.) Euclid's fifth postulate is clearly a postulate, because it involves the construction of straight lines extended (or ``produced,'' in an older terminology) from the original segments. If the same proposition is expressed in terms of lines, there is no construction and the proposition is an axiom. Hence, the subset of axioms that should be called propositions is not so fundamental: it can change under relatively minor reformulations. The fourth postulate of Book I is that all right angles are equivalent. I can see a couple of ways that this may be regarded as a claim about constructions, but again: whether it is or not can depend on small details of the formulation.
There was a widespread feeling that the fourth postulate was just a bit too involved to be acceptable directly as a postulate or axiom, and an immense effort went into trying to derive it as a theorem (1) on the basis of the other postulates of Euclid, or (2) on the basis of these plus some other, simpler axiom. The second approach yielded a variety of alternative statements equivalent to Euclid's fifth postulate. The invention of ``non-Euclidean'' geometries made clear the situation regarding the first approach: Euclid's other postulates are logically independent of his fifth postulates. On can prove a number of theorems with them alone, and one can combine them with the original fifth to prove some more theorems. (In fact, to prove all of the traditional theorems truly rigorously, one has to expose certain assumptions that were originally implicit.) It is also possible to combine the other postulates (and axioms) with one or another alternative to the original fifth postulate, even alternatives that directly contradict Euclid's fifth, and prove an alternate system of theorems that are, from the standpoint of pure mathematics, not less true than Euclid's system.
Hemp and weed are not really slang terms. Marijuana, or cannabis sativa, is a species of hemp. It just happens to have more than one practical use. At latitudes like Virginia's, it was widely grown for rope and paper cellulose fiber, until the marijuana scares at the beginning of the twentieth century. It used to grow wild along roads in the US Midwest, where it went by the name of ditch weed, but it seems to be mostly eradicated. Grown outdoors at these latitudes, it doesn't have any noticeable psychoactive strength.
I suppose one must distinguish between grammatically countable and uncountable synonyms here. A ``jay'' is a single marijuana cigarette.
Khat is another plant that also has more than one practical use. Its leaves have been a traditional chaw for centuries in East Africa and the Arabian peninsula, much as coca leaves have been in the Andes. Khat contains a stimulant that is described as being like a weaker form of cocaine or amphetamine. Its other practical use is mentioned at the MSP entry.
Okay, time for some recreational mind-bending, uh, stuff. Heidegger is good for a laugh: a wacko, but not a wack job. That is: crazy, but not personally inclined to participate directly in violence. Especially now that he's dead. He could fix up a really tasty word salad, or maybe it was a word soup, let's discuss that. He had a real talent for pretentious nonsense, and philosophers have been fressing at his trough ever since. That's a good thing, because they mine it for pearls that they cast in our general direction. If you think I'm mixing my metaphors, you don't know Heidegger. So Heidi (let's be friends) wrote an essay with the title Die Frage nach der Technik (that's not translatable, but it means `The question concerning technology'). Richard Rojcewicz has written an entire book based on his close reading of it, entitled The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger. According to the blurb, his ``goal is to mine [that essay] for the treasures only a close reading of the original German text can bring out.'' See?
What are some of those treasures? For you, I will do a close or at least a nearsighted reading of Gods and Tech to find out. I may even open the book. I'll list my discoveries as I progress:
- ``[E]specially for the late Heidegger [he is dead], the philosophy of technology is a philosophy of Being, or of the gods.'' (Back cover.) Arthur Clarke said it better.
- ``For Heidegger, technology is not applied knowledge, but the most basic knowledge, of which science, for example, is an application.'' (Back cover.) Could I have another example?
- ``In short, the smith must actively let the essence be revealed to her in advance. That is how she is semicreative: the appearing of the chalice in advance is a joint product of the silversmith's uncovering efforts and the thing's own self-revelation. (P. 43 -- a random page, I swear it!) I'd like to see a flowchart for that. A PERT diagram? You couldn't make this stuff up, and I couldn't either.
