Adrian Hester

Actually, no, I meant to change that before posting it and forgot. Basically, the Chinese legends were that you had first the three August Ones, or huang, who were demi-gods; then the five Sage-Emperors, or di, who were human culture-heroes. (The character for di is also used for mikado in Japanese.) The first of the August Ones, Fu-xi, is credited with the invention of writing, for example, in some early sources, while the third in some sources, Shen-nong, invented agriculture--in fact, his name means "divine (shen) farmer (nong)." Of the five Sage-Emperors, for example, the last two, Yao and Shun, were credited with discovering or promulgating or whatever the principles of righteousness, benevolence, and filiality. In other sources, the third of the August Ones was Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor, in which a different character for huang appears, in his case meaning yellow. (It doesn't help one in making off-the-cuff postings that from the Han Dynasty on, 206 BC-220 AD, the color yellow was reserved for the emperor--partly because imperial proclamations were printed on yellow paper, yellow in part because, I am told, it was the color of an insecticidal dye restricted to paper used in imperial proclamations from very early on.) Anyway, Qin Shi Huangdi put the two characters for the August Ones and the Sage-Emperors together in his new title to mark the beginning of a new era (which in the case of his dynasty lasted about fifteen years). He was quite arrogant that way. If I remember correctly, the emperors of the succeeding Han Dynasty kept the title huangdi, but even before the end of the dynasty scholars had established the convention of shortening the title to huang for the two Qin emperors and di for the Han emperors. (In the case of all but the first of the Han emperors, the title consisted of two characters, the second di and the first chosen posthumously to reflect the distinctive character of his reign; thus, the emperor who reigned 140-87 BC was called the Martial Emperor, Wudi, while his grandfather, Wendi, was the Cultured Emperor. They're usually called "Emperor Wu" and "Emperor Wen" in English. Those titles are different from their personal names, by the way--the family name was Liu, the same as Lucy Liu's family name, and the personal name was tabooed. Interestingly enough, this is why the character guo, as in Zhongguo "Middle Kingdom," is used for "nation" in Chinese. Before the Han Dynasty, bang was commonly used for "state"; guo meant something like "city-state," if I remember correctly. However, the founder of the Han Dynasty was Liu Bang, and because of the taboo on his personal name, guo was chosen as the usual substitute and pretty much supplanted bang in later usage.)

You're mixing transcription systems here; his title's either Qin Shi Huang(di) (Pinyin) or Ch'in Shih Huang(-ti) (Wade-Giles). If he hadn't, one of the other states likely would have done so. (And again, his state's name was Qin/Ch'in, which is also the Qin/Ch'in part of his title, First Yellow Emperor of Qin.) You can see that in the slow consolidation of power by the seven states during the Warring States period (c. 500-221 BC) and in the scramble for power after the collapse of the Qin. This was actually a common burial practice (except for the burial of the retainers) among the Chinese aristocracy of the time, just not on nearly so megalomoniacal a scale. What would you consider better methods? And "better" in what sense? (I'm not saying his were the best, I'm just curious.)

Yes, I've read that same canard numerous times. The Emancipation Proclamation didn't free slaves in the North because under the Constitution they were still the property of American citizens and thus could not be arbitrarily seized. The Emancipation Proclamation did, however, free all the slaves in any areas occupied by Union armies after 1 January 1863, which meant that almost all Southern slaves had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation by the end of the Civil War; it also declared free all slaves who had already escaped to Union lines. The border states abolished slavery on their own (under Lincoln's urging) before the end of the Civil War, except for Kentucky (there the slaves were freed by the 13th Amendment).

Which brings up the next question, In your view, what's matter?

