Tag: ABC Wednesday

L is for Loopy Language

“Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries.”


As my daughter is LEARNING the English LANGUAGE, I find it more difficult to explain to her WHY certain things happen. For instance, as this list shows, at least half the letters of the alphabet will appear in a word but will be silent. So my response to my daughter is “Don’t ask.”

To be fair, the real reason for these seeming discrepencies is that English is a LANGUAGE rooted in multiple LINGUISTIC traditions.

OK, so I’ve sussed out the logic of the silent E, which (usually) means the vowel is long.

But other letters I understand less well, particularly those silent letters that appear in the beginning of a word.

I have learned, however that:
Silent B is often after m.
Silent G is often before m or n, and that the Greek root in a word such as gnome did sound the G.
Silent H is …complicated, and appears sometimes sounded, sometimes not, in many languages.

Silent K before n once WAS sounded. The silent ‘k’ in words like ‘knight’, ‘knock’ and ‘knob’ is a remnant of Old English, and wasn’t silent at all but was pronounced along with the ‘n’. “Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries. For some reason, the ‘kn’ consonant cluster became hard for English speakers to pronounce.”
Why is the letter -L- silent in words such as salmon and solder? “In those two cases, the English spelling originally did not have an L, so there was no such letter to pronounce.”
Silent P often appears before n, s, t.
And here’s some background on Silent T and Silent W.

Yet, I tend to oppose the movement to simplify English spelling. I would find it unreadable, as I do in this example. The LOOPINESS of the LANGUAGE is also its beauty, its charm, its LIVELINESS.
ABC Wednesday – Round 8

K is for Keys

Music touches on a few aspects of the word key.


I have become fascinated with the word key. It’s a short word, worth 10 points in Scrabble, but it has so many meanings. Reference.com shows some four dozen definitions. And while some are interlocking, most of them address some sort of structure.

There is that metal thing that moves a bolt that I tend to hate because I tend to misplace it. I have a couple of duplicates of my house keys, one outside the structure – no, it’s not under the mat – just in case. Someone told me a long time ago that the number of keys one has related to how important they were. The most important person I ever knew, by that definition, was my elementary school janitor.

Then there’s “something that affords a means of access”, such as the key to happiness. The word shows up at least a half dozen times in the Bible in this context, including Luke 11:52 (New International Version)- “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” Lawyer bashing has a rich tradition.

“Something that affords a means of clarifying a problem,” I would contend, would include the pronunciation key in the dictionary, the answer key to an exam, and like entities.

Things that look like keys, such as the islands known as the Florida Keys, or a part of the floor in basketball. Or something that is the center of things, something that’s important, such as the key to figuring out a mystery; Pennsylvania is the Keystone State.

Music touches on a few aspects of the word key. The keys on the piano or other instruments, like the keys to a calculator or computer keyboard, are the items that are touched; singer Alicia Augello Cook changed her last name to Keys in honor of piano keys. But the key is also “the principal tonality of a composition: a symphony in the key of C# major.”

Stevie Wonder recorded the 1976 Grammy album of the year, Songs in the Key of Life. It featured the big hits I Wish and Sir Duke, but also this minor hit As.

I came across this list of songs containing the word key. Thought I’d pick a few:
Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key-Billy Bragg & Wilco, featuring Natalie Merchant; a Woody Guthrie lyric completed by Bragg.
Key To The Highway-B.B. King and Eric Clapton.
Brand New Key-Melanie (live). “Don’t go too fast, but I go pretty far.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

J is for Justices

The only way a Supreme Court Justice can be removed is through impeachment (indictment) by the House of Representatives, and conviction by the Senate.


On the United States Supreme Court, the nine judges are called justices. There have been 110 justices since 1789, with 17 of them having served as Chief Justice, not counting some in temporary positions due to the death or retirement of the Chief Justice.

Someone nominated by the President, and ratified by the U.S. Senate by a majority vote, can serve for life. The idea was that the judiciary not be affected by the whims of pedestrian politics. Not that that hasn’t happened on occasion.

Here’s a list of Supreme Court members. I can tell that this picture was taken after the 2006 retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever to serve on the high court, replaced by Samuel Alito, and before the 2009 retirement of David Souter. There is a particular order in these pictures. The Chief Justice, in this case, John Roberts, is always front and center, literally. To his left, from your point of view, is the justice with the most seniority, in this case, 2010 retiree John Paul Stevens. To the right of the CJ is the next person in terms of seniority, Antonin Scalia, followed by (far left front) Anthony Kennedy, (far right front) Souter, (near left back) Clarence Thomas, (near right back) Ruth Bader Ginsburg, (far left back) Stephen Breyer and (far right back) Alito.

Here are the biographies of the current Court members, plus recent retirees.

Only four Presidents have never gotten a nomination confirmed: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Andrew Johnson (who did try), and Jimmy Carter. Of those, only Carter served a full term as President, though Johnson, who was impeached, nearly did.

And speaking of impeachment, the only way a Supreme Court Justice can be removed is through impeachment (indictment) by the House of Representatives, and conviction by the Senate. And only one justice, Samuel Chase has ever been impeached, though not convicted.

The first Roman Catholic on the bench was Roger Taney (1836), the chief justice who delivered the dreadful Dred Scott decision (1857). The first Jewish person was Louis Brandeis in 1916. So it is interesting that the current court consists of six Catholics, three Jews, and none of the Protestants who had dominated the courts for centuries.


