There are more than nine, but this School is Hell cartoon covers the most important ones (þ Colby Cosh). I link it here partly for you, dear readers, partly so I can find it again myself, since Cosh’s twittery link is evanescent. The fifth and seventh types seem to overlap a bit.

The Rat links to an elementary school with an interesting name - but not as interesting as the name of this school, which I drive past whenever I go to my favorite Thai restaurant.

Her second link tells of a wine that deserves to be bought at the liquor store mentioned in this post from almost eight years ago.

In The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru quotes some leftie as saying that Sen. Webb’s recent editorial “made him sound like a mossback from the last century” and demanding that Webb “get his head out of the last, sad epoch of covert racist talk and join the rest of America in the 21st century”. The last century was only ten years ago! Is social progress that fast? Is the Clinton administration now a byword for Mediaeval repression? Was the George W. Bush administration the greater part of the new Age of Enlightenment? Or are some lefties working from talking points issued more than ten years ago, when “the last century” referred, much more plausibly, to the 19th? I wonder if any of them are still using faded mimeographs.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it. Big Lizards’ sophomoric humor is apparently contagious.

Colby Cosh reports on efforts to rename British Columbia, and adds: “The good news, for those who dread the idea, is that the proposed alternatives so far are almost all unspeakably awful.” One of the names proposed in the linked article is particularly stupid. It’s bad enough having an American state and a Eurasian nation sharing the same name: we really don’t need a third ‘Georgia’ to add to the confusion. Of course, it doesn’t help having to say ‘Eurasian’ instead of ‘European’ or ‘Asian’ for the one whose capital is Tbilisi. The non-peachtree Georgia is on the south slopes of the Caucasus, so it is technically Asian, but seems ethnically and culturally more European: calling it ‘Asian Georgia’ would confuse most listeners. We used to be able to say ‘Soviet Georgia’, but that is no longer true, and ‘Post-Soviet Georgia’ is awkward. We definitely don’t need a third Georgia, even if ‘Canadian Georgia’ would be a clear and distinct way of referring to it.

According to Just One Minute, “The NY Times front page links to Charles Blow’s column exhorting Obama to be more visibly emotional and empathetic.” I don’t know about ‘emotional’, but he’s already three-fourths or four-fifths of the way to ‘empathetic’, depending on whether we count syllables or letters.

This is the best thing of its kind since the Sokol hoax.

Does a 125th birthday count as a significant anniversary? If so — also if not — today is Alban Berg’s 125th. In commemoration, I’m playing the only really tolerable pieces written by the New Vienna School, Berg’s Violin Concerto and Lyric Suite for String Quartet. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg published a few other pieces that are not just tolerable but very pleasant, but they are arrangements of Strauss waltzes — the Old Vienna School reworked by the New — so they don’t really count.

So what would we call a 125th birthday? A hemi-demi-semi-millennium, of course.

By the way, ‘Alban’ seems an odd name for a German. I mostly know it from the name of the Alban Mount, southeast of Rome. It’s odd that ‘Berg’ is German for mount(ain), though the mountain is apparently not called the Albanberg in German. The ancient Roman name is singular, Albanus Mons, but German Wikipedia gives the plural ‘Albaner Berge’ as the preferred form, with ‘Albaner Hügel’ and ‘Albanergebirge’ as alternatives. I still wonder if Alban’s father was indulging in a pun: perhaps a native speaker can tell us.

When a visiting friend’s cat stuck its head through my bedroom door at 4:00 am, it occurred to me that we could rename her ‘Snoop Catty Cat’. According to Bing, the phrase has already been used 28 times on the web. Better 28 than “about 28,000″, I guess.

Proposed motto for the city of Staunton, Virginia:

Staunton: The ‘U’ is Silent

A local convenience store has a sign out front:

Cheeseburgers
Buy 1, Get 1

I have often thought that somewhere in the world some wit has undoubtedly named a cat or rabbit ‘Fwuffy’, with a W, but only recently thought to Google the name. Not only did I get “about 68,100″ hits, but only one of the first ten was an animal — a hummingbird — while at least six were human beings using ‘Fwuffy’ as part of their noms de web. One of the six claims to be 22 years old.

I can’t find the exact quotation in a 5-minute web search, but Capt. Picard once told Cmdr. Riker that ‘there are some things about the Klingon psyche better left unexplored’. This made me feel much the same way about the 21st-century human psyche.

