Okay, so I did something very stupid and saved a file under /tmp, switched off
my computer, and then booted it back up later to look for the file. (I blame
lack of sleep.) Anyway, it was a simple text file that I didn't really want to
write up again, so I decided to try to recover it. Since the file was on my
laptop, and since Macs have a cool Firewire Target
disk mode, I connected to my laptop from my Mini, and grepped the
partition (it wasn't a really large file, but I hate having to retype
something):
grep -a -B100 -A100 'sentence that i remembered' /dev/partition > file.out
While that ran, I just did my usual: read blogs, e-mail, and articles, and
contacted some friends on the phone, etc. I came back every once in a while to
see if file.out had any size. After about the fifth time checking, it grew to
a whopping 40k! ;-) I then proceeded to use vim to extract the text I really
needed, and I was done! Woo-hoo! This is something I can tell my students
about who were asking what good the command line was. 'Course, they could
retort and said I should have just saved my file somewhere else, but I think
that's beside the point: the file was already lost, and I was trying to
recover it. I'll see what they say Friday. :-)
Actionarena.org
So one of my friends from UCSD, Stephen Lehtonen, is now in New York with his
lovely wife Ariel, who also went to UCSD. He has started a podcast show to help people change the
world for good. He is offering podcast interviews to anyone who wants to
discuss a local issue they have, and he will then work with you to create
steps to solve the issue. The only limits are your "resources, assets, and
volition". Even though he is located in New York, you don't have to be in New
York for him to help you. Just submit your idea on
his website, and he will get in touch with you for an interview.
The author describes the Major System,
which works by associating letter (sounds) with a certain number, and is
useful for remembering sequences of numbers. The author mentions that the
number/letter associations are arbitrary (although he does give reasons for
the associations he lists), but the choice of letters is not: they are all
consonants. Specifically, the letters that are associated with a specific
number all share a certain articulatory (phonetic) features.
This makes sense, because you would probably get confused if you associated B
and F with a certain number, and then P and V with a different number. (The
list of associations in this hack have B and P associated with 9, and F and V
associated with 8.) Why is that? Well, P and B share the "bilabial" feature,
i.e., both are produced primarily by using both the both ("bi") lip("labial").
Likewise, F and V share the "labiodental" feature, which means they are both
produced by using a combination of the lips ("labio") and teeth ("dental").
By associating sounds that are articulatorily similar, it helps guard against
mapping the wrong letter (and hence the wrong number) when trying to "sound
out" whatever you're trying to memorize.
TMS, which stands for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, is explained as a
procedure that can be used along with EEG and fMRI. What TMS essentially does
is short-circuit parts of the brain, so that those parts are no longer
functioning for set duration (usually on the scale of minutes). At the end of
the hack, there was a reference to an article that
mentions the connection between TMS and savants, showing that shutting off
parts of the brain can make the subject experience savantism. Autistic savants are
autistic, yet are peculiar in that they exhibit extreme talent in memory,
artistic ability, etc.
This hack extends the previous one by partitioning each room into different
areas which you can then assign information to. For instance, if each room is
the title of a comedy of Shakespeare, you can assign the left-wall to the
protagonist, the floor to the number of acts or scenes, and so on. The book
gives 11 distinct areas within a room that you can use for assigning
information to, but for some rooms (like bathrooms) there are automatically
other distinguishable objects that can be associated with information.
So this type of memorization seems good for data that forms some kind of
hierarchy. Starting up student teaching in a few days, I think this can be a
very useful concept for lesson and unit planning.
The fourth hack explains what fMRI is and what it's used for. fMRI stands for
functional magnetic resonance imaging and is a technique to map brain
activity. It gives a very clear 3-D image of brain activity by 'push[ing] the
hydrogen atoms in your brain into a state in which they all "line up" and spin
and the same frequency.' That just doesn't sound good for your brain, even
tho' this technology has been around for a couple decades. Basically, anything
that greatly changes the way your body function at the elemental level makes
me very wary.
On the flip-side, it seems that the technology is progressing even further
and being integrated with other technologies to make of for some of its
failings. The Wikipedia article has a good overview.
Today's hack again was merely descriptive. PET stands for Positron Emission
Tomography and is used to gauge brain usage by inserting a radioactive
element in the subject's blood stream:
The level of radioactivity is not dangerous, but this technique should not be
used on the same purpose on a regular basis.
So what they're really saying is that it is dangerous, and that it is
harmful, but that your body can recover from the treatment if it gets some
time off. Putting anything radioactive in my blood stream never sounded good,
anyway.
Today's hack described what's called "memory journeys", and is another
mnemonic system useful for memorizing information. Basically, you imagine
walking through different places (e.g., start at your bedroom, then go to the
bathroom, then the kitchen, etc.) and associate each location with the
information you want to remember. The author gives an example of how he used
it to memorize the 10 tragedies of Shakespeare.
Besides that, I learned that coriander and cilantro refer to the same plant,
Coriandrum sativum. Coriander is usually the term for the seeds (used
as a spice) while cilantro is the term for the leaves. Good to know :-)
The second performance hack continues where the first left off, and explains
another system for memorizing tasks to do (the number-shape system). The
subtitle for the hack is "Associate numbers with shapes and use the hunting
and gathering faculties of your primitive ancestors to remember 21st-century
data." In the "How it Works" section, the author states:
Our ancestors used their senses to learn more about the world, find food,
escape predators, and perform many other essential tasks. These tasks were
vital to our survival in an evolutionary sense, so the faculties involved in
processing sensory information were well developed, and today our brains
still process this kind of information thoroughly and efficiently.
