RHD isn't very common, except in England and Japan; India (and Pakistan and Bangladesh), Australia, and a bunch of countries in between; and a swath of African countries -- mostly former British colonies -- stretching from Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, along the east up to Kenya and Uganda. All told, RHD countries represent a mere one third of the world's population. For a detailed survey and some history, see the Wikipedia page for Rules of the road and links therefrom, particularly Brian Lucas's more detailed page. Jan Pielkenrood's shorter page on the subject has one of the better world maps of driving side, and includes some personal observations on the subject. This page isn't listed at the Wikipedia entry; it represents some compromise between brevity and comprehensiveness. Cf. Left-Hand Drive.

In Vladivostok, at the extreme southeast corner of Russia, most cars are RHD Japanese models, but vehicles are driven on the right-hand side of the street as in the rest of Russia. In late Spring 2005, the democratically-elected dictatorship in Moscow was rumored to be considering plans to discourage RHD vehicles.

Japan has rather stringent requirements for the maintenance of motor vehicles. Even cosmetic damage (i.e., significant body damage that does not affect vehicle operation) is required to be repaired. For this reason among others (such as the relative affluence of modern Japan), there is a large supply of second-hand RHD vehicles in good condition. In LHD countries, they are sold at a discount relative to equivalent LHD vehicles. This accounts for their abundance in eastern Russia, and for import restrictions or homologization requirements in LHD Asian countries. However, Cambodia (hey, we don't have to call it Kampuchea any more?) switched from RHD to LHD specifically to stem smuggling from neighboring RHD Thailand.

Greek archaeologist Polyxeni Tsatsopoulou, interviewed by the AP in July 2005 regarding excavations of the Via Egnatia, explained that the Romans used left-handed driving and right-handed reining:

She said drivers held the reins with their right hand and wielded their whip with the left, so the Romans made drivers stay on the left to avoid the lash of oncoming riders and keep road-rage incidents to a minimum.

That was probably not the entire story, however. Back when everyone was either right-handed or ambidextrous, side-arms (uh, swords) were worn on the right side. Also, right-handedness implies right-footedness, and right-footed people find it easier to mount a horse from the left.

Whipping with the right hand has been common, at least. (The evidence from Roman antiquity below is adapted from a discussion on the Classics List in June 1999, before it descended into the political muck. Important contributors included James M. Pfundstein, Arthur J. Pomeroy, Wade Richardson, and Diana Wright.)

Visual evidence for chariot-race chirality is collected in Dictionnaire des Antiquites Grecques et Romaines, edd. Daremberg & Saglio (Paris, 1887), under the entry for circus. This includes coins displaying the races and mosaics from Barcelona and Lyon. An on-line mosaic (with really naive perspective) illustrating a chariot race is served by Tunisia On-Line. All the races are run counterclockwise (i.e., driving on the right). The whip is generally in the right hand, with the reins in the left hand or tied to the left arm.

Literary sources cited in Daremberg & Saglio include Lucan 8.199ff:

Non sic moderator equorum,
dexteriore rota laeuum cum circumit axem,
cogit inoffensae currus accedere metae.

Daremberg & Saglio also cites Silius Italicus 16.360:

laevo interior stringebat tramite metam

Book V of Virgil's Aeneid contains a naval race run counterclockwise. Later evidence includes the gripping chariot race (counterclockwise again) in Ben Hur (1959). Seventeen minutes of footage! Or hoofage or whatever. According to IMDB's trivia for this movie: ``The chariot race has a 263-to-1 cutting ratio (263 feet of film for every one foot kept), probably the highest for any 65mm sequence ever filmed.)''

Because of a forceps accident attending his difficult birth (kein Kaiserschnitt), the last Kaiser had almost no use of his left arm, and always rode rather docile horses. In a picture that illustrates Anne Topham's Memories of the Kaiser's Court, 1914 (or at least the reissue A Distant Thunder, 1992), the Kaiser and Kaiserin pose for a picture on horseback, and the Kaiser's mount has his head down because the Kaiser can't pull on the reins (so the accompanying text).

Vide symmetry dilemma.