In an abstract mathematical context, "dimension" essentially means an independent parameter. For example, say you are considering a function depending on several variables. Each variable can be treated as an independent dimension; representing the function spatially is valuable for priming your intuition, for example, if it's necessary to consider derivatives of the function (the way its value changes as you change one of the variables). In mathematical physics you use abstract spaces like relativistic space-time for the economy of the mathematical description. In classical mechanics, for example, if you have several particles (N say) in a system, you make an abstract space with 3N dimensions, in which each dimension is one of the three spatial dimensions for one of the particles. Then the time behavior of the system is represented by a one-dimensional path in that abstract space. Relativistic space-time is similar, except that the fourth (abstract) dimension is time--or, more precisely, ict. (The fact that time enters multiplied by an imaginary number means that time is not only not a spatial dimension but doesn't even act as one. The geometry of space-time is very different from regular space, in that if you take two spatial dimensions and time your intuitions about regular three-dimensional space don't carry over.) These abstract spaces with several non-spatial dimensions are very useful mathematically, but they're not real spaces with extra dimensions besides our own, of course; they're simply abstractions from reality concretized by treating numerical quantities as lengths. After all, you can represent your bank balance as a curve in a two-dimensional space of time and money, but there are no metaphysical consequences of that--time might be money, after all, but that surely doesn't follow from (I hope) a constantly upward curve in your bank balance in that space.

It reminds me of the mass slaughter of sparrows during the Great Leap Forward: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_sparrow_campaign

Only for ideal gases. For real gases, an accurate equation of state (the equation relating the temperature, pressure, and temperature of the gas) includes substance-specific terms.

Ah, sorry, I was thinking of the latter. Well, imagine your quote replaced by one about WWJGD.

Just to be clear here, your point's that the languages reflect the culture in that they see need for such a word? I'd agree with that. If you're arguing for some form of causation in the other direction, it strikes me as pretty tenuous. It has a variety of meanings depending on what you understand the omitted word to be, since it's an abbreviation of several set phrases. Nichevo (spelled nichego) literally means "nothing." (More precisely, it's the genitive singular.) It can mean "never mind" (short for nichego strashnogo, "it's nothing serious/terrible," I think) or just "oh, nothing" as well as "there's nothing to be done," though a native speaker should confirm that before you take my word for it. Seems to me there's no real difference between the Russian "Nichevo" and English "Can't be helped" except that the Russian is somewhat more abbreviated.

In that case I've seen some threads on Usenet in which all the participants were non-sentient...

It rubs me the wrong way; it savors far too much of the Christian rip-offs of commercial slogans, like "Christ--He's the real thing!" or...no, I won't repeat any more. (But boy, it sure would be great if some corporation took the people who made those shirts to court for trademark violation. That'll never happen though, alas.) One time I was riding on the bus near a heavily-tattooed fellow in black leather with a variety of piercings who was wearing a WWJD bracelet. I forget how it came up, but he said that in fact for him it stood for "World Wrestling Juvenile Delinquent."

Actually, "nonstandard" means "not part of the standard language." If you define word as "A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning..." (American Heritage Dictionary), which is a pretty standard definition, then nonstandard words are as real as any other words; they're just not acceptable in standard English. They communicate meaning, so sure they're words. Should they be used in formal writing? No. Actually, there's sometimes a distinction made between the two: "Some dictionaries use the term substandard to describe forms, such as ain't, associated with uneducated speech, while reserving nonstandard for forms such as irregardless, which are common in writing but are still regarded by many as uneducated." (AHD again.) Often the two words are used interchangeably, however.