The phrase that bothered me is in an evolutionary sense, because it is
superfluous, and might be incorrect. For instance, the passage without the
phrase is just as accurate, and might be more precise:
Our ancestors used their senses to learn more about the world, find food,
escape predators, and perform many other essential tasks. These tasks were
vital to our survival, so the faculties involved in processing sensory
information were well developed, and today our brains still process this kind
of information thoroughly and efficiently.
"Look ma! No evolution needed!" I really don't see the point of basing our
use of senses on the view that they are inextricably tied with an evolutionary
process, rather than an innate process that never underwent evolution. Our
faculties, surely, can become better developed, but I'm not sure it is an
evolutionary imperative that they ought to be. But about the hack: useful. :-)
This day's hack described what an electroencephalograph (EEG) was, how it was
used, why it was used, and the pros and cons of using it. It also mentioned a
project called OpenEEG that
tries to provide instructions, hardware, and software for hobbyists to fool
around with EEGs. The project has separate hardware and software mailing
lists, and (unfortunately) the wiki link gives me an error page. (The correct
address to the wiki is http://wiki.asiaquake.org/openeeg/published/HomePage).
Besides that, there are a quite a few links on the main home page, which will
get someone started if they are truly interested.
The first hack in Mind
Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain is for using
a mnemonic to remember what to bring when you go out, and mentions a few
mnemonic methods to help. In the See Also section, the author
mentions that he carries a man-purse to help him with all the stuff he likes
to bring when he leaves the house. While I haven't made it far enough to get
a man-purse, I regularly carry a backpack around, and when I don't have that,
I usually make sure I have cargo shorts so
that I can stuff things in my pocket. But reflecting a bit more and what I
usually like to carry (i.e., a couple books), the backpack is often too large
and the pockets often too small. So I think I'm going to break down and buy me
a man-purse. Or just start using the tote bag I got from YAPC::NA 2007 that
I've neglected to use.
I'm going to try to go through a hack a day in Mind Hacks: Tips & Tools
for Using Your Brain. The first hack just gives some background on
cognitive psychology and science, and this sentence stuck out to me:
Another problem with trying to guess how the mind works is that you can't
trust people when they offer their opinion on why they did something
or how they did it.
I think this sentence was poorly worded because it's not necessarily
true that you can't trust people when they offer their opinion about
something they did. The way that the author wrote the sentence seemed (to me,
at least) to assert you can never trust what someone says about why or how
they did something. In light of everyday experience and logic, you can trust
people to offer why or how they did something, it's just not a rule. The
simple reason being ego (making yourself look like what you are not).
But just because you can't always trust everyone doesn't
mean that you can't trust someone in certain situations. Two simple examples:
I can trust my mom telling me that she gave me a car because I am her son and
she loves me.
I can trust my friend who is out of the country when he writes e-mails to me
because he misses me.
Other than that, the first hack wasn't that interesting, but just briefly
implicitly mentioned that the mind and brain are not distinct, and that's
what should be kept in mind when reading the book.
Okay, so the final installment of what interested me in The Romance of
Words. This post covers what I found in pp. 98-160:
bridal (p. 98):
Bridal for bride-ale, from the liquid consumed at marriage
festivities, is due to analogy with betrothal, espousal, etc. A
16th-century Puritan records with satisfaction the disappearance of--
"Church-ales, helpe-ales, and soule-ales, called also dirge-ales, and
heathenish rioting at bride-ales."
(Harrison, Description of England, 1577.)
denizen, foreign, citizen, and carfax (p. 99):
In the records of medieval London we frequently come across the distinction
made between people who lived "in the city," Anglo-Fr. deinz (dans) la
cité, and "outside the city," Anglo-Fr. fors (hors) la cité. The
former were called deinzein, whence our denizen, and the latter
forein.[1] The Anglo-French form of modern Fr. citoyen was
citein, which became citizen by analogy with Fr.
denizen. The following passage from a medieval London by-law shows how
rigid was the division between "denizen" and "foreign" traders--
"Item, qe nulle pulletere deinzeyn n'estoise a Carfeux del Ledenhalle
deins mesoun ne dehors, ove conilles, volatilie, n'autre pulletrie pur
vendre...issint qe les forreins pulleters, ove lour pulletrie,
estoisent par eux mesmes, et vendent lour pulletrie sur le cornere de
Ledenhalle, sanz ceo qe ascuns pulletere deinzein viegne ou medle en
vent ou en achate ove eux, ne entre eux."[2] (Liber Albus.)
An unoriginal g occurs in many English words derived from French,
e.g., foreign, sovereign, older sovran, sprightly
for spritely, i.e., sprite-like, delight, from Old Fr.
delit, which belongs to Lat. delectare.
"Also, that no 'denizen' poulterer shall stand at the 'Carfax' of
Leadenhall in a house or without, with rabbits, fowls, or other poultry to
sell...and that the 'foreign' poulterers, with their poultry, shall stand by
themselves, and sell their poultry at the corner of Leadenhall, without any
'denizen' poulterer coming or meddling in sale or purchase with them, or
among them."
The word carfax, once the usual name for a "cross-way," survives at
Oxford and Exeter. It is plural, from Fr. carrefour, Vulgar Lat.
*quadrifurcum (for furca), four-fork.
luncheon (p. 100-101):
In the word luncheon both form and meaning have been influenced by the
obsolete nuncheon, a meal at noon, Mid. Eng. none-chenche, for
*none-schenche, noon draught, from Anglo-Sax. scencan,[2] to
pour. Drinking seems to have been regarded as more important than eating, for
in some counties we find this nuncheon replaced by bever, the
Anglo-French infinitive from Lat. bibere, to drink. Lunch, a
piece or a hunk, especially of bread, also used in the sense of a "snack"
(cf. Scot. "piece"), was extended to luncheon by analogy with
nuncheon, which it has now replaced--
"So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,
Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon."