RHIT's are accredited by AHIMA (as of this writing, anyway). RHIT is the new improved name (since 2000) for ART (which AHIMA used to accredit when it was called AMRA).

This journal was started as Rheinisches Museum by the classics professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl. Friedrich Nietzsche was the only one of Ritschl's students ever to publish in it.

F.W. Ritschl was director of the Museum of Antiquities of the Rhine during his time as a professor at the University of Bonn, which is indeed on the Rhine. Ritschl had ongoing acrimonious quarrels with his colleague Otto Jahn, and in 1865 he accepted an appointment at Leipzig, but continued as editor of RhM.

Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn in 1864, and the quarrel between Jahn and Ritschl spoiled his first year in classics, so he focused his attention on music. In 1865 he followed Ritschl to Leipzig.

``Benjamin,'' the name Jacob gave to the first of his two sons by his second wife Rachel, is ben-yad-hamim: `son of the right hand.' There's an exposition of handedness in dice available on the web.

In RHT countries, most vehicles have steering wheels and most other driving instruments on the left side. These vehicles are called left-hand drive, or LHD, vehicles. LHD vehicles encourage drivers to sit on the left or practice extreme yoga.

RHT is more common on continents; you're more likely to encounter LHT on islands and subcontinents. Given the relative sizes, you can see that RHT is more common, though not by as much as you might guess. Nevertheless, because LHT is less common overall, it is traditional to indicate which are the LHT and which the RHT countries by giving an exhaustive list of the LHT countries only. We followed that convention, and then we went on ahead and added all the interesting stuff to that entry, leaving just a couple of lame jokes here. YOU'RE READING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE GLOSSARY, YOU DUMMY!!

In 1900, both Bedford and Royal Holloway became part of the University of London. In 1965 both admitted male undergraduates for the first time. In 1982 the two schools signed a partnership agreement under the pressure of budget cuts. The university's history page doesn't happen to mention the rabid hatred of Lady Thatcher that is fairly universal in British academia, even today. In 1985 the schools merged, and in 1986 Bedford moved out of its old digs and became half of ``Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.'' By decision of its College Council in 1992, that continues to be the registered title, but ``Royal Holloway, University of London'' is the shorter name under which it is ``presents itself.'' For a number of years its domain name was <rhbnc.ac.uk>, but as of 2000 http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/ is forwarded to <http://www.rhul.ac.uk/>, and sometime in 2001 email addresses will switch over. This is a matter of some regret and even resentment among old-time faculty.

Regarding the name: ein Blatt is a sheet of paper -- i.e., a leaf, both sides. The plural Blätter can mean `newspaper.' Vierteljahrs is the genitive of quarter-year (Vierteljahr); the adjective vierteljahrlich is equivalent. The different spelling rules of German and (such as they are) of English obscure the close cognate relationship of words in the two languages. The relationship is clearer from a comparison of pronunciations or from a comparison of the spellings in a common system like IPA. For example, German jahr is English year. In IPA, these are spelled /jar/ and /ji:r/. The initial and final consonants are the same (in one or another accent, since arr's vary a lot) and only the vowels differ essentially (the colon after the i indicates that its duration is extended). We'll eventually explain more about the pronunciation of the letter jay in an appropriate jay entry. For now just understand that J is the consonantal form of I.

About the abbreviation: German systematically capitalizes nouns, common and proper. (A substantial exception concerns compound nouns and a characteristically German curiosity called extended adjective constructions, which are written wihout spaces and with interior nouns not capitalized. Thus, the compound noun quarter-year sheet is Vierteljahrblatt.) German conventionally uses lower case for adjectives, even when those are derived from proper nouns. Hence, if it were not a formal title one would describe a few Rhennish quarterly pages as rheinische Vierteljahrblätter. (Because you need to know, I'll also mention that in personal correspondence, second-person pronouns are also capitalized. Also, capitalization of foreign-language phrases obeys different rules, if any.) Although German practice regarding capitalization in acronyms is not so standardized, there is a tendency to mix case, capitalizing letters representing nouns. GmbH is a good example of this. Because only the first noun of an agglutinated compound noun is capitalized, acronyms formed from these follow a less systematic pattern. The acronym of this entry -- RhVjBll -- represents a typically loose application of the rule. The B of the noun Blatt is capitalized, but the j of Jahr (`year') is not. The double-ell represents the fact that theBlatt is in the plural form Blätter.

