28487
#ielts #toefl #gre #english_vocabulary #english
h the GRd.
The Greek dodecahedron started out as one of the Five Platonic Solids.
Although, as we have seen in previous posts, one of the five Platonic Solids had more sides than the dodecahedron, namely the icosahedron with 20 faces, the dodecahedron was the epitome of all the others. As playfully expressed in X/tweet-speak:
“In the grand blueprint of the cosmos, the gods employed geometry as their divine language. The tetrahedron sparked the flames of fire, the cube laid the earth's foundation, the octahedron whispered to the winds, and the icosahedron flowed through the waters. As for the dodecahedron, the gods used it to roll the dice on the universe's fate. Such is the playful wit of celestial architects.”
(Plato's "Lost" Tweets)
If we want to know why this is so and are not advanced mathematicians and philosophers ourselves, we can do no better than read Michael Lahanas, "Plato's "Mathematical model of the Universe – Space and Time."
Plato held the view that mathematical objects "really" existed so that they are discovered by mathematicians (in the same way that new continents are discovered by explorers) rather than invented. Plato believed that mathematics provided the best training for thinking about science and philosophy. The five regular solids are named "Platonic Solids" today after Plato.
Of the 5 solids, the tetrahedron has the smallest volume for its surface area and the icosahedron the largest; they therefore show the properties of dryness and wetness respectively and so correspond to FIRE and WATER. The cube, standing firmly on its base, corresponds to the stable EARTH but the octahedron which rotates freely when held by two opposite vertices, corresponds to the mobile AIR. The dodecahedron corresponds to the UNIVERSE because the zodiac has 12 signs (the constellations of stars that the sun passes through in the course of one year) corresponding to the 12 faces of the dodecahedron.
Please reread that last sentence.
Reread it again.
Now, on to Heisenberg (1901-1976). …But the resemblance of the modern views to those of Plato and the Pythagoreans can be carried somewhat further. The elementary particles in Plato's Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. "All things are numbers" is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras. The only mathematical forms available at that time were such geometric forms as the regular solids or the triangles which form their surface. In modern quantum theory there can be no doubt that the elementary particles will finally also be mathematical forms but of a much more complicated nature. The Greek philosophers thought of static forms and found them in the regular solids. Modern science, however, has from its beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries started from the dynamic problem. The constant element in physics since Newton is not a configuration or a geometrical form, but a dynamic law. The equation of motion holds at all times, it is in this sense eternal, whereas the geometrical forms, like the orbits, are changing. Therefore, the mathematical forms that represent the elementary particles will be solutions of some eternal law of motion for matter. This is a problem which has not yet been solved. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
Finally there is also a interesting comment by Nicholas Gier and Gail Adele: … the most amazing vindication of Plato has come from recent surveys of the universe that indicate that the universe may indeed be a dodecahedron, whose reflecting pentagonal faces give the illusion of an infinite universe when in fact it is finite. See New Scientist (October, 2003). See www.newscientist.com/news http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/dodeca4a.jpg What do we see here? http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/dodeca4b.jpg Luca Pacioli (1445-1517), inventor of the double bookkeeping method, in a stamp shown with a dodecahedron[...]
Word of the Day
spillway
Definition: (noun) A channel for an overflow of water, as from a reservoir.
Synonyms: wasteweir, spill.
Usage: The workers cleared the debris from the spillway so the excess water could flow through the channel.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
kook
a strange or eccentric person
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Idiom of the Day
ink-slinger
slang A writer, especially one who produces a large amount of low-quality material for a living. Watch the video
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a and the Second Amendment: Weisberg responds to me; plus update re OED", 6/2/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: Preliminaries and caveats", 6/4/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: Heller", 6/10/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'keep' (part 1)", 8/9/2018
"Law & Corpus Linguistics Conference", 8/18/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'keep' (part 2)", 10/21/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'bear'", 12/16/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'arms'", 2/20/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'bear arms' (part 1), plus a look at 'the right of the people'", 4/29/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'bear arms' (part 2)", 4/30/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'bear arms' (part 3)", 7/10/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'the right (of the people) to … bear arms'", 7/16/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'keep and bear arms' (part 1)", 7/29/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'keep and bear arms' (part 2)", 8/23/2019
"The linguistics of the 2nd amendment", 6/1/2022
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Word of the Day
pandemonium
Definition: (noun) A state of extreme confusion and disorder.