(Browning Pied Piper of Hamelin.)
scissors (p. 103):
Scissors were formerly cizars (cf. Fr. ciseaux),
connected with Lat. caedere, to cut. The modern spelling is due to
association with Lat. scissor, a cutter, tailor, from scindere,
to cut.
This gem, along with many others in pp. 101-109, appear to be eggcorns. (Also with next two
entries.)
run the gauntlet (p. 105):
The military phrase to run the gauntlet, has no connexion with
gauntlet, glove. The older form is gantlope--
"Some said he ought to be tied neck and heels; others that he deserved to
run the gantlope." (Tom Jones, vii. 1.)
It is a punishment of Swedish origin from the period of the Thirty Years'
War. The Swedish from is gat-lopp, in which gat is cognate with
Eng. gate, in its northern sense of "street," and loppe with
Eng., leap and Ger. laufen, to run.
curry favour (p. 105-106):
To curry favour is a corruption of Mid. Eng. "to curry favel."
The expression is translated form French. Palsgrave has curryfavell, a
flatterer, "estrille faveau," estriller (étriller) meaning "to
curry (a horse)." Faveau, earlier Fauvel, is the name of a
horse in the famous Roman de Fauvel, a satirical Old French poem of
the early 14th century. He symbolizes worldly vanity carefully tended by all
classes of society. The name is a diminutive of Fr. fauvre, tawny,
cognate with Eng, fallow (deer).
dishevelled (p. 109):
We speak pleonastically of "dishevelled hair," while Old Fr.
deschevelé, lit. dis-haired, now replaced by échevelé, can only
be applied to a person, e.g., une femme toute deschevelée,
"discheveled, with all her hair disorderly falling about her eares"
(Cotgrave).
cheer (p. 109):
The word cheer meant in Mid. English "face." Its French original
chère, lit. "make a good face," a meaning preserved in "to be of good
cheer." In both languages the meaning has been transferred to the more
substantial blessings which the pleasant countenance seems to promise, and
also to the felicity resulting from good treatment. The true meaning of the
word is so lost that we can speak of a "cheerful face," i.e., a
face full of face.
glamour (p. 116):
The poetic glamour is the same as grammar, which had in the
Middle Ages the sens of mysterious learning. From the same source we have the
French corruption grimoire, "a booke of conjuring" (Cotgrave).
Glamour and gramarye were both revived by Scott--
"A moment then the volume spread,
And one short spell therein he read;
It had much of glamour might."
(Lay of the Last Minstrel, iii. 9)
"And how he sought her castle high,
That morn, by help of gramarye."
(Ibid., v. 27)
quire (p. 116):
Quire is the same word as quair, in the "King's Quair,"
i.e., book. Its Mid. English form is quayer, Old Fr.
quaer, caer (cahier), Vulgar Lat. *quaternum, for
quaternio, "a quier with foure sheetes" (Cooper).
solder (p. 122-123):
Solder, formerly spelt sowder or sodder, and still so
pronounced by the plumber, represents Fr. soudure, from the verb
souder....Fr. souder is from Lat. solidare, to
consolidate.
gloss (p. 123):
The verb gloss, or gloze, means simply to explain or translate,
form Greco-Lat. glossa, tongue; but, under the influence of the
unrelated gloss, superficial lustre, it has acquired the sense of
specious interpretation.
gammon (p. 125):
Gammon, from Mid. Eng. gamen, now reduced to game,
survives as a slang word and also in the compound backgammon. In a
gammon of bacon we have the Picard form of Fr. jambon, a ham,
an augmentative of jambe, leg. Cotgrave has jambon, "a
gammon."
calender (p. 126):
John Gilpin's "good friend the calender," i.e., the
cloth-presser, has nothing to do with the calender which indicates the
calends of the month, nor with the calender, or Persian monk,
of the Arabian Nights, whom Mr Pecksniff described as a "one-eyed
almanack"--
"A one-eyed calender, I think, sir," faltered Tom.
"'They are pretty nearly the same thing, I believe,' said Mr Pecksniff,
smiling compassionately; 'or they used to be in my time.'" (Martin
Chuzzlewit, Ch. 6.)
Unbeknownst to me 'til now, calender is a valid alternate spelling for
calendar (according to the OED).
master (p. 127):
A craft, or association of masters, was once called a mistery
(for mastery or maistrie), usually misspelt mystery by
association with a word of quite different origin and meaning. This
accidental resemblance is often played on--
"Painting, sir, I have heard say, is a mystery; but what
mystery there should be in hanging, if I should be hanged, I cannot
imagine."
(Measure for Measure, iv. 2.)
For the pronunciation, cf. mister, for master, and
mistress.[1] the French for "mistery" is métier, earlier
mestier, " a trade, occupation, misterie, handicraft"
(Cotgrave), from Old Fr. maistier, Lat. magisterium. In its
other senses Fr. métier represents Lat. ministerium, service.
Now abbreviated miss in a special sense.
utterance (p. 129-130):
The Shakespeare utterance--
"Rather than so, come, fate, into the list,
And champion me to the utterance."
(Macbeth, iii. 1.)--
is the Fr. outrance, in combat à outrance, i.e., to the
extreme, which belongs to Lat. ultra. It is quite unconnected with the
verb to utter, from out.
Sorrow and sorry (p. 133):
Sorrow and sorry are quite unrelated. Sorrow is from
Anglo-Sax. sorgh, sorh, cognate to Ger. sorge, anxiety.
