S s

                 OH
                /
               /       NH
               \      /  2
                \____/
                     \
                      \
                       === O
                      /
                     /
                   HO

The problem here is that the sierra doesn't have enough of what we linguists refer to technically as ``oomph.'' Use ``Succotash'' instead.

Even on the best phones, ``ess'' sounds almost indistinguishable from ``eff.'' Most people just use ``Sam'' and ``Frank'' to distinguish these. You can try ``Foxtrot'' and ``Sierra,'' but people will just become confused, so if you're really not going to use the standard Sam and Frank, then you get more mileage from the SBF recommendations (Fandango and Succotash) than from the boring old FCC recommendations.

A symbol related to (s) is the downward-pointing arrow. For reactions that take place in a fluid solution, this indicates that a reaction product ``precipitates out.''

The other two common praenomina are Servius (Ser.) and Sextus (Sex.).

Many volatile sulfur compounds stink, and hell is traditionally scented with the stuff. Thomas Carlyle wrote of Napoleon III

His mind was a kind of extinct sulphur-pit.

(Historically, the predominant spellings in English have used ph. However, today sulfur is the standard spelling in the US and nowhere else in the English-speaking world. You've gotta love it: some patterns are consistent.)

You're not stupid (and even if you are, you prefer to be flattered that you're not) so I don't have to tell you that when S > 1, a solution is supersaturated, and now that I have, you feel condescended to. It's an occupational hazard of glossary compilers.

For a supersaturated vapor, S is the ratio of the gas (i.e., the pressure of the vapor) to the vapor pressure of the liquid phase (at the same temperature). At 0 °C, and atmospheric pressure, one can achieve supersaturations as high as 5 (i.e., relative humidity of 500%) in clean air. [Dirt of any sort nucleates.] Cool it further (increase S by decreasing equilibrium vapor pressure) and homogeneous nucleation takes place (fog).

Their ISU (Internet Services Unit) looks kind of central.

The domain code for Saudi Arabia, as well as the ISO country code generally (SA), is often mistaken for that of South Africa. South Africa's ccTLD is <.za>.

Take care in Italian not to confuse this with S.p.A., or with another S.A.

In Dutch the term corresponding to anonymous society is naamloze vennootschap (NV).

Hello, my name is Al and I am-- I am a logophile. I confess that I am powerless against the overwhelming force of words. The terrible state that my life has reached can be explained completely by words, and yet, so abjectly addicted am I that I still cannot bring myself to renounce words (in so many words), and I continue to resist total abstinence from words. (You may have noticed this yourself.) Finally, let me say that words cannot express my gratitude for the words of support you have given me here today, and for the stories you have shared.

Let's face it, this is ridiculous. The initial A has been enormously over-used in naming continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, North and South America, and Antarctica. (The rare term Southern Antarctica is roughly equivalent to the more common Central Antarctica. The Republic of North Antarctica has a website, but no ccTLD yet.)

The term became well-known in English after the Nazis used it as the name for their paramilitary organization. (It started out as a group of bodyguards for Nazi leaders, and evolved into a uniformed group of street hooligans tasked with intimidating the party's political enemies. Over time, the leadership security tasks were taken over by the SS. After the Nazi party came to power, the socialist-leaning SA worried Hitler's supporters among nationalist businessmen, and posed the threat of a coup. Evidence of a coup plot was manufactured by Himmler and Heydrich for Hitler's edification, just as the SS was being reengineered into a secret police. The SA was decapitated on the Night of the Long Knives (Saturday night to Sunday morning, June 30-July 1, 1934), during which the SS murdered probably a few hundred targets (SA leaders and socialist-leaning members, and scattered conservative potential problems).

The act gave the the US president broad authority to impose a range of economic sanctions and restrictions on Syria. The White House was initially reluctant to use the authority granted in it, but there was an apparent change of policy in early 2005.

The acronym expansion given (in Swedish) above stands for `Swedish Airplane Stock Company.' Hardly anyone now thinks of Saab as an acronym to be expanded, any more than one thinks that of laser. Hence, the company name is now an AAP-assisted pleonasm: Saab Aktiebolag.

SAARC publishes an Encyclopaedia of SAARC Nations, one volume for each country. It has the thick glue and coarse cloth binding that are the marks of any authentic South Asian publication (unkerned fonts are characteristic only for SA publications in Western alphabets). The last and least volume is for the Maldives.

I have to point out that there are some who don't see the wisdom of nonprofit broadcasting. They point out, with some justice, that a small town with only five stations playing top-40 and four playing classic rock'n'roll simply cannot afford to waste spectrum space on a rare musical taste. If fifty percent of the disposable income that is listening to the radio on Saturday afternoon needs to hear Aerosmith's Sweet Emotion, then by God fifty percent of radio stations should be playing Sweet Emotion on Saturday afternoon.

Is that a weird web-page sound effect, or is that my stomach? It's my stomach.

The SABC website gets a lot of its copy from Sapa.

This name is suggestive. In Spanish, sabio is `wise' and sabe is `he knows.'

Also in Spanish, tonto means `stupid' (the word estúpido is also available). Tonto used to call the Lone Ranger ``Kemo Sabe'' (originally spelled ``Kemo Sababay''). It sounds like a gringo mispronouncing quimo sabe, which means `gastric juice knows.' In the early episodes, the Lone Ranger also called Tonto ``Kemo Sabay.'' Actually, quimo (`chyme' in English) refers to the entire mix of stomach juices including partially digested food as well as enzymes and hydrochloric acid. The same word is used in Portuguese. But in Portuguese the word for stomach (estómago) is written without an accent. Can you believe we also have an entry for bolo? No one knows (nadie sabe) what ``Kemo Sabe'' really meant, although there is no shortage of guesses. (That link might expire; google the question.)

You probably thought that quimo meant `chemo.' You complete idiot! ¡Estúpido! The Spanish for chemo is quimio.

Actually, SABI itself (remember SABI?) is a bit of a misnomer. It's a ``news service that covers the South American market and Mexico. SABI provides extensive and comprehensive abstracts of articles from the main business Latin American newspapers. This daily newswire service covers newspapers, business and trade journals from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Mexico.'' (My italics.) Then again, in business circles, Miami is half-seriously called ``the capital of South America,'' so it stands to reason. More at the MIA entry.

You know (¿Sabes?), as I was rereading this entry later, I thought that the ``No one knows (nadie sabe) what'' was leading into a ``Shadow'' reference. Who knows -- maybe it was, in a shadowy way. The Shadow knows!

You're probably wondering what colleges are not employers, and who handles admissions and teaching and such at those institutions. Actually, all these ``Association[s] of Colleges and Employers'' are actually associations of colleges and prospective employers of the colleges' graduates.

Oh yeah -- sacrum is cognate with the English word sacred. It's New Latin, short for Late Latin [os] sacrum (`sacred [bone]'), itself a translation of the Greek heiron [osteon]. How this bone came to be considered sacred, I am tempted to say, God only knows.

You can get there by car.

Wait! There are a bunch of student homepages, but I don't see an official page. Found it.

Despite the ugliness of the term, it has not just a usage but a meaning. For examples of the former, see Theories of Human Communication, 4th edn., by Stephen W. Littlejohn (Wadsworth, Belmont, 1992), p. 190 (ch.9).

This cleverly named law was first introduced in the US House of Representatives (as HR 4954) on the 127th anniversary of Einstein's birth. It was signed into law on Friday, the 13th of October 2006. One day and 514 years previously, a sailor aboard the Pinta had sighted land. On the 13th of October 1492, three Spanish ships made port, such as it was, on the Bahamian island of Guanahaní.

Category	Central Pressure	Wind Speed	Storm Surge	Damage
1	>28.94 in. Hg	74-95 MPH	4-5 feet	minimal
2	28.50 to 28.93	96-110	6-8	moderate
3	27.91 to 28.49	111-130	9-12	extensive
4	27.17 to 27.90	130-155	13-18	extreme
5	<27.17	>155	>18	catastrophic

When poly-Si gates began to be used, a clever way was found between the horns of this dilemma. The poly-Si gate is laid down before the source and drain, and the implantation mask contains a window that exposes the whole region from source to drain, including the gate. When the source and drain are created by ion implantation, the MOSFET channel beneath the gate is not doped because it is shielded from the ion beam by the poly-Si gate. The channel (i.e., the undoped region between source and drain) is thus ``self-aligned'' with the gate. [Strictly speaking, the channel is rarely ``undoped.'' It is simply doped to the appropriate level and not further doped by the source and drain implantations. In fact, because of surface states and gettering of impurities to the surface, the channel region may need pre-treatment before the gate is deposited. But in general, the channel is less heavily doped than the source and drain regions.] The self-alignment game also works with diffusion, but not as well: see DSA.

Okay, that was then (as recently as 1997, if my printed source is correct), and this is now. Well, by the time you read this it will also be then. The entry will be more recent, but you will be older. That's what it's all about. This SAGE has become a sealed acronym: ``SAGE - Mozilla Firefox.'' Oops, that was the title bar. It's ``SAGE Services and Advocacy for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Elders.''

Related links: ASGE, NOSCAR.

Architektur ist überhaupt die erstarrte Musik.
[Architecture in general is frozen music.]

-- Friedrich von Schelling (1775-1854)
in Philosophie der Kunst [Philosophy of Art] (1809)

In Eckermann's famous record of conversation with Goethe, Gespräche mit Eckermann, the 23 Mar. 1829 entry quotes ,,Ich habe unter meinen Papieren ein Blatt gefunden ... wo ich die Baukunst eine erstarrte Musik nenne.'' [I have found among my papers a sheet ... in which I call architecture frozen music.]

In the preceding, I have given standard translations which translate erstarren as `to freeze.' It's worth noting that the semantic fields of the two words are not quite equivalent. The verb frieren is a closer match to its cognate freeze, being the preferred word to describe the solidification of liquid associated with cooling. Although erstarren has a similar meaning, and is used in the expression corresponding to my blood ran cold, it is closer to `gel' or `congeal,' in the sense that lowered temperature is not a necessary component of the concept. Hence, given the ambiguity of such metaphors, a less poetic translation that nevertheless captures different aspects of the original expressions would be ``Architecture is music made solid.''

It is a commonplace among classicists that

A translation is a commentary.

An article appeared November 14, 2005, in the Arab News (``[Arab] Middle East's Leading English Language Daily'' based in Saudi Arabia), dateline Jeddah: ``Teacher Charged With Mocking Religion Sentenced to Jail.'' A high-school chemistry teacher was sentenced to three years in prison and 750 lashes -- 50 lashes per week for 15 weeks. The lashes are to be given in the public market in the town of Al-Bikeriya in Al-Qassim, so at least he gets out of the prison occasionally. If the article link expires, let me know and I'll put up some more details.

This word is cognate with the Old English word sæl (`hall'). The direct etymons of this word in English petered out early in the sixteenth century, but the Germanic root had been adopted in Romance, giving rise to the Spanish head term (spelled identically in Portuguese and Italian), and salle in French. The Italian augmentative form salone was adopted as salon in Spanish and French, and as salão in Portuguese, eventually giving rise to the English word saloon. Of course, the French salon is also used in English, though it's not completely assimilated. What this little history shows is that even when English loses, it gains. A word may try to sneak out of the language, but one or two of its descendants or cousins a few times removed will be sucked in. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

Okay: the salamis belonged to Assistant Defense Secretary Richard N. Perle. He was regarded as the Pentagon's top arms control expert. He is a gourmet, and like a good Cold Warrior he came prepared. In particular, he came prepared for the reported inadequacy of Reykjavik's restaurants and the expectation of all-night sessions, with the two salamis. He kept them cold by putting them on the window sill of his hotel room (fourth floor), where they were apparently blown off by a storm. Icelandic security guards successfully repulsed the aerial attack. Perle was quoted in an October 15 article as saying that the salamis were ``smashed to smithereens.'' They were ``Hebrew National'' brand.

On April 25, 2004, two teenagers in Lee County, Florida, were arrested on arson-related charges. The unidentified minors (a high school and a middle school student) had reportedly placed an incendiary device in a wooded lot near some houses a few blocks from Interstate 75 in Fort Myers, but it had failed to go off. Local residents were evacuated after it was found, and authorities said it could have started a serious fire. The Southwest Florida Bomb Squad blew up the device around 11 a.m. the same morning.

The device itself sounds like one of those science experiments you do with stuff you find around the house. It consisted of a twenty-ounce beverage bottle filled with ``homemade napalm'' (not clear if this wasn't just gasoline) and two aerosol spray cans, tied together using kielbasa links. News reports described it as a ``kielbasa bomb'' and ``sausages of mass destruction.''

Considering the degree of sophistication of the device, I wonder if they weren't counting on it to become some hungry stray's suicide bomb. The entire episode sounds just stupid enough that it might reflect a technical conception based on sympathetic magic. You know -- soda bottles and spray cans both contain liquids under pressure that can sometimes like, you know, go boom! Did the bomb squad really check the ``homemade napalm'' thing? Maybe this was just a snack: soda, kielbasa, and spray cheese. Yum. (Preferably a diet soda, to neutralize the fat in the other foods.) The brand of kielbasa was not identified.

At 4:30 pm on April 18, 2005, an incident occurred involving sausage as a missile, but no explosive. A 46-year-old man was driving home from work. It was a nice day and he had the window down. As reported by Brian Farmer of the PA, he saw a car coming the other way and suddenly ``felt a searing pain in his nose. He managed to stop his car without hitting anyone else'' and passers-by came to his aid. He had been hit by a frozen sausage. A spokesman for the Essex Ambulance Service said that ``[h]is nose was undoubtedly fractured and he had lost quite a lot of blood ... he decided not to go to hospital but has been left with a very painful and swollen nose.'' The AP reported from London that the Ambulance Service spokesman spoke on condition of anonymity, but this is probably just an interpolated conjecture. According to the Essex Evening Echo, Essex Ambulance Service paramedic Dave Hilton said he had not come across an incident like it in 30 years on the job. The victim's decision leaves me with questions about the UK's NHS. Absent further details on his assailant's vehicle, I suppose that this was a left-handed shot. There was no further information on the sausage.

You know, this kind of story is a headline-writer's bonanza. Here are some of the better headlines under which the last story was reported:

• ``South Woodham Ferrers: Banger Mashes Nose.'' (Essex Evening Gazette; the injured motorist lives in South Woodham Ferrers, and the incident occurred as he approached the intersection of Inchbonnie Road and Broughton Road there.)
• ``Banger and Smash.'' (Very short item in Liverpool Daily Echo.)
• ``When Pork Flies.'' (A link from the <FOXNews.com>.)
• ``Flying Frozen Sausage.'' (From the CBS News website. Pretty lame, but the next item was ``Flying for Peanuts.'')
• ``Food is biting back.'' (Essex Chronicle.) Oh -- my error. This is an item out of South Woodham Ferrers from the week before. It was about a farmers' market for local produce, including a ``variety of goods ranging from sausages to venison and herbs to olives.'' First time I recall encountering the term ``meat farmer.'' (A Mr. Brew.) Jan White, of Althorne Beef, said that with ``television programmes and media articles about the origins of food and how it is treated by some retailers, people are coming back to the markets.'' Aww, people worry too much.

Alright, enough about sausage ordnance. Here's an item out of Massachusetts, a highly advanced blue state. In Newton, a dormitory community for Harvard and some other nearby universities, there was a domestic dispute on January 13, 2005. A woman showed up at about 12:30 am at the home of her ex-boyfriend's female friend. She argued with the two, striking him in the face and kicking him, and threatening to kill her. This story earned its place in this entry on account of the female friend's car. The ex-girlfriend apparently placed several slabs of salami on the trunk of the friend's car. By the time officers investigated, they found the car's paint peeling. According to Newton Police Sgt. Ken Dangelo, chemicals used to preserve the meat had damaged the car's paint job. Initial charges were assault and battery with a dangerous weapon for using the heel of her shoe during the fight (stilettoes?), threats to commit a crime, and malicious destruction of property.

The salt has the somewhat unusual property that the pressure of its liquid-vapor critical point is below atmospheric pressure. Hence, when heated it sublimates. Ancient manuscripts contain a number of recipes for producing sal ammoniac, but many of these appear to be either ignorant or purposely misleading. The primary method for producing it was essentially distillation from camel dung: when camel dung was burned, the smoke contained fumes of the sublimated salt. The salt would condense as a solid white film on a surface (glass was convenient) placed in the smoke. (The salt is water-soluble, but like ordinary salt it does occur in natural deposits. See salmiac.)

I've had a tough time getting ahold of detailed information on camel dung, but it is not surprising that ammonia salts should be present. The camel's unusual and extreme metabolism is adapted to dry conditions, and an important adaptation is to urinate as little as possible. The main reason that mammals urinate is to get rid of the nitrogen waste from protein breakdown various comes indicates the origin. Interconversion among different inorganic nitrogenous compounds is not too difficult metabolically. Birds eliminate nitrogen through the cloaca in the form of uric acid (so wash your car), mammals (most of them, anyway) eliminate it in the form of urea. (I'll have to look it up again, but in the interests of publishing this page soon I'll rely on memory to assert that fish generally eliminate nitrogen through their gills as ammonia.) Many micro-organisms can convert urea and uric acid to ammonia. Presumably camels have evolved ways to eliminate nitrogen in their dung in relatively dry form. It might be eliminated as urea and be converted to ammonium chloride by bacteria in the camel gut.

A lot of camel dung was collected in the deserts east of the Egypt and south of Cyrene. In an oasis of this desert there was a temple of the god Amon (you will recall that Alexander took a side trip there before founding or rechristening the Egyptian port of Alexandria). The desert took its name from that oasis temple, and the salt took its name from the desert.

There were some trivial variants of the term sal ammoniac (including, in English, sal ammoniack, sal ammonyak, sal amoniak, etc.). There is a large subgroup of old names with the adjective beginning in arm- (e.g., sal armaniac, sal armaniack, and even sal armagnac). These seem to have arisen from a Latin spelling hammoniacum (with silent aitch) that was interpreted as a misspelling of harmoniacum.

For centuries, sal ammoniac was used as a cleanser. My grandmother was still using it in pre-WWII Germany. Here's another application:

ALPINE EVENTS
A race should be held on hard snow. The snow should, if possible, be so hard that no holes are made when contestants fall. If snow falls during the race, the Chief of Course shall ensure that the newly fallen snow be packed or swept from time to time. Course maintenance should be done continuously and indiscriminately throughout an alpine race. Recommended as a snow additive to lower the freezing point and harden the snow is ammonium chloride for above freezing conditions and sodium chloride (rock salt) for below freezing conditions. These preparations should be added to the snow on the course at least one-half hour before race time.

1. If you will settle for less than we're willing to pay, that's okay with us.
2. We don't want our less-well-paid employees to learn what we're paying our better-paid-employees. Management understands that knowledge is power, and stupid as they are, they realize that that knowledge has to be the secrets they keep.

One reference: C. K. Lau, Y. C. See, D. B. Scott, J. M. Bridges, S. M. Perna, and R. D. Davies, IEDM Technical Digest, p. 714 (1982).

Salmiac is found as a sublimate at active volcanoes. (It can also be found at inactive volcanoes if you can just keep it dry.