The formula E=mc^2 gives the amount of energy you obtain if you convert a mass m into energy. It gives the energy equivalent of a mass at rest in a given reference frame (there is a slightly longer formula that includes momentum, and which reduces to mc^2 + 1/2 mv^2, with the second term the classical formula for kinetic energy, at small velocities). For example, if you split an atomic nucleus so that energy is released, the difference between the mass of the products and the mass of the original nucleus is the same as the amount of energy released divided by c^2. Similarly, if you cause an electron to collide with a positron (the antimatter counterpart of the electron), both particles will disappear and you'll end up with two photons of the same frequency going in opposite directions (due to conservation of momentum, and here assuming the collision occurs in a frame of reference in which the center of mass of the two particles before collision was at rest) whose total energy is that of the mass of two electrons times c^2. Basically, matter (particles that have mass when at rest) can be converted into photons and vice versa under certain circumstances. In one respect, it's just a change of one type of particle to another; in another, it is the interchange of matter and energy since photons comprise radiant energy--they are massless (that is, they have no rest mass, so the energy they carry is purely due to momentum, which is indicated by their frequency) and simply transport the energy equivalent of the rest mass as momentum. So yes, under certain circumstances, matter can be caused to do work on other matter--more precisely, it can be converted into work, since it disappears in the process. Look at it this way: Let's say you have ice in water. Over a short time, you can treat them as different (though eventually either the water will freeze or the ice will melt). Ice can only move other ice if it is set in motion and caused to collide with it, but flowing water will cause it to move without having to hit anything with a stick or whatnot. Admittedly, it's a rather dodgy analogy, but it gives the basic idea--matter is often described as a particularly condensed form of energy. If you think of the conversion of matter into energy or vice versa as some sort of phase change, the idea might not seem as counter-intuitive. (Though I still think that thinking of photons as particles essentially having only kinetic energy is more helpful, since photons basically "bridge the gap," if you will, between matter and energy.)

It's not a classical Chinese term, so going back to the root meaning of each character is a bit misleading. Rather, it's a neologism, I think one of the thousands developed by Japanese translators in the late 19th century to translate Western books, and because of this it relies on about 2,300 years of multi-layered meanings and uses in Chinese. (Though conceivably it could have been developed a century or so earlier.) The first two characters (zi1ben3 in Mandarin) should be taken as a single word, meaning "capital, wealth, resources." The first of the two, 資, originally meant something like "resources" or "endowment" (it was used not only for natural resources but also for talent or natural endowment of character), while the basic meaning of the second, 本, is "root" and by extension was used to indicate "capital" or "principal" as opposed to "interest." The next two characters (主義, zhu3yi4) have to be taken as a single unit; they are used in modern terminology as equivalent to "-ism" or "-ocracy," with that meaning coming from a root sense of "master/ruling principle"; this was not a classical usage. In classical Chinese the last character (者, zhe3) indicated a person who carries out an action (among other uses), though that is archaic in the modern language (more precisely, that meaning is still alive, but mostly in set classical phrases); it is used in modern Chinese mostly to indicate such meanings as an adherent of a system, as here. (A professional capitalist is, I believe, usually called 資本家 zi1ben3jia1, where 家 means "home, residence" at root and by extension indicates a member of a school of thought or a professional in some field.)

Well, moving something through a certain distance d with a force F, and defining the work W as F*d. Force you measure by, say, the distance through which the force causes a spring to lengthen or shorten. Then you work it out from there. There are many different kinds of energy, but they are all measured in terms of the amount of work they can be caused to do if coupled with a mechanical system (such as, say, by moving a mass on a spring); that is, work is the form of energy most readily measured, and other forms of energy are measured (for the most part, but not heat) by transforming them into work. The equivalence of all these kinds of energy and their conservation when transformed from one kind to another is a pretty abstract idea, of course, that requires such an abstract definition as "ability to do work," and it wasn't until the mid-19th century that it was stated in full generality. (And thermodynamics complicates things because although heat is a form of energy, or rather is the amount of thermal energy transfered, not all of it can be converted into work. On the other hand, you can convert all of a given amount of work into heat--hook a steam engine up so that it drives a bore into metal, converting all the work into heat; then measure the amount of heat generated by how much water it boils off, as Count Rumford did.) You have to unpack it. That's not so easy to teach.

Epics are poetry; the basic division of poetry in the Western tradition is probably between epic and lyric poetry. And in any case, even if we restrict the term poetry to lyric poetry, as you seem to have done, you'd still exclude most Latin and Greek lyric poetry (Catullus, Sappho, and many others); the Romans and Greeks just didn't go in for rhyming much. Did Catullus and Sappho write poetry or not? By your definition, no. But your argument against free verse is too strong and your definition of poetry is too narrow. Yes, yes, we know. But you are attacking the idea of non-rhyming poetry, which is a very iffy proposition.