Most of our rhyme stuff is at the fünf entry. Probably the most prominent alternate spelling of rhyme is rime, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem, ``The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.'' You wonder that he didn't use the antient spelling.

It's an ancient word, rhyme. Rime and ryme were the common spellings through the sixteenth century. (The difference in spelling, -i- vs. -y-, once corresponded to a difference in pronunciation, but the two vowels were close and tended to be confused. I think rime is supposed to have been truer to the pronunciation, but came the Great Vowel Shift and, well, you know the story.) The appearance of forms with aitch (rhyme and rhime) during the sixteenth century reflected an awareness of the etymology. Latin rhythmus is the common source of this word and rhythm, and the restraint shown (of using only one aitch, in one or the other place) seems to have arisen as a conscious effort at clarity of meaning. Rhime and rhyme were the common spellings from the seventeenth century on, the latter not prevailing until the nineteenth. Coleridge's spelling is a conscious affectation.

Républicain indépendant is not an especially distinctive designation. For example, in August 1990, in a largely meaningless development, Zaïre's Parti républicain indépendant (PRI, headed by former minister Nguz a Karl-i-Bond) and la Fédération nationale des démocrates convaincus united under the banner of l'Union PRI-FENADEC. At the same time another former minister of ``maréchal Mobutu,'' Mungul Diaka, announced the formation of a new party to be called Rassemblement démocratique pour la République (RDR). This helped keep the number of political groupings in Zaïre above 60. Politics now abhors a democracy deficit; with a loud whoosh!, democratic structures and trappings rush in to ... well, it's not clear what they do, but they don't fill the vacuum.

Fresh out of l'École nationale d'administration in 1951, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing was first elected to the French parliament as an independent. In 1966, as finance minister under Charles de Gaulle, he founded a center-right party of républicains et indépendants that worked in coalition with the Gaullists. The party supported Giscard's (successful) presidential bid in 1974, and changed its name to Parti Républicain. There may have been a couple of other names in there, and I've seen Giscard referred to as a républicain indépendant, though that may not be official. In 1978 his party formed part of his UDF coalition. Since 1997 the party has been headed by Alain Madelin, who has moved the party in the direction of economic liberalization and changed the name to Démocratie Liberale (DL).

In French reportage of US politics, US Senator John McCain is liable to be described as un républicain indépendant (though much more often as a républicain centriste). In English, he is called, depending on how favorably the reporter judges him, a ``maverick'' or ``independent-minded'' member of the Republican party, a Rino, ``not a team player,'' or simply traitor.

The Colossus of Rhodes was one of the ``Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.'' It fell down (in an earthquake), and after a few hundred years it was sold for scrap. No one remembers where it stood, but they've put up a couple of bronze deer statues where they think it was. You think that's sad? Another Wonder, the structure after which mausoleums take their name (the Mausoleum of Halicarnasus: a memorial to King Mausolus), was cannibalized for stones to build a fortress for the Knights of Saint John during one of the crusades (1402). Okay, maybe sold-for-scrap is still worse than that, but at least it's got competition for the basement.

The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Rhode Island state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.

RIAA is affiliated with IFPI.

SAFE boats are often loosely or mistakenly called RIB's.

Sometimes mistakenly expanded Rest & ICE. Apply ice indirectly: use a bag of frozen veggies if you don't have an ice pack that you keep in the freezer, and put some cloth between that and the skin -- you're not trying to freeze anything. If it's very uncomfortably cold, then it's too cold. Twenty minutes or a half hour is the usual recommendation.

After a couple of days, apply heat. That's what everyone says, so it must be true.

There's something else you should know, and normally I'd put the information in a different entry and force you follow a link. But seeing as how you're immobilized and need to rest, I'll make an exception and tell you right here. There are basically two OTC (that's over-the-counter) analgesics (that's pain-killers) for non-mild pain: tylenol and ibuprofen (that's right, I didn't mention aspirin). They're sold under an aisle-full of different brand names. Ibuprofen is better for muscle and tendon pain, and for inflammation.