You can get an idea of how the formation process by pouring out saucers of ammonia and (carefully!) hydrochloric acid, and placing them next to each other. The ammonia vapor and hydrogen chloride gas react to form sal ammoniac:

                         NH  (g)  +  HCl (g)  -->  NH Cl (s) .
                           3                         4

1. An ionically bonded compound. The product, with water, of the reaction of an ordinary acid and base. For example, with A and C representing an anion and cation of valence -1 and +1:
   HC (acid) + AOH (base) --> AC (salt) + H₂O

2. A particular salt that gave this class of compounds its name: NaCl. NaCl is the main ingredient in table salt. This is the kind you sprinkle on eggs.

   Pure NaCl is hygroscopic: it forms a hydrate and cakes. In order to prevent this and allow for smooth pouring, table-salt manufacturers add an ``anti-caking agent'' such as magnesium carbonate.

   When salt is used for its hygroscopic properties, the Mg(CO₃) is excluded. One such application is in deicing sidewalks and roads: salt is effective both because of the molal freezing point depression of water and because salt is hygroscopic. (A solution of water and salt freezes at a lower temperature than pure water. The molal freezing point depression constant of water is 1.86 C/m. m here stands for molality: a one-molal (1m) solution has one mole of solute per kilogram of solvent.)

   Jewish dietary law (kashrut) proscribes the consumption of blood, and so requires animals to be kashered (or, increasingly, ``kasherized'') -- that is, the blood must be removed. ``Kosher salt'' is used for this purpose. It's not called kosher because it's kosher -- all salt is kosher. It's called kosher because it's used to make meat kosher. Since hydration begins at the surface of the salt crystal, coarse crystals keep better. And since this salt isn't intended for sprinkling on food, there's no reason to make it fine, so kosher salt is coarser than table salt. Some people taste and dislike the anti-caking agents in table salt. Frankly, if the salt you're using is going to be dissolved in water before it reaches the table, there's likely no need for you to use table salt. Use kosher salt or pickling salt (same product, different purpose).

   Ice cream salt also uses no anticaking agents (and is sold coarse), but since it's not intended for ingestion (it doesn't go in the ice cream; it goes in the ice-water slurry around the ice-cream maker), maybe you shouldstick to the other products for cooking. Popcorn salt is an even finer grade of table salt.

   There's a Salt Institute where you can learn more.

The Salt Archive has as its stated purpose ``to collect evidence to support the theory that Common Salt and its short supply from the then known sources had catastrophic influence on the development of ancient civilizations.'' I would take this with a grain.

• sodium nitrate: Chile[an] saltpeter, Peru saltpeter
• ammonium nitrate: German saltpeter

can be salted in the shell, by applying a salt solution and then drying. To speed penetration of the solution through the shell, a small amount of wetting agent may be added to the water. Generally, pressure and vacuum are applied intermittently to increase the rate at which the solution reaches the interior of the shell.

The idea behind the alternating cycle of pressure and vacuum is similar to the idea behind repeated flushing of a vessel that can't be completely emptied. Since the air inside the unbroken peanut shells can't be completely removed in a single step, it is progressively forced out. At the beginning of a cycle, water might be applied at, say, 120 psi. This is about 8 times atmospheric pressure. (It's going to be exactly 8.000 at some moment as a cold front pushes through after a warm day, okay? We're going to take it as exactly 8 for purposes of explanation.) Assuming (it's a fairly accurate assumption) that air behaves as an ideal gas, then under maximum pressure the gas is compressed to one ninth of its atmospheric-pressure volume. The pressurization is usually applied for about 4 to 8 minutes (that would be about one quarter to one half of a kilosecond, for all you good people who don't understand stuff that isn't in metric units). If this is enough time for mechanical equilibrium to be achieved, then water (incompressible to a good approximation) has filled 8/9 of the initial air volume in the shell.

[I'm also ignoring the fact that the peanut is compressible and that the shell has nonzero thickness. If the peanut is substantially more compressible than water, then the air's fraction of fluid (gas plus liquid) volume is reduced by a factor even greater than 9. I do not have peanut compressibility data handy, sorry. And yes, I'm ignoring the solubility of air in brine and in peanut, and of water in air and in peanut. Look, it's approximate, okay? Science is like that.]

1. A Latin adjective (ablative neuter singular of salvus) meaning `uninjured, intact, safe.'
2. In medieval Latin, it occurs as a sort of preposition (really a prepositive adjective, but the gender isn't controlled by the noun, as it should be; let's call it a function word), in legal expressions like salvo servicio forinsico (`foreign service excepted'), salvo jure (`without prejudice to the right of ...').
3. In Spanish, a preposition with essentially the medieval Latin sense, which can usually be rendered in English as `with the exception of' or `save for,' and occasionally `save.'
4. In Spanish also, salvo means `I save,' a conjugation of the verb salvar, from the Latin verb salvare. Note that the saving here has a more restricted sense than the English cognate. To save money is ahorrar dinero.
5. In English, the legal Latin word was naturalized as a noun, so the salvo of a right is a provision that a certain engagement or ordinance shall not be binding if it would interfere that right, and more generally a salvo is reservation or a saving stipulation or legal provision.

``SonnECK, not sonic.''

You can avoid these problems by joining the Society for EthnoMusicology, but you may have to shift the orientation of your scholarship. (But that's nothing, my friend Lee started out as a composer of art [classical] music, and ended up as a music theorist. It's just as well, he didn't really look like a composer.) Also consider the American Musicological Society (AMS).

A constituent society of the ACLS since 1995. ACLS has an overview.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

-- William Seward Burroughs

-- or maybe Thelonius Sphere Monk, I dunno.

See also the Society of Architectural History (SAH) and the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS).

``The Society for Ancient Medicine fosters the scholarly study of ancient medicine broadly understood: not only Greek and Roman medicine, but also ancient Near Eastern, medieval European, Arabic, Armenian, and traditional Indian medicine, and indeed medicine from all pre-modern cultures.''

...
And then the witch doctor
He told me what to do:

He said that

Oo-ee, oo ah ah ting, tang,
Walla-walla, bing bang --
Oo-ee, oo ah ah ting tang
Walla-walla bang bang!

(``Artist'': David Seville; Song: ``Witch Doctor'')

Alas, there does not appear to be a ``SAMHSARA.''

I'm sure you'll want more. Get it from Calvin Broadus.

Of course this is unbalanced reporting, but it might not be unfair. It can be perfectly reasonable and efficient for journalists to look exclusively for the man who bites the dog. On the other hand, in a large enough universe of men, there will always be some man that bites a dog. To report an event is to imply that it is newsworthy. Hence, in that large universe, to report an instance of something that anyone could predict would be bound to happen occasionally may be understood to imply that it is happening unexpectedly frequently. That is what can make reporters' selective sampling irresponsible and dishonest.

Kurt Schlichter is a lieutenant colonel in the California National Guard. A veteran of the first Gulf war, he's now stateside and commands the 1-18th Cavalry, 462-man RSTA (Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition) squadron attached to the 40th Infantry Brigade Combat Team. The last media representative he spoke with before I contacted him was a New York Times stringer who wanted Schlichter's help in tracking down guardsmen who were ``having trouble because they got mobilized.''

I'd like to add that, refreshingly for a Swiss organization, they don't force you to read everything three or four times (in German, French, Italian, and maybe Swiss German or Romansch). The first time I visited, the default German webpages also had French Doppelgänger (in a folder named frz, presumably for französisch). When I checked again (2006) they'd come up with an even more clever idea: ``All SANAS information is in English.'' Except for scattered titles and links like Nouvelles and züruck. I trust the scholars of Mexico, Quebec, and the Navaho Reservation are up in arms.

To sanction a practice, situation, or event is to approve it officially or formally, while to sanction a country (more often ``to impose sanctions'') is to disapprove using similar authority, typically with the institution of formal impediments. (Trade sanctions are in the news.)

Sanguine, meaning both sanguinary and healthy, is similar to these. In this case as in that of sanction, the usage of the word in its different senses tends to take different forms or have different collocations.

Of course, you knew all this. You may not have been aware that to table has opposite meanings in US and Commonwealth parliamentary usage: In Canada (.ca), a law to be taken up for discussion is tabled -- one imagines the bill placed upon a table for examination. In the US, when discussion of a bill under consideration is to be suspended, the bill is also tabled -- one imagines a bill that was being read to be put down on a table for possible future consideration.

Benjamin Spock, the author, eventually became chairman of the national board, which changed its name to SANE, A Citizens' Organization for a Sane World. The group eventually split over an internal rule excluding members of the Communist Party from also being members of SANE. The Spock faction was against the rule; the Cousins faction in favor. The Spock faction won and the group became marginalized.

Norman Thomas was another prominent member.

This will give you an idea:

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Laura Ingraham are all Great Americans but they are each, individually and collectively, participating in the destruction of our national political discourse and national existence simply. I make this statement with all due care and regard because each of these media pundits has achieved noteworthy and important attention and audience from a large segment of average Americans. Just a few short years ago, prior to Limbaugh's breakthrough radio program and the subsequent appearance and explosive growth of conservative weblogs, these same Americans were subjected to a steady diet of a monopolized media-generated and media-dominated liberalism. The media-drumbeat in America, and the West generally, advocating directly or indirectly for a Liberal-Progressive World State, has been and continues to be supported by a university-trained Elite corps of ``professorial intellectuals'' and ``experts.'' These Elites in turn very often end up in diplomatic, bureaucratic, and technocratic positions throughout government at all levels, further exacerbating the problem of the Liberal bias in America. Granted, without the Limbaugh and Hannity voices, Dan Rather would still be anchoring CBS; but without the Limbaugh and Hannity rhetorical seduction, Americans would see the danger of the World State as very much imbedded in the discourse of democracy, which is simply another name for the Open Society.

Maybe I should have started with this: ``The far more dangerous Liberal bias is found today throughout the Democratic Party and in the far left advocates of the anti-America crowd as well as the moderate to conservative wings of the Republican Party and even on conservative talk radio.''

1. The ability to stay calm in a crisis or catastrophe: self-possession, imperturbability.
2. A demonstration of this ability: equanimity.

From the French sang-froid, `cold blood.'

Sangfroid is a notch above stoicism: you have to be not so much resigned as purposely functional. Also, strictly speaking, sangfroid requires the ability to stay cool through the heat of one's own disaster. It's no trick to be philosophical about other people's tsuris (cf. Schadenfreude).

Can you believe it?! I don't have a Santa Claus entry! Until I can devise a permanent fix for this problem, please visit the (provisional) Moore entry.

Please now pop about three levels off the digression stack.

Because the nasalization of the vowel is difficult to distinguish from a straightforward nasal consonant (and presumably because of aphesis of the final o), o dicionário de Morais (formally Grande Dicionário da Língua Portugesa, 10/e 1949) finds it necessary to warn against the sam and san misspellings of this common word.

On the other hand, the Latin insanus was restricted to mental ill health. This carried over only incompletely to Romance. In Portuguese, insânia and insanidade mean `insanity,' and insano means `insane.' This is the general pattern, certainly for Galician, Catalan, and French. In Spanish too, insania is `insanity,' but insano is `unhealthy' (more specifically, `deleterious to health'). Wait, wait! It's not just Spanish. Italian has settled into the standard pattern, but insàno once also had the sense of `ill, sick.' Anyway, I was trying to make the case that somehow the influence of insanus in Romance was relatively weak, but it's a weak case. Be that as it may, in English, apparently under the influence of the restricted semantic field of insane, the word sane also came to be restricted, referring now only to mental health. Of course, English can afford to be profligate, having other words to cover other portions of the sanus semantic field. For one there's sound, cognate with Dutch gezond, German gesund, and Yiddish gezint. The ge- (written with a yogh in Old English) became a vowel in Middle English (isund, ysonde), at the same time that the aphetic form (ultimately spelled sound) became increasingly common. [A similar process was sometimes arrested before the initial vowel was lost, hence German genug is cognate with enough.]

The convergence of são and São in Portuguese, cognates with sano and San in Spanish, is reminiscent of a similar situation in German and English. The English words hail [the verb], hale, heal, healthy, and whole are all derived from a common source of related words. These may originally have had a principal sense of `healthy' or of `whole' with a connotation of impregnable (think of ``physical integrity''). Through either of these senses the words might have become associated with deity either before or at the beginning of Christian proselytization. Anyway, German has a similar constellation of words, and as it ended up, the noun Heil has among its senses both `salvation' in the religious sense and `well-being.' (As you probably know if you've seen a WWII movie or two, Heil is used as a salutation also, parallel to English ``Hail!'' or Latin ``Salve!'')

As of early 2002, familiarity with SAP and the ability to install it (which includes extracting data from legacy-system records) is one of the dearest (i.e., highest-paid common skills in the IT field.

Nonterminal p-sounds are aspirated by English-speakers. The pi-phi letter combination that is represented ``pph'' in the English word Sapphic (designating, for example, the eponymous style of poetry) was originally also an aspirated p sound. The eff sound represents a corruption in languages that don't observe the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. A similar thing happened with the Hebrew pe (which used a dot to indicate lack of aspiration). Interestingly, with the beyt (which became beta in Greek), aspiration was transformed into a difference in articulation -- the undotted beyt (i.e., aspirated; what is written ``bh'' in transliteraton of, say, a Hindi or Sanskrit word like Mahabharata) is now pronounced with a vee sound. Note that in Hebrew, the b/v distinction is not phonemic except in foreign words that have not been integrated into the language: context determines which allophone occurs. Greek beta is now pronounced vita. So it goes. In Arabic, the b/p distinction of the original Semitic alphabet is absent. (That's discussed in one or two other places in this glossary. If you haven't seen it already, keep reading; it's bound to appear eventually.)

SAPLF publishes a Bulletin, and in 2003 a special issue of the Bulletin was published (volume XII, no. 1, 206 pp., two languages, USD 15 incl. domestic postage), ``devoted to the work of Simone de Beauvoir - a late contribution to the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Le deuxième sexe.'' The table of contents lists one article entitled ``Pourquoi reparler de Simone de Beauvoir.'' My sentiments precisely. They don't actually come out and say it directly, but I infer that they regard Beauvoir as a philosopher. It's not a problem for me, but this kind of thinking could have consequences.

If you think of a college as being divided into different departments in the same way as a hospital is divided into wards, then SAPLF, with or without surviving in-patients, would be something like an intensive care unit.

For another acronym ending in LF, see INaLF. You know, if the French language were simply eliminated, that would free up a lot of acronyms to be retasked for more pressing purposes. Especially in Canada (to say nothing of Europe).

Arnold Lobel created a series of children's picture books about two pals named Frog and Toad. From their clothes, it is clear that Frog and Toad are both male. (Lobel died of AIDS in 1987, age 54, so there was some talk. You probably want to know: he was survived by his wife, also an illustrator, and their two adult children.) The characters' names presented the Spanish translator, Pablo Lizcano, with a gender problem. All Spanish nouns have grammatical gender, but for most animals, and especially for wild animals, there is a single noun, with a single grammatical gender, for each animal regardless of the number of natural genders that animal exhibits. ``Frog and Toad'' in Spanish is ``Rana y Sapo,'' and while sapo is male, rana is a female noun. Lizcano's solution was to invent the name Sepo, which by the usual rule is male. Quite unnecessarily, it seems, the character named Frog in English (and who somewhat more closely resembles a frog than a toad) has been given the name Sapo (`Toad,' remember?).

Unless, until, and probably even if I write a Matt Groening entry, this here will be the place to mention the Akbar and Jeff thing. They are the principal characters of Groening's ``Life In Hell.'' Here's a snippet of an interview he did for Flux Magazine in 1995:

Flux: let's talk about your `Life In Hell' comic strip. Point blank: are Akbar and Jeff gay?

Groening: Here's my standard reply: Akbar and Jeff are either brothers or lovers--or both. Whatever offends you most, that's what they are. [pause] Yeah, of course they're gay! Big commercial mistake on my part, by the way. A big brewery approached me wanting to have Akbar and Jeff promote their beer. ...

It seems I don't mention it elsewhere, so I'll mention here that translating the lyrics of (appropriately) Madonna's ``La Isla Bonita'' (`the pretty island') poses a gender difficulty also. As I heard it, she whispers the line ``Me dijo que te quiere.'' An accurate literal translation of this would be `He or she told me that he or she wants you [or that he or she loves you, or that you are dear to him or her].' The gender of the third person (he or she) is uncertain -- from that sentence at least. To be honest, not one web page I can find agrees with my recollection of the lyric, and over a thousand web pages disagree with me and claim that the song contains the at-best stilted line ``Te dijo te amo'' (`He or she said to you I love you'). (The Spanish is stilted. The English is less stilted, probably because the Spanish is really gringo. At least a thousand include the merely unusual ``El dijo que te ama'' (`He [or almost It was he that] said that he loves you'). As Gary and I and some graduate students drove to a conference many years ago, I replayed that bit about twenty times in my earphone. I really think that everybody else on the web is relying directly or indirectly on liner notes that may correspond to only one or some of the versions released. Gary says he'll look for the cassette.

Fat is glycerine esterized with a fatty acid at each of its three hydroxyl (OH) groups, and saponification is an ester-to-salt reaction -- something like a strong-base-to-weak-base reaction, where the fatty acid form organic salts with the alkali ions.

Fat for soap comes as a byproduct of meat production. Where exactly the fat is diverted for soap production is a matter of practical economics. Nowadays slaughterhouses divert a fraction of their production. In my grandparents' day, excess fat could be gotten from butchers. Further back, people would trim fat when they carved up their own animals. If you didn't have fat you didn't have soap, and you used an alternative (see QS and almond powder entries). I suppose that in lean years, people went dirty as well as hungry.

See the hard water entry for how soap works or doesn't. It will be clear from that entry that one wants to use soft water for soap production. In the old days, when people normally made their own soap, reverse osmosis and demineralized water were not available. You don't need much water to make soap, so distilling was practical enough (if you already had the still for other purposes), but so was rainwater and some well water.

A quite good soap-making site is part of the Old Timer Page.

The actual process of soap-making can get involved when you consider fragrance (see EO and FO) and color. A central constraint is that fat and lye don't diffuse very well in soap, so the last bit of saponification takes a long time. This can be mitigated by mechanical mixing (blending, stirring) and by using emulsifying agents (like DPG). In the end, soap made with only the minimum ingredients tends to remain harshly basic (pH about 9) from unreacted lye. Mild acids may be used to neutralize the soap, but strong acids just drive the saponification reaction backwards. Some fat may be added late in the process. This is intended not to saponify, but to soften the soap. (You might ask why not just use excess fat from the start. The answer is mostly that by adding fat late, you can use nicer but more expensive oils -- particularly vegetable oils with desirable anti-microbial properties -- without having those oils wasted by being converted to soap with the rest of the oils.)

See also the 99.44 entry.

I don't know what the first pee is doing there, since it's not pronounced.

``Headquarters Air Combat Command (ACC), through the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center (AFRCC), is the single federal agency responsible for coordinating search and rescue activities in the continental United States. [Hawaii and Alaska -- you're on your own.] It also provides search and rescue assistance to Canada and Mexico. Besides coordinating actual SAR missions, the AFRCC is active in formulating SAR agreements, plans and policy for the continental United States.''