Well, some physicists do, certainly, such as the people who dreamed up string theory. However, in most cases they use complex equations that are then tested against empirical evidence. It's rather subtler than that. If you move alongside the clock so that it's stationary relative to you, the clock will tick out the same rate for you and for someone on the plane or spaceship carrying it. On the other hand, if you move at a different speed from the clock so that it moves relative to you, you will observe the clock ticking at a different rate than if you observed it while moving alongside it. That will happen for any clock, any device to measure the passage of time; the reason it was tested by atomic clocks is for the necessary precision. Not quite--a person observing the clock as it moves past at a high speed will measure its tick rate as slower than a person at rest relative to the clock will measure it. Similarly, if you have a second clock next to you, a person at rest relative to the fast-moving clock will measure the tick rate of your clock as slower than you do. No matter how fast you yourself are moving, you'll see your own clock ticking away at the same rate, but people you pass will measure it as ticking at a different rate. The difference in the tick rates as measured by the two people is determined by the relative speeds with which the two observers move past each other.

Well, he's already addressed this point; I take it he'd say that it's a poem in Afrikaans and only a translation of a poem in English: "He adds that poetry virtually can NOT survive translation, since all languages are different, it can only be brought over roughly. The meaning (concepts) can be translated, but the poetry (sound) cannot." (Post #8) Hmm, yeah. A transcript of what exactly he said would be helpful; Brandon's summary is too vague.

Actually having a reason in the first place would be nice: "the essential characteristic of poetry...is the quality of music, including rhythm, rhyme and meter." As I've asked before, what quality of music is rhyme? Music per se does not rhyme. Rhyme is a term that is completely inapplicable to music. If you want to say that rhyme is a musical quality of poetry in some metaphorical or poetic sense, fine, but it is not a quality of music in any concrete sense. And how does the necessity to rhyme in order to be true poetry follow from that? What regression? Greek poetry didn't rhyme either! Try the beginning of the Odyssey, for example: andra moi ennepe, mousa, polutropon, hos mala polla planchthê, epei Troiês hieron ptoliethron epersen: pollôn d' anthrôpôn iden astea kai noon egnô, polla d' ho g' en pontôi pathen algea hon kata thumon, arnumenos hên te psuchên kai noston hetairôn. all' oud' hôs hetarous errusato, hiemenos per: autôn gar spheterêisin atasthaliêisin olonto, nêpioi, hoi kata bous Huperionos Êelioio êsthion: autar ho toisin apheileto nostimon êmar. tôn hamothen ge, thea, thugater Dios, eipe kai hêmin. There's one couplet that rhymes and another that almost rhymes (omega and omicron were distinct vowels both in quality and quantity; omega was probably close to the sound of "awe" in American English and omicron seems to have been more closed, as in "boat" without the final w sound), but that's it. The poetry was organized metrically, as anybody knows full well who's had to count feet in Latin and Greek poetry, and relied much more on alliteration and other associations of sound within a line than across line boundaries. Or try this famous poem by Catullus (Carmina 7, "Let us live and love"): Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. soles occidere et redire possunt: nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum, dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut ne quis malus invidere possit, cum tantum sciat esse basiorum. Very little rhyming there, and what there is is mostly due to Catullus repeating "centum" as he tells Lesbia how many hundreds and thousands of kisses they will use to confuse the rumors of grave old men. Instead of rhyming, you get such things as a heavy repetition of w (letter v) and m sounds evoking kissing--obvious once you see it but very effective. Well, he's wrong. It's known quite well how Old English was pronounced, and rhyming was not common in Old English poetry. It was used intermittently in Beowulf, for example, and then seemingly by accident. Old English poetry was organized in two-part lines, each part with two stressed syllables and an unset number of unstressed syllables, and at least one stressed syllable in each half had to alliterate. For example, beginning of part 11 of Beowulf, lines 710-19: Ða com of more / under misthleoþum Grendel gongan, / godes yrre bær; mynte se manscaða / manna cynnes sumne besyrwan / in sele þam hean. Wod under wolcnum / to þæs þe he winreced, goldsele gumena, / gearwost wisse, fættum fahne. / Ne wæs þæt forma sið þæt he Hroþgares / ham gesohte; næfre he on aldordagum / ær ne siþðan heardran hæle, / healðegnas fand. I'll spare you a phonetic transcription, though I could provide one if I needed to, because it should be clear from the spelling (which is quite regular, though some of the double vowel sequences are non-intuitive) that there's no rhyme there, though there's a near rhyme in the last couplet. Or check out another famous poem, "The Wanderer": http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/librar...texts/a3.6.html And you haven't convinced me that rhyme is one of those defining characteristics. Brass tacks here: Are the Iliad and the Odyssey poetry or not?