Sorry, Mid. Eng. sori, is a derivative of sore, cognate
with Ger. sehr, very, lit. "painfully"; cf. English
"sore afraid," or the modern "awfully nice," which is in South
Germany arg nett, "vexatiously nice."
caulk (p. 157):
We now caulk a ship by forcing oakum into the seams. Hence the verb to
caulk is explained as coming from Mid. Eng. cauken, to tread,
Old Fr. cauquer, caucher, Lat. calcare, from
calx, heel. This makes the process somewhat acrobatic, although this
is not, philologically, a very serious objection. But we caulk the
ship or seams, not the oakum. Primitive caulking consisted in
plastering a wicker coracle with clay. The earliest caulker on record
is Noah, who pitched[1] his ark within and without with pitch. In the Vulgate
(Genesis, vi. 14), the pitch is called bitumen and the
verb is linere, "to daub, besmear, etc." Next in chronological order
comes the mother of Moses, who "took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed
it with slime and with pitch" (Exodus, ii. 3), bitumine ac pice
in the Vulgate. Bitumen, or mineral pitch, was regularly applied to this
purpose, even by Elizabethan seamen. Failing this, anything sticky and
unctuous was used, e.g., clay or lime. Lime now means usually
calcium oxide, but its original sense is anything viscous; cf. Ger.
leim, glue, and our bird-lime. The oldest example of the verb
to caulk is about 1500. In Mid. English we find to lime used
instead, e.g., in reference to the ark--
"Set and limed agen the flood" (c. 1250),--
and--
"Lyme it with cleye and pitche within and without." (Caxton, 1483.)
Our caulk is in medieval Latin calcare, and this represents a
rare Latin verb calicare, to plaster with lime, from calx,
lime. Almost every language which has a nautical vocabulary uses for our
caulk a verb related to Fr. calfater. This is of Spanish or
Portuguese origin. The Portuguese word is calafetar, from cal,
lime, and afeitar, to put in order, trim, etc.
Okay, another installment of what interested me in The Romance of
Words. This post covers what I found in pp. 61-97:
infantry (p. 64):
Infantry comes, through French, from Italian. It means a collection of
"infants" or juniors, so called to contrast with the proved veterans who
composed the cavalry.
rummage (p. 64):
To rummage meant for the Elizabethan navigators to stow goods in a
hold. A rummager was what we calla stevedore. Rummage is Old
Fr. arrumage (arrimage), from arrumer, to stow, the
middle syllable of which is probably cognate with English room; cf.
arranger, to put in "rank."
stevedore (p. 64):
A Spanish word, Lat. stipator "one that stoppeth chinkes" (Cooper). It
came to England in connexion with the wool trade.
pedigree (p. 65):
Pedigree was in Mid. English pedigrew, petigrew, etc. It
represents Of Fr. piede grue, crane's foot, foot from the
shape of a sign used in showing lines of descent in genealogical charts. The
older form survives in the family name Pettigrew. Here it is a
nickname, like Pettifer (pied de fer), iron-foot; cf.
Sheepshanks.
spade (p. 65):
Many people must have wondered at some time why the clubs and
spades on cards are so called. The latter figure, it is true, bearts
some resemblance to a spade, but no giant of fiction is depicted with a club
with a triple head. The explanation is that we have adopted the French
pattern, carreau (see p. 128), diamond, coeur, heart,
pique, pike, spear-head, trèfle, trefoil, clover-leaf. but have
given to the two latter the names used in the Italian and Spanish pattern,
which, instead of the pike and trefoil, has the sword (Ital. spada),
and mace (Ital. bastone). Etymologically both spades are
identical, the origin being Greco-Lat. spatha, the name of a number of
blade-shaped objects; cf. the diminutive spatula.
fond (p. 67):
The transition form fond, foolish, which survives in "fond
hopes," tofond, loving, is easy. French fou is used exactly the
same way. Cf. also, to dote on, i.e., to be foolish
about.
puny (p. 67):
Puny is Fr. puîné, from puis né, later born, junior,
whence the puisne justices. Milton uses it of a minor--
"He must appear in print like a puny with his guardian."
(Areopagitica)
petty (p. 67):
Petty, Fr. petit, was similarly used for a small boy.
miniature (p. 68):
Change of meaning may be brought about by association. A miniature is
a small portrait, and we even use the words as an adjective meaning small, on
a reduced scale. But the true sense of miniature is something painted
in minium, red lead. Florio explains miniatura as "a limning
(see p. 54), a painting with vermilion."
steward (p. 75):
The steward, or sty-ward, looked after his master's pigs. He
rose in importance until, by the marriage of Marjorie Bruce to Walter the
Stewart of Scotland, he founded the most picturesque of royal houses.
onion (p. 75):
The onion, Fr. oignon, Lat. unio, union- is so
named because successive skins form an harmonious one-ness. It is doublet of
union.
surly (p. 77):
From Fr. sire comes Eng. sir, and from this was formed the
adjective sirly, now spelt surly, which in Shakespeare still
means haughty, arrogant--
"See how the surly Warwick mans the wall." (3 Henry VI., v. 1.)
companion (p. 77):
Companion, with its related words, belongs to Vulgar Lat.
