“What’s in a name?”  Juliet asked as she and Romeo tried to puzzle their way around the troubling problem of their warring families.  Well, plenty, the most detailed investigation into surnames in the UK and Ireland has found.  A team of researchers has spent four years studying the meanings and origins of almost 50,000 surnames, from the most common to the highly obscure.  Some names have been around for many centuries while other more recent arrivals are explained for the first time in the work, the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland.  There are dozens of obvious ones linked to occupations, such as Smith (a name carried by more than half a million British and Irish people), or to place names, such as Leicester, Sutton or Green.  There are also many that began life as nicknames, such as Longbones and Goodfellow.  But there are also some that could not be guessed at, such as Campbell.  The surname used to be represented in Latin documents as de campo bello (of the beautiful field).  Actually, the new dictionary spells out that it comes from the Gaelic for crooked mouth.  Richard Coates, professor of linguistics at the University of the West of England (UWE), said there was great interest in the origins of family names.  (His own may stem from one of the numerous places called Coates, or from the Old English cot, for cottage or workman’s hut.)  About half of the 20,000 most common names are locative, meaning they come from places; a quarter are relationship names, such as Dawson; and a fifth are nicknames.  About 8% are occupational, including less familiar ones such as Beadle (church official), Rutter (musician), and Baxter (baker).  The nicknames are not always straightforward:  the early Shorts may have earned theirs because they were tall.  Steven Morris  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/17/dictionary-of-50000-surnames-and-their-origins-published

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

ambisinistrous  (am-bi-SIN-uh-struhs)  adjective  Clumsy with both hands.  Modeled after ambidextrous (able to use both hands with equal ease), from Latin ambi- (both) + sinister (left).  Earliest documented use:  1863.  An ambisinistrous person has two left hands, etymologically speaking.  You’d think it would be rare for such an uncommon word to have a perfect synonym, but there is one:  ambilevous, from Latin laevus (left).  A similar express is “to have two left feet” (to be clumsy, especially while dancing).

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From:  Pauline Ridel  Subject:  Two Left Feet  Richard Thompson’s song Two Left Feet, from his album Hand of Kindness, can be heard on YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJFwfWSsXEg&feature=youtu.be  3:53  Paradoxically perhaps, it’s great fun to jig around to.

BABY BURGERS  Shape 12 patties from one pound of ground beef, ham, lamb, chicken or turkey.  Fry in a mixture of either butter and worchestershire sauce or a mixture of butter and balsamic vinegar.

"Certainly one of the most enthralling things about human life is the recognition that we live in what, for practical purposes, is a universe without bounds."  "I'm one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity and quality of results."  James Alfred Van Allen (1914-2006) American physicist who discovered the Earth's magnetosphere, two toroidal zones of radiation due to trapped charged particles encircling the Earth.  https://todayinsci.com/V/VanAllen_James/VanAllenJames-Quotations.htm

Nathan Hill’s literary career almost ended before it started.  Like so many optimistic young M.F.A. graduates, Mr. Hill moved to New York City in his 20s with a hard drive full of short stories, hoping to land an agent and a publisher.  His early overtures to literary agents brought rejections.  Then one day in the summer of 2004, when he was moving out of a house in Queens where he lived with 11 other guys, his car was broken into.  He lost all of his possessions, including his computer and his backup drive.  All of his work in progress vanished.  He sulked for a while and played lots of World of Warcraft, an online fantasy game.  Eventually, though, he started something new.  The story began as a family drama about an estranged mother and son, but over the years it morphed into a sprawling tale about politics, online gaming, academia, Norwegian mythology, social media, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 1960s counterculture.  Now, 12 years later, that novel, “The Nix,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf.  And Mr. Hill finally seems poised to break out as a major literary talent.  Mr. Hill knew from the time he was in elementary school that he wanted to be a writer.  In second grade, he wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story about a brave knight trying to rescue a princess from a haunted castle.   He titled it “The Castle of No Return” and illustrated it himself.  (“The Castle of No Return” still sits in a box somewhere in his parents’ attic, but Mr. Hill sneaked the story into “The Nix,” during a pivotal flashback.  He majored in English and journalism at the University of Iowa, where he studied with the novelist Sara Levine.  Ms. Levine remembers him as a serious young man who was interested in the granular mechanics of sentence structure.  She said that she was stunned by the caliber of “The Nix” and by the unusual amount of attention the book is getting.  Alexandra Alter  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/books/nathan-hill-the-nix.html

The Wall of Sound (also called the Spector Sound) is a music production formula developed by American record producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in the 1960s, with assistance from engineers Stan Ross, Larry Levine, and the session musician conglomerate known as "the Wrecking Crew".  The intention was to create a dense aesthetic that came across well on AM radio and jukeboxes popular in the era.  In order to attain the Wall of Sound, Spector's arrangements called for large ensembles (including some instruments not generally used for ensemble playing, such as electric and acoustic guitars), with multiple instruments doubling and even tripling many of the parts to create a fuller, richer sound.  Spector also included an array of orchestral instruments—strings, woodwind, brass and percussion—not previously associated with youth-oriented pop music, characterizing his methods as a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll:  little symphonies for the kids.  The intricacies of the technique were unprecedented in the world of sound production for popular records.  Wrecking Crew guitarist Barney Kessel would note:  "Musically, it was terribly simple, but the way he recorded and miked it, they’d diffuse it so that you couldn't pick out any one instrument.  Techniques like distortion and echo were not new, but Phil came along and took these to make sounds that had not been used in the past.  I thought it was ingenious."  According to Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, who used the formula extensively:  "In the '40s and '50s, arrangements were considered 'OK here, listen to that French horn' or 'listen to this string section now.'  It was all a definite sound.  There weren't combinations of sound, and with the advent of Phil Spector, we find sound combinations, which—scientifically speaking—is a brilliant aspect of sound production."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. - Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE--ITS DEFECTS AND DANGERS by John D. Feerick  40 NEW YORK STATE BAR JOURNAL 317 (1968)   The "winner take all" or "general ticket" aspect of the system, which is purely a product of state law, isolates a candidate's popular votes in one state from those cast for him in another state.  Thus, in 1960 Kennedy received 2,377,846 popular votes in Illinois while Nixon obtained 2,368, 988 votes.  Kennedy therefore received Illinois' twenty-seven electoral votes.  On the other hand, Nixon received 1,175,120 popular votes in Indiana and Kennedy 952,358 votes.  Accordingly, Indiana cast its thirteen electoral votes for Nixon.  What is noteworthy is that on a two state basis, Nixon received a substantial majority of the popular votes but less than one-third of their combined electoral votes.  In every election millions of popular votes are never reflected in any electoral votes.  "The electoral college method of electing a President of John D. Feerick the United States is archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous." - "Electing the President," Report of the American Bar Association Commission on Electoral College Reform (1967), pp. 3-4.  Read 15-page article at http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1292&context=faculty_scholarship

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1666  December 19, 2016  On this date in 1776, Thomas Paine published one of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled "The American Crisis".  On this date in 1777, George Washington's Continental Army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.  Thought for the Day  You must protest / It is your diamond duty / Ah but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty. - Phil Ochs, folksinger (19 Dec 1940-1976)  Word of the Day  humbug interj   Balderdash!,  nonsense!,  rubbish!  Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, featuring the character Ebenezer Scrooge who hates Christmas and calls it a “humbug”, was first published December 19, 1843.