A high school pal of mine explained the formula for determining the expected annual family contribution: one quarter of the value of the family home. Of course, that was many years ago, before the big eighties inflation in college costs. That outstripped residential-property appreciation, so the formula must be different.

The book Athens, by Christian Meier, begins with the story of the evacuation of Athens in 480 BCE (ahead of advancing Persian troops, delayed heroically at Thermopylae by a small Spartan rear guard under the command of Leonidas). The Athenians retreated from Attica across the water to Salamis. The maps on the inside front and back covers label this body of water the Sardonic Gulf.

For those who prefer not to contract SARS, as well as for those who would like to attempt suicide by contracting it and spending an unpleasant final week or two on a respirator, a useful piece of information is the incubation period. That is, the time people remain asymptomatic after infection. The incubation period is typically about a week, but has been as long as two weeks in some cases. (In many cases it's impossible to say precisely, since the particular chain of transmission, or at least the moment of infection, is unknown.) So if you want to catch SARS from people who don't seem to have the disease, your best bet is to hang out with people who may have come in contact with the virus in the past week or so. Visit the Middle Kingdom.

This new disease, which flared in Hong Kong in March 2003, was eventually recognized to be the same as the disease that had affected many hundreds of people in neighboring Guangzhou (what we all used to call Canton, and what is also called Guangdong) province of southern China since the previous November. In Guangzhou, and later elsewhere in China, the severity of the outbreak has been repeatedly masked by government censorship, or more precisely by a culture of secrecy and dishonesty.

The largest initial concentration of victims outside Guangzhou province has been in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, SARS is not called SARS but ``atypical pneumonia.'' BusinessWeek correspondent Bruce Einhorn and others have suggested that the SARS name is avoided because of the similarity to SAR, the technical designation of Hong Kong in terms of its political status. Then again, in Guangzhou, it is also called (the Chinese for) `atypical pneumonia,' which is a reasonable alternative to a not-very-Chinese-pronounceable Roman-character acronym. For more on the acronym, see the next SARS entry. Have a look at the ARS entry as well.

In French, SARS is called syndrome respiratoire aigu sévère as well as pneumopathie atypique. In German it is Schweres Akutes Respiratorisches Syndrom. In Italian, Sindrome Acuta Respiratoria Severa.

Even though you came here to find out about SARS as quickly as possible, you find your attention wandering, and you ask yourself whether ``there could be an etymological connection between the German word schwer and the Latin word severus.'' Semantically, it seems not unreasonable: the German word means `heavy' or `difficult' and the sense can be stretched comfortably to overlap that of the English word severe. The Latin word severus, of course, has meanings close to the English and French terms derived from it. (The English verb sever, OTOH, has a separate Latin etymology.) Coincidentally, I got to wondering the same thing myself, so I hopped on the forklift and went to pull Pokorny off the shelf. Julius Pokorny's book Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch [English: `Big book of wild-ass guesses'] lists both words, and lists them as coming from distinct (but partly homophonic) Indoeuropean roots. One root (Pokorny p. 1151) is [conjectured to have occurred as] *uer- and *suer-, and had meanings related to `balancing,' hence schwer, `heavy.' The Latin word came from a distinct root (p. 1165) that took forms *uer- and *uer<shwa> meaning `[demonstrating] friendliness.' (Why don't we have a word like that?) This led to words meaning `true' and to the negated form se-verus, `without friendliness.' If you want to defend the claim that linguistics is a science, one of your stronger pieces of evidence is the fact that the conclusions seem ridiculous.

In other SARS-related language news, on April 25, 2003, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo of the Philippines named her Health Secretary Manuel Dayrit SARS Czar. Why didn't dubya think of that? (Uh, thank you, that suggestion has already been submitted.) Dayrit was given sweeping powers, including the authority to call upon the Armed Forces, the police and other government agencies to compel public compliance and order quarantine, and the power to order the examination of incoming and outgoing vessels and to suspend classes or close schools to prevent the spread of the disease.

In a speech the following May 15, however, President Aroyo was already saying ``[i]lan ba ang biktima ng SARS sa Pilipinas, 10 [actually 12; she was unaware of two newly confirmed cases], ibaba pa sa walo dahil yung dalawa na merong pinadala ang blood test sa Hapon, pagbalik negative pala. Walo ang nagkaroon ng SARS at dalawa ang namatay.'' I felt that you'd prefer to read it in her own words. The English-language publication BusinessWorld felt the same way (``Asian meet held to save SARS-hit travel sector,'' p. 12 of the 16 May 2003 edition).

Another early adopter was Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). chairman Morris Chang named deputy chief executive Tseng Fan-chen the company's ``SARS Czar.'' (In Britain there's been talk of question whether a SARS Tsar should be named.)

Data from national health authorities are tabulated daily except Sundays by WHO. Initially, the only explicit indication of freshness of the data was release time, usually a specific hour around 15:00 GMT+1. After April 16, 2003, the tabulations have indicated the date of the latest update for each nation's or region's data.

Under a variety of conditions -- i.e., in a variety of theoretical models -- the numbers of cases and deaths increase exponentially (equivalently, the logarithms of these numbers increase linearly in time) until a substantial fraction of the susceptible population has been exposed. Changes in behavior, treatment, quarantine, or other policy, if effective, should be detectable by a change in the doubling time of either of these numbers. All other things being equal, cumulated statistics should minimize the fractional error due to statistical fluctuations and allow those changes to be detected most clearly. Of course, all things are not equal. In particular, data from the PRC have been inaccurate (falsified at various levels) and have not been timely. Also, the US data have been suspect in a different way. The CDC and WHO case definitions do not correspond precisely, so in its cumulative reports WHO initially treated ``suspect cases under investigation'' from the US as comparable to ``probable cases'' elsewhere. By the WHO report of April 19, this had led to the following anomaly: the US had 220 reported cases, the third-largest number among countries or regions reporting, and no reported deaths. The next three countries were Singapore, Canada, and Viet Nam, with 177, 132, and 63 cases, and 16, 12, and 5 deaths respectively. The next week, CDC physicians stopped uttering inanities like ``we've just been incredibly lucky'' and started reporting probable cases.

The following table gives the cumulative number of cases and deaths as tabulated by WHO. Certain subtotals extracted from WHO's (I had to write that) official reports are given in parenthesis: when numbers appear in a format #1 (#2, #3), #1 is worldwide, #2 excludes all of the PRC other than Hong Kong, and #3 excludes all of the PRC. Furthermore, because I can't find probable-case numbers for the US from the early period, and because the numbers were relatively small, I have recomputed the earlier numbers by excluding the originally reported ``suspected'' numbers and assuming the number of ``probable'' cases was negligible (zero).

Date	Total cases	log10 of Total cases	Total deaths	log10 of Total deaths
2003.05.12	7447 (2434, 751)	3.87 (3.39, 2.88)	552 (300, 82)	2.74 (2.46, 1.90)
Sunday, 2003.05.11	no official report
2003.05.10	7296 (2412, 738)	3.86 (3.38, 2.87)	526 (291, 79)	2.72 (2.46, 1.90)
2003.05.09	7183 (2378, 711)	3.86 (3.38, 2.85)	514 (284, 74)	2.71 (2.45, 1.87)
2003.05.08	7053 (2355, 694)	3.85 (3.37, 2.84)	506 (282, 74)	2.70 (2.45, 1.87)
2003.05.07	6903 (2343, 689)	3.84 (3.37, 2.84)	495 (276, 72)	2.69 (2.44, 1.86)
2003.05.06	6727 (2318, 672)	3.83 (3.37, 2.83)	478 (264, 71)	2.68 (2.42, 1.85)
2003.05.05	6583 (2303, 666)	3.82 (3.36, 2.82)	461 (255, 68)	2.66 (2.41, 1.83)
Sunday, 2003.05.04	no official report
2003.05.03	6234 (2263, 642)	3.79 (3.35, 2.81)	435 (245, 66)	2.64 (2.39, 1.82)
2003.05.02	6054 (2255, 644)	3.78 (3.35, 2.81)	417 (236, 66)	2.62 (2.37, 1.82)
2003.05.01	5865 (2227, 627)	3.77 (3.35, 2.80)	391 (221, 59)	2.59 (2.34, 1.77)
2003.04.30	5663 (2203, 614)	3.74 (3.33, 2.77)	372 (213, 56)	2.57 (2.33, 1.75)
2003.04.29	5462 (2159, 587)	3.74 (3.33, 2.77)	353 (205, 55)	2.55 (2.31, 1.74)
2003.04.28	5050 (2136, 579)	3.70 (3.33, 2.76)	321 (190, 52)	2.51 (2.28, 1.72)
Sunday, 2003.04.27	no official report
2003.04.26	4836 (2083, 556)	3.68 (3.32, 2.75)	293 (171, 50)	2.47 (2.23, 1.7)
2003.04.25	4649 (2048, 538)	3.67 (3.31, 2.73)	274 (159, 44)	2.44 (2.20, 1.6)
2003.04.24	4493 (2017, 529)	3.65 (3.30, 2.72)	263 (153, 44)	2.42 (2.18, 1.6)
2003.04.23	4288 (1983, 525)	3.63 (3.30, 2.72)	251 (145, 40)	2.40 (2.16, 1.6)
2003.04.22	3947 (1946, 512)	3.60 (3.30, 2.71)	229 (137, 38)	2.36 (2.14, 1.6)
2003.04.21	3861 (1902, 500)	3.59 (3.28, 2.70)	217 (131, 37)	2.34 (2.12, 1.6)
Sunday, 2003.04.20	no official report; US data included above (later than) this date
2003.04.19	3327 (1815, 457)	3.52 (3.26, 2.66)	182 (117, 36)	2.26 (2.07, 1.6)
2003.04.18	3253 (1771, 444)	3.51 (3.25, 2.65)	170 (105, 36)	2.23 (2.02, 1.6)
2003.04.17	3190 (1733, 436)	3.50 (3.24, 2.64)	165 (100, 35)	2.22 (2.00, 1.5)
2003.04.16	3100 (1668, 400)	3.49 (3.22, 2.60)	159 (95, 34)	2.20 (1.98, 1.5)
2003.04.15	3042 (1624, 392)	3.48 (3.21, 2.59)	154 (90, 34)	2.19 (1.95, 1.5)
2003.04.14	2995 (1577, 387)	3.48 (3.20, 2.59)	144 (80, 33)	2.16 (1.90, 1.5)
Sunday, 2003.04.13	no official report
2003.04.12	2794 (1485, 377)	3.45 (3.17, 2.58)	119 (61, 26)	2.08 (1.79, 1.4)
2003.04.11	2724 (1415, 356)	3.44 (3.15, 2.55)	116 (58, 26)	2.06 (1.76, 1.4)
2003.04.10	2627 (1337, 339)	3.42 (3.13, 2.53)	111 (56, 26)	2.05 (1.75, 1.4)
2003.04.09	2573 (1293, 323)	3.41 (3.11, 2.51)	106 (53, 26)	2.03 (1.72, 1.4)
2003.04.08	2523 (1244, 316)	3.40 (3.09, 2.50)	103 (50, 25)	2.01 (1.70, 1.4)
2003.04.07	2460 (1192, 309)	3.39 (3.08, 2.49)	98 (45, 22)	1.99 (1.7, 1.3)
Sunday, 2003.04.06	no official report
2003.04.05	2301 (1081, 281)	3.36 (3.03, 2.45)	89 (40, 20)	1.95 (1.6, 1.3)
2003.04.04	2253 (1033, 272)	3.35 (3.01, 2.43)	84 (35, 18)	1.92 (1.5, 1.3)
2003.04.03	2185 (995, 261)	3.34 (3.00, 2.42)	79 (33, 16)	1.90 (1.5, 1.2)
2003.04.02	2151 (961, 253)	3.33 (2.98, 2.40)	78 (32, 16)	1.89 (1.5, 1.2)
2003.04.01	1735 (929, 244)	3.24 (2.97, 2.39)	62 (28, 12)	1.79 (1.4, 1.1)
2003.03.31	1563 (757, 227)	3.19 (2.88, 2.36)	59 (25, 12)	1.77 (1.4, 1.1)
Sunday, 2003.03.30	no official report
2003.03.29	1491 (685, 215)	3.17 (2.84, 2.33)	54 (20, 10)	1.73 (1.3, 1.0)
2003.03.28	1434 (628, 203)	3.16 (2.80, 2.31)	53 (19, 9)	1.72 (1.3, 1.0)
2003.03.27	1363 (557, 190)	3.13 (2.75, 2.28)	53 (19, 9)	1.72 (1.3, 1.0)
2003.03.26	1283 (491, 175)	3.11 (2.69, 2.24)	49 (18, 8)	1.69 (1.3, 0.9)

WHO SARS alerts, advisories, and situation updates:
May: #51, #50, #49, #48, #47, #46, #45, #44.
April: #43, #42, #41, #40, #39, #38, #37, #36, #35, #34, #33, #32, #31, #30, #29, #28, #27, #26, #25, #24, #23, #22, #21, #20, #19, #18, #17, #16.
March: #15 (alt. vers. of #15), #14, #13, #12, #11, #10, #9, #8, #7, #6, #5, #4, #3, #2, Update #1, first travel advisory, first alert.

Here's a flash from April 2005: ``The South African Revenue Service (SARS) today launched its most innovative taxpayer education approach to date -- a fictional cartoon character, Khanyisile Khumalo, conceptualised to be an effective and personalised communication tool in its drive for sustainable taxpayer education.'' I'm so excited! Khanyisile, meet Microsoft Bob.

Although South Africa has eleven official languages, most tax forms on line appear to be available only in English. That seems enormously unfair. Why do they only tax English-speakers? The forms for filing an objection or an appeal are available in separate English and Afrikaans versions. The estate tax and retirement fund tax forms, and forms related to trusts and directives, are the majority of bilingual (English and Afrikaans) forms available on line. Hmm.

For tax information in Afrikaans, a good bet would be to google on "Suid-Afrikaanse Inkomstediens" (SAID). The name is apparently Uphiko Iwezimali Ezingenayo eNingizumu Afrika in Zulu and Tirelomatlotlo ya Afrika-Borwa in Tswana, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of online tax help in those languages.

Acute, in medical usage, implies sudden onset. The onset of anything implies some degree of severity, so the word acute is sometimes used loosely to mean severe. In my experience, however, physicians are pretty consistent in keeping to precise usage: acute is distinguished from chronic, and severe is distinguished from mild. To have called a disease ``sudden acute foo'' would have been redundant.

I probably wouldn't have put this entry in but for the resonance with the completely unrelated SATOR.

In detail, what happened was that a group was put together in Cambridge, UK, to create a new Authorized Version for the Church of England, to succeed the earlier Authorized Version (the KJV), with more modern English expression and revised understanding based on research and creative speculation in the intervening nearly three centuries. They were eventually joined by an American Revision Committee, but it was agreed that the Episcopal Church in America would not authorize any other edition for fourteen years after the work was completed. In return, the Americans got an appendix listing their demurrers at the end.

The English group disbanded after finishing its work in 1885. The American Revision Committee officially began work to issue an American edition in 1897. (This reminds me of presumptive 1984 Democratic Presidential candidate Fritz Mondale insisting that he had not yet begun to think about whom he might consider as a running mate.) The American committee finally wrapped up in 1901.

Work on an updating of the SARV began in 1959, and was able to take advantage of some of the earlier work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and work on cognate Semitic languages. (For an example of how the latter can be useful, see the the entry for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.) The revision of the revision was published in 1977 as the New American Standard Version (NAS). I love that word standard. Many other Bible versions are based on the SARV.

SAS code-shares with Cimber Air, a regional carrier. (We took a large propeller airplane from Copenhagen to Wroclaw.) They pronounce Cimber with a hard cee, like ``KIM-bur.''

It sounds like Air Mail Special Delivery to me (it probably is sometimes). The British Post Office used to manufacture lasers. The persistence of original names of British delivery organizations leads to confusion.

1. Outstanding.
2. Good.
3. Fair.
4. Poor.
5. Failing.

China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC), Shenhua Group, and China Shipping Group led the list of 25 SOE's that were graded A. Grades of B and C were given to 141 companies. Nine were in group D for failing to meet some performance targets, and four unidentified companies received a grade of E for poor management and poor (i.e., discovered) faking of financial reports.

On one hand, grade inflation does not seem to have had as great an impact here as in US education. Then again, China Southern Airlines, plagued by financial ethics scandal, only dropped from B to C. In August 2005, police arrested its vice-president, Peng Anfa, on charges of embezzling and accepting bribes. Because of major accidents at their production facilities, China Coal Group was downgraded from A to B, and Sinohydro Corp from B to C.

The reality is that most such institutions are not really very selective, and many that require these tests needn't, since they'll accept pretty much anyone with a high school diploma. Students planning to go to these schools are paying the $28 test fee (in 2004) only to flatter their schools' conceit that they can afford to turn someone away. (Japan has a similar situation, but handles it slightly differently. Most schools use a common entrance exam which pretty rigidly determines which students will go to the University of Tokyo, which to the second-best school, and so forth down through the seven or so clearly ranked schools. Because the system is so transparent, it would be difficult for the least selective schools to participate and disguise the fact that they really exercise no discrimination among applicants other than not enrolling those who can't pay. For this reason, a number of schools write and administer their own independent entrance examinations, offering them at schools in areas from which they hope to recruit. We would call it saving face.)

Nevertheless, a large minority of students do want to enter the small minority of schools that can afford to be selective. (In the US -- we're back to discussing US students and US schools.) The professional duty of admissions officers at selective US schools is to engage in two related deceptions:

1. They must encourage students who clearly are unlikely to be admitted that they have a good chance to get in.
2. They must claim that they take a range of factors sensitively into account when making admissions choices.

The purpose of the first deception is to pump up the number of high school applicants. The number of admissions slots is essentially fixed, so increasing applications decreases the acceptance rate in inverse proportion, making the school seem more selective. No one asks about the SAT scores of rejected applicants, so getting another numbskull to apply is all gravy for the school's reputation. (You think those highminded educational institutions are above all that? Check yer wallet, fellah', and see ``marketing'' below.) Heck, maybe they can turn a tiny profit on admission fees.

Separately, a good ``yield'' -- a high fraction of admissions offers accepted -- is also desirable though less important. The instrument for improving this number is the school's early-decision program.

The purpose of the second deception (that many factors blah blah) is to support the first deception. An admissions officer who knows a student's SAT scores, high-school GPA, and ethnic or racial group can easily estimate whether the student is likely to be admitted. Often just one or two of these data will be sufficient to pretty much guarantee a yes or a no. It is true that, as conscientious admissions officers are bound to emphasize, all sorts of considerations like charitable work, unique experiences or difficulties overcome, strength of teacher or alumni recommendations, the weather on the day the officer's work-study reads the applicant's file (okay, don't emphasize that) all play a role in determining which students get in. It is also true that they rarely play this role. It's a simple matter of logistics. Say you have ten thousand applicants for -- never mind the rest: ten thousand applications is ten thousand applications! I've never graded more than fifty exams at a time.

