In my Islandsk-Engelsk Ordbok (2003 edition) there is no entry for "schmolfraedic" but there is such an entry for "skolfraedic." It is defined as "impudent, impertent, malapert; brash, bluff, saucy, nervy, exhibiting chutzpah."

The word is also to be found in Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, glossed or isoglossed as "chiefly northern." Could that be the part of Wright's English Dialect Dictionary that you don't understand?

I wrote in NRODT a year or so ago about geneticist Bruce Lahn's finding that some genes apparently involved in brain development have (a) within just the past few thousand years turned up in new varieties, which (b) seem to confer strong selective advantages to those possessing them, and (c) are not evenly distributed across all human populations, the founder group of modern humans having scattered by the time they appeared.

The actual function of these genes was, however, as I said at the time, not completely understood.  That they are connected with brain development is strongly suggested by the fact that defects in them are known to be associated with microcephaly, a congenital infant condition in which the brain fails to develop properly.  But what, in their healthy form, do these genes **do**?  That the historically-new variants Lahn turned up apparently do better?   (Based on the high rate at which they have spread through their host populations, which suggests that they confer some strong survival advantage.)

To find out, you compare population A1, in which the new variants occur at high frequency, with population B1, in which they occur with low frequency, and look for brain-related differences.  If you think you've found one, you test against different high- and low-frequency populations A2 and B2, to see if your hypothesis holds up... and so on until your research budget runs out.  Then, if you've got anything worth a damn, you publish.  Basic science.

Proceeding thus, previous researchers have ruled out direct connections to intelligence, brain size (when the genes are functioning normally) and the processing of social information.  So what the heck do they do?

Now a couple of Scottish linguists have come up with a new hypothesis:  these recent mutations may allow us to speak nontonal languages.  There is a write-up in ScientificAmerican.com here.

There are some languages—famously Chinese, in all its dialectical varieties, but there are plenty of others—in which you change the meaning of a word by changing its "tone."  That's a combination of pitch (low, medium, high) and contour (rising, level, falling).  Cantonese, for instance, has seven tones:  high-level, high-rising, high-falling, medium-level, low-level, low-rising, low-falling.  The word pronounced "yee" might, depending on tone, mean "aunt," "chair," "clothing," "idea," "two," "ear," or "suspicion."  (Or a great many other things.  Even allowing for tone differentiation, meaning-to-syllable is a many-one mapping.)  Yoking syllables together reduces the ambiguity, but not totally:  "yee-gah" means "now," but with different tones, "clothes rack."

Well, according to these researchers—their names are Ladd and Dediu—"The [newer] mutations [of these two genes] were absent in populations that speak tonal languages, but abundant in nontonal speakers." 

Why being able to speak a nontonal language gives you any survival advantage, as the genetic evidence suggests, I do not know, and the researchers don't speculate.  It may be just a side effect of some tweak in brain ontogeny that confers a more obvious advantage in perception or cognition.

It's interesting stuff, though.  It's been known for a long time that some language features have biological correlates.  European populations whose languages have a "th" sound, for instance, like English and Greek, exhibit similar blood-group frequencies (I think that's right—I'm working from memory).  So far as I know, though, this is the first study to suggest a linguistic correlation with identified genes.

This sort of thing is the most fascinating stuff going on in science now:  the slow uncovering of human nature in all its meaty & molecular actuality—the territory formerly squabbled over by philosophy, literature, and folklore yielding to cold biological fact.  It'll be a long time happening, and it will turn up things we—liberals and conservatives both—won't like, but it's starting.

Before decimalisation in 1971, British currency used a mixed duodecimal-vigesimal system. The duodecimal (tolfraedic) component - twelve old pennies in a shilling - would have withered away because of inflation, leaving only the vigesimal (based on units of twenty), which would easily have drifted into de facto decimalisaton. Sure as eggs - half a dozen of them - is eggs.

Old pennies are small fry (equivalent to about two thirds of an American cent), hence the coinage "schmolfraedic".

Dear, oh dear. There aren't enough butlers to go round. From The Telegraph:

The world faces a worrying shortage.

As the number of wealthy households expands, so does the demand for butlers. Those who keep a tally of these things say as many as two million are needed around the globe. Can there be enough suave imperturbability to go round? A butler - not to be confused with his inferior, the valet - is a multi-talented beast whose duties may range from ironing the morning copy of The Daily Telegraph to managing dozens of staff in a number of houses.

