Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: History, J Street, Language, Washington DC
This was an e-mail from my father. I live not far from where J Street should be, and am glad to have another theory on the matter. Google gives the original source as the DC Almanac
MICHAEL FELDMAN’S Whad’ya Know may have solved a major local mystery: why DC doesn’t have a Jay Street. The guest was an author who had written about the history of letters and he pointed out that Noah Webster in 1828 was the first person to publish a dictionary with all 26 letters of the alphabet in it. The letter J was one of those that were frequently missing. Noah Webster came along several decades after Washington was laid out.
WIKIPEDIA – The letter J is the tenth of the Latin alphabet; it was the last to be added to that alphabet. . . . Only about .06% of letters in English, .22% in Spanish, and .29% in French on average are Js. It is the 24th-most frequent letter in English, the 23rd-most frequent in Spanish, and the 21st-most frequent in French. . . Some believe that Petrus Ramus (d. 1572) was the first to make a distinction between I and J. The differentiation was probably made first in Spanish though, where, from the very introduction of printing, we see j used for the consonant, and i only for the vowel. For the capitals, I had at first to stand for both (as it still does in German type, and in all varieties of Gothic or Black Letter); but before 1600 a capital J consonant began to appear in Spanish. . .
In England, individual attempts to differentiate i and j were made already in the 16th century, as by Richard Day, who printed books in London after 1578, and George Bishop, who printed the translation of La Primaudaye’s French Academie in 1586, with i, j, u, v, differentiated as in modern use, but had no capital J or U. The J j types are not used in the Bible of 1611, nor in the text of the Shakespeare Folio of 1623; these have I i for both values; but the latter has a capital Italic J in headlines in the proper names ohn, uliet, ulius, and in the colophon, list of actors, etc., thus showing a tendency to use this (in its origin merely an ornamental variety of I) as a J. . . .
But though the differentiation of I and J, in form and value, was thus completed before 1640, the feeling that they were, notwithstanding, merely forms of the same letter continued for many generations. . . In dictionaries, the I and J words continued to be intermingled in one series down to the 19th century. Dr. Johnson, indeed, under the letter I, says “I is in English considered both as a vowel and consonant; though, since the vowel and consonant differ in their form as well as sound, they may be more properly accounted two letters”. . . .
SO FORGET ABOUT the Pierre L’Enfant hating John Jay myth; it’s more J was just a letter too few people knew or cared about.
Here are a list of the sites that I am in active use of. There are probably more that I use less frequently but still deserve mention, but can’t remember of at one in the morning.
WordPress: Eyes Open (this blog), 500 Flavors of Doom
Twitter: HerbertInc
Del.icio.us: Herbertanzer
Livejournal: Herbertinc
Wordie: Herbert
MyBlogLog: Herbertanzer
Flickr: Herbertanzer
Technorati: Herbertanzer
TheChocolateLife: Herbert
Ctrl+Alt+Squeak(A Personal Website in desperate need of updating)
Facebook Profile
World Community Grid: Herbertanzer, Team: SWIL, running “Nutritious Rice for the World”
Browser: Flock 1.1 with the Zotero toolset
Chat clients: AIM, IRC, SMS
Basically if you see the below icon attached to the name Herbert, you can be guaranteed that it is (a) Me or (b) someone impersonating me or (c) someone who hacked into my account.
if you visit American cities,
you will find them very pretty.
Only two things you must be aware:
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air.
-Tom Lehrer
Recently there’s been a large hulaballoo about this report on contaminants in our tap water. I was neither surprised nor outraged to hear about this. What did surprise me however, was how much everybody acted as if they didn’t know about it. We live in a closed system; it only makes sense that what we put into the water is going to end up coming out of our faucets.
But really, I don’t think this is such a big deal, at least not for humans. It’s not cholera or giardia or dysentery. In the developed world, we’re doing pretty good regarding those nasty things. So in that sense, I think we’re doing a pretty good job. The water we drink is much less contaminated than it used to be. Heck, it’s clear – that’s an improvement than a century ago when the water could be so cloudy that Ivory Soap was invented to float so you wouldn’t have trouble finding it at the bottom of your bathtub.
What we put into our own systems doesn’t bother me so much. Even with all the lead, the asbestos, the drugs, and all the other toxins the media is always trumpeting about, the human lifespan is has increased amazingly, and is still improving. I mean, I suspect what we are so alarmed about finding in our system has been there for a lot longer than we think, it’s just that we didn’t have the technology to see it, since the concentration is so dilute.
