The 3-6-3 rule describes how bankers would give 3% interest on depositors’ accounts, lend the depositors money at 6% interest and then be playing golf at 3pm.
artwork { Donald Judd, Untitled, 1985 | Donald Judd: Works in Granite, Cor-ten, Plywood, and Enamel on Aluminum at The Pace Gallery, 534 W 25th St, NYC, through Mar 26, 2011 }
Culturally, food has become completely internationalized. One of the reasons I write about food is because it reflects history and society and what’s going on. I spend a lot of time in Basque country; it has a great food tradition. Basque dishes, like the beans of Tolosa, came about because of 17th-century trade with Central America. Foods like that last because they came about through a historical process. But a lot of the famous new Basque chefs, their food is odd and curious, foods that could be from anywhere with no cultural underpinnings. So in the long view of history, it won’t have any importance. (…)
The word for salad in Latin is salted, but it’s a misrepresentation — they didn’t sprinkle salt on it, they used a brine dressing.
{ Interview with Mark Kurlansky | Culinate | Continue reading }
The word “salad” comes from the French salade of the same meaning, from the Latin salata (salty), from sal (salt). (Other salt-related words include sauce, salsa, sausage, and salary). In English, the word first appears as “salad” or “sallet” in the 14th century.
photo { Jessica Craig-Martin }
previously { Paul Krugman, Supply, demand, and English food, 1998 }
A double bind is an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, in which one message negates the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of response.
Double bind theory was first described by Gregory Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.
You can tell a person’s personality from the words they use. Neurotics have a penchant for negative words; agreeable types for words pertaining to socialising; and so on. We know this from recordings of people’s speech and from brief writing tasks. Now Tal Yarkoni has extended this line of research to the blogosphere.
For pop-language watchers, January marks the end of the words-of-the-year ritual that has so far given us ‘refudiate’ (New Oxford American Dictionary), ‘austerity’ (Merriam-Webster), and ’spillcam’ (Global Language Monitor). On Friday, members of the American Dialect Society will meet to consider the likes of ‘vuvuzela,’ ‘halfalogue,’ and ‘gleek’ for spots on its 2010 list.
Not all the annual wordfests, however, are celebratory. Since 1976, Lake Superior State University in Michigan has been issuing a list of words and phrases to be banished ‘for mis-use, over-use, and general uselessness.’
Defining a galaxy sounds so simple. We all know what a galaxy is, right? Well, not really. Surprisingly, there is no universally agreed upon definition and the ones generally bandied around leave a great deal of wriggle room.
All this has been thrown into stark relief in recent years by the discovery of a growing number of small, faint, galaxy-like objects that were entirely unknown until now. These have been given various names such as ultra compact dwarfs, ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal galaxies and dwarf elliptical galaxies.
But it isn’t entirely clear whether they have more in common with galaxies like our own or globular clusters, which astronomers generally do not think of as galaxies.
That makes the problem of defining a galaxy a growing concern.
photo { Wallpiercing LED lighting system, designed by Ron Gilad for Flos }
Damnatio memoriae is the Latin phrase literally meaning “damnation of memory.” It was a form of dishonor that could be passed by the Roman Senate upon traitors or others who brought discredit to the Roman State.
The sense of the expression damnatio memoriae and of the sanction is to cancel every trace of the person from the life of Rome, as if he had never existed.
In Ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of Roman elites and emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an individual, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked.
Any truly effective damnatio memoriae would not be noticeable to later historians, since by definition, it would entail the complete and total erasure of the individual in question from the historical record. However, since all political figures have allies as well as enemies, it was difficult to implement the practice completely.
photo { Abby Wilcox }
In a study of 98 languages from a variety of linguistic families, they found the following “rules” seem to apply:
1. All languages contain terms for white and black.
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange, grey, or some combination of these.
artwork { Mark Rothko, Red and Black, 1959 }
Exquisite corpse is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. André Breton writes that the game developed at the residence of friends in an old house at 54, rue du Chateau in Paris. In the beginning were Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Benjamin Peret, Pierre Reverdy, and André Breton. Other participants probably included Joan Miró, Man Ray, René Char, Paul Éluard… The name is derived from a phrase that resulted when Surrealists first played the game, “Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.” (”The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.”)
Last month, Gawker published a series of messages that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had once written to a 19-year-old girl he’d become infatuated with. Gawker called the e-mails “creepy,” “lovesick,” and “stalkery.”
(…) What really surprised me was his typography.
When he sits down to type, Julian Assange reverts to an antiquated habit that would not have been out of place in the secretarial pools of the 1950s: He uses two spaces after every period. Which—for the record—is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.
Oh, Assange is by no means alone. Two-spacers are everywhere.
artwork { Karsten Konrad, Black eye, 2010 }
Did you know the Office of National Drug Control Policy has a publicly-accessible database of “street terms” for drugs? It’s like the feds’ own Urban Dictionary. But with even less accountability and oversight! (…)
Author: Doctor who writes illegal prescriptions
Boo boo bama: Marijuana
Dream gun: Opium
Gangster pills: Depressants
Oyster stew: Cocaine
Raspberry: Female who trades sex for crack or money to buy crack
Strawberry: LSD; female who trades sex for crack or money to buy crack
Toucher: User of crack who wants affection before, during, or after smoking crack
Twin towers: Heroin (after September 11)
Zoomer: Individual who sells fake crack and then fleesWhy is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
The nominal price rigidity you describe is remarkable and unusual. If the price of weed had increased in line with US consumer price inflation, you’d be paying $20–$25 a gramme now. So I agree, it is a puzzle.