In 2004 or so the content and format of the SAT were changed. As you understand from the foregoing, the details of the exam are really only important to a fortunate few and an unfortunate few more, all going crazy in the year before graduation, so I haven't been feeling like updating this entry. Herewith, then, a very incomplete history of The Test.

The two principal parts of the exam, ``Verbal'' and ``Math,'' are timed multiple-choice exams graded on a scale of 200 to 800. There's also a writing test, described at the GRE entry.

A raw score is determined by a simple formula (explained at the 200 to 800 entry) that deducts a little for wrong answers. In this way, a test-taker who guesses wildly and one who just enters no answer will do equally well on average. (Someone who can eliminate some possible answers will tend to get credit on educated guesses.) The reported score was initially just this raw score, which was approximately normally distributed with a mean close to 500. Over time, performance on the test has varied. (Umm, you're to understand that means performance has declined.) Now the score is computed by massaging or curving the raw score by using a look-up table translation, so that the distribution of scores resembles a normal curve with a mean close to 500. Because raw scores have been declining, an April 1 (really!), 1995 readjustment of the scoring algorithm has made it possible to obtain an ``800'' on the verbal test with four wrong answers. This is partly due to a fetish that ETS has about not giving a ``790.'' As a result, there was a sharp increase in the number of 800's (and of scores in general) in 1995. [It is possible to receive a score of 790 on an achievement test (now called SAT II). Or at least, it has been possible. In 1974 I ran out of time, guessed ``B'' for the last five questions on the Chemistry achievement test, and got a 790.] The new SAT scoring was discussed in a NYTimes article, 1995.07.26, page B6: ``When Close is Perfect: Even 4 Errors Can't Prevent Top Score on New S.A.T.'' byline James Barron. Not mentioned in that article was the fact that the readjustment moved scores in what used to be the middle range of ability by about 100 points -- old combined SAT scores of 840 or 940 are roughly equivalent to new SAT I scores of 960 or 1030.

A popular history of the SAT appears in two parts by Nicholas Lemann in The Atlantic Monthly, August (``The Structure of Success in America'') and September (``The Great Sorting'') issues 1995. The Atlantic has carried a number of articles on student testing, including another primarily on the SAT and other College Board tests in the February 1980 issue, by James Fallows.

In late March or early April 1995, the Wall Street Journal revealed that many schools inflate their students' average SAT scores for student guides in Money magazine and US News and World Report. Names were named. One university admissions director explained that this was a ``marketing strategy.'' [See the NYTimes 1995.04.09 article, Frank Rich byline.]

Also in 1995, the official expansion of SAT was changed to Scholastic Assessment Test. This name change addresses a major problem. The SAT is essentially an IQ test. The intention when it was originally designed (in the 1930's) was to measure ``intelligence,'' conceived as an innate attribute of the testees. The particular application was to help Ivy League schools identify ``diamonds in the rough'' -- smart kids (boys) who had not had the advantages of a prep school education. Over time, the testers' thinking evolved. Now most psychologists and psychometricians regard ``intelligence'' as something profoundly influenced by both genetic (i.e., ``innate'') and environmental factors. The tests have not changed (much, since the 1940's) and thus what they measure has not changed. The tester's idea of what it is that the tests measure has changed, but out of pride and a certain professional reasoning (that whatever they can measure is what ought to be called intelligence), the testers continue to use the same terms to describe the measured datum: ``intelligence,'' ``aptitude.'' In principle, none of this need ever have been a problem if only professionals were ever involved. (In fact, the College Board wanted to prevent testees from knowing their own test scores, but abandoned the effort in the early 1950's.)

The ninth edition (``Stanford 9'') replaced the eighth (``Stanford 8'') in 1997. The new version was not normed against the old, even though the calculations are trivial for the test designer to do. This non-norming makes it difficult to compare older scores and see how badly achievement is declining over the long term. That's a feature, son, not a bug.

You've heard about it -- there was a big to-do on its first release (1995-04-05). It's supposed to be a two-edged sword, helping intruders as well as security administrators. Nevertheless, the open doors it looks for are so well-known and easy to walk through that it basically just helps the halt and lame of both communities. Since it reports problems without directly enabling the SATAN user to exploit them, the Stammtisch unanimously agrees that it primarily serves as a useful warning to security-challenged sysadmins while creating the smallest possible increase in danger from newbie intruders.

• bologna
• COBRA
• Salamis (for historical reasons, this is the entry with most of the information about sausage weapons)
• SAWSJ
• VSDL

To save money (dinero), whether at a bank (banco) or a sale (venta), is ``ahorar dinero.'' To save a life is ``salvar una vida.'' (Salvavidas is a `lifeguard,' but a guard in the usual sense -- the kind with a gun or truncheon or persuasive demeanor -- is a guardia.) To save (something) for later is guardar para después, although guardar also means `put away.' The verb guardar seems to have taken on the meaning of save in computer contexts. See also the knickerbocker discussion in this K entry.

A Message from the President in the newsletter from August 2001, Pres. Amy Thurmond, MD, observes: ``Ten years ago when the first fellowship in women's imaging was offered the concept was controversial and debated. Now more fellowships are being offered, jobs specifically for women's imagers are advertised, and the American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria Task Force includes a section on women's imaging.''

There don't appear to have been a great many scientific studies of the effectiveness of saw palmetto, but some results have been quite encouraging. In the largest study to date, the researcher (Jane) leaned over the railing looking over the crowded center of a big shopping mall and shouted ``Any man here who's still having trouble getting it up after taking saw palmetto?'' and determined that the wonderberry is 100% effective. Vide ED.

Also, it's recommended by talk-show host Larry King, who would lose count of his ex-wives if he didn't have the bills to pay. Because this is a celebrity endorsement, an FCC regulation requires that the endorser have actually used the product.

Joe Namath was the legendary quarterback of the New York Jets, famous from the start with his sensational half-million-dollar signing in 1965 to the upstart AFC. He brashly predicted victory over the heavily favored Baltimore (later Indianapolis) Colts of the NFC in Super Bowl III (Jan. 12, 1969), and he delivered (final score 16-7). Gimpy knees and multiple leg surgeries forced him into retirement in 1972. In 1974, a television ad aired that pans along a pair of pantyhosed legs, upward to reveal jersey #12 and Joe Namath. In his attenuated Alabama drawl, Broadway Joe says ``Now I don't wear panty hose, but if Beautymist can make my legs look good, imagine what they'll do for yours.''

Did he really wear pantyhose, or just nylon stockings? What kind of name is ``Beauty Mist''?

They've been shacked up over a year, and the day after her birthday he gives her three dandelions. Remember: he's just a guy, he can't be expected to understand about flower stuff.

``Geez, I'm just a guy. I dunno the flower color code!''

Second date. She admires his mind, his mind admires her butt. One dozen long-stem red roses.

``Whuddaya mean `get the wrong idea'? They're pretty flowers. Dontcha like flowers?''

There's a popular cartoon about forbidden romance -- a wolf and a sheep. Silhouetted against the night sky, they meet secretly. He brought flowers, she eats them appreciatively.

The Roberts & Etherington Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology for Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books claims that antimony is black in its amorphous form, and has been used in this form since the late seventeenth century to blacken the edges of book pages. Trust me, no elemental metal is widely available in amorphous form. It's finely divided (powder in suspension), and most metals look black if divided finely enough.

The atomic number of antimony is 51. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

The local UHF television stations are WNIT, WSBT, and a couple of others that I'll fill in as I remember them.

Maybe it's used more generally for filters?

Like most people, I watch the SB for the ads and the frantic half-time show. In 2004, I noticed that one of the most irritating sponsors was hawking a drug that is pushed by some of the most irritating spammers. During half-time, the crotch-grabbing was generally tame by current rap-video standards. More than a couple of the performances featured partial disrobing. It didn't get a rise out of me. I watched that half-time show on a wide-screen TV in a room with a dozen or so Catholic-university students. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 7 was the reaction to the end-zone interception of a Tom Brady pass, Janet Jackson's Justin-Timberlake-assisted tit-flash rated a 0. (But it did merit recognition in the degradation entry.) And the people who get a kick out of mock violence against women probably weren't rolling on the floor after the horse-fart commercial either.

In 1972, I missed getting extra credit on Mr. Coulter's Electronics exam because I didn't know that S.B. stood for Super Bowl. Don't let this happen to you if you can possibly avoid it.

Also of interest: the (nongovernment) Small Business Advisory, CENA and NASE.

• CFF (French)
• FFS (Italian)
• VFF (Romansch)

You know, the more colleges have a kind of farm system too: they'll recruit players who may not be academically eligible or athletically quite so desirable, and get them into a cooperative junior college. For example, Indiana University (in Bloomington, Indiana) and University of Nebraska (in Lincoln) and other schools have sent players to Iowa Western. Iowa Western Community College is in Council Bluffs, IA. Their teams are known as the Reivers, which apparently are some sort of river pirate.

Another popular school of this sort is MCI, Maine C--- Institute (forgot the name, can't find a listing, this is bad). Oh well, then, let's have a link to NJCAA (National Junior College Athletic Association).

Here's an image of a small school bus.

The first-phase contract was won in 1993 by a consortium led by IBM Federal Systems, which was sold to Loral.

Closely associated with the American Academy of Religion (AAR).

The Old SBN's are nine digits long, and become ISBN's by the addition of an initial zero: in the ten-digit ISBN, the first digit identifies a country or group of countries; zero (as well as one) is number for the English group, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

One effect of all this is to make housecleaning more glamorous and high-tech than it's been since the widespread introduction of jet-age ``labor-saving'' devices during the fifties, the golden age of home appliances. (Vide remote control.)

Sick Building Syndrome is also called Tight Building Syndrome (I haven't seen ``TBS'' used as an acronym in this connection, though.) I like to think of this as related to the slang sense of tight as drunk; unfortunately, the etymology is related to `air-tight.' Increased care to seal-in temperature-regulated air began in earnest during the oil crisis/embargo of 1973 [a war measure imposed by medieval Persian-Gulf states (GCC) to punish the US for supporting Israel's effort to remain in existence]. Energy-saving measures have meant that indoor pollutants accumulate to higher levels. The claim is bruited about that it's now ten times (or a hundred times, or a thousand times; i.e. much) more dangerous to be indoors than out. In 1994, UB became a non-smoking campus, meaning that you can't smoke indoors. Since then, the entry areas to building have become a million times more dangerous than the indoors.

The new chemistry building on the north campus has one chimney per fume hood, emerging as a silvery stack at the top of the building. This is now the most recognizable building on campus. If you remember that it looks like a chocolate-and-mocca layer birthday cake for a centenarian, you can't miss it.

A smart battery system is a peripheral device that communicates with the system it powers. In addition to one or more ``primary'' bateries, it includes testing and recharging components, all controlled through a smart battery management system. It looks like batteries have pulled ahead of toasters in the race to be the smartest dumb device.

PowerSmart and ON Semiconductor sell smart battery IC's.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

The five permanent members are the ``victorious powers'' of WWII: China (.cn), France (.fr), Russia (.ru), the United Kingdom (.uk), and the United States.

When Nixon made the ``opening'' to (Mainland, Red, Communist) China, Taiwan (.tw) was tossed out of the UN and the People's Republic took its place. When the old Soviet Union (.su) collapsed, Russia kept the old seat.

There is agitation from various sides to change the present system. Many nonaligned nations want to end the veto power of the permanent members. Some larger nonaligned nations (India, and some others such as uhh, well, anyway, India is one) want a permanent added member from the third world. The West is basically ignoring all that and pondering whether to add Japan and/or Germany.

1. self-contained (vide scuba)
2. single-column
3. small caps

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

SC uses the epithet ``The Premier College of Kansas.'' Even this modest self-assessment might be contested by other Kansas institutions. Hmmm: the ``premier'' claim is in little letters on the logo. Maybe it's just an official part of the name and they're actually trying to soft-pedal it. Lessee, the page for Professional Studies Centers states without false modesty ``[a]s the recognized leader in non-traditional education, Southwestern College has made completion of bachelors degrees convenient, accessible, and job focused.'' What I want to know is, do they offer degrees in premiering? According to this page, they have degrees in Business Administration, Criminal Justice, Nursing, and Pastoral Studies majors (among others). Heck, skip the tedious education step and just be president.

More than 33% of university officers that were listed on this now-defunct page were named David, sort of like a Wendy's commercial.

``Southwestern College is accredited by ... the University Senate of the United Methodist Church ...''' and other organizations.

For the imaging of semiconductor devices, there is a special kind of specimen-current-based imaging method called EBIC (electron-beam--induced current). This uses the fact that most of the energy lost by an electron beam passing through a semiconductor device goes into the ionization of atoms in the semiconductor (that's where the secondary electrons come from). In device terms, that means that the electron beam generates a highly localized density of holes (on the order of thousands per electron in the primary beam). EBIC generates an image using the specimen current measured through an ohmic or Schottky contact. (That's right: as the capitalization indicates, Ohm's identity has been submerged in the Nachlaß of his work; Schottky's hasn't been, yet.)

Here are some electron micrographs.

The Net Advance of Physics site has some entries in this category.

After you've spent the best part of your academic career burnishing your creative (``and how'' mutter the medievalists) medieval (or mediaeval) credentials, you may feel a need to fill the resultant lacuna in your academic vita. A typical way to recycle your experience is to include something like

PERSONAL
        Rose to position of treasurer in SCA, a foobar organization.

The problem is always: what to write for foobar. Some anachronists have so much trouble deciding on an appropriate description that they send out an incomplete résumé, and the interviewer asks them ``What's a `foobar' organization?'' This is not a turn you want your interview to take. If you feel uncomfortable using the F-word (`fe*dal') in the groveling-for-a-job context, then you could just leave `SCA' unexplained and unexpanded, or get a job through your SCA connections and start a little fiefdom locally. Alternatively, you can do the honorable thing, taking courage from the melees you've survived, and display your true colors. Ideally, you go to work for Disney.

I'm sorry, I guess I just don't have any good solution for this problem. Fundamentally, the difficulty is that you want to define precisely the quantity of attention that the reader of your vita devotes to this item: enough to notice some extent of experience, not enough to strain his or her limited tolerance for weirdness. You know that time and chance happeneth to them all, so precise control does not obtain.

You know, in one sense the SCA is the least governmental of NGO's. It survives on voluntary contributions by its members rather than on government subsidies, and it doesn't attempt to speak on anyone else's behalf in the councils of government.

People interested in this SCA might also be interested in the Hoplite Association.

A few years ago, some students at SCAD were so unhappy that it made national news, but I only had a link here instead of an explanation. Now (2007) I can't remember what it was all about. It probably had to do with crime, because the main campus of SCAD is in a high-crime area of Savannah. But maybe it was because of faculty issues. Faculty at SCAD generally do not have tenure, but work on one-year contracts.

SCAD was founded in 1978 with 71 students. By 2004, with about 7000 students, it was the largest art college in the US. It occupied more than 50 buildings totaling more than 1.5 million square feet, and was credited with helping to revitalize Savannah's historic district, restoring buildings that were either vacant or in disrepair. I think I can begin to see how the high-crime thing happened to come about. That year, it started scouting sites in metro Atlanta where it could open a satellite campus called SCAD-Atlanta, that would offer graduate and undergraduate courses in ``advertising design, animation, architectural history, art history, broadcast design and motion graphics, and interior design.'' It eventually selected a site that was just a short walk away from the campus of the Atlanta College of Art, which happened to be struggling at the time. The next year, months after celebrating its centennial, ACA was absorbed into SCAD-Atlanta.

For example, Eugene Onegin is in fourteen-line iambic tetrameter, with the rhyming scheme

ABAB, CCDD, EFFEGG.

FMFM, FFMM, FMMFMM.

This glossary passes along traditional mnemonics for dactylic hexameter and dochmiac meter. This glossary also has an entry pointing you to the electronic journal Versification, but if you found the rest of this entry informative, you may find that journal a bit advanced.

Here's a nice introduction to Latin scansion.

I was at a writers'-group meeting a while back and silently corrected ``scars'' to ``scares'' on my copy of a draft under discussion, then laughed when I realized that it was supposed to be ``scarce.'' The writer explained that she couldn't remember how to write the word she wanted, so she just left it wrong.

It ain't ``rouge,'' it's Science and Technology!

The Spring 2004 issue of Horizons (volume 31, no. 1) had a section entitled ``College Theology Society Fiftieth Anniversary Essays.'' The first essay, ``Present at the Sidelines of the Creation'' (pp. 88-93) is by Gerard S. Sloyan. This is a different Gerard from my pal mentioned at the Diogenes entry, just so you know. Sloyan writes

    As to what brought the [society] into existence, it was not so much the generally jejune character of the classroom teaching of religion based on the seminary courses and textbooks available as it was the professional feelings of the men and women engaged in the work. They knew that they were poorer prepared at the graduate level than faculty members in other departments. Some of the priest teachers doubled in brass as chaplains of women's colleges (and some in colleges of men), a detail that led colleagues to discount their academic seriousness. A lack of respect came from another quarter. The various religious brother, sister, and regular and secular clergy college presidents invariably had doctorates in other fields. This coupled with their remembered formation in a religious institute or seminary, qualified them in their own minds as knowing more about what should be going on in religion departments than the people instructing several sections of fifty students and more. They knew it had to be inferior because its practitioners had never written a Ph.D. dissertation like them. [I never realized that college presidents were like Ph.D. dissertations!]

He mentions later that the early agitators who brought the SCCTSD into being were primarily members of groups in Washington, New York, and South Bend. Interestingly, the South Bend group were not at Notre Dame but at its sister institution, Saint Mary's College, and at River Forest House of Studies.

There was a real contest among textbooks, and one of the entrants mentioned was ``Theodore Hesburgh, a young instructor at the University of Notre Dame.'' As I sit here typing this glossary entry at the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Library, late one Summer evening in 2004, retired university president Father Hesburgh is probably still at work in his office twelve floors above me. (Fr. Hesburgh was university president from 1952 to 1987. This is probably as good a place as any to note that in the 1960's, he invited a young European theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, to teach at Notre Dame. He turned down the invitation, writing that he felt his English was not yet good enough. When he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, at the age of 78, news reports said he spoke ten languages.)

In the early years, Horizons published a few ecumenical articles, but that trend petered out. The Society itself remains Roman Catholic, though it has held biennial meetings with the Baptist Professors of Theology since the mid 1990's. The disappearance of the word Catholic from the society's name turns out the have little to do with ecumenism and much to do with an extensively debated question of grammatical ambiguity: did the first word in the noun phrase ``Catholic College Teachers'' modify the second or third word or both? At the 1967 annual meeting (Pittsburgh), a vote decided that the proper concern of the society was ``College Theology.'' I think the society's name change came not much after. Theologians have to tie up all the loose ends. I don't.

The organization, affiliated with the MLA, publishes the journal SCE Reports. According to this page, Stanford University has a quarterly called SCE Reports that describes spending by Resident Fellows and I don't know who else. If I ever learn the expansion, I'll probably make it a separate entry.

(Global warming entry coming soon. Before 2050, at the latest.)