*companio, companion-, bread-sharer. The same idea is
represented by the pleonastic Eng. messmate, the second part of
which, mate, is related to meat. Mess, food, Old Fr.
mes (mets), Lat. missum, is in modern English only
military or naval, but was once the usual name for a dish of food....
put to the test (p. 87):
To bring a thing to the test is to put it in the alchemist's or
metallurgist's test or trying-pot (cf. test-tube), Old Fr.
test (têt). This is related to Old Fr. teste
(tête), head, from Lat. testa, tile, pot, etc., used in Roman
slang from caput. Shakespeare of has the complete metaphor--
"Let there be some more test made of my metal,
Before so noble and so great a figure
Be stamp'd upon it." (Measure for Measure, i. 1.)
shambles (p. 87):
The old butchers' shops which once adjoined Nottingham Market Place were
called the Shambles. The word is similarly used at Carlisle and
probably elsewhere; but to most people it is familiar only in the
metaphorical sense of place of slaughter, generally regarded as singular.
Thus Denys of Burgundy says--
"The beasts are in the shambles." (Cloister and Hearth, Ch.
33)--
etymologically misusing the word, which does not mean slaughterhouse, but
the bench on which meat is exposed for sale. It is a very early loan from
Lat. scamnum, a bench or form, also explained by Cooper as "a step or
grice (see p. 96) to get up to bedde."
spick and span (p. 88):
Modern German has funkelnagelneu, spark nail new; but in older
German we find also spanneu, splinterneu, chip new,
splinter new; which shows the origin of our spick and span (new),
i.e., spike and chip new. French has tout battant neuf, beating
new, i.e., fresh from the anvil.
at bay (p. 88):
Many old hunting terms survive as metaphors. To be at bay, Fr. aux
abois, is to be facing the baying hounds.
jeopardy (p. 88):
Jeopardy is Old Fr. jeu parti, a divided game, hence an equal
encounter.
cajole (p. 89):
Fowling has given us cajole, decoy, and trepan. Fr.
cajoler, which formerly meant to chatter like a jay in a cage, has in
modern French assumed the meaning of enjôler, earlier engeoler,
"to incage, or ingaole" (Cotgrave), hence, to entice. Fr. geôle, gaol,
represents Vulgar Lat. *caveola.
decoy (p. 89):
Decoy, earlier also coy, is Du. kooi, cage. The later
form is perhaps due to duck-coy. Du. kooi is also of Latin
origin. It comes, like Fr. cage, from Vulgar Lat. *cavea, and
has a doublet kevie, whence Scot. cavie, a hen-coop.
apron (p. 92):
Apron was in Mid. English naprun, from Old Fr. naperon,
a derivative of nappe, cloth.
humble-pie (p. 92):
Humble-pie is a popular perversion of umble-pie, i.e., a
pie made from the umbles, or inferior parts of the stag. But
umble is for earlier numble, Old. Fr. nomble, formed,
with dissimilation, from Lat. lumbulus, diminutive of lumbus,
loin; cf. niveau (p. 50). Thus humble-pie has etymologically no
connexion with humility.
umpire (p. 92):
Umpire represents Old Fr. non per (pair), not equal, the
umpire being a third person called in when arbitrators could not
agree. This appears clearly in the following extract from a medieval letter--
"And if so be that the said arbitrators may not accord before the said feast
of Allhalowes, then the said parties be the advise abovesaid are agreed to
abide the award and ordinance of of an noumper to be chosen be the
said arbitrators." (Plumpton Correspondence, 1431.)
For the sense we may compare Span. tercero, "the third, a broaker, a
mediator" (Percyvall).
nickname (p. 93):
The opposite has happened in the case of a newt for an ewt, and
a nick-name for an eke-name. Eke, also, occurs in the
first stanza of John Gilpin. It is cognate with Ger. auch, also, and
Lat. augere, to increase.
alarm and alert(p. 93):
The two words alarm and alert include the Italian definite
article. The first is Ital. all'arme, to arms, for a le arme,
and the second is all'erta for alla (a la) erta, the last word
representing Lat. erecta. With rolled r, alarm becomes
alarum, whence the aphetic larum--
"Then we shall hear their larum, and they ours." (Coriolanus,
i. 4)
Ger. lärm, noise, is the same word. In Luther's time we also find
allerm.
I mentioned that I've been reading
The Romance of Words I've now finished it, so I figured I would list
the many other words that I found that piqued my interest. Here's the ones
found in pp. 37-60:
magenta (p.37):
Some elderly people can still remember ladies wearing a garibaldi. To
the same period belongs the colour magenta, from the victory of the
French over the Austrians at Magenta in 1859.
Nicotine (p.37):
Nicotine is named from Jean Nicot, French ambassador at Lisbon, who
sent some tobacco-plants to Catherine de Médicis in 1560. He also compiled
the first Old French dictionary.
boycott (p.38):
Burke and boycott commemorate a scoundrel and a victim. The
latter word, from the treatment of Captain Boycott and Co. Mayo in 1880,
seems to have supplied a want, for Fr. boycotter and Ger.
boycottieren have become familiar words.
jacket (p. 40):
A coat of mail was called in English a jack and in French
jaque, "a jack, or coat of maile" (Cotgrave); hence the
diminutive jacket.
zany (p. 41):
Zany, formerly a conjuror's assistant, is Zanni (see p. 114),
and Italian diminutive of Giovanni, John.
One of my friends named John fits the modern meaning perfectly.
dunce (p. 41):
Dunce is a libel on the disciples of the great medieval schoolman John
Duns Scotus, born at Duns in Berwickshire.
The dollar is the Low Ger. daler, for Ger. taler,
originally called a Joachimstaler, from the silver-mine of
Joachimstal, "Joachim's dale," in Bohemia. Cotgrave registers a curious Okd
French perversion jocandale, "a daller, a piece of money worth
about 3s. sterl."
peach (p. 44):
Some fruits may also be mentioned, e.g., the damson from
Damascus, through Old Fr. damaisine, "a damascene or
damsen plum" (Cotgrave), the currant from Corinth and
the peach, Fr. pêche, from Vulgar Lat., pessica, for
Persica.
polka (p. 44):
Other "local" dances are the polka, which means Polish woman,
mazurka, woman of Mazuria, and the obsolete polonaise, lit.