Rock stars love them, so do Russian oligarchs, and at least one Labour minister couldn't possibly function without his gentleman's gentleman. They may be redolent of a bygone age, but they are, as a species, natural-born survivors.

Whatever the modern world throws at them, they ensure that good order reigns with a murmured "very good, sir" issuing from the stiffest of upper lips.

The best - indeed the only proper - butler was Mr Hudson from Upstairs Downstairs. This was a television series set in an Edwardian town house depicting the lives of the servants (below stairs) and masters (upstairs). This was in the Good Old Days of tolfraedic coinage when everyone knew their place. Especially Ruby, the scullery maid, who was right at the bottom of the heap. She was incompetent and was continually hectored by a tyrannical Mrs Bridges. But at least she didn't have followers, unlike Sarah, who was no better than she should be.

Mr Hudson left 165 Eaton Place, Belgravia and fast forwarded into the 1970s where he played a driven and ruthless agent of the fictional CI5. (At the time I wondered - briefly -  if this was a very short cassette tape.) But he still looked and spoke like a butler. 

Website of "Middle East International" -- How much on the Arab take, directly or indirectly, do you think these people are? And how do the sums they have taken in  compare with what their American cousins, similarly situated, such as James Akins, and Raymond Close, and Eugene Bird?

And is that suit over the Al-Yamamah bribes (the one that Ian Gilmour, an up-market George Galloway when it comes to "Palestine" and the "Palestinian" cause, brushed off as the price of doing business with the Saudis, though he offered no proof that rival American companies engage in such bribery) ever going to be revived? Or is al-Yamamah insabbiato forever? And while we are at it, what about the Saudi prince who, not content with tens of millions of dollars stolen from the nation's oil money, used his private plane, immune as he thought from inspection by the French police, to bring into France 66 suitcases full of cocaine and then was found out, and criminal charges brought against him? Will that suit too be thrown out? Or will the nations of Western Europe begin to behave so that the Al-Saud begin to realize that they are no longer above the law?

Here's that Board:

MEI’S BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Chairman

Rough and ready Englishmen - soccer fans, perhaps, or Club 18-30 holidaymakers - who wish to cop a lustful eyeful of a lady's bits and bobs, might shout: "Get yer kit off for the lads!"

Not so Fritjhof Schuon. A Guenonist traditionalist would never put it like that. He would put it - tee hee! - another way: 

Sacred nudity -- which plays an important role not only with the Hindus but also with the Red Indians -- is based on the analogical correspondence between the "outmost" and the "inmost": the body is then seen as the "heart exteriorized," and the heart for its part "absorbs" as it were the bodily projection; "extremes meet." It is said, in India, that nudity favors the irradiation of spiritual influences; and also that feminine nudity in particular manifests Lakshmi and consequently has a beneficial effect on the surroundings. In an altogether general way, nudity expresses -- and virtually actualizes -- a return to the essence, the origin, the archetype, thus to the celestial state: "And it is for this that, naked, I dance," as Lalla Yogishvari, the great Kashmiri saint, said after having found the Divine Self in her heart. To be sure, in nudity there is a de facto ambiguity because of the passional nature of man; but there is not only the passional nature, there is also the gift of contemplativity which can neutralize it, as is precisely the case with "sacred nudity"; similarly, there is not only the seduction of appearances, there is also the metaphysical transparency of phenomena which permits one to perceive the archetypal essence through the sensory experience. St. Nonnos, when he beheld St. Pelagia entering the baptismal pool naked, praised God for having put into human beauty not only an occasion of fall, but also an occasion of rising towards God.

Ooooh, matron!

From the David Project website with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

The David Project has announced that the Islamic Society of Boston ("ISB") and its officers have withdrawn all of their claims against all of the citizens who raised concerns about the ISB, its funding and its leadership, as well as all of their claims against the Boston Herald, Fox-TV and the various journalists whose investigative pieces about the ISB in 2003 and 2004 disclosed damaging information about the ISB and its controversial land deal with the Boston Redevelopment Authority ("BRA"). The ISB and its officers have abandoned all of their claims against all of the defendants they sued 2 years ago, without payment to the ISB or to them of any money whatsoever.