- ``What is disrespectful or excessive about the modern windmill? [Actually, it can be noisy.] Why does Heidegger find it necessary to describe it with such pejorative terms as `ravish' and `hoard'?'' (P. 73 -- another random stop. As the blurb says, this is rich.) That's pejorative if you've lived a very sheltered life. Maybe this bit shows the influence of Cervantes or Blake. They're not listed in the index, so let's see why Chaplin is listed (p. 229).
- P. 229: The reader is commended to Charlie Chaplin's great movie, ``Modern Times'' (I approve) because Sartre liked it. I'm beginning to have second thoughts already.
- Dasein is mentioned on page 166. Am I supposed to kneel at this point, or does that come later? On this page it is also explained that ``technology is the destiny to disclosive looking.'' I think I wet my pants.
- As potholes accumulate, they start to overlap and the road starts to level out again. Just watch out for those manhole bunkers.
- That's not silver, that's wheel-rim metal.
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In Spanish, poto is butt or rump. Regular back-formation would make potus the Latin for butt. There must be something to it. Naturally, one would associate flatus with such a potus, and as it happens, the military uses FLOTUS for the presidential spouse, who so far has always been female.
If your POV was a truck, then your POV used to be above the crowd's.
See discussion at the acronym expansion (PDP).
I certainly don't have any vocabulary to teach you -- at least not in this glossary. I only wanted to point out that this word-power thing has been going on for decades, so it's clearly not a fad. This is something Donald J. Lloyd and Harry R. Warfel wrote about in 1956 in their book American English in Its Cultural Setting. The title of their chapter ``Thirty Years to a More Powerful Vocabulary'' is a play on 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, title of a book popular in those days. Another popular title then was Increase Your Word Power. (Opportunity Alert! There is no book entitled Word Wattage.)
This is a good opportunity to mention that there are two kinds of high-school
Latin program: some teach Latin, and some teach word
power. It's much easier to get an ``A'' in the second kind of program, but
after four or five years of this, you won't be able to read or write a Latin
sentence.
During the Spanish Civil War of the 1930's (a dress rehearsal for WWII), Dolores Ibárruri (christened Isidora Ibárruri Gómez) was a famous communist speaker and writer who earned the epithet ``La Pasionaria.'' Her most famous phrase was
Antes morir de pie que vivir de rodillas.
(`Rather die on your feet than live on your knees.' This is not the most literal possible translation. Eloquence should be translated with eloquence, or the closest available approximation.) Time will tell whether the Spanish live or die on their knees.
As an organization, the PP is the continuation of the ultraconservative AP, q.v., which changed name at its ninth party congress in 1989. Of course, there is bitter disagreement on the degree to which it continues the philosophy of the earlier party. At the tenth party congress at the end of March 1990, Fraga (long-time leader of the AP) was named honorary president. Nevertheless, José María Aznar, who became party leader in September 1990, was generally given credit for the party's success until 2004. He moved the party towards the center, to credibility and power -- something of a mirror of what Blair did with the British Labour Party on the left. (In these decades, it's been called a ``third way'' if the party starts from the left.)
Something else Aznar has in common with Blair is that supporting the 2003 US (``US-led'') invasion of Iraq cost them politically. Blair survived the 2004 elections, though in 2007 his party pestered him to honor his commitment to resign as PM and party leader. Almost immediately (actually, just following a Labour Party conference in September, after which Blair's successor Gordon Brown had planned to schedule snap parliamentary elections), polls showed a shift in support from Labour to the Conservatives. The other major Western European supporter of the US in Iraq was Berlusconi, and his coalition lost narrowly in 2007. On the other hand, the two most active opponents of the Iraq invasion -- Schmidt and that French guy -- were out by the end of 2007.
The PP formed a minority government in 1996, and won an overwhelming majority in 2000. Subsequently, Aznar's policies moved rightward. In a work of reference, you expect a more substantive description than ``moved ... towards the center'' and ``moved rightward.'' You might eventually get that here, if we ever clean up some of the more serious deficiencies.
Recycling code 5 (in PCS).
There's an informative PP entry in the Macrogalleria.
