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| Life is a bit hectic as it always is towards the end of a quarter. Three exams this week and these aren't even the finals; they come in three weeks. Two more major papers due. Oh well. It is kind of fun. Some of our dear friends who are teaching English in China are unaccounted for. Two former students of mine. Please pray for Chad and Jenny Graber. | | |
| May the Glory of Easter and the fact that he is WORTHY be with you all today. The Joy of knowing that we live in something greater is what makes life, which can be rather messy, liveable. In all our philosophical wanderings, and political rants we discover that answers are at best temporal and partial. In Jesus' resurrection we find hope. I went through a period where I questioned the resurrection, but have studied and wrestled with it and there is no doubt in my mind, that Jesus rose from the dead, both spiritually and physically. | | |
| What is time? How is it that we are the ones to define what time is? Apparently God and the host of heaven are not bound by time. This is clear from the Revelation of John. So what defines a hour? what about a second? The following is a www.dictionary.com definition, "the system of those sequential relations that any event has to any other, as past, present, or future;indefinite and continuous duration regarded as that in which events succeed one another" So if time is the system of sequential relations to any event, what gives congress the right to define that. Of course I am speaking of their manipulation of the clock with laws relating to Daylight Savings Time which is a joke. if their is anything that could cause me to agitate for revolution it would be this. Every spring I get very upset with this. What gives them to right to define what my evenings are like. I read all these news stories about America's sleep deprivation, etc. Well let the clocks alone and lets go to bed when the sun goes down. I did a bit of a study and the idea that it saves energy is ludicrous. In fact the latest studies done by the Government prove that it actually uses more energy. Also they have noticed an increase in Gasoline usage. Is that not enough of a reason to abandon the foolishness? Save gas and return to real time. Lets start a revolution with the slogan from the eminent American wit: "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man (or woman) healthy, wealthy and wise." B. Franklin. | | |
| Bob's comment about a murder of crows got me thinking again. Here is the etymology of crows from my favorite online etymology site http://www.etymonline.com/ " E. crawe, imitative of bird's cry. Phrase eat crow is probably based on the notion that the bird is edible when boiled but hardly agreeable; first attested 1851, Amer.Eng., but said to date to War of 1812 (Walter Etecroue turns up 1361 in the Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London). Crow's foot "wrinkle around the corner of the eye" is c.1374. Crowbar (c.1400) is either from resemblance to a crow's foot or possibly from crows, from O.Fr. cros, pl. of croc "hook." Phrase as the crow flies first recorded 1800. The Crow Indian tribe of the American Midwest is a rough translation of their own name, Apsaruke." So where does the collective noun for crows get the name of murder? "The phrase, according to James Lipton* in his An Exaltation of Larks, dates from 1450 in the form a mursher of crowys. It was a murther of crowes by 1476. Whether it arose because murdering was thought to be a characteristic of crows or simply as a negative comment upon flocks of crows is not known. The mursher form is problematic, however, as we must wonder if it was not intended as murder but was mistakenly interpreted as such. We could find no instances of murder with a similar spelling." (from www.takeourword.com) Here are more animal collective nouns, they are a real trip (Pun intended). Goats- Trip Elk-Gang Finches - Charm Bears-sleuth or sloth | | |
| I will refrain from adding more poetry for now. Would not want some of you to try and find the treasure that I was giving you. I have discovered that I love words. How they craft sentences, what they mean, and especially where they originate (Etymology). Take for instance the verb "to be." We use it every day, We also misuse it every day. The following quote is from a fascinating website www.wordorigins.org, "Our modern verb to be is actually a conflation of three distinct roots: es-, wes-, and beu-. The modern inflections of to be are a jumble of inflections of these three original roots. And this conflation has been going on for well over 1,200 years." Think about it-- 1200 years of to be. This rambling all comes from traveling through the Arizona countryside and seeing Cacti, which is the plural for cactus. Why is it not simply cactus, like deer, or shrimp, or sheep? Maybe a plant is different than an animal. but then how come we say a group of lion are a pride, and multiple geese are a gaggle? | | |
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