A showmance (sometimes show-mance), also known as show romance, is a romance that develops between two individuals in theater, or on films and television series and between reality show contestants or participants for the running period of the show.  When the two actively engage in a "made up" situation, it can be called a fauxmance.  It is also considered a neologism and its usage is gaining popularity in the media.  The term came to the attention of the mainstream on the non-scripted American television show Big Brother when it was first used by Will Kirby in 2001.  It has been used in theater on stage for years.  Then it moved to films, theater and scripted television.   It is primarily entered into as a ploy to gain more public and media attention and, in case of television, more camera time during the run of a theater piece, or a television series.  It may be also just a publicity stunt.  The second episode of Glee is entitled "Showmance".  It aired on September 9, 2009.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showmance 

The Greek god Hermes (the Roman Mercury ) was the god of translators and interpreters.  He was the most clever of the Olympian gods, and served as messenger for all the other gods.  He ruled over wealth, good fortune, commerce, fertility, and thievery.  Among his personal favorite commercial activities was the corn trade.  He was also the god of manual arts and eloquence.  As the deity of athletes, he protected gymnasiums and stadiums.  Despite his virtuous characteristics, Hermes was also a dangerous foe, a trickster and a thief.  He brought the souls of the dead to the underworld, and was honoured as a god of sleep.  Hermes/Mercury's relation to business and speed survives in words like "mercurial" and "mercantile".  Because of his speed, he was sometimes considered a god of winds.  As one of the "planets" known in antiquity, Mercury's name is at the origin of the name of "Wednesday" in French and other Romance languages:  "mercredi" comes from the Latin "Mercurii dies", or "Mercury's day".  https://www.eso.org/public/outreach/eduoff/vt-2004/mt-2003/mt-mercury-mythology.html 

"At sixes and sevens" is an English idiom used to describe a condition of confusion or disarray.  It is not known for certain, but the most likely origin of the phrase "At sixes and sevens" is a complicated dice game called "hazard", a more complicated version of the modern game of craps.  Michael Quinion, a British etymologist, writing on his website on linguistics, says, "It is thought that the expression was originally to set on cinque and sice (from the French numerals for five and six).  These were apparently the most risky numbers to shoot for ('to set on') and anyone who tried for them was considered careless or confused."  A similar phrase, "to set the world on six and seven", is used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde.  It dates from the mid-1380s and seems from its context to mean "to hazard the world" or "to risk one's life".  William Shakespeare uses a similar phrase in Richard II, "But time will not permit: all is uneven, And every thing is left at six and seven".  The phrase is also used in Gilbert & Sullivan's comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), where Captain Corcoran, the ship's Commander, is confused as to what choices to make in his life, and exclaims in the opening song of Act II, "Fair moon, to thee I sing, bright regent of the heavens, say, why is everything either at sixes or at sevens?"  In chapter three of the 1926 Clouds of Witness by Dorothy Sayers the ladies maid, Ellen, says "Anyhow, it was all at sixes and sevens for a day or two, and then her ladyship shuts herself up in her room and won't let me go into her wardrobe."   The phrase appears in a few songs, including "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" from the musical Evita, "Raoul and the Kings of Spain" from Tears for Fears, and "Playing With Fire" by Stereo MCs.  The eleventh studio album from Strange Music front man Tech N9ne was entitled "All 6's and 7's". The song "Sixes and Sevens" was cowritten and sung by Robert Plant.  It also appears in the Rolling Stones' song "Tumbling Dice".  The phrase is also used in the 1978 movie The Wiz, when Miss One gives Dorothy the silver slippers and comments, "Oh, don't be all sixes and sevens, honey" to Dorothy as Dorothy is in a state of confusion after killing the Wicked Witch of the East.  It is also found in the 1993 film The Remains of the Day.  It is also mentioned in the 2002 film Goldmember by Mike Myers' character Austin Powers to his dad, who at the time were speaking "English English":  "oh, the one who was all sixes and sevens?"  During the second episode of season five of the HBO series Six Feet Under, George uses the phrase to describe his wife's attitude towards him.  The phrase occurs in Sabina's opening monologue from Thornton Wilder's 1942 Pulitzer Prize winning play The Skin of Our Teeth:  "The whole world's at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn't fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sixes_and_sevens  At Sixes and Sevens is the debut studio album by the Norwegian gothic metal band Sirenia. 

The letters of the alphabet that have the most words starting with them, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, are S, followed at some distance in decreasing order by P, C, D, M, and A.  https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ini1.htm 

An analysis by Peter Norvig on Google Books data determined, among other things, the frequency of first letters of English words.   A June 2012 analysis using a text document containing all words in the English language exactly once, found 'S' to be the most common starting letter for words in the English language, followed by 'P', 'C', and 'A'.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency

 The concept referred to as the butterfly effect has been embraced by popular culture, where the term is often used to emphasize the outsize significance of minute occurrences, as in the 1990 movie Havana, in which Robert Redford, playing the role of Jack Weil, a gambler with a knack for math, proclaims to his costar, Lena Olin, that “a butterfly can flutter its wings over a flower in China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean.”  Edward Lorenz, the mild-mannered Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorology professor who developed the concept, never intended for it to be applied in this way.  Indeed, he meant to convey the opposite point.  The purpose of his provocative question, he said, was to illustrate the idea that some complex dynamical systems exhibit unpredictable behaviors such that small variances in the initial conditions could have profound and widely divergent effects on the system’s outcomes.  Because of the sensitivity of these systems, outcomes are unpredictable.  This idea became the basis for a branch of mathematics known as chaos theory, which has been applied in countless scenarios since its introduction.  Lorenz’s insight called into question laws introduced as early as 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton suggesting that nature is a probabilistic mechanical system, “a clockwork universe.”  Similarly, Lorenz challenged Pierre-Simon Laplace, who argued that unpredictability has no place in the universe, asserting that if we knew all the physical laws of nature, then “nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to [our] eyes.”  Lorenz discovered that this deterministic interpretation of the universe could not account for the imprecision in human measurement of physical phenomena.  He observed that nature’s interdependent cause-and-effect relationships are too complex to resolve.  To approximate the most likely outcomes for such complex systems as weather patterns, he began using sets of slightly different starting conditions to conduct parallel meteorological simulations.  This method is still used today to generate our daily weather forecasts.  Jamie L. Vernon  https://www.americanscientist.org/article/understanding-the-butterfly-effect

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2451  November 5, 2021