In principle, I suppose it could be pleasure in another's sadness of whatever provenance -- through specific misfortune or otherwise. Then again, sadness is usually regarded as some kind of misfortune in se. However, I think that the typical context involves ``another'' with whom one is not (or more like is no longer) in immediate communication. In this situation, the typical misfortune one is likely to know of is the substantive sort.

Cf. sangfroid.

French: onomatopée
Portuguese: onomatopéia,
Italian: onomatopèa (also -pèia),
Polish: onomatopeja,
Spanish: onomatopeya,
Norwegian: onomatopoietikon, lydmalende ord, and lydhermende ord
Dutch: klanknabootsing, klanknabootsend woord, and onomatopee,
Albanian: onomatopé and tingullimitim,
Hungarian: hangutánzás and hangfestés,
Russian (transliterated): zvukopodrazhanie (you will not complaining; adjective is being zvukopodrazhatyel'nii).

This is completely absurd; not only are the words insanely long, but many of them resemble the original Greek and therefore each other, reducing diversity and facilitating mutual comprehensibility among languages. These are problems that English can solve. The word should be something like the Dutch or Albanian outliers -- whizbang or zingptooey or tweetmeow -- but not suggest anything in particular. I think buzzpoppery would do nicely. The adjective would be anything totally different.

A popular early method of producing oxygen was by the reduction of mercurous nitrate [that's mercury (II) nitrate: Hg(NO₃)₂]. It was widely used in the making of felt hats in the nineteenth century. Over time, they would inhale or ingest enough to suffer mercury poisoning; thus arose the expression ``mad as a hatter,'' an expression possibly preserved in the language by Lewis Carroll's `Mad Hatter' character.

Scheele's detailed reasoning is outlined at this site.

This is my proudest discovery.

Anyway, the description fits US usage well enough. A closely related sense of scheme occurs in the phrase ``pension scheme.'' That term is used widely in the UK and rarely in the US (the US term is ``pension plan,'' much less common in the UK). Thirteen other OED2 entries do include the phrase ``pension scheme'' within definitions or quoted examples, with the earliest dated instance occuring in 1935. This phrase and others like it (recording scheme, compensation scheme, ombudsman scheme, etc.) seem to account for most occurrences of the word (as noun, the verb disappearing) in UK usage (i.e., in .uk webpages). The occasional exceptions seem to be older texts. Another example of this new collocation pattern, or perhaps revived older sense, is in the phrase ``housing scheme.''

The new OED edition offers an additional sense of scheme as short for this phrase in Scottish colloquial usage, but that is not enough. The negative connotation of scheme should be identified as ``chiefly American'' or at least not British. (Of course, if you're in the opposition, loyal or otherwise, perhaps government schemes do seem to have a nefarious or at least misguided element.) Australian usage, as suggested by the expansion of HECS, apparently parallels UK usage. The word scheme also occurs in the phrase ``incontinence pad scheme'' quoted at our entry for the (Western Australia) AABIC. There seems to be a real divergence in usage under way here.

Now I'm going to give an example of the (incidental) use of the term ``housing scheme.'' The example comes from pp. 90-91 of G.N.M. Tyrrell's Homo Faber: A Study of Man's Mental Evolution (1951). (You may as well know that I'm only doing this to assuage the accountancy of my conscience, which knows it was a waste to have skimmed even this much.)

... Behind the working of our rational mind lie forces which rise up to it from the instinctive level and also forces which descend to it from the unadapted level. Both can influence the mind unconsciously. An example of the latter kind is provided by the building of the medieval cathedrals. The great and prolonged effort which was put into these permanent messages in stone can surely not be accounted for solely by the intellectual beliefs which their builders held. The real driving force must have been unconscious; for the cathedrals have a significance which cannot be expressed in language. They were not built to provide places of worship in the deliberate way in which a modern government might decide on a housing scheme. If one sits in a cathedral, especialy if it is empty, and, so to speak, feels it, the conviction comes home to one that it is the crystallization of a message that could not be expressed in words. No formal doctrine or dogma is enshrined in it but a reality which enters from beyond our life in time. It is this which must have inspired the planners and builders to carry on their long and laborious work--although they could not have said as much if they had been asked.

Other entries that mention cathedrals are those under the head terms

1. Arrhenius plot (this link is actually worth following)
2. Campanian Society
3. WNC (strangely, this entry is relevant)

          _____ 
         / ___ \
        / /   \ \
        \ \___/ /
         \_____/
               \          _____
                \        / ___ \
                 C==N___/ /   \ \
                /       \ \___/ /
               /         \_____/
              H

The situation was a bit more complicated in medieval Austria and Bavaria, which used a ``long'' Schilling worth 30 Pfennig as a unit of account. I'm sure at the time that someone thought this made things simpler. Eventually, it became the name of the currency of post-imperial Austria. It remained the monetary unit (currency symbol ATS) until replaced by the euro. The conversion was at a rate of 1 EUR = 13.7603 ATS, or approximately 1 ATS = 0.07267 EUR. See also Groschen, a subsidiary unit.

Reported in 1992.

Yiddish is written in Hebrew (originally Aramaic) characters, so capitalization is not an issue as it is in German written with (any more-or-less) Roman characters. In English I suppose you could capitalize the word to make clear that you're borrowing from the German, but then you could just as well write lard. I suppose if you want to emphasize that you're borrowing from the Yiddish you might write ``shmaltz,'' but that spelling is much less common. The shm and shn consonant clusters are common in German languages but rare in English words not recently borrowed from German or Yiddish, so I guess it's hard to naturalize the spelling.

Goose fat makes a good breadspread, but tastes depend on early childhood experience. I remember the first time someone suggested dipping good bread in an icky pool of green olive oil. Ah, but I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now. Cf. skwarka.

The word has taken English inflections: schmaltzy, schmaltziness. That doesn't always happen with Yiddish words in English (contrast the noun meshuga, with adjective form meshugene). It's interesting how the transferred sense of schmaltzy compares with that of the materially almost equivalent greasy. They have similar connotation -- both are at least vaguely deprecatory, but different denotation.

This is an epithet in the manner of Johnny come lately, nervous Nelly, silly Billy, and simple Simon. A fair literal translation might be `Smith Always Along.' A reasonable English version might be `Tag-Along Smith,' although it carries slightly different connotations. At minimum, unlike the German ``immer mit,'' ``tag-along'' in English carries a suggestion of someone who follows a group.

The English epithet examples suggest that alliteration or rhyme contribute to their popularity. In case there's any doubt, therefore, I'll note that -midt is pronounced identically with mit. Generally speaking, final stop consonants are unvoiced, and final dt, tt, and t are equivalent. Indeed, the words statt and Stadt originally had the same spelling, and one of them (I forget which) had its spelling altered just to make an orthographic distinction.

In the literal translation above, I Englished mit as `along.' As English speakers generally know, mit is the German preposition typically corresponding to the English preposition `with.' However, in the head term mit is used as an adverb, and English with is rarely an adverb. Along is a fair translation of the adverb mit, and it works reasonably well for the translation of verbs with the separable prefix mit into verb-plus-particle constructions: mitbringen is `to bring along,' mitkommen is `to come along,' etc. For another contrast between mit and with, see ablative of association.

Just to be a little pedantic, I'll note that along used as an English preposition does not correpond at all well to the preposition mit. A better way to go is with the postposition entlang, which happens to be the closest cognate of along.

The cognate Yiddish words, with slightly different senses than the German, appeared in English early in the twentieth century (see schnorrer). The German may have had some influence on the English spelling.

There is a defining story that gives the precise sense of schnorrer. To have the full flavor, you should know that megillah is Yiddish for `overlong story' and tsuris is an uncountable noun meaning `troubles, problems, worries.'

A schnorrer sees one of his regular contributors, and comes up to buttonhole him for some spare change. The touch replies with a megillah about his own tsuris. He's going through a rough patch, so he can't help right now. The schnorrer complains in reply: ``Just because you've got tsuris, why should I suffer?''

Well, at least we've broken ground on this entry. Schnorrer is probably related, either as a cognate or parallel development, to English snore, so we've got a bit more to describe.

Scholia Reviews is an electronic journal that features the pre-publication versions of reviews that appear in Scholia.

One of the major agitators for reform was the physicist/philosopher Ernst Mach. Out of kindness, perhaps, writers fail to mention that Mach's early encounter with the classical languages was traumatic. Like many children of the affluent in that time, he was home-schooled until he was ready to enter Gymnasium at age ten. He was very unhappy, particularly with the classical languages and also the religious instruction. Perhaps he suffered a nervous breakdown. He was withdrawn from Gymnasium and home-schooled for another five years, also doing a part-time apprenticeship. It was probably a much better education for a scientist than he would have gotten had he been kept in. He reentered the formal track (i.e., Gymnasium) at age fifteen. It's interesting to contrast the reactions of Mach and Ernst Schrödinger to the classical grammars. Mach was repelled by the memorization necessitated by the irregularity and by the semantically arbitrary distinctions of declension, etc. Schrödinger was impressed by the logic of the system.

A good place to read about Mach and Schrödinger is the wonderful Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Your library must have it. A good starting point to learn about the Schulkrieg is The Young Einstein - The advent of relativity, by Lewis Pyenson (Bristol and Boston: Adam Hilger, Ltd., 1985), pp. 1-3 (with extensive notes to the secondary literature). The reformers largely won the Schulkrieg, but the form of this success did not initially consist in a general change of curriculum, but rather in a change of status of different kinds of existing schools.

Existing high schools in the period fell into three categories. Gymnasien (that's plural of Gymnasium) were classical schools that taught Greek and Latin. Realgymnasien -- semiclassical schools -- taught Latin but not Greek, and Oberrealschulen -- nonclassical schools -- taught neither Latin nor Greek. Originally, only Gymnasium graduates could enter university and certain government positions. The other kinds of schools offered what one might think of as a nonacademic terminal diploma, or vo-tech training. A large part of the reform was the opening up of university education and higher government positions to graduates of all Gymnasien. The curricula changed more slowly. My cousin Franz, one of the older children to get out of Germany on the Kindertransport (and one of the last; his bus raced the back roads into Holland on the day Germany invaded Poland) had gone to a regular Gymnasium. The only languages he knew were German, Latin, and Greek. It was not unusual for Gymnasium graduates in those days to take a year off and travel Europe, learning a modern language or two and maturing. (That was before the war.)

The name SCIA suggests sciatica, which is a pain down the leg caused by irritation of the sciatic nerve (the main nerve into the leg). The irritation is typically spinal, occurring where the nerve emerges from the lumbar vertebrae. After spending weeks on my back trying to decide whether to phrase the preceding sentences in the singular or plural, I've concluded that hey, did you know that Hebrew and Arabic have three grammatical numbers -- singular, dual, and plural? I think it's used more systematically in Arabic; in Hebrew it tends to be used only for things that are naturally paired, like, uh, legs. One leg is regel, a pair of legs is raglayim, more is regalim (stressed syllables bold). As noted at this LE entry, that's not exactly `leg.'

You recognize the Hebrew word regel (`foot, leg, lower extremity') because you remember the star named Rigel. That star marks the left foot of Orion. (He faces us, so that's on our right in the northern hemisphere. If you cross over into the southern hemisphere, the same thing happens that happened to Dante and his guide Virgilio at the end of the Inferno. No, not ``Towering Inferno''; this Inferno is deep.) The name is short for the Arabic rigl al-gauza, `foot of the central one.' (The definite article al in a compound like this means `of the'.) Rigel Kentaurus, the third-brightest star in the sky, is the foot of the constellation Centaurus. It is designated Alpha 1 Centauri, the alpha indicating that it is the brightest star of its constellation. The 1 is to distinguish it from two much dimmer stars that occupy what looks to the naked (earthbound) eye as a single (twinkling) bright point. Rigel (in Orion) is also close (9'' -- nine seconds of arc, not nine inches, you clown) to a dim companion, but apparently that's not quite enough to merit the 1 treatment.

Rigel is the seventh-brightest star in the sky (in apparent magnitude, of course), and the brightest in Orion. Bayer designated it Beta Orionis (implying the second-brightest of Orion) by mistake. Alpha Orionis is a variable star, so I guess it got named, or at least observed, on a good day. Alpha Orionis is better known as Betelgeuse. The latter star name, and you have my permission not to believe this, is a corruption of the Arabic yad al-gauza (yad, in Hebrew and Arabic, means `hand').

Old English and other Germanic languages also had a dual, most evident in the personal pronouns. With the exception of, I think, Icelandic (with dual and plural forms of we), modern Germanic languages do not preserve the distinction.

The term really entered the lexicon in June 1929, with Hugo Gernsback, editor of Science Wonder Stories, who sponsored a monthly $50 contest for essays on ``What Science Fiction Means to Me.''

I think the magazine later became Amazing Stories. Hugo Gernsback also operated the radio station WRNY.

The term sci-fi, oddly enough, is used to describe a broader genre than science fiction proper, as once conceived. In contrast, SF, though in principle more ambiguous (as it fits science fantasy) has a more restrictive sense (see further discussion at SF).

This is also used to mean namely.

The shorter form, sc., is probably more common.

These tousled wearers of the flat hat [the author refers only to professors], supererogated by the medieval magic of the cloister, and made additionally colossal by a little knowledge of some external or measurable facet of the universe, have failed wretchedly in their assignment of educating post-school Americans. They have so departmentalized knowledge that a quadrennium is not long enough to make a sciolist, and they have let the teaching of wisdom disappear altogether from the curriculum, because doubtless, they no longer have any to teach.

(Did he check the 500-level courses?)

Also known as the NSCL. More information, and a raison d'être, at the JCL entry.

Rhymes with SDLC.

There's an FAQ of SCO UNIX newsgroups on the web.

As of mid 2003 I think they had lawsuit on claiming patent infringement by Linux. AFAIK, SCO is the software industry's leading provider of lawsuits.

I was going to wait until I had a minim entry to mention this, but I decided that making my opinions known was simply too urgent. Okay, now we have a minim entry so you can be enlightened.

The etymology of this is suggested to be lobscouse, a mariner's stew, but no one knows the etymology of that. (Specifically, lob is an old word meaning boil, but no one knows the origin of scouse. I wonder if it mightn't be an unattested variant of souse.) As long as you've got all day to ponder stuff like this, you could do worse than browse the house entry.

I say, let the chips fall where they may.

Playing ``Bop'' is like scrabble with all the vowels missing.

1. Go away!
2. Perform an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor! (See below.)

All over the world, reactor control panels have emergency shutdown buttons labeled "SCRAM." One often-heard story holds that the term is an acronym for Safety Control Rod Ax Man, an homage to Norman Hilberry, Argonne's second director, who stood poised with an ax during the start-up of the first reactor, ready to cut a rope and release the control rods that would stop the reaction should all else fail. But during the break after the symposium's first panel, [Volny] Wilson laid this myth to rest.

He said that he and Wilcox Overbeck were working in the squash court [at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field] where the reactor was under construction while an electrician wired the control panels. The electrician finished wiring the red emergency-shutdown button, turned to them, and asked how he should label it.

According to Wilson, Overbeck responded by asking, "Well, what do you do when you push the button?"

And Wilson replied, "You scram out of here as fast as you can."

More about the construction of the Stagg Field pile at the CP-1 entry. See also the Martinmas entry.

Dr. Samuel Johnson suffered from scrofula, as well as from gout and, to judge from Boswell's Life, Tourette's syndrome (TS) as well.

Robert Browning spoke of his `` scrofulous French novel.'' There's some more discussion of this [ (1) (2) ] in the archives of the classics list.

See also the syphilis entry.

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2002. At TTU.
2003. At Saint Louis University.
2004. At Rice.
2005. At Baylor.
2006. At University of Arkansas.

Yes, they're coming to take me away.

The latest specs are SCSI-2 (X3.131-1994), SCSI-3 Parallel Interface (X3T10/855D). All SCSI drives support built-in error detection.

FOLDOC has a bunch of stuff at its SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 entries.

Mike Neuffer serves a number of documents on SCSI and RAID, with a Linux orientation.

The fastest scuzzy interfaces are have always been faster than the contemporaneous fastest interfaces standard for PC hard drives, but those SCSI drives are typically not yet available for PC's. In any case, the speed difference has been shrinking. The one reason to get SCSI for a PC right now is if you need to access a large number of disks simultaneously.

Some Chosen State Universities:
• Saint Cloud State University, in St. Cloud, Minn.
• South Carolina State University.
• Southern Connecticut State University.

Scuba is a great way to meet fish and slimey invertebrates, as you may see.

We live in a time of deep skepticism.

The SCYC, whose expired existence is still atested on the web pages of some of its former subagencies, is now simply the Secretaía de Cultura. Well, you know, in the latest economic nightmare, there've been cutbacks all around. We've all had to tighten our belts and -- what? Now there's also a Secretaría de Medios de Comunicacón? Do I detect here the germ of the problem that besets the nation?

Within the SCYC there were, and within the Secretariat of Culture there are

• Comisión Nacional de Museos y de Monumentos y Lugares Históricos. (`National commision for museums and historic monuments and places.')
• Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA).
• Instituto Nacional del Teatro. If they can't have bread, they might as well have circuses.

The phrase salutem dicit became sufficiently standard that the abbreviation S.D. was used formulaically at the beginnings of letters (in the preserved letters of Cicero and Pliny, for example). Here salus occurs in the accusative form salutem, indicating that it is the direct object of the verb dicit (meaning `says' in this instance). So you can think of salutem dicit as meaning ``says `[good] health' '' or ``says hi.'' Sometimes S.D. was shortened to S., and the word ``dicit'' was understood. I suppose one could imagine that S. stood for the verb salutat (`greets'), but apparently S.D. was sufficiently standard that S. was regarded as a shortened form of it.

One instance in a modern language, of a similar verb that may be elided and understood, is sprechen (`speak'). In the phrase ich kann Deutsch sprechen (`I can speak German') is colloquially truncated to ich kann Deutsch (`I can German'). This pattern occurs in a few other expressions, such as ich will ins Kino [gehen] (`I want [to go] to the movie theater'), but which elisions are conventional and which weird is something you'll have to ask a native speaker (or maybe google) about.

Today this S.D. (or S.) occurs primarily in college diplomas, if there. The form S.P.D. also occurs: Salutem Plurimam Dicit. This is normally translated `sends many greetings.' This is a good place to point out that salutem is a singular form, and is treated a mass (a/k/a uncountable) noun; plurimus means `much' in this context.

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

``FILLING IN 4 YOU'': DENTAL PLACEMENT SERVICE
FOR SASKATOON, NOW EXPANDING INTO REGINA

I guess Regina must have a crown. Don't gag!

Here's a report on ``Worldspace'' apparently appropriately targeted to the parts of the world with fewest CD-players per capita. Here's a trial in Australia.

Yeah, yeah -- everybody's got a mission. But the SDA's get an entry for theirs because the stretch of acronyms beginning in SD was threadbare. See the bit on Kellogg for more on one SDAM.

SDB's official publication is Developmental Biology (online access free to SDB members). Their website provides links to Current Topics in Developmental Biology (CTDB), but that seems to be an independent journal owned by the publisher (Elsevier).

An SDB member in the news in late 2008 was Prof. Martin Chalfie of the Columbia University Department of Biological Sciences. He shared that year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Osamu Shimomura (of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole) and Roger Y. Tsien of (UCSD) for the discovery and development of green fluorescent protein (GFP). That's a camera-friendly Nobel if there ever was one.

