September 2009
11 posts
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“Above his mouth is a mustache that somehow suggests that this man has been to places most people do not imagine exist.”
His left forearm looks as if it could bring down a tree.
—John McPhee on Wimbledon
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Gift originally had the same meaning in English and German. About a thousand years ago, this word was sometimes used as euphemism for “poison” in German. During the centuries following, by a process of “pejoration”, this meaning of “Gift” became predominant. Today, “poison” is the only meaning for German “Gift”, except in the word...
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In its original medieval usage, donjon meant a keep, the main tower of a castle which formed the final defensive position to which the garrison could retreat when outer fortifications were overcome. The word dungeon is based on Old French donjon, which is derived from Latin dom(i)niōn- “property” (and ultimately dominus “lord”). By association of a tower with a prison,...
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Demands for even more surveillance miss the point. The problem is not obtaining data, it’s deciding which data is worth analyzing and then interpreting it. Everyone already leaves a wide audit trail as we go through life, and law enforcement can already access those records with search warrants. The FBI quickly pieced together the terrorists’ identities and the last few months of...
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With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds — big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-size arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophic arm.
—David Foster Wallace, http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-0796
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