     The ISB's decision to drop all of its claims against all of the 17 defendants it sued back in 2005 alleging "defamation" and accusing them of conspiring to violate its civil rights comes just months after the defendants--who included a Muslim cleric, a Christian political science professor and the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, as well as Boston civic leader William Sapers and national terrorism expert Steven Emerson--had begun through their lawyers to conduct discovery into the ISB's financial records, its receipt of millions of dollars in funding from Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern sources, its contributions to certain organizations and the records of certain of its officers and directors. The ISB's abandonment of its lawsuits comes only weeks after two of its original Middle Eastern Trustees, Walid Fitaihi of Saudi Arabia and Ali Tobah of Egypt, suddenly resigned as Trustees just before they were required to submit themselves to the jurisdiction of the Massachusetts court hearing the case.

     The David Project, whose public records litigation against the BRA forced the public disclosure of evidence regarding the below-fair-market land deal between the BRA and the ISB and the role played in that deal of BRA Deputy Director Muhammed Ali Salaam, will proceed exactly as before with its litigation, seeking the remainder of the documents presently withheld by the BRA. That litigation, The David Project v. Boston Redevelopment Authority, is on file in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston.

     "We were determined from the beginning to act the way citizens should, by asking questions about this matter and by refusing to be intimidated into staying silent," said David Project founder and President Charles Jacobs, "and we intend to continue as we have before. Indeed, the evidence that has emerged about the transaction, about the BRA's failure to do due diligence into those whom it chose to subsidize and about the funding and the leadership of the organization that received this public subsidy is of extremely deep concern. That evidence not only vindicates the reporting of the courageous journalists whose investigative work broke the story back in 2003 and 2004, but validates many times over the concerns expressed by the good and decent citizens—Muslims, Christians and Jews- who refused to stay silent."

     "Those citizens were vilified by the ISB for having had the courage to speak out", said Jacobs. "The ISB's abandonment of its claims without payment of one dollar to them, coming as it does as the ISB was ordered to turn over evidence, speaks more eloquently than anything else could about the truth of what these citizens said, about the validity of their concerns, and about the lack of merit to the ISB’s allegations that they had been ‘defamed’ and had been financially ‘damaged’. Above all, the ISB’s ultimate abandonment of its lawsuits speaks eloquently about the importance of refusing to be bullied and intimidated into silence."

That ha ha looks a bit funny to me.

Is that funny ha ha, you may well ask, or funny peculiar?

Fancy topiary is not permitted, nor may funds be diverted and sunk into ditches or hahas.

A fine example of an English country ha ha.

"Bunkum" has its 19th century American demotic points: Petroleum V. Nasby, Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain. But "buncombe" also has its points, including the mocking ye-olde-englisshe spelling, the kind that Hyacinth Bucket would give it, if she were given to spelling it at all. The ending "kum" in "bunkum" nowadays hints at  the pornographer's deliberately rude and crude spelling of "come" as still ruder and cruder "cum." We do want to keep things clean, don't we?

"Combe" on the other hand is high-toned, making one think of High Wycombe, and the grammar school where the soon-to-be-famous son of a St. Louis furrier once taught.

And makes one think as well of Thomas Coryat, and his travel-tales in "Coryat his Crudities," describing himself as an "Odcombian legge-stretcher." A litotic Englishman's way of saying he'd travelled all over the place.

So we've come, or travelled rather,  from crudity to crudity, from the first to the third short paragraph -- two very different kinds of crudities.

The technique may be considered  a variant on that made famous by Raymond Roussel in "Locus Solus," and described by him in "Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres."

From the Site Institute with thanks to Jeffrey Imm:

Adam Yahiye Gadahn AKA Azzam the American, is featured in a 7:57 minute video produced by as-Sahab, the multimedia wing of al-Qaeda, and titled: “Legitimate Demands”. The video was issued to jihadist forums today, Tuesday, May 29, 2007. The speech, spoken in English and subtitled in Arabic, is presented as an address to U.S. President George W. Bush, Gadahn speaking in a condescending tone and accusing him of spearheading a Crusade led by his “empire of evil” against Muslims and embroiling American forces in wars without end. Reinvigoration of old fronts in Somalia, continuation of fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, and the region of the Levant (Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan), in addition to an alleged failure in the media to tarnish the image of the Mujahideen to Muslims, are cited by Gadahn as reasons for Bush to seek escape and “prevent the number of American casualties at home and abroad from rising even higher.”

