Bartender Geek

I just found a claim that the quote "Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today," from Alice's Adventures Through the Looking-Glass, is actually supposed to be a mnemonic to help remember the distinction between the Latin words "nunc" and "iam".

Can someone who actually KNOWS Latin sanity-check this claim for me?

Have I ever mentioned my favorite food label? It's on the store brand evaporated milk of the local supermarket chain, Stop&Shop.

On the side of the can is written:
I LOVE that. I'm trying to imagine the person who wrote that. And I think that I would really get along with that person.

I dreamed that someone was asking me trivia questions about languages, and the question was how you say "please" in German.

And I totally couldn't remember. I went through por favor, permisso (which may actually be "excuse me"), si vous plait. And I couldn't remember. So I turned to Lis and said, "I'm remembering various Romance language things, but not Germanic ones. Can you think of any English words of Anglo-Saxon origin that have a meaning similar to 'please' that might give a clue?"

Lis came up with "beg". I started rolling that around in my mind, with typical sound changes. "Beg" to "bed" to "bet" to "bit", to Bitte.

I have no idea if my brain actually worked something out, or if it's just a coincidence.

Anyway, when I woke up, that dream reminded me of something ELSE that I have been rolling around in my mind occasionally.

One day, I just started thinking about the words "retrospect" and "hindsight". Those two words are synonyms, and they are both compound words, made from two roots, one might "sight" and one meaning "backward." It's just that in one word, both roots are Latinate, and in the other, they're both Germanic.

And so, since then, I've been occasionally trying to think of other pairs of words that have that same relationship: words made from more than one root, in which, in one word, all the roots are Latinate (or Greek, I guess -- let's open the game up further), and in the other word, they're all Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Old English. and in which the two words are synonyms. I haven't really come up with any good ones besides that first pair that inspired the thought.

When I was a kid, my parents would watch All in the Family. One of the main things I remember about it was how much the opening impressed me.

See, it stated that "All in the Family is filmed before a live audience," and I thought that was amazing.

See, I understood that people had evolved millions of years ago, and so I couldn't figure out who was making the show if it had been filmed before there was a live audience. I mean, I figured that, okay, the writers and cameramen and stuff might be dinosaurs, but how did they get actors who looked like humans? And, for that matter, how did they know what humans would LOOK like?

Eventually, I figured that it had just been filmed before anyone had come up with the idea of a "live audience", and, back when they were filming All in the Family, they just packed the auditorium with corpses for some reason. I couldn't figure out WHY they would do that, but it made more sense than the "dinosaur" theory.

[This isn't a humor post, or a political post. This is a history/theology geeking post. Just so's y'all know what to expect.]

First off, as you all know, the Number of the Beast is "616", not "666" -- the whole "666" thing is a transcription error. The earliest versions of the Book of Revelations have "616".

Second, as you all know, in Hebrew, every letter also has an associated numerical value, and Hebrew numerology is based around the numerical values of words.

Hebrew Letter	Value	Name	English Approximation of Sound
א	1	Aleph	Silent
ב	2	Bet	B or V
ג	3	Gimmel	G (historically, also could sound as j)
ד	4	Dalet	D (historically, could also sound as djz)
ה	5	Hay	H
ו	6	Vav	V, or oo, or oh (historically, sounded as "w", "oo", or "oh", and was called "waw")
ז	7	Zayin	Z
ח	8	Chet	kh (as in "Bach")
ט	9	Tet	T
י	10	Yod	Y
כ	20	Kaf	K or kh
ל	30	Lamed	L
מ	40	Mem	M
נ	50	Nun	N
ס	60	Samekh	S
ע	70	Ayin	Silent, basically
פ	80	Pay	P or F
צ	90	Tzade	ts, as in "pizza"
ק	100	Kuf	K or Q (a little more gutteral than K)
ר	200	Resh	R, more or less
ש	300	Shin	Sh or S
ת	400	Tav	T, T or S in some dialects, T or Th historically

As an aside, I find it interesting that, historically, the following letters had two sounds:
Bet, B and V (no English equivalent of which I know)
Gimmel, G and J (the English letter "g" maintains both sounds)
Dalet, D and djz as in the French "gendarme" (no English equivalent that I know of)
Kof, K and Kh
Pay, P and Ph
Shin, S and Sh
Tav, T and Th

So, a fair number of the Hebrew two-sound letters made it into English. . .

Anyway, that's not what I'm posting about.

The Book of Revelations is clear that "616" refers to a person's name. So you need to find a name, or name and title, which adds up to 616.

How about קסר נרו ? That's 50+200+6 + 100+60+200 = 616. What are the English equivalents of those letters? NRV QSR. Of course, that "V" may be a "W", a "U" or an "O", and we need to add vowels.

NRO QSR. NeRO CaeSaR.

Hard to argue with that one. Emperor Nero pretty much deserved the title of "the Beast", and, for that matter, was the Emperor when the Book of Revelations was written.

So, my point is to just plain relax about the Book of Revelations. We KNOW what the "number of the Beast" is, and who it refers to, and why. It's not a great End-Times Mystery or anything.

This is something of a pet peeve.

The word "doth" is pronounced "duth." It's the same word as "does", except that the "s" is pronounced as "th". You just pronounce it as if you were saying "does" but with a lisp.

This was beaten in to me, figuratively, when I was fourteen, by Ms. McCarthy of Arlington High School -- a holy terror of an English teacher, who didn't LITERALLY beat these facts into us, even though she was an ex-nun, because, as it was a public school, she wasn't allowed to whack us with rulers. Ms. McCarthy was one of the teachers I most hated in school, and respect most now -- I respected her then, too. She's the one that was claiming that "Merchant of Venice" wasn't anti-Semitic, and required us to write a term paper demonstrating that. I wrote a paper, with pages of endnotes and an appendix, showing that there was absolutely no way that Shakespeare COULDN'T have been anti-Semitic, and that OF COURSE the play was anti-Semitic.

This, of course, was a total defiance of what the teacher instructed us to do, and I was prepared to get an "F" on it.

Final page comment was "Excellent paper, well researched, well written, I disagree with everything you say, A-." The minus was for a couple typos and a subject-verb disagreement. Which were examples of TOTAL carelessness on my part, and she would have been well within her rights to knock it down to a B+ or even a B for that kind of sloppiness.

Anyway, in tribute to a hated English teacher whom I quite love, I pass along this pet peeve: it's pronounced "duth".

Really.

Article I, Section 10 includes the phrase "except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection Laws". The superfluous apostrophe appears in both the handwritten and early printed texts.

How embarrassing.

. . . that the Eskimos have 200 words for snow. But the Scots do have about 40 words for "oatmeal".

Since someone on my friends list mentioned JUST figuring out what relationship my username has to my default user icon, I thought I'd tell a story about my username, and the one person ever who knew what it meant. (Okay, I assume that, for instance, classics_cat could figure it out instantly, but I've never met her in person, so I can still tell this story that way.)
( The Story )