- One Person's Musing – The United States
- Weird Words – Heiligenschein
- Article – Five Secrets to Getting Organized
- Special Dates – Something to Celebrate Each Day
- Humor – British and Americans
- Thoughts – The United States
- In Closing
One Person's Musing – The United States
"In a self-governing republic – good government in some places, dubious in others – 3000 miles wide, 1800 miles long, with fifty separate states which in many important matters have almost absolute powers; with 200 million people drawn from scores of nations; what is remarkable is not the conflict between them but the truce. Enough is happening in America at any one time – enough that is exciting, frightening, funny, brutal, brave, intolerable, bizarre, dull, slavish, eccentric, inspiring, and disastrous – that almost anything you care to say about the United States is true. You can make a case for thinking this the best, the worst, the most abject, the most alert democracy ever invented."
– Alistair Cooke, (1908-2004), British/American journalist, television personality and broadcaster in his essay "Eternal Vigilance – By Whom?" dated 19 October 1969
"America is so vast that almost anything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true."
– James Thomas Farrell (1904-1979), American novelist
Weird Words – Heiligenschein
It's a German word - literally "holy light" - for an aureole or circle of light around an object. Applied to people it's a halo.
The word has been borrowed in a particular and specialist sense for a sheen that, if you're very lucky, you may see around the shadow of your head. The sun must be low in the sky and your shadow must be cast on grass that's damp with dew, so you have to be an early bird to stand much chance of seeing it.
It's caused by internal reflection within the drops of water on the blades of grass (a related process in other circumstances makes a rainbow). The rays of the sun are reflected most strongly at or near the point that's exactly opposite the sun. As your head's in the way, the brightness is visible around the edges of its shadow. You can see it best if you move your head a little, because the increased brightness moves with you. Only you can see it; other people with you will each have one of their own which, likewise, you can't see.
The word first appears in this sense in German in 1834, in a book with the title Abhandlung über der Heiligenschein (Treatise on the Halo), in which Dr C Garthe wrote on the phenomenon. When writers in English followed it up, they naturally borrowed his name for it.
This is a rare appearance outside books on optics:
With the sun behind him, the shadows were flattened,A related optical effect, but like a circular rainbow, is called a glory. You can sometimes spot it if you're looking out of a plane's window at its shadow cast on a cloud. Natural phenomena like the famous Spectre of the Brocken, an extended shadow of a person cast on fog or cloud from a high place when the sun is low in the sky, often have a glory around the person's head.
or disappeared altogether, as if he was looking down at
the bleached floor of some dead ocean. In fact, when the
sun was right behind him, the lunar landscape seemed to
brighten suddenly. _Heiligenschein_, the lunar scientists
called it. The saint's halo: some obscure effect of the dust.
[Moonseed, by Stephen Baxter, 1998. The effect here, a
real one noticed by astronauts, is caused by glassy
volcanic beads within the lunar dust.]
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WORLD WIDE WORDS
Copyright (c) Michael B. Quinion 2009. You may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the Web address of "http://www.worldwidewords.org".
Article – Five Secrets to Getting Organized
One of the biggest challenges in organizing a mess is figuring out where to start. Without a game plan, you're likely to become overwhelmed and then nothing gets done. Use these five secrets to help you get started.
http://www.businessknowhow.com/homeoffice/orgsecrets.htm
Special Dates – Something to Celebrate Each Day
7 January
1789: The first U.S. presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later, chose George Washington to be the nation's first president.
1800: Millard Fillmore, 13th President of the United States, born at Locke, New York.
1912: Charles Samuel Addams, American cartoonist, born at Westfield, New Jersey. Addams's work appeared regularly in The New Yorker magazine, to which he eventually contributed more than 1,300 cartoons. Members of a ghoulish family were recurring figures in his subject matter. Famed for their wit, fantasy, and sense of the macabre, his cartoons are collected in Drawn and Quartered (1942), Addams and Evil (1947), Monster Rally (1950), Home Bodies (1954), Black Maria (1960), Charles Addams' Mother Goose (1967), My Crowd (1970), and The World of Charles Addams (1991). Addams's characters also have been the basis for television series and motion pictures.
8 January
1982: The U.S. telephone system is opened to competition when the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) monopoly is broken up.
1942: Stephen William Hawking, British theoretical physicist, born at Oxford, England. In 1971 Hawking provided mathematical support for the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe; he showed that if the general theory of relativity was correct the universe must have a singularity, or starting point, in space-time. He wrote an explanation of his work that became a popular bestseller, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). He has also published Superspace and Supergravity (1981), The Very Early Universe (1983), Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993), and The Nature of Space and Time (1995).
9 January
1913: Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President of the United States, born at Yerba Linda, California.
1951: The United Nations headquarters officially opens in New York City.
10 January
1863: The "Metro," the world's first underground railroad/subway, opens to the public in London.
11 January
1755 (or 1757): Alexander Hamilton, lawyer, first secretary of the U.S. Treasury, leader of the Federalist Party, born at Nevis, West Indies.
1902: Popular Mechanics magazine was published for the first time.
12 January
1773: The first public museum in America was established, in Charleston, S.C.
1923: Ira Hamilton Hayes, one of the six men in the Rosenthal photo of the Iwo Jima flag raising, born at Gila River Indian Reservation, Arizona.
13 January
1794: President George Washington approved a measure adding two stars and two stripes to the American flag, following the admission of Vermont and Kentucky to the union. (The number of stripes was, of course, later returned to 13)
Humor – British and Americans
The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The Germans drink a lot of beers and eat lots of sausages and fats and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
Thoughts – The United States
“Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969), 34th President of the United States
In Closing
Keep smiling; have fun!
– Paul
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