caroljane

Actually, I wasn't aware of that. Did Ludlum write The Bourne Identity then? I was referring to the character's name, and hadn't even thought about the author. (I didn't even see the movie, just a few minutes of a sequel. As a meaningless novel, Shrugged is inferior to other novels that primarily just tell a story (Although Gone with the Wind had real meaning behind it.) I would put Shrugged in the same category as 1984 and Brave New World, which were not so great in terms of storytelling as they were statements about society. I'll have to think about Huxley, but I can't agree about Orwell. His statement about society is as great as his ability to tell his story; they are seamlessly intertwined. AS leaves the impression of a statement grafted onto a story, resulting in some novelistic awkwardness.

Ludlum and Rand are both novelists, and the question of their relative literary merits doesn't disrail a conversation about the meanings and associations of character names in novels. As you are aware, there is a body of critics who would remove Rand from the company of Swift, Bunyan etal and place her with the Ludlums and Margaret Mitchells.

I don't know what the current views are on Maslow's needs theory, but I think he was right on the money. So to speak. Carol I love my job

Guess that means you're not a basketball fan.

kekeke. Did you ever see Russell Peters's hilarious routine on the anatomical diversity among white, black, brown and Oriental men? (Peters is brown)

Well, I thought that you were serious. Now, I wonder at the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony accepts that the premise is true. Sarcasm denies the premise. I thought it was serious too, since the topic is serious and the previous posts were also. And Japan is pretty ethnically homogeneous. You should have put in an emoticon or something Ted.

Shane and Rich: If only you'd been in your exotic locales back when I was touring the Augustan discount shoe warehouses and strip malls!I'm sure Ma could have discovered a distant cousinship.

Re gagging, the lyrics of "My Way" are pathetic. I know, I know, the sense of life and all that, but I repeat, as a lyric it is lame. I have other dislikes of this fave (I also hate "Amazing Grace") such as the melody, the singer and composer whom I do not admire as people, and so on, but I will stick to the most egregious examples of Bad Words. "if not himself, then he has nought" - you hear that and think, "not what?" - who uses Nought in a 20th-century song except comically? "the words of one who kneels" - looks OK on paper, sounds silly and strained when sung. Coming at the crescendo as it does, it's bathetic. "not in a shy way" - again, straining for a rhyme, using a negative when a positive would be expected. "Head held in high way" wouldn't have been much worse here. I could go on, but I have to get ready for the funeral of Old Man Kneelnought. There won't be many people there because he was hard to get along with and nobody liked him. Guess what the music's going to be.

Nice to know that an individual can still be more individual/cleverer than other individuals who program electronics. Guess the Singularity is not here yet. But not clever enough to figure out 13-letter acronyms. I have not acronym solver, not being as technologically advanced as you, and to go to Staples and buy one would be cheating. If your reaction is printable, traduire SVP.

Nice to know that an individual can still be more individual/cleverer than other individuals who program electronics. Guess the Singularity is not here yet. But not clever enough to figure out 13-letter acronyms. I have not acronym solver, not being as technologically advanced as you, and to go to Staples and buy one would be cheating. If your reaction is printable, traduire SVP.

"She gagged her way through breakfast"

I think there is sufficient prima facie evidence to accept Greenberg's Amerind hypothesis, which holds that except for the Eskimo-Aleut and the Na-Dene (of North/west North America) all the natives of the Americas speak languages descended from a common ancestor. My understanding is that the anthropological evidence supports this also. There is certainly no positive evidence contradicting the hypothesis - all objections are epistemologically skeptical rather than counterevidentiary in nature. My investigation has been rather superficial, and, unlike as is the case with Siberia (where sufficient documentation and reconstruction work is available) there isn't much to go on in the Americas. But what there is all points to Greenberg being right. Greenberg is largely right in his assertion that the majority of languages of Siberia are related to Indo-European in his Eurasiatic family. But his inclusion of Ainu in Eurasiatic strikes me as obviously unfounded - so I do believe it possible he may have made mistakes in the Americas. The problem is that those who criticize him, and who are in a position to truly test his work, rely on authority and raised voices rather than an appeal to facts to disprove him. I strongly recommend: George Campbell's Concise Compendium of the World's Languages http://www.amazon.co...99991548&sr=8-1 Anatole Lyovin's An Introduction to the Languages of the World http://www.amazon.co...99991690&sr=1-5 for a survey of world languages (Cambell has sketches of dozens of languages, Lyovin detalied samples of the major families) and, especially: Merritt Ruhlen's The Origin of Language http://www.amazon.co...99991864&sr=1-1 Ruhlen's book presents the evidence for deep time linguistic relationships in a way perfectly valid and accessible to the interested layman. Thanks Ted. I will look for Ruhlen. I have been interested in linguistic history theory since I read about epigraphy-based Welsh-in-America, Troy-is-Camelot, and so on - now that we are all more and more one world it is even more fun to think about. There is a movement here to save the aboriginal languages which are dying out, and with them the irretrievable culture and history they embody. Such movements have succeeded in reviving gaelic for example (not to mention Hebrew) so I hope and will do whatever I can to help that they can succeed also. Ruhlen is out of print, buy the book used. He provides the word lists and lets you figure out which families are related by comparing the roots. My grandmother spoke a dying language which has stories evincing pagan, and even pre-Indo-European roots that would be familiar from Frazer's Golden Bough and Graves' White Goddess. I agree with the value of what is being lost be see little hope of doing more than documenting the dying tongues. Carol and Ted: I saw a special last year about a project to save dying dialects and languages...FYI World Oral Literature Project This is fascinating Dan, thank you.

