The Christians all say that reciting the first verse of the 23rd psalm helps them enter a religious state.
Right back at you across the pond: Sprain, Bad Reportugal, Inkland, Dire- land, Not-so-Niceland, Greece Trap, Francid, Itally, Wild Turkey, Check Republic, Repoland, Slowvakia. You started this.
That approach was first used by German scholars, and then British ones, just over a century ago, on the texts sacred to Christianity, using techniques honed on the writings of Greece and Rome. From small differences in the four Gospels, they drew big conclusions. Matthew speaks of a lamp giving light to "all those in the house"; Luke speaks of a lamp to guide "those coming into the house".
Nowadays, all the world over, people speak with accents.
Halloween bridges the retailers' gap between the return to school and Christmas.
Now that "nigger" (which he calls the N-word) has become taboo in polite society, what happens to Niggerhead Point? The author notes in passing that this cape on Lake Ontario was thus named because it was a point on the laudable underground railroad that helped thousands of escaped slaves to freedom in Canada. That interesting historical association survives in the first name change, to Negrohead Point (which remains on federal maps). But to call it merely Graves Point (as New York state maps do) seems a pity. "Nigger" and "Jap" are now banned on American maps, though a Dago Gulch survives in western Montana. More puzzling to the non-American is the onslaught on the use of "Squaw", which according to some activists (though not philologists) is not an innocent word for a Native American woman, but a derogatory term for her vagina. So Squaw Peak is now set to be renamed after Lori Piestewa, the first Native American woman in the American army to be killed in combat.
Philosophers have rarely flourished on foreign parts: Kant spent his whole life in the city of Konigsberg.
Echoing ancient thinkers such as Democritus and Lucretius, they held ideas that were to prove too revolutionary even for a revolutionary age.
The apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.
Nationalism and religion can be a toxic brew.
Myth and fantasy populate the world with "othermen"— the elves, goblins, dwarfs and giants that live in the wild wood, in the cave or on the high mountain peak. Not animal, but not quite human either, they feed fear and imagination in equal quantity. Nor are such creatures merely the province of the past and the poetaster.
It is not so much the languages that have two dozen words for snow, say, or horse or walrus carcass that impress the most, but those that draw differences between the seemingly indistinguishable. Italian, as one would imagine, is particularly good on male vanity, and French on love as a business. The richness of Yiddish for insults seems to be matched only by the many and varied Japanese words for the deep joy that can come as a response to beauty and the German varieties of sadness and disappointment.
If this walking penitentiary is such a worthy symbol of religious piety, why isn't the burqa worn by men?
For broadcasters, more eyeballs mean more subscribers and advertisers.
Forecasts a decade ahead are no likelier to be accurate than a bet
on a horse.
Hell is a city much like London.
When is a Jew not a Jew? When he's a Karaite.
He matured into a man of laconic, sardonic, quintessentially Roman aphorisms: "If you think ill of others, you commit a sin. But you often get it right."
Morality is powerful stuff, and as such should be used with care.
No wonder novice writers are often at a loss, and put commas where they do not belong. The title of the punctuation-promoting bestseller "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" comes from a joke about a poorly punctuated wildlife guide describing the diet of panda bears.
£ £ Science, technology, progress, history, civilization
Einstein: "Why is it that nobody understands me, but everybody likes me?"
Science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap."
Privacy is also at risk. Users were appalled when it emerged iRobot, a robotic vacuum cleaner, not only cleans the floor, but creates a digital map of the home's interior that can then be sold on to advertisers, Standard
Innovation, a maker of a connected vibrator called We-Vibe, was recently ordered to pat customers $10,000 each after hackers discovered that the device was recording highly personal information about its owners.
Three-quarters of Americans admit that they search the web, send e-mails and check their social-media accounts in the bathroom.
The GAFA, as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple are collectively called, also have good arguments on their side.
Compared with the size of its brain, an elephant's hippocampuses are about 40% larger than those of a human being, suggesting that the old proverb about an elephant never forgetting may have a grain of truth in it.
For every Spotify there is a WannaCry.
Do you know how a toilet works?
Wherever David Rockefeller went in the world — and in his 35 years at Chase Manhattan Bank, from 1946 to 1981, he ran up 5m air miles — David Rockefeller carried a small jar in his pocket. It was in case he found a beetle on the way. From the age of seven, partly from his own solitary, careful catching, partly from expeditions he sponsored, he built up a collection of 90,000 specimens from 2,000 species, carefully labelled and stored in airtight hardwood boxes at the 3,400-acre family place in Pocantico Hills. His preference was for wood-borers, leaf-cutters and tunnellers, whose industrious activity changed the world in ways few people saw. His discreet gathering of contacts had started in the war, when he was sent to Algiers to work for army intelligence: though of junior rank, he soon assembled a list of people who knew what was really going on. He also collected 131 beetles in his jars.
At the heart of myriad devices, from computers and smartphones to drones and dishwashers, a microprocessor can be found busily crunching data. Switch the power off, though, and this chip will forget everything.
No one has truly understood why shoelaces come undone in the first place. Regardless of any practical benefit, though, the three researchers, are surely contenders for an Ignobel prize. That award is made every year for work which "first makes you laugh, and then makes you think". Their study of laces looks like a shoo-in.
Dolly the sheep was cloned from an udder and named after a singer noted for her ample bosom as well as her talent.
You know, young man, one day all of these will be replaced by quantum computers.
If the history of human civilisation is of the collapse of distance — from walking to horses to carriages to motorised transport to jet engines — then what happens when you take that thread to its logical conclusion, when it becomes possible to move from any one place on Earth to another simply by walking through a door?
People could spot bacteria, but not viruses, which are smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Until the electron microscope was invented in the 1930s, influenza was, like the Higgs boson before 2012, a theoretical entity: its existence was deduced from its effects. In the face of such uncertainty, public faith in medicine wavered. People reverted to superstition: sugar lumps soaked in kerosene, and aromatic fires to clear "miasmas".
"Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers," Voltaire advised.
As Niels Bohr, a Danish physicist, said: "If quantum physics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
Most of the people who buy computers don't even know what a transistor does.
By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more oxides of nitrogen and sulphur — gases much worse for global warming than carbon dioxide — than all the world's cars put together.
You can't flush your toilet over the internet.
Once upon a time the space race was driven by the competition between capitalism and communism. Now it is driven by the competition between individual capitalists.