Don’t be an idiot. Be polite. If those two sentences don’t appear to be natural go-togethers, it’s because we’ve lost track of the origin of a pair of words that were once intimately related. Let’s start with the Greek word idiotes (id-ee-OH-tays). In ancient times an idiotes was someone who chose not to participate in civic life. Such a person often lived and… Read more »
In the vast majority of human languages, nouns and verbs have all the fun. Those forms of speech are usually at the center of the action when it comes to communication. Prepositions, however, aren’t far behind. That’s because they express relationships between words. And that can matter a great deal. When someone says, “The boat is in the water,” our… Read more »
Everyone agreed that it was a wonderful painting – Paolo Veronese’s ginormous depiction of Jesus and his disciples at the Last Supper. But was it really a religious painting? Church authorities in Venice in 1573 were deeply offended by what they saw on the canvas. Why were so many of “the wrong people” basking in the gracious presence of Jesus? Veronese, along… Read more »
“If you could live forever, would you want to, and why?” That’s the question that the host of the 1994 Miss USA competition posed to Miss Alabama, Heather Whitestone. She memorably replied, “I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live… Read more »
In 2004, a 15-year-old student turned an extra credit project into a national movement. California high schooler Shauna Fleming was unsettled when she heard a news report that American military personnel serving overseas were feeling unappreciated on the home front. She began to think about the community service credit she could earn at school. “Dad,” she said to her father, who was… Read more »
On July 14, 1789, a Parisian street mob stormed the Bastille, a state prison that symbolized the oppressive regime of King Louis XVI. Today is Bastille Day, the French version of America’s Fourth of July. It commemorates the beginning of the French Revolution. The French ardently admired what the American colonists had accomplished in their revolt against Great Britain the previous decade. … Read more »
For more than 4,000 years, on three different continents, many of the smartest people in the world pursued a dream. They yearned to turn ordinary junk into treasure. It was the dream of alchemy. Through a combination of research, magic, and laboratory trial-and-error, alchemists in China, India, the Middle East, and medieval Europe searched for the mythical “philosopher’s stone” – a… Read more »
It’s back. It’s time for America’s annual mid-summer obsession with sharks. NatGeo’s Sharkfest, a four-week celebration of the fearsome eating machines, kicked off two nights ago. The Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, which begins on July 24, is now the longest-running cable television programming event in history. This will be the hit show’s 35th consecutive summer. It can be argued that our country has… Read more »
For most of my life I have rooted against China. I was born the same year the Chinese announced they had become members of the exclusive club of nations who can deploy nuclear weapons. When I was a teenager, global sales of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book momentarily surpassed those of the Bible and prompted millions of his most zealous young… Read more »
When digital technology arrived in church offices towards the end of the 20th century, it launched a timesaving revolution with regard to mundane tasks like bulletin preparation. It also provided some genuinely funny moments. One of them happened at a church that quickly grasped that their new computer could retain a liturgical paradigm for funerals. All the administrative assistant had to do… Read more »
