mad dogs and englishmen

Writing for The Daily Beast, Tom Sykes mourns the loss of the nutty aristocrat, a class gradually being replaced by a dull and drab and socially-conscience set who if not our betters then also not reproving, cautionary cases nor charming eccentrics neither. The article includes many anecdotes and one can delve further into these mostly harmless and often truly obliging and passionate oddities. I enjoyed finding out more about the interview subject of the column, William Sitwell, who definitely has a priceless streak of unconventionality galloping in the family—but has sadly accepted the fate of self-exile as a celebrity judge in television land. As Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

interbellum or altı ok

In a new, provocative work, author Stefan Ihrig examines the role the perception that Nazi leadership in post WWI Germany had of Turkey as successor to the Ottoman Empire contributed to the prosecution of WWII.
To some of the defeated and downtrodden Germans, Turkey’s refusal to be passively divided up by the Allies, preoccupation with matters of heritage, and large-scale social reforms must have seemed to burgeoning party like hyper-nationalist “pornography.” Guided by the philosophy of the Six Arrows (Altı Ok) the Young Turks under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk created the modern and progressive country and were unrelenting in their efforts. Through the press and propaganda, these heroics and hero-worship that grew around that cult-of-personality created a role-model and for the attempted coup, the Beer Hall Putsch, organisers resolved to adopt so-called “Turkish Methods.” Only after this failure did Nazi leaders ally themselves more towards Benito Mussolini’s form of fascism but still held this figment of Turkey in high regard. This admiration certainly became something unwelcomed and misplaced and a book such as this one ought to spark dialogue and cultivate a more informed readership—through their own research.

iberia-hispania or elegant variation

Although we can identify a classic period of the language and Rome had institutions to preserve and promote a standard, there was probably never a universal Latin spoken across the Empire.
Romance languages descended from Latin but as conquests of Gaul, Iberia and the Balkans came centuries apart, the spoken language that supplanted their native tongues had changed as well. Early on during the Punic Wars as the Empire was expanding across the Mediterranean, Rome secured the lands of Spain from Carthage, and through the discontinuity of the French speakers, Spain remains one of the vulgar languages most true to that original language. Euskara, the language of the Basque people, seems to have developed prior to the arrival of Indo-Europeans and has endured to modern times. The subjugation of the Gallic tribes came later, after Rome had absorbed Greece and Macedonia and incorporated many Greek words, reflected in modern French. Of course, other powers came to dominate these provinces as Rome’s influence waned and these Germanic speakers helped shape the vernacular dialects to a greater or lesser extent. Owing to the Franks, French has inherited a smattering of Germanic loan-words. 
The Visigoths, however, who came to rule the Iberian peninsula, due to extended contact with the Roman civilization, were bilingual in Latin and Gothic, and Latin and its derivative local languages remained in common-parlance for day-to-day activities and native Gothic remained mostly in the background. Exceptions were found in the Church, Gothic having been the first Germanic language to be written down in order to produce that Gothic Bible commissioned by the Arian bishop Ulfilas, until the Roman Catholic Church consolidated authority, and interestingly in family names to this day. Many of the most common surnames of Spain, Portugal and Latin America reflect remnants of Visigoth rule: Hernández from Ferdinand (protector of the peace and probably a title rather than a name originally), Gutiérrez from Walter—wielder of hosts, Rodríguez, son of Roderik, the name of one of the last kings of the Goths before the Muslim incursions into the area and meaning rich in glory.

jupiter vi

Via the Presurfer comes a study about the unique niche that type of deep-ocean shrimp have occupied, whose symbiosis with extremophile bacteria may point us towards extraterrestrial corollaries, which may be discovered in environments like on the Moon of Europa.
One can also find out more about the research and the mysterious satellite thanks to this splendid video presentation curated by BoingBoing. The existence and lifestyle of these shrimp that float in the narrow, tolerable range between the frigid depths and the boiling, churning thermal vents makes me think of the strange and secretive race of Outsiders as imagined in Larry Niven’s Known Space franchise. The ancient creatures evolved on a frozen world, as evinced by the fact that they later lease one of the moons of Neptune from the Humans as a local base of operation, and eked out a bit of a vital spark from the difference in temperature between unfiltered solar radiation and the subzero surface of their planet. Examples found in terrestrial biology so far only show a population established in the more Goldie Locks places of the world specialised and moving into an exclusive environment—which is amazing enough in itself—but signs that life sprung up organically in such places remain elusive.

lit crit or synecdotes and dozy doats

The writing staff at the wonderfully studious Mental Floss must recall the salad days of the Academic Decathlon going by one of their latest lists of rhetorical devices.

One can really fill one’s oratorical quiver with these terms, illustrated by modern, accessible examples. A couple of my favourites that I don’t recall encountering before—at least not presented in a penetrable way, are antimeria, a figure of speech describing a change in a word’s usage, most commonly turning a noun into a verb (Shakespeare’s line from King Lear—“The thunder would not peace at my bidding”) as into to message someone or to gift something—fortuneately, one can yet befriend another—but also in the growing trend of using a slash (/ a virgule) as a grammatical conjunction rather than just a juxtaposition between two related things and the construction called an anacoluthon for something that is non sequitir and disjointed or galloping forward, often what rambles on after the em-dash.