Okay, I have to look into this more carefully. PPA is sometimes refered to as a particular drug, and sometimes as a class of drugs. My guess is that the single drug -- the one mentioned in the preceding paragraph, is the simple amine, a compound with an NH2 group, and that there is a class of related compounds (``PPA's'') in which various organic groups are substituted for one or both of the remaining hydrogens. That's the obvious guess. I have to look doing so, but until I get around to it, this note will have to do.
PPB(a) means atoms per billion atoms.
PPB(v), ppbv mean parts per billion by volume.
PPB(w) means parts per billion of weight.
Oooh, ``evidence-based''! A revolutionary idea, sounds like science without the boring parts. And yes: PPIP materials are partly ``[b]ased ... on focus group testing with clinicians, office staff, and patients.''
The ODPHP launched PPIP in 1994; in 1998 management of PPIP was transferred to the AHRQ.
Charles Dickens's great novel Great Expectations is about a young orphan who is called Pip.
PPM(a) means atoms per million atoms.
PPM(w) means parts per million of weight.
The Montreal-based party was founded in June 2000 at the Foufounes Electrique bar by members of la Coalition Pour les Droits des Travailleuses et Travailleurs du Sexe (`coalition for the rights of sex workers'). It made the news in early July, it had gathered about 400 signatures from supporters and was going to send them to Elections Canada to apply for official party status. The party seems to be most popular among nonvoters, which is probably just as well, because they seem to have no candidates. A few days before the federal parliamentary elections in November 2000, a PPP spokesman announced that complex federal election rules governing party status had prevented them from becoming an official party. The rules required such a party to have a minimum of 50 candidates (each paying a deposit of $1,000). They were hoping that a court challenge of those rules by the Communist Party of Canada would make things easier the next time. The next time was 2004, and though their website is still up, they apparently didn't field any candidates.
In addition to a cool logo, they have the political slogan ``Pour avoir du fun en chambre, ralliez vous au PPP!'' [As best I can make out, this means, `to have some fun in the chamber, join the PPP!' I hope this isn't an illegal solicitation. The word fun (also fonne) is an English loan used in Quebec; the phrase ``avoir du fun'' as a whole looks like a sort of calque.] The slogan is a double entendre in the English sense, since chambre may be understood both as `parliamentary chamber' and as `bedroom.'
It is feckless to assign repetitious names to these symbols, but the names exist. For example, pppppp is pianissississississimo. Some may wonder whether this is a legitimate construction for Italian. It is, but not everything that is grammatical is worth saying. Spanish has a somewhat similar system of endings, and its diminutive morpheme -it- can be iterated also. Hence, acceptable but progressively more childish constructions like chico, chiquito, chiquitito, chiquititito, ... (`small, very small, very very small, ...'). It is also acceptable, though less common, to iterate the intensifier morpheme -is(im)-, hence mucho, muchisimo, muchisisimo, ... (mucho means `much'; big surprise there). Chiquitisimo is approximately equivalent to chiquitito, but if you want to get any more precise, I recommend a micrometer.
For more on Spanish diminutives, see the poco entry. Evita is another example. For an insight into the etymology of piano, see the planet entry.
During the 90's this superseded SLIP as the standard protocol for telephone-line computer-to-computer communications. One of its advantages is that it can handle both synchronous and asynchronous communication. Try this link. If it works you'll get a bit of PPP information from whatis.com.
PPPP was founded in December 1990 by actor and satirist J. Rewinski. It supported a ``common-sense liberal program'' and won 3.27% of the vote in the 1991 elections, getting 16 seats in the Sejm. Later, the party split into groups known as ``Large Beer'' and ``Small Beer,'' and overall became ``small beer'' so far as Polish politics was concerned.
It's written in Latin because it's embarrassingly stupid if people can understand it.
Postscript is abbreviated P.S.
Latin is abbreviated Lat. and L. or L, but usually not all at once. You have to choose.
Abbreviation is abbreviated abbrev.
I think I need some sleep.
This would make a good unit of expressed audience disapproval, if they didn't throw fruit and non-pulse vegetables as well.