My guess is that the illegality of the market gives a push towards the price stickiness you have encountered. Buying and selling cannabis is hazardous and there must be a benefit to a situation where nobody haggles over the price.
Still, the nominal price wouldn’t stick like that unless supply and demand were at least roughly in balance at $10 a gramme. And I confess, I am perplexed. My own research, which has been purely academic, suggests that prices vary between £20 and £250 an ounce in the UK, roughly £1 to £10 a gramme. Since the price stability you describe is not matched in other markets, could it be purely fortuitous?
photo { Olivia Malone }
Cryogenics is the study of the production of very low temperature (below −150 °C, −238 °F or 123 K) and the behavior of materials at those temperatures.
The word cryogenics stems from Greek and means “the production of freezing cold”; however the term is used today as a synonym for the low-temperature state. It is not well-defined at what point on the temperature scale refrigeration ends and cryogenics begins, but most scientists assume it starts at or below -240 °F (about -150 °C or 123 K).
Chinese netizens have already started selecting the Internet catchphrases of 2010. (…)
Geili Geili used to be a word only spoken in the northern dialect literally meaning “giving power,” but is now widely accepted as an adjective describing something “cool,” “awesome,” or “exciting.” Its antonym “bugeili” means “far from desirable,” “dull” or “boring.”
Magic horse is just floating cloud. “Magic horse” actually does not refer to a horse, but is rather a homophone of “shen me” meaning “what.” “Magic horse” replaced its predecessor “xia mi” as the most popular phrase in the Chinese Internet community shortly after its emergence. “Floating cloud” here indicates “purely imaginary” or “disappearing quickly.” Altogether, the phrase means “nothing is worth mentioning.”
{ Flag of the International Federation of Vexillological Associations. | Vexillology is the scholarly study of flags. The Latin word vexillum means “flag.” The term was coined in 1957 by the American scholar Whitney Smith. It was originally considered a sub-discipline of heraldry. It is sometimes considered a branch of semiotics. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
{ Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur, 1899-1904 | Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919) was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including ecology. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
I use a method called “Dutching” (named for 1930s New York gangster, “Dutch” Schultz, whose accountant came up with it). With Dutched bets, you make two or more bets on the same race with more money on more favored horses and less money on longer odds horses such that your profit is the same, no matter which horse wins. (…)
I haven’t bet with this strategy yet, but I have found from playing with the data that very often there are opportunities…
{ David Icke’s Official Forums | Wikipedia }
Arthur Flegenheimer, alias Dutch Shultz, was a fugitive from justice. He was wanted in 1934 for Income Tax Evasion. On October 23, 1935, Shultz and three associates were shot by rival gangsters in a Newark, New Jersey restaurant. Shultz’s death started rival gang wars among the hoodlum and underworld gangs.
{ FBI.gov | Continue reading | Read more: By the mid-1920s, Schultz realized that bootlegging was the way to make serious money. }
In 1961 a new edition of an old and esteemed dictionary was released. The publisher courted publicity, noting the great expense ($3.5 million) and amount of work (757 editor years) that went into its making. But the book was ill-received. It was judged “subversive” and denounced in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Life, and dozens of other newspapers, magazines, and professional journals. Not every publication condemned the volume, but the various exceptions did little to change the widespread impression of a well-known reference work being cast out from the better precincts of American culture.
The dictionary was called “permissive” and details of its perfidy were aired, mocked, and distorted until the publisher was put on notice that it might be bought out to prevent further circulation of this insidious thirteen-and-a-half–pound, four-inch–thick doorstop of a book.
Webster’s Third New International (Unabridged) wasn’t just any dictionary, of course, but the most up-to-date and complete offering from America’s oldest and most respected name in lexicography. (So respected, in fact, that for more than a hundred years other publishers have adopted the Webster’s name as their own.)
The dictionary’s previous edition, Webster’s New International Second Edition (Unabridged), was the great American dictionary with 600,000 entries and numerous competitors but no rivals. With a six-inch-wide binding, it weighed four pounds more than Webster’s Third (W3) and possessed an almost unanswerable air of authority. If you wanted to know how to pronounce chaise longue, it told you, shāz long, end of discussion. It did not stoop to correct or even mention the vulgarization that sounds like “Che’s lounge.” When to use less and when to use fewer? It indicated what strict usage prescribed. It defined celebrant as “one who celebrates a public religious rite; esp. the officiating priest,” not just any old party guest.