Good for you, cheating on these things is no fun anyway.It is indeed a trick question. Good thing the Sphinx didn't ask Theseus this one.It is a verse from "Un canadien errant" which I felt like when banni from OL. (only I felt like I had an extra n and 3 extra e's.) It's a lament by a fugitive who was in the Riel Rebellion and had to flee to the US, knowing he can never return home. Better start refreshing your memory on Renault, the test is coming up. But it'll be easier than this.

That is so cool!Thanks wss. I love maps. And oh, we know Michael & Kat are in Chicago and I'm sure they wouldn't mind being added. It's fun to plan a fantasy pilgrimage -- reminds me of my childhood when my my mother would plan our vacations based on the relatives we could "land on" - family parlance for "announce your plan to visit, then visit before they can think of a good excuse to not be home." Note to Joel MacD, this is how we went to Cape Breton (my aunt's family was in Glace Bay). I don't remember much of the visit I was 5), but I do remember the stunning vivid beauty of the scenery - so different from southern N.B. I remember looking out the car window just entranced, and for the first time ever on a trip I was not carsick. My parents spoke fondly of the Cape forever after. Otherwise it was usually Boston or Augusta, Maine, a truly depressing place.

Yes, Daunce Lynam's a manly dunce. A wall of calumny has been Erekted against me!

I can't take it out, it would ruin the anagram. The opportunity to call me a dunce has been taken by my fellow members here, many times, so I am fairly inured to it. I thought of Daunce as a sort of unisex name like Ashley or Sydney are now (or Chris or Lee for that matter) but it does seem to have a masculine sound. Maybe I am getting in touch with my inner male under cover of the internet! (My inner child escaped and invaded my whole persona years ago so I am all too closely in touch with it). I hate those guys with the "steely blue (or grey) eyes" too. We get enough of them in real life. Even steely brown. Cenuda Lynam? Nah, too girly for a woman of my mature years.

This is still true. I take "love thy neighbour as thyself" to mean something like: "Know that each other person is more like you than they can ever be different from you, and has the same capacity for goodness and greatness as for evil and pettiness, as you do within yourself"

What a fine piece, ghs. You remind us that our deepest emotions and aspirations are always greater than the names we give them.

OK, first of all, regarding criminology, you mistake criminalistics (solving crimes by analysis of physical evidence) for criminology, the academic study of crime, largely as a subset of sociology. (If you think that criminals are "sick" - and we once did - then criminology is a branch of medicine. If you think they are "lost souls" - as the Quakers did when they built the first solitary confinement penitentiaries - then crimiology is a branch of theology. And so on.) Also, Holmes and Poirot were, indeed, fictional. For real life people of those times, look to Alan Pinkerton, William J. Burns (less successful than he appeared in the headlines), J. Edgar Hoover, and Eliot Ness. But they were not criminalists. Ness knew who the perpetrator was. Pinkerton built an organization of criminalists, investigators, and detectives. Hoover, also, was an "industrialist", not an inventor. There was August Vollmer, who created "professional policing" in Berkeley, California, in the 1920s, moving law enforcement away from the politically-appointed ward healer with a billy club. It is a different thing, also, entirely from the admittedly fictional adventures of Holmes, Poirot, Marple, Wolf, Spade, and the many others. All of that being as it may, if you read anything of Ayn Rand's theory of fiction, you know that as much as it is true that William Hewlett and David Packard, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Henry Ford, and many, many others, did, indeed, build great industrial enterprises, right up to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, that was not the "point" of her story, nor the "goal" of her writing. If it was, she might have sold 1000 books - maybe - to just exactly those people, and no one else. It is possible to write about a grocery clerk heroically getting food from the loading dock to the shelves, each item priced correctly, and set up square, meanwhile pining for the cashier whose husband does not appreciate her, though she cannot leave because of the children. But it would be hard for their boss to get into that story. Nor could the line accountants in the district office or the traffic manager in the line haul division, or that person's doctor, to say nothing of the soldier standing guard or his commanding officer... The way it works, is you write about really alive and interesting people doing really important and consequential things. Then, everyone can read the story. Tron Legacy was not the greatest movie ever made - perhaps not the worst ever - but if it had been about one guy debugging one module in one day, it would have been a long two hours. As Howard Roark said, "Of course I need clients. I'm not building mausoleums." The questions are: Who is the goal of your effort? What motivates you? What do you value? Thanks for the correction about crime-solving. It's a fascinating area, hence my comment about how the "popular imagination" perceives the crime-solvers now. In the days of real legendary "lone" detectives, the fictional Poirots deduced at the top of the mental hierarchy, the assistants assisted and the minions minioned. Now we watch the CSI and Law & Order teams on TV. They're teams, and their only minion-assistant is the computer. In literature, the lone hero will I think always endure.