Synonyms: bedlam, chaos, topsy-turvydom.
Usage: Instantly the avenue was a pandemonium of clashing blades, cursing warriors, and squealing throats.
Discuss
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Language Log
Unknown language #18
[This is a guest post by John Mock]
Query about inscription on crystal from Afghanistan.
Face 1 (actual and reverse):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface1.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface1reverse.jpg
Face 2 (actual and reverse):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface2.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface2reverse.jpg
Face 3 (actual and reverse):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface3.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface3reverse.jpg
Face 4 (actual and reverse):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface4.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface4reverse.jpg
Face 5 (actual and reverse):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface5.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface5reverse.jpg
Face 6 (actual and reverse):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface6.jpg http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/~bgzimmer/crystalface6reverse.jpg
The crystal in the photographs was purchased in Afghanistan in the 1970s and is now held in a private collection, the owner of which sent the photo images and asked for help in identifying the script.
The crystal bears inscriptions on 5 of 6 sides. On the sixth side is what may be a symbol. It bears no discernible resemblance to the 5 inscriptions.
I do not recognize the script. Its angularity may suggest a form of runic script, but that is just a guess. It does not appear to me to be an Indic script.
On 4 of the inscribed sides, the size of the characters are the same and on one side, the size of the characters is substantially larger.
I have arbitrarily numbered the faces, which proceed clockwise; 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Face 4, which is opposite the face with the "symbol", is the face with the larger (and fewer) characters.
My speculation is that the "symbol", i.e., face 1, might identify where the inscription begins (if it is a continuous or linked inscription). The large character face, i.e., face 4, which is opposite face 1, the "symbol" face, might be a name. But this is mere speculation.
Any informed insight would be appreciated.
Selected readings
* "Unknown language #17" (5/2/24)
* "On the etymology of the title Tham of Burusho kings" (5/17/20)
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
Zs
sleep
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
cross out
If you cross something out, you draw a line through it with a pen or a pencil, usually because it's wrong or is no longer necessary.
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Language Log
It is that time of the year again
Florida 12-year-old Bruhat Soma wins 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee after competition’s second-ever spell-off
By Sydney Bishop and Christina Maxouris, CNN (5/31/24)
—
Bruhat Soma, 12, of Florida won the 96th Scripps National Spelling Bee Thursday night after defeating all seven other finalists and beating his final competitor in the Bee’s second-ever spell-off.
Bruhat spelled 29 words correctly during that spell-off, while 12-year-old Faizan Zaki of Texas, spelled 20 words correctly. The two shared a handshake after Bruhat was announced this year’s champion.
Spell-offs are special rounds activated to determine a champion once the competition exceeds a certain time and there’s more than one competitor left, according to the Spelling Bee’s rules. In a spell-off, the contestant who spells the most words correctly in 90 seconds wins.
“When they first announced there was a spell-off, my heart was pumping so fast but then I realized – because I was practicing spell-offs for six months – I realized that, ‘Maybe I have a shot at winning,’” Bruhat told CNN’s John Berman and Kate Bolduan Friday morning. “And I did.”
The word that crowned Bruhat champion: abseil.
He calls those 90 seconds “kind of exhilarating.”
“I’m really excited. It’s been my goal for this past year to win, and I’ve been working really hard,” Bruhat said while still on stage, clutching his trophy. “I really can’t describe it, I’m still shaking.”
To get to his trophy, Bruhat correctly spelled habitude, indumentum, dehnstufe, Okvik and Hoofddorp, and correctly defined “sine qua non.”
What comes next in the CNN report is highly significant, both for the nature of spelling mastery and for touch typing:
Many watching on air noticed Bruhat’s method of “typing” the words while on stage by pantomiming pressing the correct keys for each letter. Bruhat told CNN this motion comes from his practice of typing words into spelling practice websites, and doing so on stage “simulates that experience.”