Richard Simmons is to David Letterman what Charo! was to Johnny Carson: a bundle of enthusiasm and energy, intimidating no one while demonstrating unashamed gracelessness, who barely conceals enjoyment at not being taken seriously. A consumate amateur. What does it say about the decadent state of the universe, that we have come from Charo! to Richard? It's not encouraging.

This is probably the place where I should say something about William Hung, but words fail me.

One fellow who worked as a publicist for Simmons went on to work as a G.O. at Club Med, according to a story she got published in the UCB alumni magazine. Now she wants to write for a living. Times are tough.

In Spanish, the adjective charro means coarse (or of low value in other ways), and in some countries charro is used as a noun for `cowboy.' I think Elvis Presley played a Mexican cowboy in a movie called Charro. Another common word for cowboy, in Argentina at least, is gaucho. Guacho, on the other hand, means `bastard.' I detect a recurring theme.

One of the purposes of this glossary is to make important connections among things that are completely unrelated to each other. I don't want to imply that these connections are often tenuous or specious (although this is true). Let's just say you might not have thought of them -- which, of course, is the reason we point them out to you. Anyway, cf. UCSB.

The word riches is understood and construed as plural, as if it were the regularly constructed plural of a noun rich. Now it is true that rich can be used as a sort of noun in phrases like ``the rich.'' (Observe, however, that like any adjective it is modified by adverbs. E.g., ``the newly-rich.'') In any case, if riches in the ordinary sense were simply the plural of the sort-of-noun in ``the rich,'' it would designate the same group, rather than what it is they have that makes them so. In fact, the word now usually spelled riches was originally a singular noun spelled richesse. It was a French loan, and the -esse was simply a suffix that converts adjectives to abstract nouns (-esse and -ece in Old French). (More about that below.) English doesn't have many words that use that suffix (caress, distress and later stress, duress, largess, and prowess seem to be the only common survivors). This, and the presence of the pre-existing English word rich, apparently explain how richesse was interpreted as a specialized use of a plural (of rich). (This is not a metanalysis, but similar confusions are described at the matanalysis. It's also not a pea, so check there too in particular.)

This -esse suffix represents the Latin suffix -itia. The corresponding reflex in Italian is -ezza (the adjective ricco yields ricchezza). Spanish and Portuguese use -eza (hence riqueza from rico in both). [The OED claims (s.v. -ess, suffix²) that Portuguese also uses -ezza. That might be, but I can't find any instances. The double z looks like something that might have been eliminated in the major reform first promulgated in 1911, but a couple of mid-nineteenth-century dictionaries I checked also had riqueza and similar forms. However, Portuguese spelling wobbled a lot back then, so it's hard to be definite.]

There's a rich galaxy of words associated with rich. In broad terms, they are all believed to originate from Latin rex and or Celtic rix, meaning `king.' That was borrowed into Germanic at a very early point, and within Germanic languages evolved into words like modern English rich and modern German Reich. The Germanic words were borrowed back later in Late Latin and Romance (see the rico entry for an example). There were further effects, like the borrowing of richesse mentioned above, and the French word riche may have influenced the development of the native English word rich.

Once the law was passed, however, another law came into play. This other, the law of unintended consequences, cannot be repealed. The unintended consequence is that many prosecutors found RICO a convenient tool to use against business groups that are not engaged in the kind of organized crime that legislators probably had in mind. In particular, many of the businesses targeted were not involved in any violent activity or threats; their intimidation methods were legal (but in support of illegal behavior).

Wealth, treasure, and various sorts of abundance are riqueza, but tastiness is buen sabor or buen gusto. The toponyms Puerto Rico and Costa Rica mean `rich port' and `rich coast,' resp. The associated gentilicial nouns (nouns for the inhabitants) are puertorriqueño and costarriqueño (also costarricense).