``We are a fun-loving sail group, with over 60 boating families and other associates.''

``Perhaps the simplest way to convey the spirit that drives our activities is to quote from the SDCA Constitution.'' Perhaps so.

I'm sympathetic to all these church groups, but the problem is that there just aren't enough Sundays in a life to check them all out to decide who has the one true faith.

This SDCA sponsors a radio broadcast by Ronald L. Dart. Mommas, just to be on the safe side, I recommend that you not use both an initial L and ``Ron'' in your babies' names.

Hey! Cut out the racket! Thou shalt let thy neighbor sleep unmolested.

If you're reading this much after August 2003, I hope the allusion is obscure.

``[A] partnership of associations representing professional counselors who enhance human development by providing benefits, products, and services to expand professional knowledge and expertise; to promote recognition of counselors to the public and media; and to represent member's interests before federal, state, and local government. SDCA represents nearly 550 professional counselors in the counseling profession and related fields of interest.''

Matinee is only $3.75, all movies, at the mumble mall.

In the post-WWII era, a majority of Japanese have adopted some kind of pacifist position. Like Germany, Japan has been reluctant to become involved in military action beyond its own borders. On the other hand there is also a powerful minority in Japan that wants to see the standing of Japan's military rehabilitated.

In 2001, Junichiro Koizumi almost single-handedly saved the fortunes of his LDP by campaigning on a promise to clean up corruption and secrecy in government. Once elected, he reneged as quickly as possible and negotiated (with LDP party factions) his own survival as PM. An interesting aspect of his political maneuvering after the election was the number of big symbolic crumbs he threw to the factions one would call militarist, if the word were not too strong for the time being.

In the aftermath of its Iraq conquest in 2003, the US urged Japan to contribute personnel to the reconstruction effort. SDF personnel are being deployed in non-combat capacities. This got done partly on the basis of arguments that the reconstruction effort is not a combat situation. A small 1000-person advance team of the GSDF left for Iraq on January 19, 2004. In a joint appearance on a Fuji TV show the day before their departure, the secretaries general of the LDP and New Komeito (their coalition partner) announced that the SDF mission would not be abandoned if Japanese troops are injured or even killed by terrorists there. Really! What commitment! The special reasoning required for this conclusion was explained by New Komeito's Sec.-Gen. Tetsuzo Fuyushiba: ``Terrorist attacks are not recognized as an act of combat'' (Japan Today translation).

Rhymes with SCLC.

Effect is complementary to SDG, q.v.

The product was authored by Roger B. Winston, Jr., Ted K. Miller, and Diane L. Cooper (1999). These individuals appear to constitute ``Student Development Associates, Inc.'' (SDA). In fact, R.B.W. is president of SDA.

The SDTLA is a revision of the Student Developmental Task and Lifestyle Inventory (SDTLI) ``is grounded in the theoretical approach described by Chickering and Reisser (1993) in Education and Identity (2nd ed.).'' I hope that this theoretical approach is not overthrown in ``(3rd ed.).''

According to the authors, the ``SDTLI [developed in part by R.B.W. and T.K.M.] has been useful in working with students individually, for assessing student needs in program development, for teaching in orientation courses, and for conducting outcomes assessments. We believe that the SDTLA is an even better assessment instrument.''

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Selenium is the active ingredient in nonprescription dandruff shampoos/treatments like Selsun Blue, as well as prescription treatments that often simply have a higher concentration of selenium. Coal-tar derivatives are also used, but they smell. (When you think about it, you see that they more-or-less must smell: coal tar ``derivatives'' are obtained by fractional distillation with no chemical processing, and coal-tar has a vast collection of different compounds, many of them odoriferous. A process as unselective as distillation is unlikely to separate useful and non-smelly compounds from smelly ones.) Bishop Berkeley, the empiricist philosopher and enthusiast of education and new-world settlement, had a pet theory that most of the problems of Ireland could be solved if everyone (everyone in Ireland, not England) would bathe in tar-water. It might have done for the dandruff and lice, anyway.

You know, if you take the sentences on the homepage of the SSS (``established in 2000'') and just scramble the sentence order and paragraph divisions, and change all the details, you get something that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the SE page. Somebody really ought to look into this. Is this right?

``Although the SE is primarily a philosophical society, others are also encouraged to become members.''

Distinguished from really special edition.

A number of years ago, I saw a .sig that listed an address in ...

Stockholm, Sweden, Europe.

That's the country we're talking about here.

[I emailed the guy with that .sig ("Oh, _that_ Sweden!"), and he wrote back that for some newsgroup readers, the last bit constitutes new information. This exchange took place in the early 1990's, before Sweden joined the EU (see EU-15 entry). Today, he might write ``Sweden, EU,'' and it would provide geopolitical rather than political-geographical information. See also this CA.]

The Prologue (``In the Beginning Was the Moraine'') of Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (described at the IKEA entry) begins

Älmhult, Småland, Sweden, the World.

Sweden has the reputation of having the highest suicide rates in Europe. It's probably the lack of sunlight. (It's SAD, don't you agree?) The Swedish-born founder of IKEA comes from a family of mean mothers-in-law and their suicidal sons, yet those're on the German-immigrant side of the family.

Membership has its privileges. Primarily, it allows you to claim that you're ``at SEA.''

It is very often the case that an organization that seals its acronym (e.g., ADSC, ARMA, SPIE, and YIVO above) will adopt an official name that includes a description in apposition to the old initialism. This is one of the key signs that the acronym has been sealed or (see AGI) is in the process of becoming sealed. This is often ungainly, and is especially awkward in situations where abbreviations are being introduced. For example, sometime in 2007 a feature article in ADSC's glossy bimonthly had the following title and subtitle: ``Annual Alliance Report: Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and ADSC: International Association of Foundation Drilling (ADSC).'' This glossary entry was inserted on or before August 14, 2007.

Another problem with sealed acronyms in appositional names may occur if the original acronym expansion contained words, like ADSC's ``Association,'' that were later added in apposition. (There's also the partial overlap of the acronym's ``Drilled'' with the appositional phrase's ``Drilling.'') These may be considered AAPP's -- Pleonasms with Acronym Assistance pleonasms. However, this is a very dicey question, particularly once the acronym is completely sealed. We have teams of philosophers working around the clock to resolve this vital issue, and we expect to receive a preliminary report within a couple of millennia. SPIE (with overlaps in Society, Photo-optical/Optical, and Engineers/Engineering), ARMA (Association and Managers/Management), and YIVO are on tenterhooks. [YIVO is an extreme case if you're reading the Yiddish, where the description in apposition is simply the original acronym expansion (details at its entry). In English, the appositional Institute echoes the Yiddish Institut -- represented by O in the acronym.]

(It might be objected that when an initialism is pronounced as a sequence of letter names, it is less likely to be deemed an acronym. However, that could only be a valid objection in a phonetic language.) If I wrote any more, I'd start waxing philosophical about the past participle. No one wants to see that happen.

• Jackson Browne's ``The Load Out'' and ``Stay'' (some people think it's one song ``Load Out and Stay'').
• Journey's ``Feeling That Way'' and ``Anytime'' (second and third tracks from their excellent 1978 album Infinity).
• Bob Seger's ``Travelin' Man'' and ``Beautiful Loser.''
• REO Speedwagon's ``Riding The Storm Out'' (the 1977 live version with the storm siren) and ``Roll With The Changes'' together in the A Decade of Rock and Roll album (1980).
• Led Zeppelin's ``Heartbreaker'' and ``Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman),'' tracks 5 and 6, resp., of the Led Zeppelin II album, released by Atlantic Records in October 1969.
• Queen's ``We Will Rock You'' and ``We Are The Champions.''
• ZZ Top's ``Waitin' For The Bus'' and ``Jesus Left Chicago'' (the first two tracks of the Tres Hombres album).
• U2's ``An Cat Dubh'' and ``Into the Heart'' (third and fourth tracks of the album Boy). I'm not sure how much air play these have had, but they're pretty seamless on the album, and they're very similar. The 1:58 ``Into the Heart'' could pass as a coda to the preceding song (6:16), or as a second movement like the sung part of Elton John's ``Funeral for a Friend.''

There's actually a silent moment in the Queen item, but it's a single track in some of Queen's albums.

[It's hard to say precisely how complete the above list is, especially since only a small fraction of songs from albums ever sold get much airplay, and the above is based mostly on what I've noticed on the radio. (Of course, there's some overlap with pairs I've noticed in my personal collection.) What I can say is that I've returned to this entry at least half a dozen times to add a pair that turned out to be on the list already. Not only does this prove that I have absolutely no long-term memory, but it also suggests that the songs on this list represent a solid majority of such pairs, weighted by airplay, at least in the ``classic rock'' genre.]

I guess that if you're a DJ with the runs, you can queue these along with American Pie. They're also ready-made for Two-for-Tuesday.

I heard these described as medleys by more than one DJ. (I've also heard a DJ stumble trying to describe the ZZ Top pair listed above, evidently because he didn't know or couldn't think of an apt term.) I suppose these song pairs fall within most loose definitions of the word, but medley normally implies or suggests incomplete serial performance of more than two songs. Part of the charm of nonindustrial medleys is the art of the musicians in making a smooth transition. When the whole songs form a medley this is less of a challenge, because the beginning and end of a song needn't carry the same rhythm as the rest of the song.

There are some single songs, like Elton John's ``Funeral for a Friend'' and one or two Pink Floyd tunes, that seem like two songs combined. Ike and Tina Turner did a famous cover of ``Proud Mary,'' sung half ``nice... and easy'' and half ``rough,'' which is discussed at the octane number entry.

To help you find the foregoing entry, we include this search-engine fodder:
two-fer 2-fer I thought it was one song but it was really two songs only one song but it's two songs back to back together recorded live I thought it was just one song but it was actually two songs no pause no silence no interlude album tracks like a single track I thought it was a single song but it was two songs the first song flows into the second song the first song flows into the next song one song flows into the other song when they play it on the radio it sounds like a single song but it's really two songs that sound it sounds like just one song but it's really two songs that it sounds like one song but it's really two songs I thought they were one song I thought they were just one song I thought they were a single song

Deutsch:
• Acoon
• Bellnet
• Blitzsuche
• Deutscher Branchenindex
• DINO (Deutsches InterNet-Organisationssystem)
• Nathan
• quarx.de (more forthrightly a meta-search than most)
• Sharelook Deutschland
• web.de
• Yahoo! Deutschland
English:
• Alta Vista
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Español:
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This isn't really our oldest entry. It's just the most dated.

The English-language Wikipedia entry for SEAT claims that the E is long (``SEE-at''). I don't recall ever hearing it pronounced any other way than phonetically according to its spelling in Spanish (hence short-e: ``SEH-at''). Perhaps the British pronunciation is modeled on that of Fiat. (There probably isn't any distinct American English pronunciation, since SEAT isn't marketed in North America.) The Spanish-language Wikipedia entry makes no particular comment on the pronunciation. It does, however, explain the following:

SEAT currently names its models after Spanish cities. In order to avoid possible trademark problems in the future, it has registered the names of all the cities of Spain.

Another approach that some may find preferable is to wear a silk shirt soaked in K-Y jelly.

When I think of what the world is missing because my book of essays and life hints has failed to find a publisher, it brings tears to my eyes. Another approach that some may find preferable is to apply glycerine to the side of the nose. (What Goya did was simply tell his daughter that her fiance had died. I do believe he let her in on his little joke once he finished the painting.)

A good example of the voluminous literature alluded to (though one with an odd interpretation that abstracts testatory uses of ``second best'' from obscure English legal history) is The Second Best Bed: Shakespeare's Will in a New Light by Joyce Rogers (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1993). On page 72 there you can find a paragraph of the usual examples of parallels that have been adduced, not including the one above.

Online you can find ``Alas, Poor Anne: Shakespeare's `Second-Best Bed' in Historical Perspective,'' an 18-page article on the subject (critical of the Stratford man) by Bonner Miller Cutting, published in the Oxfordian in 2011.

Oh yeah, what I wanted to mention was that sometimes ``second second'' is synonymous with ``third.'' One example occurs at our L2 entry. Another example occurs in the movie industry, where ``second second assistant director'' is a synonym of ``third assistant director.'' You may wonder which term is more undignified. It looks like a calculation. One factor to include in it is that reportedly, ``third'' is sometimes mispronounced to suggest a false etymology of the word that comes behind it.

Eventually, this entry will be mostly about instances of numbering similar to ``second second.'' For example, we'll mention a distortion of traditional Hebrew numbering that is used to avoid writing a reference to the name of God. We won't bother explaining the Pentium II, Pentium III thing, since that's already covered at an existing entry. Later, we'll veer off into things that are somewhat more tenuously related to ``second second,'' like French base-twenty number names. Somewhere along the line, some etymological quirk will catch my attention, and the entry will end up being about that.

You can't have a science without specialization. Mine is experimental spelign.

I should be clear about the ``whether'' above. Many universities offer a degree in this undiscipline, and though I think they have a lot of cheek, I haven't noticed a tongue in any of them.

But be careful what you google for, you may get it back in adsense. I got sidetracked into degrees in ``Fire Science,'' and for a week my banners and margins were burning with invitations to get a degree in that subject.

1. American SECS
2. East-Central/American SECS
3. South Central SECS
4. Southeastern American SECS
5. Midwestern ASECS
6. Western ASECS

One design strategy involves a calibrated transfer of data that generates a constant time-remaining estimate. Ideally, this requires

	d   /   1-f \
	-- (  t ---  )  =  0 ,
	dt  \    f  /

... students of literature have had cause to be nervous of social scientists plundering the golden treasury, often for partisan purposes heavily disguised as science.

Here's something relevant from Studies in Linnaean Method and Nomenclature (q.v.), by John Lewis Heller (a classical scholar):

A prominent feature of Linnaeus's Latin style, at least in the Dedication, is his omission of connectives, whether it be in a series of enumerations where no semifinal et or final -que was written or in a pair of contrasting terms where we might expect sed. This was a familiar device of classical rhetoric and I have been at some pains to preserve it in the translation, probably to the reader's annoyance.

[The comment refers to Heller's translation of Hortus Cliffortianus, which Carolus Linnaeus published in 1737. In the commentary following his translation, the quoted text is the first thing mentioned under the rubric (p. 105) of ``Problems of translation.'']

In March 2004, the 15th AGM of SEDERI was held in Lisbon -- the first time it had been held outside Spain. Following that meeting, the society changed its name to the ``Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies.'' In various documents, the name appears in Spanish (Sociedad Hispano-Portuguesa de Estudios Renacentistas Ingleses), Portuguese (Sociedade Hispano-Portuguesa de Estudos Renascentistas Ingleses), English, or in two or all of these. The initialism was kept unchanged. There must be a name for this common maneuver and the anachronistic acronyms that result.

As of February 2007, it seems that SEDERI could use some revitalization itself. The last time it was mentioned in a major paper such as the Globe and Mail was February 3, 2001 (in the Toronto Star -- is that a stretch?). Under the caption ``SEDERI is being written about,'' the SEDERI website helpfully reproduces an editorial from ``The Bulletin, the most read community newspaper in Downtown Toronto.'' That editorial, from February 8, 2005, includes this mention of SEDERI:

``In trying to purge itself of the taint from its freewheeling days, HRDC renamed itself HRSDC. (No the S isn't for strippers, it's for skills. [That was true at the time, anyway.]) Under the ministrations of Toronto's Joe Volpe, its bureaucrats have gone berserk in an orgy of red tape that is strangling useful programs, including the South East Downtown Economic Redevelopment Initiative (SEDERI).'' Apparently the funding was being continued on a month-to-month basis, and SEDERI was having trouble paying its bills. ``This current situation of course threatens to overshadow much of the great work that SEDERI accomplished in the past year, such as delivering the successful Southeast Downtown Job & Career Fair held in October at St. Lawrence Market, the series of Youth Employment Skills workshops delivered in the spring and summer, and the recent Stakeholder Workshop & Public Forum on seeking local solutions to getting our shelter resident population back into the workforce.'' The most recent activity on the SEDERI website is a blog entry from June 2005 to the effect that the Board of Directors was ``refocussing on the mission and direction of the organization.''

... una entidad sin ánimo de lucro cuyo objetivo es reunir a todo el profesorado y personas estudiosas de la didáctica de las diferentes lenguas y sus literaturas que tengan el propósito de promover e intensificar la investigación y la enseñanza de dichas materias.

`...a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to bring together all those in the teaching profession and those who study the teaching of different languages and their literatures who have the goal of promoting and increasing the study and teaching of said subjects.'

Normal Spanish style is more florid and verbose than normal English style. However, bureaucratese is universal.

American Sign Language (ASL) uses one-handed signs for alphabetic characters; British Sign Language uses two-handed lettering.

In Winter Olympics years, since the time that those have not been Summer Olympics years (i.e., 1994+4n, n a small nonegative integer), SEERI has hosted an International Syriac Conference. (There were two earlier such conferences, in 1987 and 1990.) They say that their ``publication, The Harp, mainly contains papers presented in the Syriac conferences.'' That now seems to account for about two of the annual volumes. ``Other volumes of The Harp contain learned papers from scholars all over the world.'' I have the volume XXV before me (2010) and, apart from Syriac words under analysis, its articles are mostly in English (there's an article in French and an article and a book review in German; nothing in Malayalam).

1. In the natural sense of the collocation of see and through, the preposition through takes a noun (possibly a noun phrase) object, which is the thing through which the subject of the phrase sees. For example, Superman can see through doors, a perceptive person can see through your pretenses, etc. One can typically imagine a line of sight through the named object of the preposition. The verb see is often intransitive, as in the preceding examples, but not necessarily (as in ``see the sun through a break in the clouds'').

2. In the idiom similar to this, see is transitive. E.g., ``courage will see you through the current troubles.'' One can sometimes imagine a line of sight from the subject to object (of see): ``I will see you through this.'' The expression is usefully ambiguous: in the last example, it probably means that ``I will be with you (or be there-for-you) during this' (something a little weaker than ``I will walk you through this''). But it could, just barely, also mean ``I will see you on the other side of this; you will get through this and I will see you again.''

   In this idiom, through may not have an explicit object (``love will see you through'') or it may look as if it has a prepositional phrase as predicate (``we will see you through to the end''). One can think of through in these abstracted forms as a particle, like out in the ``verb + particle'' construct pass out. In the last example, ``to the end'' modifies the transitive construct adverbially.

You can sound very silly using the wrong expression. In late 2003, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was trying to decide whether to site the world's first large-scale nuclear fusion reactor in France or Japan. Claudie Haignere, France's minister of research and new technologies, issued a statement through her ministry on December 20 that was either originally in, or eventually translated into, Broken English. It said that the fusion project ``remains an absolute priority for Europe. We are utterly convinced that our human, financial and technological advantages should allow us to see through this project.'' As it stands, the statement suggests the the project is a kind of screen to be seen through, implying that it is a deception and a boondoggle. Unless the author was having an attack of candor, the intended English was ``...to see this project through.'' (No French version of this statement was published in any of the French-language news sources searchable by Lexis-Nexis.)