I ask Language Log readers whether Bruhat's method applies to them. When you type, do you mentally pronounce each letter of a word? Or do you apply "whole word" entry?
For the first fifty or so years of my life, I iterated every single letter of words that I typed on a typewriter or entered in a computer — almost as a point of honor. By the time I was sixty, after I had typed millions and millions of words and could do so ever more smoothly, swiftly, and confidently, the words became the units of production — they would just flow onto the screen, almost as though I were speaking them. I was no longer concerned about spelling out their letters.
…
In addition to Bruhat and Zaki, the finalists included: YY Liang, 12, from New York; Aditi Muthukumar, 13, from Colorado; Shrey Parikh, 12, from California; Ananya Rao Prassanna, 13, from North Carolina; Rishabh Saha, 14, from California; and Kirsten Tiffany Santos, 13, from Texas.
…
This year’s spellers – all age 15 or under – came from all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and Department of Defense Schools in Europe.
The article includes a photograph of the eight finalists. The spelling bee website has more information about each of the finalists.
It was inevitable that so many of contestants would be desi*.
*Desi (Hindustani: देसी (Devanagari), دیسی (Perso-Arabic), Hindustani: [deːsiː]; also Deshi) is a loose term used to describe the people, cultures, and products of the Indian subcontinent and their diaspora, derived from Sanskrit देश (deśá), meaning "land" or "country". Desi traces its origin to the people from the South Asian republics of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and may also sometimes include people from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and[...]
Word of the Day
exigency
Definition: (noun) Urgent requirements; pressing needs. Often used in the plural.
Synonyms: need, demand, requirement, necessity, constraint, wont.
Usage: The reduction was caused by the exigencies of a wartime economy.
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
fix (1)
to influence the result of a contest, a vote, or a race by illegal or unethical means
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
queue up
If you queue up, you join a line of people waiting for their turn to do something.
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Language Log
DJT nearly (or barely?) escaped death . . .
Dan Halpern, "Trump’s charm offensive in the Bronx", The Economist 5/29/2024:
As the former president glowered and dozed through his criminal trial a few miles south in lower Manhattan, the Trump campaign emails had been growing weirder and weirder. Their subject lines were an anthology of cryptic clickbait. “I stormed out of court!” read one (he didn’t). “I nearly escaped death,” said another (if he had, then grammatically speaking he would be dead, which he pretty clearly wasn’t).
Linguistic analysis of "proximatives" (or "approximatives") like English nearly, almost, barely, …. has been going on for a while. There's a clear and interesting account of one relevant aspect in Larry Horn's 2017 chapter "Almost et al.: Scalar Adverbs Revisited" (unfortunately behind a stiff paywall):
The division of labor between semantic and pragmatic aspects of the almost, barely, and other proximatives has been a bone of contention ever since Sadock’s (1981) proposal that a almost <miϕ"> ’d is true if a in fact <miϕ"> ’d: Chris almost died entails that Chris approached dying while merely conversationally implicating that Chris didn’t die. Given that barely <miϕ"> = almost not <miϕ">, Dana barely survived would likewise on the same account implicate, not entail, that Dana in fact survived. While additional support has been marshaled for this “radical pragmatic” line, one persistent problem acknowledged by Sadock and not dispelled since is the resistance of the almost <miϕ"> → not <miϕ"> implication to cancelation. New evidence for and against Sadock’s approach and competing analyses of the proximatives is considered and a solution presented.
Presumably the author of the Trump campaign email was subject to the human tendency to jump to a contextually plausible interpretation, as often seen in misnegations and inversions of scalar implicatures (as in this post).
The obligatory screenshot (of the paragraph in The Economist's article):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/NearlyEscapedDeath.png
[h/t Philip Taylor]
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Idiom of the Day
in the next breath
(especially when speaking) In or at the very next moment or opportunity; in a very short space of time. Watch the video
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Language Log
Roman dodecahedra between Southeast Asia and England, part 4
Wherein we embark upon an inquisition into the divine proportions of the dodecahedron and its congeners, take a peek at the history of accounting, explore the mind of Leonardo da Vinci, and examine the humanistic physics of Werner Heisenberg*.