The first black on the bench was Thurgood Marshall (1967), who appeared before the court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) anti-discrimination case; Clarence Thomas is the second. Marshall is not the only justice to move from lawyer before the court to justice on the court; e.g., Abe Fortas was the lead attorney in Gideon v. Wainwright (1962), which ruled that state courts are required under the Sixth Amendment to provide counsel in criminal cases for defendants unable to afford their own attorneys.

The first woman, as noted, was Sandra Day O’Connor (1981). There are now three women on the court, and there have been four in total. In the current picture, Thomas and Bader Ginsburg have made it to the front row. The newbies are Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic on the Court (2009), and Elena Kagan.

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

I is for Ides

Only the ides of March, May, July, and October are on the 15th; the rest are on the 13th.


Vincenzo Camuccini-The Ides of March. 1800.

When one hears of ides, it is almost always the Ides of March, which is March 15. And when one thinks of the Ides of March, one inevitably contemplates the assassination of Julius Caesar by his foes and so-called friends in 44 B.C.

Of course, the telling of the tale by William Shakespeare is the most well-known portrayal of the leader’s murder. There are at least 27 different movies and TV shows named Julius Caesar in the IMDB.

An iteration of Caesar’s death I hadn’t been familiar with is The Ides of March: A Novel by Thornton Wilder. From the Amazon description: “The Ides of March, first published in 1948, is a brilliant epistolary novel set in Julius Caesar’s Rome. Thornton Wilder called it ‘a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic.’ Through vividly imagined letters and documents, Wilder brings to life a dramatic period of world history and one of history’s most magnetic, elusive personalities.” Moreover, Jerome Kilty turned the book into a 1971 play.

I never saw it, but Episode No. 89 of the TV show Xena was called IDES OF MARCH.

Here’s a look at March 15 in history. Incidentally, the ides of a month is not necessarily on the 15th. In fact, only the ides of March, May, July, and October are on the 15th; the rest are on the 13th.

George Clooney began filming the movie Ides of March, about a Democratic governor campaigning in presidential primaries, in Cincinnati, Ohio in February 2011, continuing into March. Perhaps even on the 15th? Or would that be tempting fate?

There are a few songs called Ides of March, including one by Iron Maiden, but I thought I’d end with a song by a group called Ides of March, doing a live version of their #2 1970 hit Vehicle.
ABC Wednesday – Round 8

H is for Her, in charge

Today is International Woman’s Day, designed 100 years ago this month as a “global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future.”

A whole JEOPARDY! category of WOMEN IN CHARGE (#6081, aired 2011-02-07)
$200: From 1966 to 1977 & from 1980 to 1984, she led the world’s largest democracy
$400: Vigdis Finnbogadottir led a theatre co. for many years before becoming this country’s president in 1980
$600: In 2010, before her term as president ended, Michelle Bachelet oversaw earthquake relief efforts in this country
$800: In 2009 Vilnius-born Dalia Grybauskaite became president of this country
$1,000 (Daily Double): President of the Philippines from 1986 to 1992, she passed away in 2009
Questions at the end of the post.

Countries that have had:
(yellow)Female heads of government
(dark orange) Female heads of state (including female representatives of heads of state (Governors-General and French Representatives of Andorra), excluding monarchs)
(light orange) Female heads of state and government (including female representatives of heads of state, excluding monarchs)

How many women are currently in the United States House of Representatives? How about the US Senate? I had to look it up. It’s 73 and 17, respectively, which puts the country 71st in terms of the number of women in national parliaments.

I’m a firm believer that progress towards equality, whether it be gender-, ethnicity-, or sexual orientation-based is not truly achieved until one can no longer keep track of the achievement.

And how many US Presidents who were female have we had? Lessee – take the square root of…oh yeah, that would be zero. Not even Petunia Pig.

This is fascinating to me because other countries have had female heads of state and/or female heads of government for decades. According to Wikipedia, the first female head of state was Khertek Anchimaa-Toka of the Tuvan People’s Republic, an independent state in Russia. The first one for a place I’ve actually HEARD of was Sükhbaataryn Yanjmaa of Mongolia, back in 1953. But the first woman who was head of government, generally a more significant role in most countries that separate the functions, was Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1960. The second and third are much better known: Indira Gandhi of India and Golda Meir of Israel.

Of those currently in office, the female head of government with the longest tenure is Angela Merkel of Germany (pictured above), followed closely by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia (pictured right), who is the longest-tenured of those women serving as both heads of state and government. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica, and Dilma Rousseff of Brazil also currently hold both roles. Mary McAleese of Ireland and Tarja Halonen of Finland are the longest-tenured female heads of state; the latter, talk show host Conan O’Brien claims, looks like him.


Today is International Woman’s Day, designed 100 years ago this month as a “global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present, and future.” Here is the website, and here is a history of the event, provided by the United Nations.

From the Census: In the US, National Women’s History Month dates back to March 8, 1857, when women from New York City factories staged a protest over working conditions. But it wasn’t until 1981 that Congress established National Women’s History Week to be commemorated the second week of March. In 1987, Congress expanded the week to a month. Every year since, Congress has passed a resolution for Women’s History Month, and the President has issued a proclamation.

JEOPARDY! questions-
Who was Indira Gandhi?
What is Iceland?
What is Chile?
What is Lithuania?
Who was Corazon Aquino?

ABC Wednesday – Round 8

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