Who said it was supposed to be "some sort of huge metaphor"? It was a likely explanation of why she would have been attracted enough to the line break to keep it, even if she didn't think about it consciously. What you wrote does not convey that; you went straight from her being widely published to Hitler and Picasso being popular. I'd prefer the term "cuts across" the grammar. It introduces a pause that emphasizes "I," certainly, but I don't find that it interrupts thought; if anything, it provokes it, at least if you're reading attentively. Sometimes you might not want to read poetry with such concentration, but I usually do; a musical or poetic wallow in warm sentiment is fine, but you get more out of fine music if you listen attentively to the interplay of themes, and you get more out of poetry if you pay attention to the interplay between rhythm, the sounds of words, and grammar. Rhyme can contribute to that very effectively, but it's the rhythm that's essential for the structuring of a poem that makes it a work of art. Well, when they're not listening to talk radio, anyway. Why? I already said that I don't consider popularity relevant to evaluating the value of a work of art. Curiously enough, much of Richard Strauss's best music does have words: The Four Last Songs, Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella, Die Frau Ohne Schatten... But "to have someone" in the sexual sense is very common; you should have noticed the possibility of that reading--and though it might have been "cleared up by the end of the poem," it would still persist throughout the reading like an echo in the ear of the attentive reader, especially with the morning bedroom scenes. The reader might disregard it or entertain it as a second reading, but it would still be there.

Actually, it reads better if it's treated as a scud--a secondary stress or unstressed syllable falling where you'd expect a primary stress. It's a common technique that works wonders at avoiding a cloying sing-songy sound. (Nabokov's Notes on Prosody has an excellent discussion of scuds in English and Russian poetry.) In the context of that particular poem, it adds a prosaic note to "promises to keep" that is important to the poem's theme. Actually, it's better if a poem doesn't have exactly the same meter throughout; slight variations of the basic meter are common and effective, such as replacing a trochee with an iamb. However, if you mix feet throughout, you end up with something rhythmically much like daily speech, not poetry. If you consider rhyme the distinctive feature of poetry, that might not be so important, but if you consider some sort of codified meter more basic, as I do, then letting your feet fall where they may is no more artistic in poetry than in the dance.

Then perhaps he's just being poetic, but taken literally it's false for just the reason I gave. Non sequitur. What qualities of music cause rhyme to be a quality of poetry? No it doesn't; that's a variation on a hackneyed popular catchphrase that's not even true. If you take "rule" in the descriptive sense, then an exception disproves the rule. If you take "rule" in the prescriptive sense, then exceptions violate the rule; they certainly don't make (or follow) it. If your definition of poetry as necessarily rhyming excludes the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid as poetry from the get-go (which it does since they don't rhyme), then your definition of poetry is useless; if you have to treat blank verse as some sort of exception that makes your rule, then your definition doesn't even do justice to English-language poetry. For example, this is very fine poetry, even though it doesn't rhyme, a poetic exploration of the nature of the poetic art and the relation between art and life: That trick is, the artificer melts up wax With honey, so to speak; he mingles gold With gold’s alloy, and, duly tempering both, Effects a manageable mass, then works. But his work ended, once the thing a ring, Oh, there’s repristination! Just a spirt O’ the proper fiery acid o’er its face, And forth the alloy unfastened flies in fume; While, self-sufficient now, the shape remains, The rondure brave, the lilied loveliness, Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore: Prime nature with an added artistry— No carat lost, and you have gained a ring. (Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, beginning of Book I) If your definition of poetry excludes that, then your definition does not do justice to the subject. Words name concepts, if you will, or are associated with or refer to them; the two are not the same. (Are man and men the same concept or different ones?) "Temporal form"? What does that mean? What would be a "mental integration of concretes or abstractions" that is not held in a temporal form?