[*Heisenberg's father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies at the University of Munich in Germany. Heisenberg had more a “humanistic” education, i.e. more Latin and Greek than in natural sciences. One morning the young Werner Heisenberg discovered reading Plato's Timaeus a description of the world with regular polyhedra. Heisenberg could not understand why Plato being so rational started to use speculative ideas. But finally he was fascinated by the idea that it could be possible to describe the Universe mathematically. He could not understand why Plato used the Polyhedra as the basic units in his model, but Heisenberg considered that in order to understand the world it is necessary to understand the Physics of the atoms. (source) He contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle's position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. (Britannica | Apr 23, 2024)
—————
We have had an exciting, joyful journey through dodecahedra land, from the archeological discovery of a new specimen in England, to deep, dense discussions about the meaning and purpose of these mysterious objects, to scampering through and clambering over a playground installation of a related form. In this post, I would like to return to the essential twelveness of the dodecahedra.
I am especially sensitive to the metaphysical, mystical meanings of twelve, partly because I once had a duodenal ulcer that almost killed me. I would never have known that it had something to do with "twelve" had I not realized that its name in Chinese is shí'èrzhǐcháng kuìyáng 十二指腸潰瘍 ("twelve finger intestine ulcer"), cf. the etymology of duodenum: late Middle English, from medieval Latin, from duodeni "in twelves", its length being equivalent to the breadth of approximately twelve fingers.
In addition, my brother David (cf. Ur-David of Tarim mummy fame) is a master horoscope reader and knows his zodiac through and through. Not to mention the implications of twelve for Chinese (and many other civilizations) calendrical and astronomical sciences. Above all, for me, are the implications of the zodiac and the cycle of twelve for the history of writing, as so magisterially elaborated in the many SPPs of Brian Pellar.
Metaphysical. Did I say "metaphysical"? Yes. Now, after all the metaphysics that have come, let us delve into the physics of the dodecahedron (in the history of philosophy writ large, metaphysics comes after physics [ta meta ta physika τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά]).
From the beginning of our stimulating, fruitful investigations of the Gallo-Roman dodecahedra (GRd) of the past month, we have gotten used to thinking of them as having holes on their sides and knobs at their vertices. In this episode, I will posit that those holes and knobs are artifacts of the GR phase of the evolution of the form. For the GRd are fundamentally an adaptation of what is essentially a Greek form.
Gallo-Roman culture was a consequence of the Romanization of Gauls under the rule of the Roman Empire. It was characterized by the Gaulish adoption or adaptation of Roman culture, language, morals and way of life in a uniquely Gaulish context.
(Wikipedia)
GR culture was no longer pristine, pure Greek culture. Already with the Romans, it was an adaptation of the Greek, and when the Romans extended it to the provinces in the north, it was inevitably adapted even further. Things were no different wit[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: sheepishly
This word has appeared in 37 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Phrasal Verb of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
run into (1)
If you run into someone, you meet them by chance, or without expecting to.
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Language Log
The ideology of legal corpus linguistics
Jonathan Weinberg sent in a link to this article — Molly Redden, "How A Luxury Trip For Trump Judges Doomed The Federal Mask Mandate", Huffington Post 6/3/2024:
Buried in the April 2022 ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate was a section that was unusual for a court decision.
The outcome itself was far from surprising. Places all over the country were dropping local mask requirements, and the judge hearing this case — a challenge to the federal mandate to mask on planes and other public transportation — was a conservative Trump appointee, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle for the Middle District of Florida. Mizelle ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mask requirement overstepped the agency’s legal authority.
What was eye-catching was her explanation of why. In her ruling, Mizelle wrote she had consulted the Corpus of Historical American English, an academic search engine that returns examples of how words and phrases are used in select historical texts. Mizelle searched “sanitation,” a crucial word in the 1944 statute that authorizes the CDC to issue disease-prevention rules, and found it generally was used to describe the act of making something clean. “Wearing a mask,” she wrote, “cleans nothing.”
