Introduction
Adventures in the Nearest East (1957)
Context: Mesopotamian merchants spread their commercial institutions far and wide, into Western Asia, Egypt and Europe. The ancient inhabitants of Babylonia used the word qaqqadum, 'head', in the sense of 'principal'... our English word 'capital' (via Latin caput [head]) reflects ancient Mesoptamian usage.... our financial system, that reckons with interest on principal, harks back to the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
Quoted in Khrushchev Remembers (1970), p. 474
The Cultivation of Conspiracy (1998)
Context: The Latin osculum is neither very old nor frequent. It is one of three words that can be translated by the English, "kiss." In comparison with the affectionate basium and the lascivious suavium, osculum was a latecomer into classical Latin, and was used in only one circumstance as a ritual gesture: In the second century, it became the sign given by a departing soldier to a woman, thereby recognizing her expected child as his offspring.
In the Christian liturgy of the first century, the osculum assumed a new function. It became one of two high points in the celebration of the Eucharist. Conspiratio, the mount-to-mouth kiss, became the solemn liturgical gesture by which participants in the cult-action shared their breath or spirit with one another. It came to signify their union in one Holy Spirit, the community that takes shape in God's breath. The ecclesia came to be through a public ritual action, the liturgy, and the soul of this liturgy was the conspiratio. Explicitly, corporeally, the central Christian celebration was understood as a co-breathing, a con-spiracy, the bringing about of a common atmosphere, a divine milieu.
“Science is only a Latin word for knowledge”
Source: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
Source: The Dresden Files, Changes (2010), Chapter 18
Interview with Parker in Randall E. Parker(ed.), Reflection on the Great Depression (2002)
Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)
“59: In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.”
Epigrams on Programming, 1982
“Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.”
The story of BBC Television - How it all began http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/general/tvstory1
Variant: It’s fascinating. You know all these words, and they’re all English, but when you string them together into sentences, they just don’t make any sense.
Source: City of Fallen Angels
