winkie-winkie and the royal we

The Queen has now surpassed all of her forebears in length of her reign, with many other superlatives besides. We extend our hardy congratulations and best wishes for many more years.

amici curiæ

The Notorious RBG and her fellow US Supreme Court Justices of the present class all have perfectly plausible names, but it always seemed to me that there was a disproportionate number of individuals appointed whom did not.
Albeit there has been one hundred twelve of them holding court that has ranged from five in membership to the current nine, but beginning with associate Bushrod Washington, Esq., younger step-brother of George Washington—there are quite a few oddities to be found, many packaged in familiarity and the expectation that such achievers ought to have unique monikers. There is Salmon P Chase hailing from Ohio, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar from Mississippi, Mahlon Pitney—and of course, Felix Frankfurter of Massachusetts and Potter Stewart. The often-cited Doctor Learned Hand, however, only rose to the position of Chief Justice on the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals—no doubt a prestigious position but not the court of last-resort.

apocalypso or head in the sand

Via the resplendent Nag on the Lake comes a look at the latest art installation of London sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, positioned on the banks of the Thames, not far from the Houses of Parliament. The artist who has executed many submerged galleries to surprise and enthral divers in Cancun, the Bahamas and Caribbean, has created ghostly likenesses of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which are only visible twice daily at low-tide as a statement against sanctioned environmental abuses and the adage that what’s out of sight is out of mind. The knights agee are modelled after businessmen but their mounts have their heads replaced by another sort of horse’s head, the pumpjack or nodding-donkey of an oil drill.

unknown knowns or ignotum per ignotius

After being rather gobsmacked on learning that there was a single term, adiaphora, that could be used to describe all those non-essential conventions of a faith, I found myself looking askance towards my own humble quiver of vocabulary, to discover an antonym for omnipresence. An individual or a system described as parviscient could be said to know very little, but as the term is derivative (a back-formation) of all-knowing, it also suggests fancying oneself to be quite clever in one’s ignorance. There are a lot of awkward situations that could be diffused with such a word.

aloha ‘oe or business-casual

No matter how long one has been in the US labour force—or indeed the international one since it seems that the tradition has been widely adopted, relaxing the office’s dress-code on Fridays seems something as firmly ingrained as the desperate compulsion to clean one’s desk of backlog procrastination and pass it off to another on that same day of the week. I know some co-workers just beam at their accomplishments, thinking it took me all week to perfect that problem and now I give it to you.
The former observance, however, is a relatively new practise with rather surprising origins. Purveyors of what is known as Aloha Attire sold, in lieu of conventional business dress as the islands’ hot climate make it far too impractical to expect workers to wear suits and ties, Hawaiian shirts and related apparel, meant to be worn untucked, to make office conditions a little more tolerable. Championed by a consortium of native textile manufacturers called the Hawaiian Fashion Guild to boost sales, the shirt-makers lobbied the US Congress (perhaps a small concession after the territory had been annexed by a fruit magnate) for an Aloha Week to strengthen relations between the islands and the mainland. Changes came about slowly and the garb was still associated in the main with tourists and outsiders’ ideas of what Polynesian culture ought to be, but the stock-market crash of 1987 and the savings-and-loan sector collapse that followed cemented Casual Fridays—whose unofficial uniform is the Hawaiian Shirt. Businesses had sustained significant losses and that translated to several lean years in salary and compensation, and companies hoped to placate the disgruntled without actually spending any money. This tradition of dressing-down for the weekend was born as a way of boosting employee morale—one which the fashion industry probably greatly appreciated as well, forming another nuanced category of clothing