Searching large linguistic databases is a relatively new approach to judicial analysis called legal corpus linguistics. Although it has gained in popularity over the last decade, it is barely discussed outside of an enthusiastic group of right-wing conservative legal scholars. Which raises the question: How did this niche concept wind up driving such a consequential decision in the country’s health policy?
I've been involved in "corpus linguistics" for more than 50 years — including founding the Linguistic Data Consortium in 1992, and promoting applications in legal arguments along with many other areas. In the cited Huffington Post article, Molly Redden goes on to highlight a connection of the legal applications to socio-political ideology:
Now, new disclosures seen by HuffPost shed some light. Just weeks before she issued the ruling, Mizelle had discreetly attended an all-expenses-paid luxury trip from a conservative group whose primary mission is to persuade more federal judges to adopt the use of corpus linguistics. For five days, Mizelle and more than a dozen other federal judges listened to the leading proponents of corpus linguistics in the comfort of The Greenbrier, an ostentatious resort spread out over 11,000 acres of West Virginia hillside.
The newly formed group that picked up the tab, the Judicial Education Institute, received more than $1 million in startup funding from the billionaire libertarian Charles Koch’s network and DonorsTrust, a nonprofit that has funneled millions in anonymous donations to right-wing causes and has been dubbed “the dark money ATM of the conservative movement.”
There's a logical connection between corpus-based analysis and "originalist" and "textualist" theories of legal interpretation, which do tend to be preferred on the right end of the political spectrum. But the many relevant LLOG posts over the decades are not clearly identified with a Kochian perspective:
"The right to keep and bear adjuncts", 12/17/2007
"What did it mean to 'bear arms' in 1791?", 6/18/2008
"Corpus linguistics in a legal opinion", 7/20/2011
"Corpus linguistics in statutory interpretation", 3/3/2012
"An empirical path to plain legal meaning", 3/3/2012
"Corpus-based judicial opinions", 7/2/2016
"The BYU Law corpora (updated)", 5/6/2018
"The coming corpus-based reexamination of the Second Amendment", 5/28/2018
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: 'arms'", 2/20/2019
"Corpora and the Second Amendment: Responding to Weisberg on the meaning of 'bear arms'", 5/29/2018
"Corpor[...]
Word of the Day
Word of the Day: empathetic
This word has appeared in 155 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Language Log
Taiwanese romanization and subtitles
Song by a Taiwanese band with sinographic and romanized transcriptions of the lyrics in the center and Mandarin translation at the bottom as subtitles, via Bilibili:
I told Kirinputra that I liked the way the font was big and clear, and asked him if he thought it is a good romanization. He replied:
They used the Chinese Taipei romanization, and they used it as a transcription method rather than as full-blown writing. (These two things go hand in hand, but they're not the same thing.) Why not use mainline romanization, and use it as writing? … Mostly I try not to comment on this kind of thing. On a technical level, this is pretty good romanization. Much better than what you'll see in, say, old-school Hokkien-Taioanese KTV videos made in Malaysia.
Also note the choice of sinographs ("doubly" Chinese nationalist) and the (not thoroughly) Mandarized lyrics. Also note the lack of tonal coordination between the melody & the lyrics. (This is something that the "pros" talk about regularly.) Also, I wouldn't say the song is musically unsuitable for Taioanese (I doubt that would be true!), but the cadence of the lyrical arrangement is clearly Mandarin-oriented. (This is something that's not explicitly discussed, but compare it to Vietnamese pop music or "traditional" Taioanese pop music. Also, a lot of people about 50 & under will praise the "modernity" of songs like this one, and everybody will know what they mean; I think the Mandarish cadence is the key part of that. But I could be partly speaking from ignorance.)
Good point about the font size. Taioanese romanization often appears in minuscule fonts, for several reasons, mostly non-technical.
There's a long row to hoe, friends.
Selected readings
* "Writing Taiwanese with Romanization" (10/7/20) — with very long bibliography
* "Subtitles matter" (4/29/22)
* "'I tell you'" (2/9/14)
* "Speak Mandarin, not Cantonese, even in Macau" (10/31/23)
[h.t. Xinyi Ye]
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Idiom of the Day
incumbent (up)on (someone)
Imposed or expected as an obligation, duty, or requirement on someone. Watch the video
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the Maldives.