Dylan Thomas wrote a famous poem to his dying father, entitled ``Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.'' He used the adjective gentle rather than the adverb gently, because he meant to describe not how the father should go, but how the father should be as he went. The gentle is an adjective because it modifies the noun father (implicit subject of the imperative verb). This is a perfectly standard form of expression, parallel to ``he ran laughing through the underbrush'' or ``he stands red-faced at the door.'' I think a similar distinction is at work in the see-through idioms, but I haven't figured it out yet.

Links: thumbnail description - hours - location (It's in Capen Hall. Take my advice and follow the link if you've never been there before.)

Unfortunately, later I forgot what specifically it was a term for. I think it was intended to refer to praise that ostentatiously implies that the praiser has the special understanding or perception necessary to sit in judgment of the praised. A subspecies of condescension.

Oh, enough philosophy. I want to talk about one of my own favorites in the genre of very bad books: A Short History of Technology. It's self-published by proxy. That is, it was ``A Publication of THE THOMAS ALVA EDISON FOUNDATION, INC.,'' but the authors, Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen and Mr. Charles F. Kettering, were Executive Director and President, respectively, of that laudable foundation.

The book is indeed short -- a ``booklet'' in the words of the author of its foreword (C.F. Kettering). This requires a bit of compression and scanting of details. Here's a breezy sentence on page 19: ``In passing we must not forget the great contributions of Euclid to geometry and Hipparchus and Ptolemy to trigonometry.''

Professional historians looked down their noses at the Durants, who depended almost entirely on secondary research for their sweeping vistas of history. Short is a few scratches below that. Cited works include Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd Edition and (47 times in 91 pages) Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition (not further specified). (Kettering, an important inventor, now has his own entry in the Britannica.) Many pedestrian passages are ``reprinted with permission.'' I imagine the permission was granted by the publishers and not the authors. It must have been galling to Herbert Butterfield to have a passage quoted from his The Origins of Modern Science. A page or two after the quoted material, he enveighs against the kind of Whig history that Short is such a parodic example of (example at HOT entry).

Incidentally, the perceptive and/or hip student of this glossary will perhaps have noticed that this glossary is itself self-reflexive (setting aside the surprisingly difficult question of whether that is actually a meaningful observation). Indeed, your glossarist is walloping the gentle reader over the head with manifold demonstrations of this ambiguously meaningful, uh, fact. Let's face it: the student of this glossary who has not noticed this fact is basically a COMPLEAT NINCOMPOOP! and is kindly called upon to take notice of the fact (of glossary self-reflectivity, I mean), so that we can all move on.

Now then, that we are all reading from the same page (S04.html, to be precise, or maybe S.cgi), your glossarist raises the following question which will no doubt fascinate you: we know that the SBF glossary is a (most excellent, of course) work of metanonfiction, but is the Stammtisch in se self-reflexive? The answer, you will be relieved to know, is just a hyperlink away.

    In 1943 I had arrived at a dead-end in my attempts to find a theory of man, society, and history that would permit an adequate interpretation of the phenomena in my chosen field of studies. ...
...
    The default of the school-philosophies was caused by a restriction of the horizon similar to the restrictions of the consciousness that I could observe in the political mass movements. But if that was true, I had observed the restriction, and recognized it as such, with the criteria of the observation coming from a consciousness with a larger horizon, which in this case happened to be my own. ...
...
    What I had discovered was consciousness in the concrete, in the personal, social, and historical existence of man, as the specifically human mode of participation in reality. At the time, however, I was far from clear about the full bearing of the discovery because I did not know enough about the great precedents of existential analysis in antiquity, by far surpassing, in exactness and luminosity of symbolization, the contemporary efforts. I was not aware, for instance, of the Heraclitian analysis of public and private consciousness, in terms of xynon and the idiotes, or of a Jeremiah's analysis of prophetic existence, before I learned Greek and Hebrew in the 1930s.
    Nevertheless, I was very much aware that my ``larger horizon'' was not a personal idiosyncrasy but surrounded me from all sides as a social and historical fact from which I could draw nourishment for my own consciousness. ...

I know what you're thinking: ``Sure, but that's the beginning of chapter one -- introductory remarks. Personal experience for orientational purposes.'' Alright then, from page 41:

    Our old family seamstress in Oberkassel, Mrs. Balters, has much influenced me gently. She introduced me to the Leather-Stocking Tales; I still remember distinctly the much-used and greasy book that she brought. I must have been about six years old. Leather-Stocking constituted an inner kingdom of adventure; I do not remember having understood America to be the scene of the tales.
    More important were our theological conversations. Mrs. Balters had excellent information about Paradise. All that I know about Paradise I learned from her. ...

As Americans squabble over whether their presidential cliff-hanger is a case of democracy at its finest or constitutional confusion, many Europeans are relishing their self-styled role as a sort of transatlantic heckling gallery.

(In the same article, Herbert quotes a number of malapropisms attributed to George W. Bush. He expresses skepticism, but fails to note that they are well-known to have been spoken by J. Danforth Quayle. Depend upon it: someone who stumbles on vocabulary is likely to have other faults.)

Well, selim is one form of the Arabic word salam (cognate with Hebrew shalom), and occurs as a Muslim name. During the medieval era, high accomplishments in language and literature were reached in the Islamic world -- the highest, in some estimations. So there's a connection of sorts.

SELIM's website makes a distinction between all-caps unitalicized ``SELIM'' for the society and italicized ``Selim'' for the society's journal (ISSN 1132-631X) published (mostly) annually since 1989. Most of the content is in Modern English,

(WARNING: the rest of this entry contains more boring detail unrelieved by paragraph breaks and traces of nuts.)

There's a famous story that after a public demonstration of electrical phenomena by Faraday (see EMF), PM Gladstone asked him what good it was, and Faraday replied ``Someday, sir, you will tax it.''

I guess that would make Faraday a Republican. Gladstone, or more precisely his possible drowning, figures in Disraeli's distinction between tragedy and disaster.

A site in Oz has some nice graphics for those who are not faint of bandwidth.

Here's a description from Charles Evans & Associates.

Cf. American Musicological Society (AMS) and Society for American Music (SAM).

In detail: German universities used the term Semester, derived from the Latin [cursus] semestris (`six-month [course -- implicitly, of study]'). Most universities in most places I know of use a semester system -- two long terms separated by two long breaks, often with short academic terms for intensive or short courses during one or both breaks.

In the US, the typical semester has about fifteen weeks of classes and a final-exam period of something over a week, plus some vacation days. Typically, the Spring term runs from mid-January to mid-May and a fall term from just after Labor Day, or early September, to mid-December. Obviously this makes the schedule for fall a bit tighter, so although the mid-March ``Spring Break'' is an institution, the longest break during the fall semester is typically the long weekend of Thanksgiving. A lot of US schools have a ``quarter'' system, but this is the semester entry, so we can't discuss that.

In Japan a semester system is standard, with the school year beginning in April and final exams around the end of January. The Japanese word for semester (i.e. term) is gakki. [The double-k, incidentally, is not an artefact of transliteration. The k's are a geminate pair, with a syllable break in the middle. The word gakki makes a minimal pair with gaki, a derogatory word for `kid' (i.e., `child, young person'). Oh yeah, this is all covered at the gakki entry. Well, you probably needed to know it right away.]

The common semiconductors (homopolar and compound semiconductors) have relatively weak electron-phonon coupling and electron-electron interactions, so carriers produced by doping are quasifree, with electron and hole mobilities much greater than 10 cm²/V-sec. At low temperatures, in single-crystal material that has been modulation doped, phonon, defect and ionized-impurity scattering are all small and mobilities on the order of 10⁷ cm²/V-sec have been achieved.

The Chop Shop again offers what it calls ``Latin Proverb Undies'' for women and ex-boyfriends. They look cheap and they cost $9 to $11 apiece. The ``proverbs'' are not proverbs but mostly riffs on real Latin proverbs or translations of common English expressions (e.g., ``Carpe Noctem'' instead of ``Carpe Diem''; ``Amor Caecus Est,'' `Love Is Blind''), and they're mostly grammatical. They're not very sexy, but the print is small enough that you have to get close to read it. This reminds me of something that happened to me that I had better not retell yet.

The Japanese sen discussed above is written as a kanji. Kanji are traditional Chinese characters, typically pronounced in at least a couple of ways in Japanese. This sen kanji has a Mandarin pronunciation Romanized as qián. The Mainland Chinese currency, the yuan, is subdivided into 100 fen, which I imagine are something else.

Yuan, yen, and won (Korean currency unit) all look like they might be the same word. After all, what's a vowel (or a semivowel) among friends (or enemies). The ``English-Chinese Dictionary (Unabridged)'' edited by Lu Gusun asserts firmly that the Korean word is derived from the Chinese yuán. [No Chinese etymology is offered for chon (or jeon or jun), the hundredth part of either Korea's won.] The Japanese word is a bit more of a problem, and this dictionary unaccountably offers yuán as its origin (albeit tentatively). One small problem is that its pronunciation in Japanese is ``en.'' A substantial problem is that its kanji is different from that of yuán. The kanji for en means `circle,' and the (different) hanji for yuán means `round [thing].'

Sen is also the name of the hundredth part of the base monetary unit of various other countries. It is (or possibly was) 1/100 of an Indonesian rupiah, a Bruneian dollar, a Malaysian ringgit or dollar, and a Cambodian riel. (The Bruneian sen is also called a cent.) The American Heritage Dictionary (AHD4) agrees with the Lu Gusun dictionary on the origin of the Japanese sen (``from Chinese (Mandarin) qián, money, coin''). It traces the Indonesian sen through senti back to cent. The cent was 1/100 of a Dutch guilder. On historical or geographical grounds, I suppose the Malaysian and Bruneian sen have the same origin. I can't tell exactly what the Lu Gun dictionary has to say, since it says it mostly in Chinese, but it uses the same symbol for the Indonesian and Cambodian sen (different from the one used for the Japanese sen). FWIW, 100 Vietnamese xu are worth one Vietnamese dong.

Some day we'll have an entry for the centum-satem thing.

Example of use: as the WSJ reported on August 1, 2005 (article available on line from the Pittsburgh PG), the FDA and EPA delayed many years in issuing a public warning about mercury levels in canned tuna, and then issued one that was vague and apparently inadequate. Interviewed for the story, former EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt explained: ``Mercury is bad and fish is good. We needed to choose the right words that would give people a sense of knowledge without creating unwarranted fear.''

The Our flows south for 78 km, approximately along the border of Germany with Belgium and then with Luxembourg; it is a tributary of the Sauer. I don't know how much of Luxembourg's electric power is hydroelectric; power companies like to emphasize their ``green'' side. Their homepage says they operate a pump-fed power station at Vianden (a historic town on the Our) for peak power production. They don't say what powers the pumps, but they go on quickly to say that they also operate hydroelectric and wind-power facilities.

Anyway, the river names are interesting. Sauer is a cognate of, and in ordinary contexts has the same meaning as, the English word sour. (See, however, the acid entry.) The name of the Our is apparently a French spelling of the old German name Ur. There's an evidently unrelated German word Uhr (same pronunciation) that means (and is cognate with) `hour' and also means `clock, watch.' There's another morpheme ur- which is more interesting.

Many English-speakers find ur- a useful prefix for which there is no adequate English translation. It refers to ultimate origin. Thus, ursprünglich is an adverb that can be translated `original' but feels more like `in ultimate origin.' English has borrowed Ursprache, `protolanguage,' and Urtext, `original text.' (In the relevant context, however, this ought to mean `original lyrics.') There is no known connection between this morpheme and the Biblical city of Ur whence came Abraham.

There might be a connection with the Latin orior, oriri, `to rise' (it looks funny because it's a deponent verb, okay?) and words like orient, origin, and abort that are ultimately derived from that. The Latin is believed to come from an Indo-European root *er-, with reflexes *ar, *or, *art(a) in Germanic, that yielded the English words are, arise, raise, [the verb] rear, and rise.

In Old High German, er was a preposition meaning `from, out of,' and ur was a semantically undifferentiated alternate pronunciation. Both forms ultimately ceased to be used prepositionally, but they survive as distinct prefixes. There is also an adverb eher, meaning `earlier,' which originated as a comparative form of er. So far I haven't been able to find a linguistic reference work that makes the connections I have failed to make explicit in this paragraph: that the er roots that yielded modern German ur- and eher are identical with the *er- that yielded origin. (It would also be interesting if there were a connection with the extinct aurochs, whose name is ultimately Germanic; in Old English, for example, the name was ur.)

Der Kelch is `the goblet,' or similar drinking glass, and comes from an early (pre-Christian) adoption of the Latin calicem (accusative of calix) into West Germanic. Old English had a cognate, but later versions of the word, borrowed from ecclesiastical Latin and from Old French (in the thirteenth century and then again in the fourteenth), each successively extinguished use of earlier cognates, leaving Modern English with chalice.

The Latin calix that is the origin of the base noun of the German Blütenkelch (meaning calyx) is in fact unrelated to the word calyx. The Latin calyx is a borrowing of the Greek kályx (outer covering of a plant part such as a fruit, flower, or bud), which comes from the verb kalýptein , `to cover.' However, confusion of calix and calyx is common in the scientific literature, and calyx is now widely used for any cup-like organ.

This entry pahrt of the Japanese berry inaforamashan rin. Preeze now to proceed to sumo.

Ricciotto Canudo (b. 1879), an Italian film theorist, published a manifesto on October 25, 1911, entitled ``La Naissance d'un sixième art - Essai sur le cinématographe.'' (This was published in French because Canudo was by then established as a leading figure in the French avant-garde. Except while serving in the French and later the Italian military during WWI, Canudo lived in Paris from 1902 until his death in 1923.) In this manifesto he argued that cinema synthesized the ``spatial arts'' (architecture, sculpture, and painting) with the ``temporal arts'' (music and dance). Okay, the quoted terms are not literal quotes from the original essay. I suppose he wrote ``arts spatiaux et temporels'' or somesuch.

Anyway, at some point he seems to have noticed that there was already a sixth art, whichever it was, and by 1922 he had founded La gazette de sept arts. The next year he published an essay better known than the 1911 effort, this one probably entitled ``Manifeste des Sept Arts.'' The French Wikipédia page pour Canudo gives the title ``Manifeste du septième art,'' which seems more sensible to me, but l'université de Metz serves a page for Canudo that shows what appears to be a scan of the cover, with the Sept Arts title. In any case, that particular essay went through a few earlier versions, variously published in France and Italy. According to that U. Metz page, Canudo introduced the term le septième art in 1912.

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) clearly fancied the name Septimus. The most prominent Septimus in his work is Rev. Septimus Harding, who figures in his Barchester stories [The Warden, 1855; Barchester Towers, 1857; The Last Chronicle of Barset, 1867]. Trollope also has a Rev. Septimus Blake in The Way We Live Now (1875). In Phineas Redux (1874), one of his characters misremembers the name of Quintus Slide, publisher of salacious gossip, as ``Mr. Septimus Slope, or whatever his name is.''

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, (1870), Charles Dickens (1812-1870) included a minor canon ``Rev. Septimus Crisparkle,'' so named, as explained parenthetically, ``because six little brother Crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were born, like six weak little rushlights, as they were lighted.'' Dickens chose memorable, evocative names that were often puns, onomatopoeic, or both, or close. In this instance, he has to insert a little story to make his pun. Other and better examples:

1. Thomas Gradgrind, a great believer in Facts, and Dickens's representative of insensitive scientific materialism (not yet Scientific Materialism) in Hard Times (1854).
2. Mr. M'Choakumchild, master of the experimental school established by Mr. Thomas Gradgrind.
3. Luke Honeythunder, a somewhat detestable bureaucrat of the philanthropic persuasion, in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870). The story also has two orphans surnamed Landless (seems almost trite, after King John). A lot of orphans in this story. Another is ``Rosa Bud.'' This is ridiculous! Observe that Edwin Drood is dated to the year Dickens died. We don't get to find out how the novel was supposed to end.
4. Miss Nipper (see the syllepsis entry).
5. ``Pip'' (nickname of Philip Pirrip, hero of Great Expectations, first published in serial form 1860-61).
6. Ebenezer Scrooge. Really, what more is there to say? A Christmas Carol, 1843.

Before moving on, back to Septimus, I'd like to mention Smerdyakov -- half-wit, maybe half-brother to The Brothers Karamazov (by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as if you didn't know that, 1879-1880), and murderer of their father and himself. The name suggests his place of birth (an out-house).

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) included both a Septimus and an Octavius in his The Moonstone (1868). Octavius Guy (that's a name) is bug-eyed, just like a lot of bass-players, and that's all I'm going to tell you about him, but it might be relevant. Septimus Luker (not ``Lukier,'' as it says in the Cyclopedia of Literary Characters) is a moneylender who takes the Moonstone diamond for safekeeping from a guy who stole it and who is eventually found dead. A moneylender is a shady character -- someone who may be engaged in a legit business, but irregular opportunities have a way of cropping up. Now think about Bogie. In The Maltese Falcon he plays a private detective, and in Casablanca a nightclub owner. Two demimondain professions. In each case, Bogie gets care of a highly valued piece of stolen property, and various people die in mysterious circumstances. As for scary or scared-looking eyes, I can't remember whether that's covered in MF.

Wilkie Collins, I might mention, made a career writing novels that were disparaged in his time as ``sensational'' (Moonstone was not in this category). Eventually, I'll probably mention another of his novels at the nemo entry. Can't wait, huh? Collins had a close personal association with Charles Dickens from about 1851 until the latter's death; his younger brother Charles married Dickens's daughter Katie.

One of the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction is Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925). (I'm writing in freshman essay mode, eh?) One of the important characters, by some measures the most courageous and sympathetic, and clearly representing Virginia Woolf's romantic rebellion against nineteenth-century rationalism (What, again? Didn't Dickens cover that in Hard Times?) is Septimus Warren Smith. He's married to an Italian woman named Lucrezia, but in this story he and not she commits suicide. It's a wonder professors who have to read hundreds of freshman comp essays don't commit suicide pretty often too. Three suicides mentioned so far in this entry, by my count. Ah, literature. I firmly approve the use of uncommon names for people with common surnames, but this seems to happen more in fiction than in life. Vide camp.

You know, having slogged through to the end of this entry myself, I have to admit it grows a bit dutiful after this point, even boring. You might as well follow the camp link.

Disraeli's Vivian Grey (1826) included a young barrister named Mr. Septimus Sessions. Oh, and it turns out we're not quite through with Reverends Septimi. George Meredith (1828-1909) put a Rev. Septimus Barmby in his One of Our Conquerors (1891).

John O'Keefe (1747-1833) had a hit with the play ``The Doldrum'' (like, 1798 or so, published in 1803). This sported both a Septimus (played by Mr. Quick; sometimes you wonder which names aren't invented) and a Captain Septimus (Mr. Middleton).

The other play I can find that features a modern Septimus (not counting the Edwin Drood stage adaptation by Joseph Hatton, 1841-1907) is ``Pork Chops, Or A Dream At Home'' (1860) by E. L. Blanchard, ``a Farcical Extravaganza IN ONE ACT.'' This features a Septimus Snooks, ``a Gentleman connected with the Press---vulgo---Penny-a-liner---with the `Life of a Vagabond' '' according to the front matter.