The demands are emphatically stated by Gadahn to not be construed as negotiations, for Muslims do not negotiate with “baby killers and war criminals”. These entail the removal of American military forces from Muslim lands, cease of encroachment into the political, social, and economic affairs in these countries, and to free Muslim captives from prisons. Should these demands not be met, Gadahn states, “means that you and your people will- Allah willing- experience things which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11th, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Virginia Tech.” Withdrawing from Iraq alone, Gadahn states, does not qualify as acceptance of terms, and he mockingly advices for Bush to stop his “futile farcical maneuvers on Capital Hill.”

[Viginia Tech??] 

Adam Yahiye Gadahn AKA Adam Pearlman, Azzam al-Amriki (Azzam the American), was charged with treason by a Grand Jury in an indictment filed Wednesday, October 11, 2006, in the State of California. According to the document, Gadahn has been indicted for treason, providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, al-Qaeda, and aiding and abetting terrorists. The two counts against Gadahn are based on his appearances and statements made in al-Qaeda films produced and distributed by the organization’s multimedia arm, as-Sahab.

This piece compares the world of Islam, closed and indifferent to all that the non-Islamic world offers (save for military technology), with the West, always open to the outside world. It maintains that Said's "Orientalism" not only gets it wrong in specifics (the "Orientalists" he ignores, or those Said names but entirely miscomprehends -- matters dealt with by early on by Bernard Lewis, then by Keith Windschuttle, and, last year, by Robert Irwin who , despite his superior and growing comprehension of what Islam is about, nonetheless seems intent at the TLS in still assigning books with an Islamic theme  to the appalling likes of William "Barbara-Cartland-of-the-Moghul-Empire" Dalrymple and the hagiographic biographer of Muhammad Barnaby Rogerson) but also in its main point. Said got  it not merely wrong but completely wrong, the very reverse of right.

This is what Scruton's article is about. His book "The West and the Rest" (it ought to have been  "Islam and the Rest" in order to make clear the identity of interests among all the non-Muslim victims of Islam) is different. Every word in this piece is instinct with what must surely be his recent reading of Ibn Warraq's as-yet-unpublished-but-widely-distributed-in-galleys book.  I know that book. And I don't forget things.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to take a drag on this fine smooth Mild Seven. Have you tried them? I can't recommend them highly-paid enough.

A reader:

Sorry this isn't about the current posting but I can't find the earlier one that prompted this comment. I take issue with the affected 'buncombe' as opposed to the universally accepted bunkum. Whatever the etymological accuracy, it is the spelling equivalent of pronouncing forehead phonetically instead of idiomatically to rhyme with horrid.And while I have your attention, if I do have it, can you explain 'net-net' ?I sort of half understand it from context but whence the two nets?

This is from a fan by the way

"Buncombe" is a Mencken-ism, and sanctified thereby, far as I'm concerned.  And that aside, I think it's a nice word.  It's an affected writing of "bunkum," and that's a neat way to express the notion of **affected** bunkum.

"Net-net" I first heard in the 1980s on Wall St trading floors, & always assumed it came from that subculture.  Calculating your actual revenue from a trading-floor transaction can be extremely difficult.  Typically a trade will have to compute (a) what's due to the client, to get a net, then (b) subtract what's due to the firm, to get a net-net.

Linda Chavez says that:  "Some people just don't like Mexicans...  Unfortunately, among this group is a fair number of Republican members of Congress, almost all influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable news anchors — most prominently, Lou Dobbs..."

Linda might at least have noticed, as the 60 Minutes team did the other week, that Lou Dobbs' wife, Debi Segura, is of Mexican ancestry.

My yesterday post about the Creation Museum drew the following correction:

Derb—-your post about Ken Ham's creationist museum misrepresented the position of young-earth creationists. You may think this a quibble, but young-earth creationists will range anywhere from Bishop Ussher's date to around 25,000 years ago that I've heard bandied about among Seventh Day Adventists. I've known quite a few young-earth creationists, and I don't think any are on board with the Ussher chronology.  Cordially, [Name]

I appreciate that "Cordially," Sir.  This is not a topic in which cordiality is very prominent.  And 25,000 years instead of 6,000?  Well, that makes MUCH more sense!

From the Cox and Forkum website (hat tip: LGF):

Funny:  I had just started to read this fascinating new book by Angus McLaren in the hardback edition when suddenly it went limp in my hands. Which never happened to me before.

Fox News story from Mexico City, where Miss Universe 2007 was crowned last night.