The ethnonym belongs in the endonymic category (i.e., it is a self-appellation). Desi (देसी/دیسی desī) is a Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) word, meaning 'national', ultimately from Sanskrit deśīya, derived from deśa (देश) 'region, province, country'. The first known usage of the Sanskrit word is found in the Natya Shastra (~200 BCE), where it defines the regional varieties of folk performing arts, as opposed to the classical, pan-Indian margi. Thus, svadeśa (Sanskrit: स्वदेश) refers to one's own country or homeland, while paradeśa (Sanskrit: परदेश) refers to another's country or a foreign land.
(Wikipedia) Selected readings
* "Dog bites man: Indian wins spelling bee" (6/3/23)
* "Spelling bee 2022 — back on track" (6/4/22)
* "Spelling bee 2021 – Indian streak broken!" (7/9/21)
* "What happened to the spelling bee this year?" (10/21/20)
* "Spelling Bee 2019" (5/31/10)
* "The worldly sport of spelling" (6/2/18)
* “Spelling bee champs” (6/1/14)
* “Spelling bees and character amnesia” (8/7/13)
* “Brain imaging and spelling champions” (8/7/15)
* “Spoken Sanskrit” (1/9/16)
* "Once more on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (5/27/16)
* "Spelling bees in the 1940s" (7/10/16)
* "Yet again on the mystery of the national spelling bee" (6/5/17)
* "Of toads, modernization, and simplified characters" (8/16/13) — especially the last two comments on Chinese "spelling bees"
* "Bahasa and the concept of 'National Language'" (3/14/13)
* Victor H. Mair, "Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages," The Journal of Asian Studies, 53.3 (August, 1994), 707-751, in which it is shown that the concept of "national language" had passed from India to East Asia along with Buddhism in the form of Sanskrit deśa- bhāṣā ("local spoken language"; "language of a country")
* "Keyboarding and typing" (10/1/21) — with extensive bibliography on typing, inputting, writing characters vs. letters, etc.
* "Typing by voice recognition" (8/22/20) — with lengthy list of readings on swyping, romanization, and so forth
* "The weirdness of typing errors" (3/14/22)
[Thanks to H. Krishnapriyan]
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Language Log
Virgin birth
It's surprising (at least to me) that this seemingly oxymoronic belief is so widespread. Check out this quote from Christopher Hitchens in “Religion Kills” from his 2007 book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything:
…the Greek demigod Perseus was born when the god Jupiter visited the virgin Danae as a shower of gold…The god Buddha was born through an opening in his mother’s flank. Catlicus the serpent-skirted caught a little ball of feathers from the sky and hid it in her bosom, and the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli was thus conceived. The virgin Nana took a pomegranate from the tree water by the blood of the slain Agdestris, laid it in her bosom, and gave birth to the god Attis. The virgin daughter of a Mongol king awoke one night and found herself bathed in a great light, which caused her to give birth to Genghis Khan. Krishna was born of the virgin Devaka. Horus was born of the virgin Isis. Mercury was born of the virgin Maia. Romulus was born of the virgin Rhea Sylvia.
Wayne Alt remarks:
Now we can add one more variation of the myth of human parthenogenesis to Hitchen’s multi-cultural list. David Nivison’s translation of strip #3 of The Bamboo Annals is: “His mother’s name was Fubao. She saw a flash of lightning around the star Shu in the Northern Dipper, its brilliance illuminating the countryside around her. Feeling it, she became pregnant. In twenty-five [lunar] months she gave birth to [Huang] Di on Longlife Hill. While still a weak baby, he was able to talk.”
It's interesting that the virgin daughter of the Mongol king and Fubao were both illuminated by a brilliant light. Even more interesting is how common this myth was.
To which I replied:
Yes, Wayne, and Jesus Christ, sure enough, was born of the Virgin Mary
Wayne responded:
Hitchens wonders why Jesus and his mother never mention this incredible event anywhere in the gospels.
Yet it's an article of faith for Christians around the world.