Polish, cracovienne, from Cracow, and varsovienne, from Warsaw.
tarantula (p. 44-45):
The tarantella, like the tarantula spider, takes its name from
Taranto, in Italy. The tune of the dance is said to have been originally
employed as a cure for the lethargy caused by the bite of the spider. Florio
has tarantola, "a serpent called an eft or an evet. Some take it to be
a flye whose sting is perillous and deadly, and nothing but divers sounds of
musicke can cure the patient."
troy (p. 45):
The town of Troyes has given its name to troy weight.
lateen (p. 45):
An argosy, formerly also ragusye, was named from the Adriatic
port of Ragusa, and a lateen sail is a Latin,
i.e., Mediterranean, sail...
guinea-pig (p. 46):
The guinea-fowl and guinea gold came fist from the west coast
of Africa, but the guinea-pig is a native of Brazil. the name probably
came from the Guinea-mean, or slave-ships, which regularly followed a
triangular course. They sailed outward to the west coast of Africa with
English goods. These they exchanged for slaves, whom they transported to the
West Indies, the horrible "middle passage," and finally they sailed homeward
with the new World produce, including, no doubt, guinea-pigs brought
home by sailors. the turkey is also called guinea-fowl in the 17th
century, probably to be explained in the same way. the German name for the
guinea-pig, meerschweinchen, seems to mean little pig form over the
sea.
h-artificial (p. 48):
The "educated" h- of modern English is largely an artificial
restoration; cf. the modern hotel-keeper with the older word
ostler (see p. 130), or the family name Armitage with the
restored hermitage.
ampersand (p. 49):
The m of the curious word ampersand, variously spelt, is due to
the neighbouring p. It is applied to the sign &. I thought it
obsolete till I cam across it on successive days in two contemporary writers--
"One of my mother's chief cares was to teach me my letters, which I learnt
from big A to Ampersand in the old hornbook at Lantrig."
(Quiller-Couch, Dead Man's Rock, Ch. 2)
"Tommy knew all about the work, Knew every letter in it from A to
Emperzan.
(Pett Ridge, In the Wars.)
Children used to repeat the alphabet thus--"A per se A, B per se B," and so
on to "and per se and." The symbol & is an abbreviation of Lat.
et, written ___
(I couldn't find the character in Unicode :-( Basically it's the fancy style
of &, like as seen here).
mob and pun (p. 57):
This method of shortening words was very popular in the 17th century, from
which period date cit(izen), mob(ile vulgus), the fickle crowd,
and pun(digrion). We often find the fuller mobile used for
mob. The origin of pundigrion is uncertain. It may be an
illiterate attempt at Ital. puntiglio, which, like Fr. pointe,
was used of a verbal quibble or fine distinction.
I knew about mob, but not about pun.
whiskey (p. 58):
We have navvy for navigator, brandy for
brandywine, from Du. brandewyn, lit. burn wine, and
whisky for usquebaugh, Gaelic uisge-beatha, water of
life (cf. eau-de-vie), so that the literal meaning of whisky is
very innocent. It has a doublet in the river-name Usk. Before the 18th
century usquebaugh was the regular form.
daffodil (p. 60):
Cotgrave has asphodile (asphodèle), "the daffodil,
affodill, or asphodill, flower." The playful elaboration
daffadowndilly is as old as Spenser.
I thought this was interesting, especially at 3 in the morning:
Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments,
and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a
structure which has no relation to reality. -- Nikola Tesla
Over the past two semesters, I've perused the books that are sold at the
library of the university I'm going to,
to see if anything is interesting. The hardbacks are sold for 50 cents and the
paperback are sold for 25, so the price is good if the book is :-). So far
I've picked up quite a few books, but haven't cracked many of them open. One
I have cracked open is The Romance of Words by Ernest Weekley,
which was first published 1911, and is a discusses some etymologies that the
author has found, as well as those that have come out of the New English
Dictionary project (now the Oxford English
Dictionary).
So far I've gotten through 60 pages, and while I don't want to regurgitate
all the etymologies Weekley goes into, here are a few that I personally found
interesting in the first 36 pages (I'm going to mention the ones from 37 to
60 at some other time):
trivial (p.11):
...and a trivial matter is so commonplace that it can be picked up at
the meeting of "three ways" (trivium).
I first heard of this from one of my professors last semester. It's one of his
favorites to mention (along with assassin).
Tennis, says Minsheu, is so called from Fr. tenez, hold, "which
word the Frenchmen, the only tennis-players, use to speak when they strike
the ball." This etymology, for a long time regarded as a wild guess, has been
shewn by recent research to be most probably correct. The game is of French
origin, and it was played by French knights in Italy a century before we
find it alluded to by Gower (c. 1400).
jingo (p.18):
Jingo first appears in conjurors' jargon of the 17th century. It has
been conjectured to represent Basque jinko, God, picked up by sailors.
If this is the case, it is probably the only pure Basque word in English.
assassin (p.25):
Assassin is really a plural, from the hachaschin, eaters of the
drug haschish, who executed the decrees of the Old Man of the
Mountains. It was one of these who stabbed Edward Longshanks at Acre.
