“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.”

– The Dhammapada: Path of the Dharma

Here is today’s word from A.Word.A.Day:

And here is an example of an ancient boustrophedon:

The Gortyn Code

I once recommended George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman to a libertarian comrade who then said, "Wasn’t he a socialist?"

Shaw’s socialism wasn’t as harmless as some shavians would want us to believe, but neither do I think it was coincidence that this brilliant playwright was friends with such antisocialists (in the shavian state-socialist sense) as G.K. Chesterton and Benjamin Tucker.

Also, when most intellectuals 100 years ago were somewhere on the spectrum from pink to red, we can’t be too surprised when the cleverest stuff came from the pens of the revolutionary Left — or, in Shaw’s case, the evolutionary Left.

Shaw hated the quirks of English spelling. True to the central-planning spirit (the version of "rationalism" that F.A. Hayek decried and sometimes mistakenly applied to his allies), Shaw wanted English spelling revised to be simple, straightforward, and logical.

To illustrate how much current spelling was the opposite of these three virtues, Shaw offered the following spelling of "fish":

ghoti

If you don’t think that looks like an English spelling of something pronounced fish, then you’re not alone. But Shaw pointed out that combining the gh of "tough" with the o of "women" and the ti of "nation" produced the exact phonemes needed for "fish."

(I just double-checked Wikipedia, and apparently Shaw didn’t originate this suggested spelling; he just popularized it.)

This is not a non sequitur:

I’m listening to The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh by David Damrosch. So far it’s reminding me of my favorite stuff by Simon Winchester.

The Buried Book relays this amusing ghoti-like mistake in the rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamian mythology:

[A] major complication in the process … was that cuneiform had originally been developed in southern Mesopotamia by people who spoke Sumerian, an ancient language completely unrelated to any other known language. The script had then been taken over by speakers of Akkadian, which became the most commonly written language for much of Mesopotamian history. Yet the Akkadian scribes continued to learn Sumerian as they mastered the script, and they often employed Sumerian loan words amid their Akkadian texts. It is as though, in reading an English text we would often have to pause and determine whether pain meant ’suffering,’ as in English, or ‘bread,’ as in French.

Conversely, a sign might have the same meaning in Akkadian as in Sumerian but a completely different sound: when used to mean ’sky,’ the star symbol is pronounced an in Sumerian, but shamu in Akkadian. Names in particular could be tricky, for Assyrian names often included Sumerian elements, along with Akkadian symbols. This would lead George Smith [a self-taught linguist responsible for the first translation of Gilgamesh], for example, to misread the name Gilgamesh as ‘Izdubar’; he didn’t realize that what looked like two Akkadian characters, iz and du, were actually Sumerian signs pronounced ‘giz-ga’ or ‘gil-ga.’ He then guessed incorrectly on the final syllable, which was Akkadian as he assumed, but which can be pronounced either ‘bar’ or ‘mesh.’ … The reading of ‘Gilgamesh’ was finally established twenty-five years later by Smith’s friend and successor Theophilus G. Pinches, in an article triumphantly entitled "EXIT GISTUBAR!"

(Transcription stolen from “Dare I read?”)

This is from About.com : Babies & Toddlers :

Court Intervenes, Changes Child’s Name

From the story in the Telegraph:

A lawyer acting for the girl claimed she was so embarrassed by her name that she had kept it from her friends, insisting she should be known as ‘K’ instead. She also feared that if it became public she would be mocked and teased.

The lawyer claimed the girl fully understood the absurdity of her name, unlike her parents who had not considered the implications when they named her.

Justice Robert Murfitt said the name clearly presented a social hurdle for the child.

Read the rest of the story, too. It’s got lots of examples of names that folks have given their kids as well as names rejected by the New Zealand government. I’m also reading a book right now called Bad Baby Names which has some incredibly funny and sad (please don’t name your kid Typhus or Rubella) baby naming blunders.

It makes me think of the "Seinfeld" episode where Jerry couldn’t remember the name of the girl he was dating and she told him that it rhymed with a female body part. They spent the rest of the episode trying to figure it out. "Mulva?" Turns out it was Delores. It also makes me wonder how I would feel if the government wanted to tell me that I couldn’t give my child a name that they didn’t approve of. With the last name Brown, I had plenty of choices of odd baby names and being a strange girl with a bizarre sense of humor, some pretty entertaining ones came up during the initial phases of baby name negotiation. In the end, I chose a name that was pretty normal and had significance on both sides of our family. Certainly we won’t be having any upcoming days in court over it.

Then I think about that song, "Boy Named Sue," and I wonder if giving your kid a name like Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii might build character or prepare them for some serious adversity that they may face later in life. Maybe they’re doing a disservice by changing her name now. But… Nah.

What Do You Think?

Right now in the poll, almost half of you say that the court should be allowed to intervene in cases like this.

Chante says,

I agree with the court. I don’t for one minute think that their intervention was wrong, for the reason that the girl was so utterly embarrassed. If someone had a totally bizarre name, but was proud of it… maybe that would be a different story.

Michelle says,

I disagree with the court. No one should have any rights over the parents unless the parents were causing harm to their children. A name does not cause harm. Why didnt the girl who obvously is smart just have people call her Talula or Mary or Jessica? My daughter’s name is Sunshine. Everybody told me that she would be made fun of. It is exactly the opposite. Everybody alwasy tells her how pretty her name is.