It’s the media’s fault, really. When they get bored reporting on war, famine, recession, and whatever other flavor of doom of the day, contamination makes a pretty good choice. People are scared. They are careless of what what they put into the system but paranoid about what they put into themselves (excepting fats and empty calories). And shock tactics work well for holding an audience.
No, what bothers me is what we’re putting into the system of the rest of the world. Killing off animals with toxic waste, choking our air with smoke, and our water with oil. Contaminating pure strains of crops with GMO DNA, rendering it inedible. If only humans were affected by what we do, it wouldn’t bother me so much. Not that that means I don’t think we shouldn’t stop killing ourselves slowly, but rather that I think it’s just as important that we realize that we’re not the only ones here. If we were, well, we wouldn’t be here for much longer. We need to respect this planet and everything else that lives on it. It is a matter of our very survival.
I’ve always found it ironic that human are supposed to be the most evolutionarily advanced species on the planet, and yet, we seem to be the ones with a poorly developed survival instinct.
In a way, I suppose I should be grateful for our nation’s contaminationphobia. Since it’s finally getting people to stop and think that maybe they don’t want to let industry to put all those toxic chemicals into our waterstream and that maybe waste output should be regulated closer. It would be about time.
There are a few things I am addicted to: chocolate, my boyfriend, vinegar (especially salt and vinegar potato chips), chocolate, hats, and the most recent addiction to this list: RSS feeds.
There was a time, not too long ago, where I refused to read the newspaper, excepting the morning comics. It was just too depressing. This lasted most of the way through high school. During that same period I also gained regular access to the internet, but I spent most of my time on Instant Messenger, message boards, and research sites. News was not my top priority.
Then I went to college. People say that college is a bubble from the outside world. But I’ve found Swarthmore to be much the opposite. People read the news (free copies of the New York Times proliferate the campus), people talk about the news, people care about the news. Granted, the news people care about might be specific to their interests, but it’s difficult not to be friends with a significant crosssection. So I started reading the news, just a little bit here and there. Then I discovered a little Mac application called Shrook. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to keep a bookmark folder of scores of links to check every day. I could get my computer to do it for me. This would prove to be my downfall.
When I checked links manually, I only had a couple dozen; usually those that I knew updated on a daily or otherwise regular basis. But with an RSS reader, I didn’t have to worry about that. I could subscribe to as many as I’d like. Soon I had over a hundred feeds with several hundred posts a day. This started to become a problem- I use multiple computers – my MacBook, my XO (now running XFCE), my work station, and the terminals at school. But if I checked a site anywhere else buy from my macbook, I would have to go through the articles again when I opened my feed reader. So after a few different tries, with Apple Mail, Vienna, and Endo, I gave up.
But then, about a week ago, I finally gave in to Google Reader. And I admit, I am a convert. I can have my feeds anywhere, and not have to worry about seeing the same posts (except cross-posts) multiple times. It’s quite wonderful. So now I am back to reading 120 feeds and upwards of 700 posts a day (and growing). Yes, it takes up a lot of my time, but I think it’s worth it.
The question is now, while I have this information, what will I do with it? Write about some of it, hopefully. As for larger actions; it remains to be seen. I still have very low energy. And a low Brilliant Idea & Implementation Quotient. Hopefully those will both improve one of these days. As mentioned earlier, I have felt the energy, the need to Do Something, I’m just not sure what yet.
Also, I have learned that I can post my daily de.icio.us (another service of which I am late to jump on the bandwagon of, but have done so for the same reasons as switching to Google Reader) links automatically to my blog. Which I will be doing, so you will be seeing a small snippet of of what I am reading. And if it turns out my notes are posted with them, I will start writing more commentary.
Santander gets an immediate plus in my book for being of the few companies (El Rey is another – Venezualen) that is based in the country of origin. It also is fair trade, small farmer, and kosher.
It has an extremely smooth flavor and mouthfeel, and is not at all bitter. It is one of the most flavorful chocolates I have eaten, complex, with strong fruity undertones, criollo without a doubt.. The cacao nibs give it a subtle bitter crunch, which is a nice contrast to the smoothness of the chocolate itself. This is chocolat meant to be eaten slowly, nibbled and savoured.
Even the packaging is elegant – dark red with light yellow lettering and two theobroma cacao beans in the upper right corner. It’s packaged in foil in a box, making it easy to save for later – if you
I eagerly give this bar my highest approval.
This bar, like many, was provided by my boyfriend, who is, as ever, a strong facilitator of my addiction. (At least since he’s moved within easy walking distance of a gormet grocery store with an outstanding selection of chocolate.) You can see why I love him.