The third edition took a more empirical approach, listing variations in pronunciation and spelling until the reader looking for the one correct answer became the recipient of numerous competing answers: shāz long and Che’s lounge (with lounge labeled a folk etymology). Shades of meaning were differentiated with scads of quotations from the heights of literature and the lows of yesterday’s news section. The new unabridged dictionary was more rigorous but harder to use. And all this made some people quite irate. (…)
“I am not a linguist and have no claim to being a lexicographer but have done considerable research on 17th and 18th century dictionaries,” wrote Philip Gove in a job inquiry to the G. & C. Merriam Company in 1946. Gove was a lieutenant commander in the Navy on leave from a teaching position at New York University and, with the end of the war, about to be discharged. A literature PhD who had published articles on Samuel Johnson’s pioneering dictionary, he soon became an assistant editor at Merriam. Five years later, after a long search for a prominent editor to oversee the editing and production of W3, the company promoted the painstaking Gove, then in his late forties, to the position. (…)
An entry’s main function, by Gove’s lights, was to report the existence of a word and define its meanings according to common usage. (…) But how a word should appear in writing was not uppermost in the minds responsible for W3. The only actual word given a capital letter in the first printing was God. Others given a capital letter in later printings were copyrighted names such as Kleenex, which appeared as kleenex in the first printing (the reason it was in the dictionary, of course, was that it had changed in usage from denoting a brand of tissue to being a synonym for tissue), but was thereafter capitalized under threat of lawsuit.
Another innovation Gove introduced was in the style of definition-writing. “He insisted,” explained Morton “that essential information be logically organized in a single coherent and clearly expressed phrase.” In some cases, this led to a more direct expression of a word’s meaning, but it also led to infelicities. The prose was made even more curious by Gove’s hostility to commas, which he banned from definition-writing except to separate items in a series. He even claimed to have saved the equivalent of eighty pages of text by reducing comma use.
The circuitous entry for door, quoted in a caustic Washington Post article, became well known: “a movable piece of a firm material or a structure supported usu. along one side and swinging on pivots or hinges, sliding along a groove, rolling up and down, revolving as one of four leaves, or folding like an accordion by means of which an opening may be closed or kept open . . .” and so on.
This definition, said Gove, was for someone who had never seen a door. (…)
In a 1961 article he penned for Word Study, a marketing newsletter that Merriam circulated to educators, Gove discussed how the young science of linguistics was altering the teaching of grammar. (…) The major point of Gove’s article was to note that many precepts of linguistics, some of which had long been commonplace in lexicography, increasingly underlay the teaching of grammar. The National Council of Teachers of English had even endorsed five of them, and Gove quoted the list, which originally came from the 1952 volume English Language Arts:
1—Language changes constantly.
2—Change is normal.
3—Spoken language is the language.
4—Correctness rests upon usage.
5—All usage is relative.These precepts were not new, he added, “but they still come up against the attitude of several generations of American educators who have labored devotedly to teach that there is only one standard which is correct.”
photo { Alec Soth }
At the forefront of early psychedelic research was a British psychiatrist by the name of Humphry Osmond (1917-2004). In 1951, Osmond moved to Canada to take the position of deputy director of psychiatry at the Weyburn Mental Hospital and, with funding from the government and the Rockefeller Foundation, established a biochemistry research program. The following year, he met another psychiatrist by the name of Abram Hoffer. (…)
The pair hit upon the idea of using LSD to treat alcoholism in 1953, at a conference in Ottawa. (…)
By 1960, they had treated some 2,000 alcoholic patients with LSD, and claimed that their results were very similar to those obtained in the first experiment. Their treatment was endorsed by Bill W., a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous who was given several sessions of LSD therapy himself, and Jace Colder, director of Saskatchewan’s Bureau on Alcoholism, who believed it to be the best treatment available for alcoholics.
Osmond also “turned on” Aldous Huxley to mescaline, by giving the novelist his first dose of the drug in 1953, which inspired him to write the classic book The Doors of Perception. The two eventually became friends, and Osmond consulted Huxley when trying to find a word to describe the effects of LSD. Huxley suggested phanerothyme, from the Greek words meaning “to show” and “spirit”, telling Osmond: “To make this mundane world sublime/ Take half a gram of phanerothyme.” But Osmond decided instead on the term psychedelic, from the Greek words psyche, meaning “mind”, and deloun, meaning “to manifest”, and countered Huxley’s rhyme with his own: “To fathom Hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.” The term he had coined was announced at the meeting of the New York Academy of Sciences in 1957.
LSD therapy peaked in the 1950s, during which time it was even used to treat Hollywood film stars, including luminaries such as Cary Grant.
LSD hit the streets in the early 1960s, by which time more than 1,000 scientific research papers had been published about the drug, describing promising results in some 40,000 patients. Shortly afterwards, however, the investigations of LSD as a therapeutic agent came to an end.
photo { Lina Scheynius }
Words that don’t exist in the english language
L’esprit de escalier (French)
The feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when you think of all the things you should have said. Translated it means “the spirit of the staircase.”Waldeinsamkeit (German)
The feeling of being alone in the woods.Forelsket (Norwegian)
The euphoria you experience when you are first falling in love.Gheegle (Filipino)
The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute.Pochemuchka (Russian)
A person who asks a lot of questions.
artwork { Ana Bagayan }
