Category: The Dish

The Hard Words

By Patrick
According to Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, the earliest dictionaries only contained the hard words:

Johnson’s Dictionary contains many of these hard words, and for word lovers they can be delightful. There you’ll find nidification, meaning “the act of building nests,” and gemelliparous, “bearing twins.” Scrabble players will delight in words like ophiophagous (“Serpent-eating”), galericulate (“Covered as with a hat”), or decacuminated (“Having the top cut off”). But Johnson was not entirely comfortable with them: “I am not always certain,” he said, “that they are read in any book but the works of lexicographers” (preface, pp. 87–88). He was right. Consider the word naulage, which appears in nearly a hundred books in the eighteenth century alone. The problem is that every one of those books is a dictionary. They all tell us that naulage means the fee paid to carry freight by sea, but there’s no indication the word was ever used even by those paid to carry freight by sea.

The dictionaries were also notorious for stealing definitions from one another.   

(Hat tip: Frank Wilson)

Counting Cards

By Patrick
Jim Manzi shares his experiences:

When I was at MIT there were three well-known teams: the MIT team, the Stanford team and the Czechoslovakians. The Czechs were by far the coolest – a small group of mathematicians and scientists who had somehow gotten across the Iron Curtain and were living the American Dream in Vegas, complete with gold chains, Kangol caps and plaid polyester pants. They were almost perfectly represented by a famous Saturday Night Live skit.

My experience was that it was very easy to stay under the radar of casinos if you didn’t feel the need to do any of that. Just play solo at the quarter tables, never spike your bet above 5:1, and play no more than one hour at casino before you move on to the next one. There are about 100 casinos in Vegas, so you can play ten hours per day every other weekend and only visit a given casino once every two or three months (for an hour each time). No pit boss will know who you are or care what you’re doing because you’re so far down in the noise. You can make a lot of money this way. Of course, nobody will ever know that you are taking them, and the emotional satisfaction arises from walking into this multi-billion dollar enterprise and walking out with their money because you’re smarter and more disciplined than they are. In a bizarre way, you succeed through classical bourgeois virtues: self-discipline, frugality, ego control and steady work.

Once you realize all this, of course, you figure out that you can make a lot more money in that giant casino called Wall Street.

(Hat tip: Jesse Walker)

Yoo Two

By Patrick
The always insightful Scott Horton on the recently released Yoo memo:

When Yoo Two was declassified and released, we see that not a single word of the document was blacked out or excised. And indeed, there was no basis whatsoever for the classification to start with.

So why has a legal policy statement been classified and withheld for five years? The answer to that question is now clear. The memorandum would have produced reactions of ridicule and outrage from throughout the professional community—as indeed it has. The author and the classifier knew that. They used classification as a political tool to keep something which is a quintessential public document out of the reach of the public.[…]

We now know that there are at least six memoranda crafted by OLC that discuss the torture issue; we do not know the details on the more recent of them. But for analytical purposes it is important to group them together and to view the undisclosed subsequent memoranda as the progeny of Yoo Prime and Yoo Two. Attorney General Mukasey insists that those who received these memoranda were entitled to rely on them, and they cannot be prosecuted. In other words, Mukasey is saying that the OLC can legitimately be used as a printing press to issue get-out-of-jail free cards to be distributed at will.

The more we learn about the factual circumstances in which these memoranda were crafted, the purposes for which they were sought, and the way they were used, the more outrageous that contention sounds.

The rest of his analysis is here. 

Tips For Joining A Cult

By Patrick
Scott Adams has some free advice:

If you ever decide to join a cult, the first thing you should ask about is the quality of their doomsday cave. A poorly constructed cave could kill you, and that would take most of the fun out of doomsday.

You should also look for a cult leader who has some specificity about the exact doomsday date. Otherwise you’re just sitting in a cave for an extra month for no good reason. I’d want the comet to strike earth a minute after I wiped my feet on the cave’s welcome mat. That way the people who got all of my worldly possessions wouldn’t have time to enjoy them.[…]

The big problem with picking a doomsday date is that it so obvious when you are wrong. For most other decisions, you can generally make a case for why your wrongness was really right. For example, you still hear people say Saddam had WMD but he did a good job of hiding them…But when the world doesn’t explode on Tuesday, it’s hard to make a case that it did. You have to go with something like “The comet was heading this way, but we prayed it off course. You’re welcome. Give me back my stuff.”