I first heard this one from a professor I had last semester, but he only went
so far as to say assassin was derived from those who ate haschish, not that
it was really plural nor that one of them stabbed Edward Longshanks. (And
yes, the only thing I can think about when I hear the name Longshanks is
Braveheart).
cinch (p.26):
Other "cow-boy" words of Spanish origin are the less familiar cinch
girth of a horse, Span. cincha, from Lat. cingula...
fetish (p.27-8):
Fetish, an African idol, first occurs in the records of the early
navigators, collected and published by Hakluyt and Purchas. It is Port.
feitiço, Lat. factitius, artificial, applied by the Portuguese
explorers to the graven images of the heathen.
Both uses are different from how I use it (and have heard it used now): an
intense interest in something, e.g., a Southwestern fetish is an intense
interest in anything Southwestern.
gorilla (p.28):
The word gorilla is perhaps African, but more than two thousand years
separate its first appearance from its present use. In the 5th or 6th century
B.C., a Carthaginian navigator named Hanno sailed beyond the Pillars
of Hercules along the west coast of Africa....Among the wonders he
encountered were some hairy savages called gorillas. His word was
translated into Greek and later on into several European languages, so that
the word became familiar to naturalists. IN 1847 it was applied to the giant
ape, which had recently been described by explorers.
Reminded me of when Horace talks about building something more lasting than
bronze. Sure, Hanno wasn't as cocky as Horace in this regard, but coining a
word which later cam into constant usage 4k years later is nothing to shake a
stick at.
daisy (p.29):
To take a simple instance, how many realize that the daisy is
"day's eye"?--
"Wele by reson men it calle may
The dayeseye or ellis the 'eye of hte day.'"
(Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, Prol., 1. 184.)
I, for one, didn't realize. :-)
mosquito (p.36):
Musket like saker (v.s.), was the name of a hawk...But
the hawk was so nicknamed from it's small size. Fr. mousquet, now
replaced in the hawk sense by émouchet, is from Ital.
moschetto, a diminutive from Lat. musca, fly. Thus
mosquito (Spanish) and musket are doublets.
I just thought it weird because then a mosquito hawk is awkwardly a hawk hawk.
:-)
porcelain (p.36):
Porcelain comes, through French, from Ital.
porcellana....It is a derivative of Lat. porcus, pig.
For some reason, I could vividly see a piggy bank made of porcelain, and it
all came together.
easel (p.36):
Easel comes, with many other painters' terms, from Holland. It
is Du. ezel, ass, which, like Ger. esel, comes from Lat.
asinus.
The metaphor being that it is carrying the load for the painter, which I guess
is what a donkey is literally used for.
Today I updated my resume and sent it out to a prospective employer for
part-time summer work. When I attached the pdf, I forgot to check the mime
type, and the recipient said when they opened my resume, it was blank. After
some quick googling, I found that mutt looks for a ~/.mime.types file (and
afterwards $PREFIX/share/mutt/mime.types. Unfortunately, when I installed
mutt, it didn't install the file into that location, and so the mime type
wasn't correctly set. So I saved the mime.types from a clean, unzipped
distribution of mutt as ~/.mime.types. Just frustrating that I didn't see an
easy way to change the mime encoding for the attachment within mutt. All
better now, though :-)
Dreamhost and SVN Perl bindings
Dreamhost already has Python bindings installed for SVN, but not the Perl
ones. So it took some fitzing around to make git-svn work on my DH account.
git-svn was giving an error that SSL wasn't supported, and after I tried
installing subversion-1.4.3, it was saying that there was an SVN library
mismatch. So, I just decided to installed the subversion version that was
installed on the DH machine already (version 1.4.2).
The first thing I did was compile and install some dependencies: autoconf,
curl, and libtool. I installed all of these under my home directory. After
that, I downloaded neon-0.25.5, since that specific version is required by
subversion. I compiled neon like so:
.
I edited the Makefile to change line 604 to read:
cd $(SWIG_PL_DIR)/native; $(PERL) Makefile.PL PREFIX=$(HOME) SITELIBEXP=$(HOME)/share/perl/5.8.4 SITEARCHEXP=$(HOME)/lib/perl5
.
I had to make sure to add $HOME/lib/perl/5.8.4 to the $PERL5LIB, since
SVN::Core was being installed there (and not in $HOME/lib/perl5).
I then ran make && make install && make swig-pl, and watched everything
compile and install. When I ran make check-swig-pl, I got an error:
/tmp/subversion-1.4.2/subversion/libsvn_ra_dav/.libs/libsvn_ra_dav-1.so.0:
undefined symbol: SSL_load_error_strings at /usr/lib/perl/5.8/DynaLoader.pm
line 225.
I first came across the Grice's
conversational maxims in LIGN 130: Semantics about a year and a half ago.
I have to say that they've (and the semantics class has) helped me in
thinking more about what I say and how I say it.( "give
credit where credit is due", scroll down to History). Maybe I don't have
a good perspective of the maxims (in which case this post will be an ignorant
rant), but I don't always like practicing them to the tee, nor do I always
like when they are practiced by others to the tee. I believe the reason being
that they suck when applied to friendship, or to any other kind of good
relationship. I can see the conversational maxims being good when talking
about a "weighty" matter (e.g., a doctor explaining what needs to be done in
order to save a person's life whose waist has been ripped to shreds in an
accident), but for everyday life they seem to stifle language inventiveness
and wit.
The reason why I even thought of writing about them is because I've been
re-reading Learning
Perl over the last few days, and it made me realize how much I
like writings which don't follow Grice's maxims (if you haven't read the
book, I suggest you do). In the book you'll find footnotes that don't need to
be in there at all, but their addition makes the reading much more enjoyable
(if you've ever read technical books, I'm sure you're not always sitting on
the edge of your seat in excitement). The two pages of the book exemplify
what I mean (and explain why the authors use footnotes). Since it's the
weekend, I decided to be generous and copy the first two pages of the book
(quite short, actually) so you can see what I mean. After reading these
couple of pages along with their footnotes, hopefully you'll agree (with me).
