Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Animals as verbs  To "horse" around means to goof off, to "crow" means to brag, to "bull" up means to become stubborn, to "snake" around means to be sneaky, to "weasel" into something also means to be sneaky, to "cow" means to be intimidate someone, to "fox" means to outwit, to "rabbit" means to babble about something, to "dog" is to remain persistently attached to.  http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/animal-verbs.130982/

Phubbing refers to the practice of ignoring one’s companion or companions in order to pay attention to one’s phone or other mobile device.  The word is a blend of phone and snub.  It was invented in 2012 as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign to promote the Macquarie dictionary in Australia.  Instead of promoting the word directly, they got other people to use it, targeting journalists through  an astroturfing ‘Stop Phubbing’ campaign which succeeded in generating news stories which used the word.  Phub popped up on Oxford’s New Monitor Corpus, which is designed to identify emerging vocabulary, in July 2013, and it surged in frequency the following month.  By the time the true story behind the campaign was revealed in October of that year, some of my colleagues had even begun to mention it as a potential Word of the Year candidate.  Katherine Connor Martin  http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/05/phub-made-eat-words/

Feedback to article on Grace Hopper from a Muse reader:   I remember Grace Hopper attending an ACM Conference in Toledo, February 1981.  Also, really enjoyed the book, The Innovators, which is about computing pioneers.  What an amazing woman.  Oh yeah, I picked her up at the Toledo airport and returned her to the same.

February 4, 2015  In the closing pages of his epic 2007 biography “Einstein: His Life and Universe,” author Walter Isaacson observed that Albert Einstein not only was a scientist who sought a unified theory that could explain the cosmos.  Einstein also was a humanist who believed that freedom was the lifeblood of creativity.  “Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality,” Isaacson wrote, “was his willingness to be a non-conformist.” Isaacson cites a forward that Einstein wrote, late in his life, to a new edition of Galileo.  The theme that I recognize in Galileo’s work,” Einstein wrote, “is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority.”  “The world has seen a lot of impudent geniuses,” Isaacson concludes.  In his latest work of history, “The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution,” Isaacson returns to these themes once more.  Impudence, yes. Genius, for sure.  Yet “The Innovators” veers radically away from Isaacson’s exhaustive study of the lone brilliance of Einstein, much less the petulant independence captured in his award-winning biography of Steve Jobs  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXSJzWxh0yo  John C. Hollar  Read much more at http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/insight-into-the-innovators/

Antirhodos (sometimes Antirrhodos or Anti Rhodes) was an island in the eastern harbor of AlexandriaEgypt, on which a Ptolemaic palace was sited.  The island was occupied until the reigns of Septimius Severus and Caracalla and it probably sank in the 4th century, when it succumbed to earthquakes and a tsunami following an earthquake in the eastern Mediterranean near Crete in the year 365.  The site now lies underwater, near the seafront of modern Alexandria, at a depth of approximately five metres (16 ft).  Descriptions of the island were recorded in classical antiquity by Greek geographers and historians.   Strabo described a royal house on Antirhodos in 27 BC and wrote that the island's name ("counter-Rhodes") derived from the island's rivalry with the island of Rhodes.  Antirhodos was part of Alexandria's ancient royal port called the Portus Magnus, which also included parts of the Lochias peninsula in the East and the island of Pharos in the West.  The Portus Magnus was abandoned and left as an open bay after an earthquake in the 8th century.  On the esplanade the explorer Franck Goddio uncovered the remains of a relatively modest (90 metres by 30 metres) marble-floored 3rd century BC palace, believed to have been Cleopatra's royal quarters.  Md. Anwar Hossain Rubel  See many pictures at http://rubeliba.blogspot.com/2016/09/sunken-city-antirhodos-lost-kingdom-of.html

The Pharos at Alexandria was the last structure to be named on Antipater of Sidon's list of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  It was constructed at the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, begun by Ptolemy Soter, the ruler of the Egyptian region after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE.  It was impressive in its construction and scale, and legends claim that its light (a reflective mirror) was visible in the harbor from 35 miles away.  The Pharos (which has become a generic term for lighthouse) was actually located on the tiny limestone island of Pharos that sat in front of the harbor of what would become Alexandria.  When Alexander the Great arrived in Egypt in 332 BCE, Pharos was a shrine and home to Proteus, a sea god.  When Alexander and his troops took Memphis (the ancient Egyptian capital) and defeated the occupying Persians, the Egyptian people were elated, and accepted him as their new Pharaoh.  As Alexander and his troops further explored their new territory, they happened upon a small fishing village called Rhacotis.  Its strategic location (on the coast) caught Alexander's eye, and he proclaimed that a new capital city, Alexandria, was to be built there.  Immense and opulent, this city would be home to beautiful art and architecture, as well as all of the most influential literature in ancient history in its fabled Library.  The Pharos at Alexandria stood and remained in use until two earthquakes, in 1303 and 1323 CE, reduced it to rubble.  In 1994 CE, underwater archaeologists located some of the remains of the lighthouse in the Alexandrian Harbor, and more have recently been located using remote imaging.  Some remains of the Pharos were also used in the construction of Fort Qaitbey in the 15th century CE, which stands on the very same spot to this day.  http://www.ancient.eu/article/130/  Find a map of "the conventional list" of the Seven Wonders of the World and a map of Alexandria between a list of principal characters and Chapter 1 in Alexandria, a Marcus Didius Falco novel by Lindsey Davis

Consistcomprise and compose are all verbs used to describe what something is ‘made of’.  We only use the active form of consist of:  Their flat consists of two bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.  Comprise is more formal than consist:  The USA comprises 50 states.  We can also use it in the passive voice in the form ‘be comprised of’:  The course is comprised of ten lectures and five seminars on the theory of economics and banking.  Compose of  is even more formal than consist of and compriseCompose of  is only used in the passive voice:  Muscle is composed of different types of protein.

On January 17, 2017 the National Book Critics Circle announced its 30 finalists in six categories––autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry––for the outstanding books of 2016.  The awards will be presented on March 16, 2017 at the New School in New York City.  The ceremony is free and open to the public.  Find the complete list of NBCC Award finalists for the publishing year 2016 and winners of three additional prizes  (The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, The John Leonard Prize and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing) at http://www.bookcritics.org/


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 1679  January 18, 2017  On this date in 1778, James Cook was the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the "Sandwich Islands".  On this date in 1886, modern hockey was born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England.

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