Miss USA Rachel Smith slipped and fell to the floor during the evening gown competition and was jeered by the Mexican audience during the interview phase.  Smith was booed during her interview and several audience members chanted 'Mexico! Mexico!' until she spoke in Spanish, saying 'Buenas noches Mexico. Muchas gracias!' which earned her applause. Mexico has a fierce rivalry with its northern neighbor.

Roger Scruton argues that, unlike Islam, the West has always reached out:

One of the strangest of recent movements in the world of education has been that promoting “multiculturalism” and attacking the traditional humanities for their “ethnocentricity”. Multiculturalists argue that our curriculum has focused on the works of “dead white European males”, with the tacit or conscious intention of excluding the achievements of people regarded, on account of their race, sex, culture or locality, as “other”.

The thesis, argued with exemplary carelessness by Edward Said in his bestselling book Orientalism, has had an impact not only in European and American academies but also on intellectuals in those incendiary areas like the Middle East where grievances against the “West” gain an easy hearing.

To someone educated in Britain during the postwar period, at a time when the old curriculum was assumed as the norm, the thesis is not only astonishing but also a vivid testimony to our cultural decline. Like others of my generation I was brought up on the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, on the Thousand and One Nights, Kim and The Last of the Mohicans; at school I was taught to love Virgil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad; I was encouraged by my teachers to read Confucius in Pound’s translation and the Vedas in the edition by Max Müller, and I encountered through LP records and the concert hall amazing vistas of other worlds, from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Britten’s The Prince of the Pagodas, to Ravi Shankar playing evening ragas to packed halls of the young....

We who enjoy the fruits of western culture ought to be rallying to its defence, now that it is under attack both from internal critics and from external enemies. It is time to ask what we learn from this culture and why it matters. We lament the decline of university science, since it presages a widespread loss of knowledge. We would lament it less if this loss of scientific knowledge were offset by a gain in knowledge of other kinds. But if students of the humanities learn only to repudiate their culture while putting nothing in its place, then it cannot be said that they acquire any real knowledge from their studies.

Although it was probably no part of Said’s intention, the combined effect of his attack on western “orientalism”, Foucault’s attack on bourgeois “discourse”, Derrida’s “deconstruction” and the general crushing of the old curriculum under a weight of inquisitorial “theory” has led to an orthodoxy of nihilism in the western academy. The effects of this nihilism are widespread, as in the addictive drumbeats and soundbites that form the background of popular culture.

To counter this culture of nothingness, I suggest that we begin from the very certainties that Said put in question: the certainties contained in the art, literature and music that we were once encouraged to regard as precious personal possessions. Such works are not empty ciphers on which to try out our analytical skills. They show us what we are and what we are capable of. They also teach us how to judge. From culture we acquire a sense of what is intrinsically worthwhile in the human condition and a recognition that our lives are not consumed in the pursuit of power and profit, but devoted to intrinsic values...

That was why my schoolteachers – who had lived through the second world war and doubted that a benign God was still in charge – were so intent on introducing their pupils to the art and literature that they loved. They agreed with Arnold that such things exemplify “the best that has been thought and said” and what else, in uncertain times, can humanity depend upon?

Dance critic Clive Barnes on a current American Ballet Theater production:

This 1964 ballet is totally alive with both Shakespeare's poetry and his earthy, timeless human comedy, all magically enmeshed in a gossamer web of choreography shimmering like moonlight on dewdrops.

It was in 1949 that Rothbard first concluded that the free market could provide all services, including police, courts, and defense services better than could the State.

He split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention, and aligned himself with what he called the 'rightwing populist' wing of the [Libertarian] party, notably Ron Paul, who ran for President on the [Libertarian Party] ticket 1988.

It's lucky for most of us that our parents didn't go creative as dizzy Gwynnie did in naming her girl Apple—or as that parent did who first named a child LaToya.  Horse breeders, on the other hand, have free rein in the name game.  One thinks of the winner of yesterday's $600,000 Metropolitan Stakes at Belmont, Corinthian by way of Pulpit and Multiply.  Clever, no?

Sometimes, though, horses go by assumed names.

Popcorn Deelites at Old Friends, 2007 by Robert Bové

Says Popcorn Deelites' "agent":

“I'm not one of the greatest racehorses of all time, but I played one in the movies.” This might be the motto for Old Friend retiree Popcorn Deelites, a low-level claimer whose career took a turn when he was cast as one of the six horses to play the great Seabiscuit in the Oscar-nominated film starring Tobey Maguire and Jeff Bridges.