Search

...world into four nations, based on their religion: Christians, Jews, Muslims (often called Mahometans), and Idolaters. For centuries, Buddhists fell into this last category. The process of their elevation to having an “ism” of their own is too long to tell here. However, one chapter in that story would be about those Jesuits, the intrepid travelers who set out from...

...world, as a first, second or foreign language, having been carried from its country of origin by former colonial and imperial activity, the slave trade, and recently, economic, cultural and educational prestige. It continues to change at all linguistic levels, in both standard and non-standard varieties, in response to external influences (e.g. modern communications...

...world learned about sex. Often we suppose that rural people like John Cannon did not need to consult books to learn about sex; they lived “closer to nature”, and could abstract what they saw in the barnyard to the bedroom. The most common euphemism for sexual knowledge, “the birds and the bees”, was first used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1825, at the very moment...

...world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and...