Like B and P (which also have a place in baby vocabulary), the M belongs to a category of consonants known as bilabials, from the Latin for “two lips.” Formed at the lips, with no tricky use of the tongue and no need of teeth, the three bilabial sounds are simple enough to be spoken by infants as young as two or three months.
Because of its powerful kiddy connection, the syllable ma or similar has denoted “mother” in diverse languages through the centuries.
Just look at the “mother” words in a handful of languages that have nothing to do with each other, that are linguistically and geographically separate. There’s Mandarin Chinese ma, Hindi maa, Vietnamese me, Malay emak, Hawaiian makuahine, Swahili mama, Finnish emo, Hebrew ema, Basque ama, and Quechua (aboriginal Peruvian tongue) ma —all of which would seem a re(ma)rkable coincidence, were there not a suspected common cause.
Old gangsters never die, except for the few that fall asleep in cinemas at midnight. Lay there sprawling in the footlights for the usherette or the ice cream girl to find. And if I die, God knows I might, don’t let me die in black and white, don’t make me share a haunted screen with every other ghost boy who stood trembling in the foyer drinking wine, then coughed and shot his cuffs and checked the time and stepped outside and got cut down by dead policemen, faces strobing in the panic-light, their long dark cars parked out the back, their halos black against the night, and John Dillinger’s name in finest bullet silver etched upon their hearts, a cold tattoo upon their skin, right next to where the badge is pinned. I could die carefully, at dusk.
‘Cause buddy I once owned a pair of diamond collar studs and as I live and breathe I swear that that’s no lie, and men with such good taste as me deserve to cash their chips more elegant than those without a shirt upon their back or shine upon their dancing shoes. Like playing poker, being dealt the ace of flames you stand, and whispering once your mother’s name pitch headlong dead across the roulette table, bullet holes pinned like armistice poppies in neat rows across your back. Or drowning. Do you know so many hoods and hitmen got sent down to tread the riverbed for all eternity and now they look like statues in some cold submerged art gallery and I would gladly kiss the hand of any man who would bind my wrists and send me down to be in such good company. Dutch Shultz, Capone, why, men like that had hellstars in their eyes and when they walked in groups of more than three, they must have looked like grounded constellations torn down from a B-film sky.
Old gangsters never die.
Say, wouldn’t it be nice to fall asleep
Hume’s view was that if A and B are constantly conjoined and A occurs before B, then this still would not be enough for us to conclude that A is a cause of B. The reason for this is that A and B would also need to be next to each other; that is, spatially adjacent. This is what Hume means by contiguity.
When we accept that causes are temporally prior to their effects, something useful comes out of it. If A caused B, then B did not cause A. The acceptance of temporal priority might explain this asymmetry. If A caused B, and causes must be prior to their effects, then it follows that A is before B. It follows again that B cannot, therefore, be before A; and thus that B cannot be a cause of A.
By the asymmetry of causation, we mean that A causes B but B does not cause A, whatever A and B are.
The joys of life are rare and precious, and you do not want to forsake them without due cause.
Sayfa 135 - RULE X: Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.·Kitabı okudu