Terry Teachout titles a post “FAQ and A”. Is that a pun on “Fuckin’ A”, or do I just have a dirty (and pun-obsessed) mind?

I don’t generally waste money on ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ foodstuffs, but when I buy a delicious gooey granola bar from a man wearing a fringe beard, straw hat, white shirt, and suspenders, I really don’t like it to have quite so many inorganic and unnatural ingredients as this:

It makes me wonder whether they’re really ‘home-made’, and whether it’s even legal to sell home-made foodstuffs any more.

From a comment by ‘Brown Line’ on Matt Welch’s Hit and Run column in Reason:

Of course, the problem may well be that what Klein and other journalists are peddling isn’t news at all, but a news-flavored opinion product: not the same thing at all.

I wish I’d written that.

I think it was Patterico’s Pontifications where I recently ran across a weblog called Verum Serum. An interesting name, since it has three or four meanings in Latin:

1. True Whey (taking Verum as an adjective and Serum as a noun). I thought the second word meant ‘gravy’, but apparently not, at least in classical Latin. Which is too bad: “True Gravy” might almost work as a website name, but not “True Whey”.
2. Late Truth (taking Verum as a noun and Serum as an adjective). Alternatively, this could mean “Too Late Truth” or “The Truth Too Late”, since the adjective has both meanings.
3. Truth of the Chinese (taking both words as nouns, with Serum genitive plural). Just to be pedantic, “Chinese” here is plural, so perhaps “Truth of the Chinese people”. (Hmmm. That’s not clearly plural, either, since “people” may be a singular meaning “nation” or a plural meaning “persons, humans”. English is a tricky language.)

So which of these interesting possibilities is the right one? None, as it turns out: it’s only half Latin. As the proprietors say on their ‘About’ page, “Verum is Latin for truth, as in truth serum. Why Latin? Because we’re tired of the Catholic blogs hogging all the cool names.”

In its article on Leibniz, Wikipedia reports: “No philosopher has ever had as much experience with practical affairs of state as Leibniz, except possibly Marcus Aurelius.” Possibly? Privy Counselor of Justice to the House of Brunswick, trusted adviser to the Electress of Hanover and the Queen of Prussia, and Imperial Court Counselor to the Habsburgs are important positions, beyond the reach of most philosophers, but they hardly compare to being Emperor of Rome.

The Perseus Collection of Greek and Roman Materials provides a convenient list of Word Counts by Language. As of half an hour ago, the totals were:

English
(42,956,587 words)
French
(2,001 words)
German
(426,929 words)
Greek
(8,263,757 words)
Italian
(178 words)
Latin
(9,244,457 words)
Old English
(1 word)
Other
(3,318 words)

I want to know how a single word of Old English slipped in among the tens of millions in other languages, why it isn’t listed among the ‘Other’ languages, and — most important — what word is it?

Most depressing things I’ve seen or heard in the last two weeks:

1. The policeman who pulled me over for speeding last Tuesday asked me about my driving record and I told him, quite truthfully, that I’ve had four moving violations in nearly forty years of driving, the most recent a speeding ticket in another county last August. He said that not having had a ticket for eight whole months made me an excellent driver, and let me go with a warning. Apparently a significant percentage of local drivers get several tickets a year, which explains a lot about my insurance rates. I’ve had one ticket each in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, so I suppose I should be worried that the ’10s will arrive fairly soon.

2. The next evening, one of the actors at the play I was seeing (Comedy of Errors here) asked if that was me he’d seen pulled over by a police car. Thanks for noticing, funny man.

3. A week or so before, a fellow theater-goer asked me about the Loeb Classical Text I was reading at intermission and whether I teach Latin (yes) or Greek (if there’s any demand). We talked about teaching and learning for a good five minutes before realizing that if we were in the same grad department at the same time, we really should know each other. We knew each other’s names, but less than twenty years had changed both our faces beyond recognition.

4. My students sometimes offer unsolicited dating advice, which I can generally squelch by saying that I don’t really think dating advice from teenagers is very helpful to someone my age. Before I could do so last week, one of my 11th-graders offered to set me up on a date . . . with her grandmother. To make it worse, she seems to have been serious, and well-intentioned.

When Orson Welles was filming Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, did the crew call him Horson Welles? Behind his back, or to his face, it would have been a thoroughly Shakespearian pun.