I don't think anything could make that sentence readable. And the tiptoeing could mean that the week was so eventful that nobody noticed the week passing. More fun to make it worse-- "The week slouched its way to Friday" "The week sulked and pouted in its corner of the calendar" "The week dawdled along like city workers paid by the hour"

Well, then, I hope you're not divining my thus being "terrified." "Greybird" is closer to being unique, it has personal resonance (I'll explain if anybody gives a damn), and my real name (a boring one, unlike yours) is on my profile page anyway. Other O-sites use my real name, and the same avatar picture, but I don't use them any more. I might have changed it here, but all of the hard-coded quotations of what I've said would remain the same anyway. My Facebook page shows it. Relax, Steve. I didn't have you in mind. And I shouldn't have taken out after "Daunce" the way I did, either. Her name is on her profile page, too. I was, as I do so often, shooting from the lip. This is a pet peeve of mine, I'm afraid. One of our number here on OL, a lawyer who recently let us all know he wouldn't be around much in the near future because he had to prepare for a trial, is one of the few posters I've ever seen post a completely satisfactory explanation of why one might seek anonymity in an environment like this. Almost all the rest of those who do so are, as far as I can see, cowering behind a nom de screene for no apparent reason. JR It seems to me that it's the screen itself we can cower behind, whatever name we use. This is a written medium. Words on the page, or the screen, just cannot have the same personal impact as words heard in real life conversation. My screen name is an anagram, as I've mentioned before. "Daunce" is made up and Lynam is my married name.

What's "twee"? Who said "twee"? Some self-proclaimed Canadian socialist who's so terrified that someone she knows might find out what her views are that she hides behind a screen name online. JR Check your premises. My real name and a ton of personal information as well as my real views on various topics are all over this forum. Carol Jane Elizabeth Stuart Lynam You need to team up with Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastian d'Anconia. --Brant If I but could! I know he wasn't strictly Spanish, but sometime I'll tell you about Majorca where xxxxxxxxxxthe weather was very nice and I learned the language quite well. Since Spanish children add the names of their mothers to those of their fathers, plus the usual family and baptismal names, it is perhaps as well that the time is past for a little Juan Rubia Aycaramba Andres Sebastian d'Anconia y Stuart Lynam Multicultura

What's "twee"? Who said "twee"? Some self-proclaimed Canadian socialist who's so terrified that someone she knows might find out what her views are that she hides behind a screen name online. JR Check your premises. My real name and a ton of personal information as well as my real views on various topics are all over this forum. Carol Jane Elizabeth Stuart Lynam

Ad Hominem!! Unprovoked insults!! Time for me to write an essay with bullet points and a bolded title all about "the decline of the list". Hmm, what a Spenglerian title. kekeke

Bunyan used character names like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mercy, Hypocrisy, really obvious things that couldn't pass for names, at least not in English. For some reason this makes me think of the German name Gottlob, which means God-praise, we just don’t use names like that. I cited on another thread earlier today a character from V. by Thomas Pynchon, the name is Benny Profane. Profane has a pretty obvious meaning, while Benny could allude to Benedetto, as in blessed, or Benzedrine, as in speed, amphetamines. Both probably. In any event it hardly passes for a name, maybe just barely, I say no. He has crazier one's too, Genghis Cohen is a favorite. Are his names just more artfully allegorical than Bunyan’s, or is there a fundamental difference? Moving on, how about Heinlein's Lazarus Long? Umberto Eco's William of Baskerville? What do you mean by allegorical? I think you are both right up to a point, Lords Copper and <Metroland. Character naming is not a literary indicator except of the individual writer's inclination. The sublime Austen just reused boring common names and got on with the story. I think Rand had a fair bit of fun choosing her names but hardly agonized over them. They have resonances beyond what she may have thought of, certainly. For the first and only time I will compare myself to Ayn Rand and give an example of why I think the above is true. Recently I wrote something trivial here, on Canadian Boring,about Scottish-Canadians, quoting the Heritage Minister, James something. I forgot his name so called him James Candour, thinking it good for a politician. After I wrote it I realized that scots are often dour - Can.-dour- obviously an unconscious connection, or happenstance. This stuff happens all the time, in speech and writing. Unless the writer deliberately plots his names (like Dorothy Dunnett, a chess-master) I don't think they're usually that significant.