By the way, I'm not that impressed by your poetry. First, you combine very colloquial language bordering on cliches ("make me blue," "burn a hole in my sole [sic]") and quite literary language ("supine," "ponder her morning physique") rather incoherently. There's a vulgarity to some of your images that might well work on the top 40, but not here. (In fact, "hole in my soul" is part of a pop lyric--Aerosmith, I think, and a blues singer before that, though I can't place it right now.) In particular, you write "I had her," whose secondary meaning of sexual conquest undercuts the tone of the whole poem; by the time I reached "Why did I have her? I still do not know," the first thing it conveyed to me was that you picked up some chick in a bar for a one-night stand and you still don't know why. Second, you violate your own strictures about not abusing grammar to get a rhyme: "While her delicate voice recalls for me silk." Your meter constantly shifts gears in a lurch-lurch-lurch that's very distracting--I mean, come on, if you're going to quote Robert Frost as an exemplar, you should be able to match his flawless use of regular meter underlying a wondrous colloquial rhythm. For example: I woke on a morning when she was with me; I sat up to ponder her morning physique. No make-up, puffy eyes, crease on her cheek. But her beauty transcended my scrutiny. - * - - * - - * - * - - * - - * - - * - - * - * - * - * * - - * - - * - - * - - * - - So which is it, dactylic, iambic, anapestic, or trochaic? All of the above. Is it a trimeter, tetrameter, or pentameter? All of the above. And at the end of the last line, to force a rhyme in a * - - foot with a * - foot, that doesn't work well. (And if instead you read "with me" with the stress on "me," that's even worse.) What is the rhyme scheme of the whole poem? The first quatrain is A-B-C-B, the next three couplets are A-A B-B C-C, and the last quatrain is A-B-B-A. And frankly, the misspelling at the end of "Her beautiful eyes burn a hole in my sole" reduces it to the ludicrous (though I'd say the trope expressed is already hackneyed enough not to bear repeating yet again): She's staring at the bottom of your foot and her powerful superhero laser eyes are burning a hole in it.

Prose does indeed have rhythm, and good prose writers pay close attention to the rhythm and flow of their sentences. It's a subtler use of rhythm than in poetry, but it's present if you listen for it. "By definition...by definition." By one definition, poetry must rhyme. By the other definition it's art whose medium is the sound of concepts. (Which is nonsense, by the way. Concepts are mental entities and don't have sounds. You mean words, which do have sounds.) You haven't convinced me that your definition of poetry as the art whose medium is the sound of words means that poetry must rhyme. And what defining quality of music corresponds to rhyme?

Which was probably her intention; it's obvious from the stanza itself. "I...signed away/what portions of me I/ could make assignable..." Her I stands there cut off from what precedes and follows just as death cut her off from the world. Uh huh. So, since I like Dickinson's poetry quite a lot, that means I would also have voted for Hitler and spent my pension fund on Picasso. If you didn't mean to imply that, then why bother to go on about their respective popularities at all? Interesting. So in one paragraph you say that Emily Dickinson's being widely published is pretty much tantamount to Hitler being elected, but then you turn right around and say that the popularity of the top 40 discredits the academy. But really, you're quite right: popularity does not mean quality or profundity. Just listen to the top 40 some time! In fact, popularity is irrelevant to the evaluation of a work of art or to the establishment of rational artistic criteria. So why do you bring it up at all? Why do you use it as a snide attack on Emily Dickinson for writing widely published poetry (and yes, it is poetry, and fine poetry at that) that you don't seem to like very much, then turn right around and praise the top 40 for its popularity because it reflects what you like in poetry?