slept over with marlene friday night. she turned on the bedroom lights at three to
read the bible for ten minutes, pushed me out of bed at six so she could
sweep the floor and still make seven thirty mass. i wrote the
statistics textbook for a few hours, lit a joint at noon. the goal has
always been to experience as many human lives as you can.
consider good bread foundational to the meal.
imagine that five thousand years from now, historians will study this current moment of our existence mushed in with the rest of the industrial revolution, the same way that we now think of ancient and ptolemaic egypt as one culture. could you distinguish the biblical pharaohs from cleopatra's court? humanity's arc hasn't advanced as far from the steam engine as we might like to think.
watched a little bit of the king. "and fuck everybody, now that i think of it. sometimes in comedy, you have to generalize."
am sure that is not what carl sagan meant, google.
listened to the history of the alphabet.
like many new letters, it was placed at the back of the alphabet. but before i completely leave greek i, let me look at the modern name for this letter in english and the romance languages. since the romans called this letter greek i, that name stuck in late latin and the later romance languages. so today the letter y is called igrec in french and it's called igriega in spanish. and these names literally mean greek i. but of course we know the letter in modern english as wye. the english name for the letter is probably based on its overall shape. if you think about it, a y is basically an i with a v on top..the v was originally the same letter as u. sometimes it was written in a curvy style, sometimes it was written in a straight line angular style, but it was considered the same letter. and it not only represented the vowel sound of u, it also represented the w sound..but the point here is that the v shape often had the w, wuh, sound. and of course the i shape had that eee sound originally. so it's believed that the early english speakers looked at the letter y and saw the two letters that represented the w sound and the eee sound. the wuh sound and the eee sound. and they put those two together to create the name wee in early english. but when english experienced the later vowel shifts, the eee sound became the i sound
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