One of
Italy's leading universities - the Politecnico di Milano - is
going to switch to the English language.
The university has announced that from 2014 most of its degree courses -
including all its graduate courses - will be taught and assessed entirely in
English rather than Italian. "Universities are in a more competitive world, if
you want to stay with the other global universities - you have no other
choice," says Professor Giovanni Azzone.
He says that his university's experiment will "open up a window of
change for other universities", predicting that in five to 10 years other
Italian universities with global ambitions will also switch to English.
The dynamic lexicon changes the way we look at problems ranging from human-computer
interaction to logic itself, but it also has an application in the political
realm. Over the last few decades, some
important legal scholars and judges — most notably the United States Supreme
Court Justice, Antonin Scalia — have made the case that the Constitution is not
a living document, and that we should try to get back to understanding the
Constitution as it was originally written by the original framers — sometimes
this doctrine is called textualism. Scalia’s doctrine says that we cannot do
better than concentrate on what the Constitution actually says — on what
the words on paper say. Scalia once put
this in the form of a tautology: “Words mean what they mean.” In his more cautious formulation he says that
“words do have a limited range of meaning, and no interpretation that goes
beyond that range is permissible.” Pretty
clearly Scalia is assuming what I have called the static picture of language. But “words mean what they mean” is not the
tautology that Scalia seems to think it is. If word meanings can change dramatically
during the course of a single conversation how could they not change over the
course of centuries? But more importantly,
Scalia’s position seems to assume that the original meanings of the words used
in the Constitution are nearly fully determined — that the meaning of a term
like “person” or phrase like “due process,” as used in the Constitution is
fully fleshed out. But is it really
determined whether, for example, the term “person” in the Constitution applies
to medically viable fetuses, brain dead humans on life support, and, as we will
have to ask in the fullness of time, intelligent robots? The dynamic picture says no. The words used by
lawmakers are just as open ended as words used in day-to-day conversation. Peter Ludlow http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/the-living-word/
The story
goes that the John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, asked for beef served between
slices of bread so that he could eat while continuing to play cards and his
friends asked "to have the same as Sandwich", according to the
British Sandwich Association. The first
written record of the sandwich was in 1762 and the Kent town of Sandwich, which
is the earldom of the Montagu family, is celebrating the 250th anniversary of
the meal. Sir Edward Montagu, a
prominent naval commander, became the first Earl of Sandwich when he was
offered a peerage in 1660. Steve
Laslett, one of the organisers of the Sandwich Celebration Festival, said Sir
Edward Montagu chose the title because "at the time Sandwich was the
premier sea port in England". "When
he was offered the earldom he could have chosen Portsmouth but he chose
Sandwich - today we could be eating a Portsmouth." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-18010424
The Preakness Range on northern New Jersey was originally inhabited by the Munsee (Minsi) Lenape. Preakness appears to be a modernized form of per-ukunees, a Lenape term thought to mean young buck. For a time, Dutch settlers actually referred to the range as Harteberg, which appropriately translates to Deer Mountain. For most of modern history the Preakness Range remained a wilderness providing recreation to the inhabitants of surrounding towns. Only the southern section of the range was particularly built up, with William Paterson University acting as buffer to hold back development from encroaching northward across the main ridge of Preakness Mountain. In the 1980s, when development began to threaten the remaining wilderness of the range, a push by local citizens to preserve the Preakness Range for the public interest was begun, ultimately resulting in the creation of High Mountain Park Preserve. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preakness_Range
One variation of Preakness was Preckiness, used by General George Washington to describe the
area where his troops were quartered in the winter of 1776-77. Nearly a century later, Milton H. Sanford, a
thoroughbred owner, became attracted to the name. He called his farms, one in New Jersey and
another in Kentucky, Preakness. His
Jersey farm was located in the Indians' "quail woods." Today, there remains a Preakness, N.J. When
he bought a yearling sired by Lexington and foaled by Bay Leaf from A. J. Alexander,
he named the colt (bred in Kentucky at Woodburn Farm) Preakness, unaware that
he was contributing to turf immortality. It was Preakness who turned up as a
3-year-old for his debut in the Dinner Party Stakes at Pimlico's inaugural in
1870. He was derided as a "cart
horse" for his ungainly appearance, but won that first stakes at Old
Hilltop, which became a history-producing victory. It was the colt's only start in 1870 but he
left a lasting impression at Pimlico. Three years later, the Maryland Jockey Club
honored him by calling its newest stakes race "Preakness". The Dinner Party Stakes eventually became the
present-day Dixie Handicap. http://www.preakness-stakes.info/preakness.php
Reduplication is a morphological
process in which the root or stem of a word, or part of it, is repeated. Reduplication is used both inflectionally to
convey a grammatical function, such as plurality, intensification, etc., and derivationally
to create new words. English uses some
kinds of reduplication, mostly for informal vocabulary. There are three types:
Rhyming reduplications: abracadabra,
boogie-woogie, bow-wow, chock-a-block, claptrap, gang-bang, eency-weeny,
fuddy-duddy, fuzzy-wuzzy, hanky-panky, harum-scarum, heebie-jeebies,
helter-skelter, herky-jerky, hi-fi, higgledy-piggledy, hobnob, Hobson-Jobson,
hocus-pocus, hodge-podge, hoity-toity, hokey-pokey, honey-bunny, hubble-bubble,
hugger-mugger, Humpty-Dumpty, hurly-burly, hurry-scurry, itsy-bitsy,
itty-bitty, loosey-goosey, lovey-dovey, mumbo-jumbo, namby-pamby,
nimbly-bimbly, nitty-gritty, nitwit, okey-dokey, pall-mall, palsy-walsy,
pee-wee, pell-mell, picnic, razzle-dazzle, roly-poly, sci-fi, super-duper,
teenie-weenie, tidbit, walkie-talkie, willy-nilly, wingding
Exact reduplications: (baby-talk-like):
bonbon, bye-bye, choo-choo, chop-chop, chow-chow, dum-dum, fifty-fifty, go-go,
goody-goody, knock-knock, no-no, pee-pee, poo-poo, pooh-pooh, rah-rah, so-so,
tsk-tsk, wee-wee.
Ablaut reduplications:
bric-a-brac, chit-chat, criss-cross,
dilly-dally, ding-dong, fiddle-faddle, flimflam, flip-flop, hippety-hoppety,
kitcat, knick-knack, mish-mash, ping-pong, pitter-patter, riff-raff, riprap,
see-saw, shilly-shally, sing-song, teeny-tiny, teeter-totter, tic-tac-toe,
tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tip-top, tittle-tattle, wish-wash, wishy-washy, zig-zag
See much more at: http://www.chemistrydaily.com/chemistry/Reduplication
Search the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art and find examples such as the sculpture Gorilla by
Daisy Youngblood at: http://classes.toledomuseum.org:8080/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/111/10/invno-asc?t:state:flow=f1385fa4-f7d9-42e4-96aa-0f13ad77c46b
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