Time is such a slippery thing. It ticks away, neutrally, yet it also flies and collapses, and is more often lost than found. If scientists agree on anything, it's that nobody knows enough about time.
Crowds are often mad rather than wise.
English is the language on which the sun never sets.
Reality is less whiter than white.
Those of Norse descent who lived through the events of the 820s, would not, of course, have feared the anger of a god they did not believe in. But they might have feared they were witnessing Fim- bulwinter — three summerless years marking the onset of Rag- narok, the twilight of their own gods.
Troublemaker was his middle name.
As a Harvard philosopher, he might have no idea how to tell an elm from a beech.
INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. Ancient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in meaning come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what (inverted commas), and so on.
Who can say what order should be used to list adjectives in English? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac."
Whig histories typically focus on the progress that the state and evangelicals made in forging a Church of England: a history of the winners.
In Mark Forsyth's marvellous book, "The Etymologicon", and largely corroborated by the Oxford English Dictionary, feisty, in the sense of "spirited", is derived from "fist" or "feist", meaning a small dog. This in turn comes from the phrase "a fisting hound", where "to fist" means to fart.
The price of being on the wrong side at the wrong time was terrible.
To win an argument, Roman orators taught, first win the goodwill of your audience.
One of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in a hugely influential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled a pause twice as long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you read a text aloud.)
A business traveller in Istanbul may pop by the kuafor for a haircut ahead of a randevu with a client, board a vapur (steamship) to beat the afternoon trafik and finish the day relaxing in a sezlong on her hotel teras.
The Gregorian calendar has a number of problems. It is based on the birth of Jesus, which is not a universally relevant event; the years before Christ are counted backwards; and there is no year zero: 1BC is followed directly by 1AD.
A famous story tells how, in a previous life, the Buddha took pity on a starving tigress, who might otherwise have had to eat her newborn cubs. He sacrificed himself instead. The agonising question, however, is whether these brave acts do anybody any good at all.
Alas, just because something is irrational does not mean it will not happen.
The Prophet Muhammad is even said to have shied from entering Damascus, otherwise called al-Fayha, "the fragrant", for fear of entering Paradise twice.
Sherlock Holme's maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.
But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda.
There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.
Any truth, it is said, passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and finally it is taken as self-evident.
A decent man with some liberal instincts and a lot of personal courage was just what the doctor ordered.
This Anonymous, the publishers claim, is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama, though whether that's the men's room or a ballroom, they are not saying.
There is nothing worse than a know-all who is sometimes right.
Play the players, not the cards, he would say. Watch them from the minute you sit down. Play fast in a slow game, slow in a fast one. Never get out when you're winning. Look for the sucker and, if you can't see one, get up and leave, because the sucker is you.
He wants to sell the family silver.
At the University of Missouri at Columbia a petition drive calls for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been adorned with sticky notes reading "racist" and "rapist", in a reference to his ownership of slaves, with one of whom he fathered a child.
How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, a game and (for those who think have more fun) hair. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square.
There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of politeness. The first is a "bald, on-record" approach: "I'm going to shut the window." The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: "I'm going to shut the window, is that OK?' The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window." The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at alclass="underline" "Gosh, it's cold in here."
If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards.
This is the land of smiley faces and the "have a nice day" greeting — Americans like to be liked.
There is life in the old dog.
Hacking is, nevertheless, a useful reminder of an old adage: if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.
But being right and being seen to be right are different things.
Sherlock Holmes once remarked that: "It is my business to know what other people don't know".
Ask people what they think of statistics, or try to use some in an argument, and you will often get the quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli that lists them alongside lies and damned lies.
Odd that a meaningless phrase can be used so meaningfully by so many people.
The Cyrenaics, or egoistic hedonists v. egoistic hedonists, the Epicureans and universalistic hedonism.
Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one.
Bharat Mata's iconography remained vague. Did she have four arms or ten? Was she accompanied by a lion, or a map of India? And which map at that?
A man invents a new game, chess, and presents it to hi ikes it so much that he offers the inventor a reward of his choice. The man asks for one grain of rice for the first square of his chessboard, two for the second, four for the third and so on to 64. The king readily agrees, believing the request to be surprisingly modest. They start counting out the rice, and at first the amounts are tiny. But they keep doubling, and soon the next square already requires the output of a large ricefield. Not long afterwards the king has to concede defeat: even his vast riches are insufficient to provide a mountain of rice the size of Everest. Exponential growth, in other words, looks negligible until it suddenly becomes unmanageable E (18 446 744 073 709 551 616 grains).
Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems: a cover story entitled "The meaning of Lula" (see article) in October 2002 resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazilians who were impressed at our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.
It's the old philosophy of buying straw hats in December.