:)
Welcome to the Llama book!
This is the fourth edition of a book that has been enjoyed by half a million
readers since 1993. At least ,we hope they've enjoyed it. It's a sure thing
that we've enjoyed writing it.*
Questions and Answers
You probably have some questions about Perl, and maybe some about this book,
especially if you've already flipped through the book to see what's coming.
So, we'll use this chapter to answer them.
Is This the Right Book for You?
If you're anything like us, you're probably standing in a bookstore right
now,* wondering whether you should get this
Llama book and learn Perl or maybe that book over there and learn some
language named after a snake, or a beverage, or a letter of the alphabet.* You've got about two minutes before the
bookstore manager comes over to tell you that this isn't a library,* and you need to buy something or get out.
Maybe you want to use these two minutes to see a quick Perl program, so
you'll know something about how powerful Perl is and what it can do. In that
case, you should check out the whirlwind tour of Perl later in this chapter.
Why Are There So Many Footnotes?
Thank you for noticing. There are a lot of footnotes in this book. Ignore
them. They're needed because Perl is full of exceptions to its rules. This is
a good thing, as real life is full of exceptions to rules.
But it means we can't honestly write, "The fizzbin operatore frobnicates the
hoozistatic variables" without a footnote giving the exceptions.* We're pretty honest, so we have to write the
footnotes. But you can be honest without reading them. (It's funny how that
works out.)
Many of the exceptions have to do with portability. Perl began on Unix
systems, and it still has deep roots in Unix. But wherever possible, we've
tried to show when something may behave unexpectedly whether the cause is
running on a non-Unix system, or some other reason. We hope that readers who
know nothing about Unix will find this book a good introduction to Perl. (And
they'll learn a little about Unix along the way at no extra charge.)
And many of the other exceptions have to do with the old "80/20" rule. By
that, we mean that 80% of the behavior of Perl can be described in 20% of the
documentation, and the other 20% of the behavior takes up the other 80% of
documentation. To keep this book small, we'll talk about the most common,
easy-to-talk-about behavior in the main text and hint in the direction of the
other stuff in the footnotes (which are in a smaller font, so we can say more
in the same space).* Once you've read the
book all the way through without reading the footnotes, you'll probably want
to look back at some sections for reference. At that point, or if you become
unbearably curious along the way, go ahead and read the notes. A lot of them
are just computer jokes anyway.
What About the Exercises and Their Answers?
The exercises are at the end of each chapter because, between the three of
us, we've presented this same course material to serveral thousand students.
* We have carefully crafted these exercises
to give you the chance to make mistakes as well.
1. To be sure, the first edition was written
by Randal L. Schwartz, the second by Randal and Tom Christiansen, the third
by Randal and Tom Phoenix, and now the fourth by Randal, Tom Phoenix, and
brian do foy. So, whenever we say "we" in this edition, we mean the last
group. Now, if you're wondering how we can say that we've enjoyed writing it
(in the past tense) when we're still on the first page, that's easy: we
started at the end, and worked our way backward. It sounds like a strange way
to do it, we know. But, honestly, once we finished writing the index, the
rest was easy. [return]2. Actually, if you're like us, you're
standing in a library, not a bookstore. But we're tightwads. [return]3. Before you write to tell us that it's a
comedy troupe, not a snake, we should really explain that we're dyslexically
thinking of CORBA. [return]4. Unless it is. [return]5. Except on Tuesdays, during a power
outage, when you hold your elbow at a funny angle during the equinox, or when
use integer is in effect inside a loop block being called by a
prototyped subroutine prior to Perl Version 5.6. [return]6. We even discussed doing the entire book
as a footnote to save the page-count, but footnotes on footnotes started to
get a bit crazy. [return]7. Not all at once. [return]
First Few Criticisms
So I've been reading The
Intellectual Devotional ever since I bought it a couple weeks ago. I've
enjoyed a lot of the entries so far. I never knew about the bust of
Nefertiti, the results of the cloned ewe (Dolly), nor what made
Ulysses a literary masterpiece. However, there are three things that
have bugged me about it so far:
a blatant typo:
Yes, the first one might seem pedantic, but seriously, how hard is it to
check for misspellings of common words like built (Day 6)?
non-factual information:
Umm, I consider it common knowledge that Christians refer to all of
Hebrew scriptures as the Old Testament, not just the first five books (Day 7).
musical typesetting:
Today's entry (Day 12) discussed what melody is. In doing so, it gives an
example of a melody in standard musical notation, parts of which seem out of
whack. The third bar of the first system looked like it started D notes. But
then finishing reading the bar, they looked like C notes because of their
distance from the lowest line of the stave, or maybe even B notes. I decided
in the end that they were C notes. Also, in the second bar of the second
system, it looks like the first three notes are supposed to be quavers,
considering time signature. I decided that it was another fluke they weren't
combined with a beam (as the second bar of the first system was). I ended up
creating a pdf of what I think the musical piece was supposed to look like,
using muscript:
2 systems /24/
/
4 bars
|
=1' treble 6/8 cro C qua C cro D qua D
|
=1 qua [E G E] cro. C
|
=1 cro C qua C cro D qua D
|
=1 cro. E qua C rest rest
/
4 bars | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 ||
|
=1' treble cro C qua C cro D qua D
|
=1 qua [E G E] cro. C
|
=1 qua A-emph, rest rest cro D qua D
|
=1 cro. E qua C rest rest