An educated person would be expected to have an active vocabulary of about 30,000 words, whereas to read The Sun newspaper you require a vocabulary of just 800 words.
from AC Grayling, The Form of Things
Fact of the Week
Category Archives: quotes
Quotes of the Week
Some odd bedfellows this week …
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
[Robert Louis Stephenson]
Your car is Japanese. Your vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers are Arabic, your letters Latin. And you complain that your neighbour is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!
[Seen on Facebook]
‘chav’ (vogue label of 2004, originally a traveller’s term of address or endearment, from a French nickname for a young fox), who represents an imagined social grouping, a troublesome, truculent, feckless, shameless underclass delighting in petty criminality and conspicuous consumption (of, inter alia, illicit substances, electronic stimuli, pimped technology and ‘bling’).
[Tony Thorne, Jolly Wicked, Actually]
An eye for an eye makes the world go blind. A tooth for a tooth gums up everything!
[Thoughts of Angel]
Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands … It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly.
[Paul Theroux quoted in Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn]
I had a friend at university who used to propound this latter theory that sex was (and should be seen as) not necessarily more than an expression of sincere friendship and that why should one not have sex with ones friends just as one might have a beer with them. Not sure he ever managed to put it much into practice though.
Word of the Week
Hoatzin
A species of colourful, remarkably saurian, chicken-like bird, Opisthocomus hoazin, found in swamps, riverine forest and mangrove of the Amazon and the Orinoco deltas of South America. It is notable for having chicks that possess claws on two of their wing digits; the chicks are also able to swim and climb — useful when you’re a pheasant-sized bird which nests in trees over water!
It is brown in colour, with paler underparts and an unfeathered blue face with maroon eyes; its head is topped by a spiky, rufous crest. The Hoatzin is herbivorous and has an unusual digestive system with an enlarged crop used for fermentation of vegetable matter — broadly analogous to the digestive system of mammalian ruminants. It’s common name of Stinkbird is due to the strong smell produced by the bird, perhaps due to its consumption and fermentation of leaves.
Despite its striking plumage, unwary nature and poor flight it seems to be only rarely hunted by the indigenous peoples of its native range. Consequently it is not endangered. It is the national bird of Guyana.
Quotes of the Week
Here’s this week’s usual eclectic and eccentric mix …
Biologists and philosophers have pondered for generations the ways in which our modern lives may be disconnected from our pasts, out of synch … When you look beside you in bed, you notice no more than one animal (alternative lifestyles and cats notwithstanding). For nearly all of our history, our beds and lives were shared by multitudes.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
The moment that made us human in that series of happenings was not the language, the gods, or even the ability to draw Rubenesque women in stone. It was when we decided that when a leopard stalked the cave, we ought to go after it and kill it. When we decided to kill a species not for food or in self-defence, but instead in order to control what lived and did not live around us, when we did that, we were then fully human.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
Grasses and cows were not the only species we favored. We also came to choose species that were beautiful to our senses … tulips and other flowers are shipped around the world at huge expense. Goldfish live in houses in nearly every country. Dogs, which appeal to our social sense of appeasement and connectedness, were brought into our beds. (Cats – well, no one can explain them.)
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
Anyone offering subtitles for the following?
[It’s] amazing how the secondary endosymbiosis has left its signature in the topography of plastid membranes like in dinoflagellates and cryptophytes.
[“fer” in a comment at The Loom]
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
[GK Chesterton]
There are more fools in the world than there are people.
[Heinrich Heine]
Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?
[Thoughts of Angel]
Word of the Week
OK, sorry, there’s been somewhat of a hiatus here. Mainly because I had a major computer malfunction last Wednesday evening — basically a dead Windows installation that refused to repair. Luckily all the data was safe and I have a laptop which kept the essential functions running, but I’ve had to build a new system from Ground Zero. Anyway we seem to be back fully on the air now.
So without more ado, here’s this week’s word:
Hecatomb.
Originally in Ancient Greece a sacrifice to the gods of 100 cattle but extended as early as Homer to mean a great public sacrifice. Thus also a sacrifice of many victims; a great number of persons, animals, or things, presented as an offering, or devoted to destruction.
Quotes of the Week
The usual eclectic and kleptological collection this week …
Blunt common sense is valued above Gauloise-wreathed nuances of gossip about concepts.
[AC Grayling, The Form of Things]
Religion is false but the masses should be encouraged to believe it; it keeps them in order.
