When people are buffeted by seemingly
endless windstorms and their lives look like
calamities, they may wonder why they have
been given so many tests, and why God
appears to be so merciless. Going through
hardship is like being a rock in a tumbler.
You're tossed to and fro and get bruised, but you come out more polished and valuable
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As English lost the old forms, it gained new ones, in the form of what we traditionally call contractions. They arose starting in the early 1500s, having begun in less crunched forms such as donnot for don’t and wonnot for won’t , of which cannot has for some reason held on despite can’t existing alongside. We no longer have nis from ne + is , but we have isn’t , and while nave is no more, we have haven’t . The apostrophes do not make isn’t and haven’t different from nis and nave . The apostrophe is not pronounced; nor does it mark a pause: it is simply a convention of how we transcribe speech into marks on a page, and quite an arbitrary one: comprehension would suffer not a bit if we wrote isnt and hasnt .
In the back of our minds, we are always sprucing the language up, making sure it does the job, like a director regularly working with the cast of a long-running play to keep it fresh. This is the source of words condemned as redundant, such as the famous irregardless.
One does not technically need the ir - when the - less of regardless already conveys the negation. However, the fact that the reinforced version with ir - has been so readily taken up indicates that people want that negation component to be as clear as possible. In the word overwhelm , you might wonder why there is no word whelm . In fact, there once was. You might wonder what it meant, and it meant … “to overwhelm.”
Town dwellers are likely to live in smaller, better-insulated homes than those in the countryside, so they will be more fuel efficient and their overall emissions lower. A 2004 study, for example, found that Londoners' carbon emissions were around half the UK national average,22 while New Yorkers are reckoned to emit around 30 per cent less carbon than the average American.23 Highly urbanized New York has the lowest per capita emissions of any US state.24 As the urban designer and planner Peter Calthorpe put it, "The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city-dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower density. Our tendency to live in towns and cities allows half of all humans to live on less than 3 per cent of the world's surface.
All over Europe, the Revolution destroyed the independent institutions of the clergy, and subjected them to the control of the state. Stripped of the local privileges, customs and rights which had given them autonomy, the clergy increasingly looked to Rome for protection. The Revolution had also swept away the great prince-bishoprics of Germany, the strongholds of episcopal resistance to papal power. Europe had now only one prince-bishop, the Pope, and he stood increasingly high as the visible centre of a Church which felt less local, more universal.
The W fared less well in southern Europe. The sound “w” having largely departed from late Latin, the Romance languages of 1600 were in no desperate need of a new letter in this category. The legacy of ancient consonantal U sufficed to cover surviving “w” sounds, as in Italian Guido or Spanish iguana. To this day, W is not properly a letter of the Italian or Spanish alphabets, although it is employed to render foreign words already in print.
French, likewise, was very reluctant over W. French got along fine with consonantal U to show “w,” as in the word suave (which English shares). To show an initial “w,” French employed the combination OU-, as in oui, meaning “yes,” or ouest, pronounced “west,” meaning “west.” Not until the late 19th century was W accepted into the French alphabet, the last to arrive. Today French W remains rarely used, except for foreign-derived names and English-borrowed words.
The most ironic thing about this ‘Identity Crisis’ is that the least attractive thing to most women is a man who is willing to compromise any part of his identity to placate to her, much less a wholesale selling-out of it. Women are naturally attracted to that masculine independence as it represents a very strong cue for security and the potential to provide that security to her (and any children she may have). Women don’t want a man who’ll “do everything she says” because this sends the message that this man can be bought with even the prospect of a sexual encounter. Why would that indicate anything more than insecurity and a lack of confidence? Women want to be told “No”, and constantly test a man’s resolve to say this to her (a.k.a. shit testing) in order to affirm that she’s made the right choice (even in marriage) of a guy who’ll put his sexual impulse (knowing full-well how powerful it is with men) on hold to stick to his own self-interest, beliefs and ambitions.
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Since about 1960 Western economies have been dominated not by industrial capitalism (the manufacture of goods) but by commodity exchange. Typically the very rich make their money not by owning and operating factories, but by participation in the exchange of goods. The emphasis in this new economy is not so much on things as on representations. To begin with, the utility of objects is much less important than the way they are advertised, marketed, and packaged. Vastly more effort is put into creating the right symbolic significance for products, wrapping them in "mythical" glamors, and manufacturing desire, than into developing the intrinsic merits, if any, of the widgets in question.
INSTANTS
If I could live again my life,
In the next - I'll try,
- to make more mistakes,
I won't try to be so perfect,
I'll be more relaxed,
I'll be more full - than I am now,
In fact, I'll take fewer things seriously,
I'll be less hygenic,
I'll take more risks,
I'll take more trips,
I'll watch more
By Classic times, full royal courts came into view, as population grew to an unprecedented extent. These courts centered on a ruler and close members of his, or less often her, family. Several courtiers were so mighty as to be magnates, perhaps descended from collateral royal lines.
Then, below, came a variety of servants, some priestly, skilled in war, music, and the crafting of images and glyphs. The latter overlapped with what we might call “bureaucrats,” the bean counters – quite literally so, of chocolate beans, an item of wealth!