Joaquin Miller (1837-1913) included the interesting rich widow of one Septimus Boggs in a long poem called ``The Baroness of New York'' (1877). Miller was an interesting character in his own right, so interesting that I hardly know where to begin, so I won't.

In 1978 there was a UK TV series called ``The Body in Question,'' written and hosted by Jonathan Miller, an interesting character in his own right (his professional life has alternated between medicine and the theater and related areas). In one episode the following exchange from Hard Times is quoted:

``Are you in pain, dear mother?''

``I think there's a pain somewhere in the room,'' said Mrs. Gradgrind, ``but I couldn't positively say that I have got it.''

The two other common praenomina are Sextus (Sex.) and Spurius (S. or Sp.).

The word seda (`silk') doesn't sound too similar to sera in Spanish, but it could be confused as pronounced by many non-native speakers: The letter ``d'' in Spanish is pronounced like the voiced fricative ``th'' in the English words they, these. The noninitial single letter ``r'' in Spanish is pronounced like the flap consonant that many or most American English speakers use for intervocalic ``d'' (and intervocalic ``t''). See also será next:

The song lyrics include the same phrase in English: `Whatever will be will be.' This is almost an inspired translation. One day I should come back to this entry and write a dissertation on the differences between what and whatever, and the twisted ways that they do and don't map into ¿qué?, lo que, and que.

English-speakers and sloppy spellers of all tongues write the word without the accent: ``sera.'' This spelling moves the stress to the penult. There's actually a word with that spelling.

Universiti Kebangsaan, a/k/a the National University of Malaysia, established its SERI on July 1, 2005. Suri, the daughter of Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, was born April 18, 2006 (except according to the National Enquirer). I think that explains everything. Cf. SERIS.

    Nationalisms and Sexualities was first imagined at Eve Sedgwick's house in Amherst, Massachusetts during a pajama party attended by the editors and several members of the editorial board of the newly-launched journal Genders.

That was the punch line.

A ``historic international conference'' resulted, held at Harvard June 16-18, 1989, sponsored by the Harvard Center for Literary and Cultural Studies, the Radcliffe Project on Interdependence, and Amherst College. I was kind of expecting something like ``Amherst College Initiative on Gendered Discourses of the Other,'' but it just says ``Amherst College.'' I guess they don't believe in compartmentalizing that stuff. They let all the fine individual participations of the college redound to the enhanced reputation of the whole.

Just in case you were thinking of inviting me to your next conference-brainstorming session, I think you should know: I sleep naked.

Dave Barry explains about the US version of this telephone, uh, service that it's just no good. They tell you to write clearly and not make arithmetic mistakes, instead of telling you how to cheat without getting caught.

Why was it the Pentagon that was doing this? Because the relevant agency (FVAP) is within the Department of Defense (DoD). During the Florida vote-counting morass in 2000, it was widely reported that most Americans voting from abroad were in or with the military. In January 2004, when SERVE was publicized, it was reported that of the six million U.S. voters living overseas, most are members of the military or their relatives. Although statistics about Americans abroad are strikingly uncertain, it is clear that these claims, at least, are false. See the FVAP entry for more.

According to the theory of relativity, these six-rows-of-three-piece-columns or three-rows-of-six-piece-columns compass equal quantities of chocolate (in the ``rest frame,'' if you haven't opened the box yet). A separate calculation shows that this quantity is eighteen (18) chocolate pieces. This number is confirmed at three separate places on the outside of the box -- which makes sense: once you can read the inside of the box, you can probably tell how many pieces there are by the methodology of direct inspection. This has to be what people mean when they talk about ``thinking outside the box.''

Flipping the box over carefully, we find an information region labeled ``Nutrition Facts.'' (There is separate text, bearing the rubric ``Ingredients,'' which evidently does not contain nutrition facts, in some application of that term.) In order to state the nutrition facts clearly, it is necessary to state the nutrition content using intensive measures (in the thermodynamic sense) rather than extensive ones.

``Serving size'' is the food-science concept that makes this intellectual transformation possible. Intensive quantities are stated in ordinary extensive units like grams, but these quantities represent ``amount per serving.'' In our chosen example (Lindt-brand Lindor Truffles), the serving size is

[Information Facts: Normally I don't bother, but in this entry it seemed apropos to indicate the ``information serving size.'' Studies indicate that at approximately this point, give or take a word or two, readers pause to digest the information so far consumed. One serving of glossary entry contains 16% of the recommended daily value (DV) of information for the sort of adult who consumes 2000 bytes per day.]

39 grams. Given that the net weight in the package is 100 g, a serving size of 39  might seem a bit fussy. After all, they might have chosen a serving size of 40 g, which divides evenly into two packages. (Don't tell me you selfishly bought only one!) I'm sure that Lindt & Sprüngli GmbH catches a lot of flack for this, and I'm here to tell you it is just completely unfair. A sober reappraisal of the relevant nutrition fact -- ``Serv. Size 7 pieces (39g)'' -- suggests that

You know how some sites say ``under construction''? Here you actually get to see the construction underway.

Actually, it's not something NASA does anymore, since Congress cut funding in 1993. The project has been continued with private contributions -- see the SETI Institute and the SETI League. Listen to Coast-to-Coast AM long enough, and you're bound to hear about it.

In the SBF, we conduct a very similar enterprise, which is the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It's been suggested that Hungary might be a good place to search.

The Planetary Society hosts back issues of Bioastronomy News (scroll down to it there), the official publication of the International Astronomy Union's Commission 51, which worries about such things.

Back in the 1990's, I think, you could let your computer participate in the search in its spare time while you were away. It would help search for less-likely-to-be-noise patterns in the electronic noise of outer space. (The link is dead, okay? Now you can use your personal computer, when you're not using it for anything else and even when you are, to search for the search program of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence on Earth, or cyberspace or wherever.)

Ha-ha! Just kidding! Of course: everyone knows that belief is not based on reasoned argument. Not even true belief.

Well, there are always arguments about whether viruses are alive, yet there's no question but that you can kill them anyway.

• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nuns. Wait until Sunday.
• The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Genes.
• The Seven Hobbits of Highly Effective Mythology.

Radcliffe College was in Cambridge along with Harvard, but was absorbed into Harvard in the 1970's. All that remains is a Radcliffe Institute (research into Women's studies, um, broadly defined) and annual campaigns for money from Radcliffe alumnae. (See the seriousness entry for a sample of the Institute's good work.) Barnard is across the street from Columbia.

Wellesley is a dozen miles from Harvard and Bryn Mawr a dozen miles from the University of Pennsylvania. Vassar College (in Poughkeepsie, NY) and Cornell (in Ithaca, NY) are both less than half a dozen miles from nowhere, but they're different nowheres, nowheres near each other, no way. Well, Vassar is a bit over 30 miles from West Point. Basically, this sister has no big brother. Mount Holyoke, the eldest sister, and Smith College, are both in Massachusetts.

``Trangeneration,'' a documentary series that aired on the Sundance Channel in September 2005, featured four transgender students described as ``two women and two men.'' One of the students, Lukas, was transitioning from female to male while attending Smith College. I do not know why Lukas decided to attend Smith College, but I can see it from at least a couple of angles. It also means that anyone who looks at his résumé now will notice a sort of discrepancy. (Another student, a Filipino scholarship student at UCLA, bought hormones from street dealers for a fraction of the price of medical estrogen. Estrogen is available as a street drug? Why order from Canada when discount pricing is as close as the nearest inner city?)

According to a 2005.09.15 article in the San Francisco Chronicle (byline Reyhan Harmanci), ``legal and social pressure has resulted in administrative changes at many schools. The main issues are in the places where normative gender is enforced -- restrooms, on-campus housing, sports teams. Gender-neutral restrooms have become the standard at Wesleyan University, Oberlin, University of Massachusetts, the University of Chicago, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of New Hampshire, Beloit College in Wisconsin and several other schools.'' This is gonna wreak havoc with Title IX.

Bryn Mawr's grad school has been integrated, but the undergraduate college is still all-female. I'll just keep adding facts at random.

The two other common praenomina are Servius (Ser.) and Spurius (S. or Sp.). You say you don't know what a praenomen is? Well shame on you! All you had to do was ask and be berated! (We're trying to reproduce the traditional Latin pedagogical experience here, see?) It's explained at the tria nomina entry.

A name to watch out for is Sextus Empiricus, a physician and Skeptic philosopher of the second century BC. A Greek who may have taught in Rome or Alexandria, he is normally called Sextus, with that being taken as his name in the Greek style, Latinized. Then Empiricus is regarded as an epithet referring to the fact that he was a member of the ``Empirical school'' of physicians (although he did not agree completely with that school). However, and particularly with the little that we know of him, it cannot be ruled out Empiricus was his gens or family name.

I only said I wanted to mention Teresias.

You know, the trouble with a love letter is that you put a lot of work into writing it and making it personal and everything, but after all that effort you send it to very few people. Fortunately, I have a place to deposit such subliterary odds'n'ends. (This glossary.)

To Miss X------:

   I know a bold woman like you can have any boy she
wants, and I know you know you are a ``man-eater.''  I
see you with other boys -- my rivals -- and I always
check them out.  What makes *them* so special?  Why
not me?

When that day I long for comes, when you finally turn
your gaze upon me and I quickly glance down at my
knees, a smile playing at the corner of my blushing
cheek, you know you will have me.

But I don't want to be just another notch in your
lipstick case.

The guys you've been with before, they're just ``loose
men.''  They only want you for ... for what's between
your legs!  *I'm not that kind of guy.*  Oh sure, I
think about, you know, down there.  Nice guys have
needs too.  But I want you to respect me after we....
(Giggle.)

I'm not like those empty-headed boys you've known.  I'm
a quality person.  I have serious interests, I watch
Animal Planet, I read magazines.  That's why I look up
to you, not just because you're on top.  I'm the kind
of guy who can appreciate the woman that you are --
your education, your seriousness, your sense of humor,
your income.

xxxooo (heart) xxoo,
your Secret Admirer.

P.S. I want to have your baby!

A much tamer and lamer cinematic treatment of sex in space occurs in Moonraker. Roger Moore (as James Bond) and Lois Chiles (Bond Girl ``Dr. Holly Goodhead'' -- Ian Fleming was a satirist, you know) are shown post coitus in an orbiting space shuttle. They are obviously floating in zero gravity, but some mysterious force causes her hair and the sheet covering them to hang earthward.

Astronauts may have sex on the ground, of course, or in bed if they prefer. Apparently this is something that shuttle astronauts Lisa Nowak and Bill Oefelein did, for a couple of years while they were married to other people. Then they broke up and Oefelein took up with Colleen Shipman. On February 5, 2007, Nowak drove 900 miles from her home in Houston to Orlando, Florida, where she confronted Shipman. The confrontation led to charges of attempted kidnapping, burglary with assault and battery against Nowak. Nowak -- at least as of as May 2007 -- and Oefelein were in the Navy. Ironically enough, but not ironically enough to merit a spot in our Nomenclature is destiny entry, Shipman is not in the Navy. She's an Air Force Captain. I guess you could say it was an inter-service rivalry.

News reports described Nowak's 900-mile drive as ``bizarre,'' apparently just because she wore an astronaut diaper so she wouldn't have to stop. Her lawyer has insisted that she didn't wear a diaper, that those were left over in the car from an earlier trip with a baby along.

``People who honestly appreciate gastronomic miracles or in other words really good cooking never worry about their weight while they eat, anymore than a man worries about his heart while having sexual intercourse with a good looking woman.''

[Punctuation and the rest sic.]

But that isn't what prompted my thought of the old saw, because I didn't notice the ``introduction.'' I noticed the facing page, page 3, which begins the Meats section with ``Toulouse Lautrec Chicken.'' An illustration dominates the page. Its caption begins ``This painting is called `Friendship' by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec'' and ends ``[t]he name of this painting is probably one of the greatest understatements ever made.'' The painting shows a reclining couple facing each other; she is topless. At first you don't even notice her hand. (Either it's horribly deformed or that part of the painting wasn't very carefully executed.)

Early in January 2007, when she was in a twelve-step program for her ``addiction issues,'' Lindsay Lohan spent a lot of time sexting Brody Jenner. Brody, the son of Olympian Bruce Jenner, has achieved fame by appearing on a reality show and dating celebutantes. At the time, he had just signed a deal to be a ``spokesman'' for Scope mouthwash. Was he supposed to say things, or just open his mouth? When asked by <Usmagazine.com> to comment on the Lohan story, Jenner said, ``Sorry, dude. I don't text and tell.'' Chivalry is not dead.

The US Congress once designated the entire Commonwealth of Puerto Rico a special economic zone, in fact if not in name, and exempted companies from paying taxes on profits earned from manufacturing there. They sez the system was gamed, and Congress rescinded the tax break in 2006. But after that many companies shuttered their manufacturing plants in PR, and they sez it hurt the economy there. I sez you can't have it all both ways; if rescinding the tax break hurt the economy, it suggests the tax break was helping it (however inefficiently). That wasn't the only problem, but in any case, as of 2016, PR has been on the brink of bankruptcy (a legal remedy that isn't legally available to US territories such as PR -- yet or possibly ever) for a couple of years.

I was first rather pointedly informed of this fact in 1975, but it goes back at least a bit further. Here's an item from a novel published in 1946 (set in 1944 or so; details at the BF entry):

   ``Wake up,'' someone was saying. ``We're letting down.'' It was broad daylight in the plane, late morning or early afternoon.
   ``Down where?'' he asked, and he pulled himself together.
   ``Frisco.''
   ``Don't call it that,'' Bob Tasmin said. ``Call it San Francisco. The citizens don't like it.''

Oh look, here's something: at one point, the Italian consulate in San Francisco had the domain name <italconsfrisco.org>. I guess they found out that might not be popular.

You know, people from Cincinnati take no offense at ``Cinci'' (also spelled Cincy) and people from Philadelphia don't mind ``Philly.'' A clerk I spoke with at a Turkey Hill store in Wind Gap, PA, called Pennsylvania ``Pennsy.'' (That's pronounced, and less often spelled, Pencey or Pency. You remember that at the beginning of Catcher in the Rye, Holden is flunking out of his latest prep school? That was Pencey Prep.)

Forget all that stuff about going with flowers in your hair and meeting some gentle people there. Don't worry about checking your heart and forgetting the ticket stub. Eric Burdon needed a fact-checker. All that stuff was propaganda. San Franciscans are just plain thin-skinned.

Hold the phone -- this just in! In response to threatening, um, I mean to characteristically polite email from many beautiful San Franciscisciscans, I am prepared to reveal my recent discovery of the true objection to ``Frisco.'' It's to avoid confusion with Frisco, Colorado, and Frisco, Texas. So considerate!

Maybe we should use ``Frisky'' instead of ``Frisco.'' Someone almost tried that, in fact. I'm thinking of Henry Glover (``with'' Morris Levy -- co-writing or maybe just co-collecting royalties), who wrote the words and music for ``California Sun.''

This charted for the Rivieras just as the British Invasion hit and changed everything. ``California Sun'' was a very representative American song of the era that closed then -- almost an instant antique. I think it was released in 1964; it entered the Top 40 on February 1, 1964 and stayed nine weeks, reaching #5. The Beatles' ``I Want To Hold Your Hand'' had its American release on December 26, 1963, and first appeared on the Top 40 in the January 25, 1964, edition of Billboard. There was a historic mob scene at JFK International Airport when the Beatles landed on February 7, and when they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show two days later, they could hardly be heard over the screams of their fans. (Eventually, crowd noise was a major factor in the Beatles' decision to stop touring.) ``I Want To Hold Your Hand'' spent 14 weeks in the Top 40, including seven weeks at #1. For the week of April 4, the Beatles owned the top five slots of the Top 40.

(On the web, I've read alternative reports of the chart career of ``California Sun,'' such as that it was held at #2 or toppled from #1 by the Beatles' first American hit. There must be some basis for these reports, but I don't know what it is. I don't think it's the Billboard competitor Cashbox. The #5 ranking and associated dates are from the 7th and 8th editions (which were ready to my hand) of Joel Whitburn's The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits. What has been popularly known as the ``Top 40'' since mid-1958 is the top 40 slots of the Billboard ``Hot 100,'' based on both sales and airplay.)

The Rivieras, you'll want to know, formed when the members were in high school in South Bend, Indiana, and had some success playing clubs in the area. They were variously described as playing surf, garage, teen, and frat rock. ``California Sun'' was their one hit. There were a number of personnel changes, partly caused by the draft, and they broke up in 1966. (Not for good -- they got together again in the 80's.) Anyway, that Glover song includes these lines:

Well the girls are frisky in ol' 'Frisco --
A pretty little chick wherever you go.

The ECLIPSE website hosts areas for Doom, Dr. Who, Captain Power (Captain Who?), and Babylon 5. In 1998 ECLIPSE won a lot of web awards, but it's getting tougher all the time.

There's an on-line Ultimate Science Fiction Poetry Guide.

Traditionally, a distinction is observed between SF, meaning ``hard-core'' Science Fiction, and sci-fi, which may be more fantasy-oriented, with ``fantasy'' often in the sense of wish fulfillment. However, non-SF sci-fi enthusiasts by and large do not cooperate in maintaining this (sometimes loose) distinction.

SFA ``is the international trade association of the snack food industry representing snack manufacturers and suppliers. Founded in 1937, SFA represents over 800 companies worldwide. SFA business membership includes, but is not limited to, manufacturers of potato chips, tortilla chips, cereal snacks, pretzels, popcorn, cheese snacks, snack crackers, meat snacks, pork rinds, snack nuts, party mix, corn snacks, pellet snacks [I think they mean M&M's and similar foods, and not bird food], fruit snacks, snackbars, granola, snack cakes, cookies and various other snacks.''

The italics on the not-limited clause serve to highlight the differences of opinion that necessarily exist on the question of what exactly qualifies as a ``snack food.'' The book Snack Food (1990), edited by R. Gordon Booth, includes in the category of snack foods pickles, sauces, and salted jellyfish. Somewhat at the opposite extreme is Snack Food Technology (1993) by Samuel A. Matz, (details at the snack food entry). Matz prefers to exclude the three aforementioned items as well as candy, although he concedes in his preface that ``a good case could be made for including all such materials in the wider category `snacks'.''

Matz's laudable fastidiousness leads to admirable caution in the case of granola, but also to excessive indecision. For example, the introduction of chapter 18, on ``Meat-Based Snacks,'' begins

      There are several snacks composed primarily of raw materials derived from animals [he's not thinking of milk-chocolate-coated caramel here]. Almost every consumer would agree that fried puffed bacon rinds are snacks [hadn't we better take a survey?], because their texture, appearance, and flavor resemble those characteristics of puffed or fried cereal snacks [he must be thinking mouthfeel here; I don't recall pork rinds tasting like cocoa puffs], and they are sold in portion-size pouches for eating mostly between regularly scheduled meals. ...

From various fortune files, here's

For all P, where P is a package of snack food, P is a SINGLE-SERVING package of snack food.

What's this ``regularly scheduled meals'' business? I take my food item when I'm hungry. As the French say: Consume mass quantities!