[Plato quoted in AC Grayling, The Form of Things]
Harvester of maidenheads
[Description of the second Earl of Rochester, circa 1660, quoted in AC Grayling, The Form of Things]
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
[Bertrand Russell]
… and those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
[Friedrich Nietzsche]
I like prime numbers … I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your lifetime thinking about them.
[Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time]
The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
[Thomas Carlyle]
Long range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
[Peter F Drucker]
Life begins at 40 — but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.
[Helen Rowland]
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
[Anon]
Quotes of the Week
This week, a few words of wisdom from some Americans …
Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.
[Robert A Heinlein, Glory Road]
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.
[Thomas Jefferson]
Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.
[Scott Adams]
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
[Thomas Edison]
I have always believed that I was slightly saner than most people. Then again, most insane people think this.
[Truman Capote]
Quote : Belief
The more people who believe something, the more apt it is to be wrong. The person who’s right often has to stand alone.
[Soren Kierkegaard]
Quotes of the Week
Somehow I’m not writing this week, probably because I’ve spent a lot of time with my head in family history research. But here is this weeks strange set of bedfellows.
First I’ve been reading a 1923 book about my home town and discovered that even Cromwell’s officials in 1650 could write estate agent-ese …
The Presence Chamber. One very large, spacious delightful Room called the Kinge’s Presence Chamber, being wainscotted round with carved wainscott of good oak, coullered of a liver color, and richly guilded with gold, with antique pictures over the same ; the ceiling full of guilded pendants hanging down, setting forth the roome with great splendour […] Also a very fair, large chimny piece of black and white marble, with four pilasters of the same stone […]
[Government Survey of Theobalds Palace, 1650 quoted in Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt]
This really is what it’s thought Theobalds Palace looked like!
And from the same volume this delight …
For, if those enemies to all good endeavours, Danger, Difficulty, Impossibility, Detraction, Contempt, Scorne, Derision, yea, and Desperate Despight, could have prevailed by their accursed and malevolent interposition either before, at the beginning, in the very birth of proceeding, or in the least stolne advantage of the whole prosecution; this Worke of so great worth had never bin accomplished.
[John Stow, Survey of London, quoted in Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt]
And now for some things much more of our time …
Face to face advice on the internet.
[BBC TV London News, 11/07/2011]
Be especially sure to wipe your children down. Children are just about the grimiest thing in the world.
[Rob Dunn at Scientific American Blogs]
Boris Johnson knows even less about geology than he does about geography. Undercutting Ealing with a tunnel means my constituents, and his electoral voters, will fall into the ground. London’s transport system is built on clay, it would cost more money to tunnel through that than if we replaced HS2 with sedan chairs and walked people to Birmingham.
[Ealing North MP, Steve Pound, on Mayor Boris Johnson’s idea of tunnelling HS2 rail under outer London]
Quotes of the Week
A rather temporal theme this week …
What is time? If no one asks me, I know. If I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.
[St Augustine, Confessions]
Time is Nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.
[John Archibald Wheeler]
The universe is a simple place. True, it contains complicated things like galaxies and sea otters and federal governments, but if we average out the local idiosyncrasies, on very large scales the universe looks pretty much the same everywhere.
[Sean Carroll, From Eternity to Here: the Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time]
Apart from Earl Alan, the Lord of the Manor, there is no record of local names. As to the women, who one must assume formed the usual percentage of the community, not one word!
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt commenting on the Domesday Book entry for Cheshunt]
I just love the preambulatory greetings in old documents, which are maintained even to this day in royal letters patent.
To all Christ’s faithful people unto whom this present shall come, Peter, by the grace of God, Abbot of the Church of St Peter of Fulgeres and of the Convent in that same place, greeting in the Lord!
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt translating a 12th century document]
Conan, Duke of Brittany, Earl of Richmond, to all the sons of the Church of the Holy Mother, and its steward and chamberlain, and to all its servants, and to all its men, French and English, and to all Britons, and all its well-wishers, greeting!
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt translating a 12th century document]
The constant recurrence of old familiar names in the ancient Parish registers seems to show that some of them have long taken root in the place. “Lowin” and “Adams” and “Archer” and “Cock” and “Tarry” and “Dighton”, and a good many more household names, are plentiful as blackberries in the old Registers.
[Percy Charles Archer, Historic Cheshunt quoting comments on parish registers by Revd Arthur Brown]