Incidentally, some folks have tried to explain virgin birth as a kind of teratoma:
…a rare type of germ cell tumor that may contain immature or fully formed tissue, including teeth, hair, bone and muscle.
(source)
but I don't want to get into that for the time being. For now I'll just leave it at this: it's amazing how, when it comes to faith, people can live quite comfortably, even fervently, with oxymorons.
Selected readings
* "No virgins on Danger Island" (10/6/10)
* "An eccentric translation of the bible" (5/1/24)
* "What we believe in" (6/29/11)
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Word of the Day
Word of the Day: introspection
This word has appeared in 75 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year. Can you use it in a sentence?
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Idiom of the Day
in the wild
In naturally occurring conditions or environments. Watch the video
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Language Log
Microsoft Copilot goes looking for an obscure sinograph
and finds it!
Back in early February, I asked the Lexicography at Wenlin Institute discussion group if they could help me find a rare Chinese character in Unicode, and I sent along a picture of the glyph. It won't show up in most browsers, but you can see the character here. You can also see it in the first item of the list of "Selected Readings" below. In the following post, when you see this symbol, , just imagine you're seeing this glyph.
On 2/27/04, Richard Warmington kindly responded as follows:
I asked Microsoft Copilot (a chatbot integrated into Microsoft's Edge browser), "Can you tell me anything about the Chinese character ?"
The answer began as follows: Certainly! The Chinese character is an intriguing one. Let’s explore it:
1. Character Details:
Character:
Unicode Code Point: U+24B25
[…] I will paste the rest of Copilot's answer below.
I don't know whether it's relevant to your interest in the character, but the character has 30 strokes and looking in Wenlin reveals that, if one considers only the "20,902 original Unicode Hanzi", there are only 22 characters with 30 or more strokes, and is not one of them. However, if one looks at "all 80,000+ Hanzi (new, rare, obscure …)", is indeed there, one of 305 characters with 30+ strokes.
Now, for what it's worth, here is the rest of Copilot's answer. For all I know, it may contain incorrect information. Certainly! The Chinese character is an intriguing one. Let’s explore it:
1. Character Details:
Character:
Unicode Code Point: U+24B25
Pronunciation: In Mandarin, it is pronounced as “yǎn.”
Meaning: The character represents a type of ancient musical instrument called a “stone chime” or “stone bell”. These chimes were made of stone and were used in ritual ceremonies during ancient times.
2. Historical Context:
– The character has its origins in ancient Chinese culture, particularly during the Shang Dynasty (around 1600–1046 BCE).
– Stone chimes were an essential part of ceremonial music and were often played during important rituals and events.
3. Unicode and Non-BMP Characters:
– Interestingly, is one of the non-BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) characters in Unicode. These characters lie outside the standard BMP range and have higher code points.
– Non-BMP characters are less commonly used but still hold historical or cultural significance.
4. Standardization:
– The character is not part of the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters, which contains the most commonly used characters in modern Chinese.
– However, its inclusion in Unicode ensures that it is preserved for historical and scholarly purposes.
In summary, represents an ancient musical instrument, and its presence in Unicode reflects the rich cultural heritage of China.
[I omit the three Web links provided by Copilot as they appear to be generic rather than specific to the character in question.]
Thanks much to Rich Warmington for his reply, also for including the parts of Copilot's response that are useless and / or incorrect (supposed Mandarin pronunciation, musical instrument meaning, etc.). They humored me.
At least it knew how to find the Unicode number. Selected readings
* "Cucurbits and junk characters" (3/30/24)
* "Troublesome characters" (10/14/14)
* "Weird characters" (7/7/13)
* Victor H. Mair, "The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese: A Review Article of Some Recent Dictionaries and Current Lexicographical Projects", Sino-Platonic Papers, 1 (Feb. 1986), 31 pages. (pdf)
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Word of the Day
marionette
Definition: (noun) A jointed puppet manipulated from above by strings or wires attached to its limbs.
Synonyms: puppet.
Usage: They appeared to me clear-cut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures, like a procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage.
Discuss
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Slang of the Day | Vocabulary | EnglishClub
aggro
aggressive, violent
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