Rico is one of those Spanish words, which I had been led to believe are rare, that originated in the East Germanic language of the Visigoths who ruled Iberia. The Gothic word was reiks, `powerful.' (I might say this is a Visigothic word, but the fact is that most of what we know about East Germanic languages is what we know about Gothic, and most of what we know about that is from the Bible translation of Ulfilas, who was a Visigoth.) If you want to know any more about rico and its cognates (in case you were wondering: yes, you do want to know more) you can learn about it by following the link to the riches entry. Before you go, though, I should mention that riqueza took over the meanings of an earlier word rictad, now obsolete. The ending -eza in riqueza is common in Spanish (forming nouns from adjectives) so it is superfluous to posit the influence of the Old French form richesse that is mentioned at the entry for riches.

AVLIC describes itself as ``an RID Approved Sponsor of Continuing Education (CE) Activities'' so at least some (and for all I know all) pronounce RID as an initialism and not an acronym. Too bad.

By ``downstream'' I mean the direction in which water flows on average. This a useful extension of the definition. If a river issues in an ocean or bay (i.e., in a body of water that has tides), and if it has too little ``river flow,'' then it functions as a tidal river. At the lower end of a tidal river, salt water flows upstream as the tide rises, and there typically develops an estuary of often brackish water.

To ``bank right'' is to change the direction of an airplane's flight by lowering the right wing (not this right wing) and adjusting other control surfaces to execute a turn toward the right.

The convention that ``right'' and ``left'' correspond respectively to conservative or reactionary or resistant to change or whatever, and to liberal or progressive or favoring change or whatever, goes back to the French Revolution (the one in 1789). Specifically, in the Estates General the aristocratic members sat to the right of the speaker (the place of honor; let's not get into it) while the commoners sat to the left. So basically, to be on the right was to be in support of the established order, and to be on the left was to be in opposition. When a new order has been recently established, the meaning of the terms is in flux. In Paris there is a bohemian (and left-wing -- ça va sans dire) district on the left bank of the Seine. I think that's just a coincidence.

I understand that the term ``wing-nut'' as a disparagement is supposed to derive from the threaded item of that name and from the resemblance to uncool people with prominent ears. That doesn't seem like enough of an explanation to me. Perhaps there is some influence of ``right-wing nut'' parsed as ``right wing-nut.''

From one of RIKEN's own (English) about pages:

The mission of RIKEN is to conduct comprehensive research in science and technology (excluding only the humanities and social sciences) as provided for under the "RIKEN Law," and to publicly disseminate the results of its scientific research and technological developments. RIKEN carries out high level experimental and research work in a wide range of fields, including physics, chemistry, medical science, biology, and engineering, covering the entire range from basic research to practical application.
RIKEN was first organized in 1917 as a private research foundation, and reorganized in 2003 as an independent administrative institution under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.

I was really charmed by the parenthetical ``only'' in the first sentence.

The last volume was 15 (1989). It was subsequently merged with Répertoire d'art et d'Archéologie into an online database called the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA).

Vocabulary word for today: ekphrasis.

It is reported that Rip Torn is only acting, but I'd just as soon not share a carpool with him, or any other kind of pool. On the other hand, as Groucho once pointed out to Dick Cavett, Peter O'Toole is doubly phallic, so take your choice.

The Public Health Medical Society was set up informally in 1886, and incorporated in 1892 as the British Institute of Public Health (BIPH). Not long after (1897) it gained royal patronage (I think that means that the reigning monarch nods in the organization's general direction) and it proudly adopted the name Royal Institute of Public Health. Then in 1937 it merged with the Institute of Hygiene (est'd. 1903), and the resulting organization adopted a new name that included all the words in both of the original names, and and. They didn't have to use the word Institute twice. That's one of those reduced-overhead advantages of combining name operations. It's called the nomenclaturics of scale. Okay, it isn't.

The independent bookdealers in Buffalo all say Rochester is much more of a book town. Rochester was the name of Jack Benny's straight man.

Here's a listing.

There is a school of thought that mini-RK -- RK using small incisions -- can achieve good results without the risks of ordinary RK. That argument doesn't seem to have won many adherents.

The term radio picture was also used during WWII for still photographs (typically of action, but still they were stills) transmitted by radio. Functionally, this was a bit like fax -- it was certainly the transmission of a facsimile, but the pictures were in grayscale, and given the technology available, the coding had to be analog.