For people living in Massachusetts April 19th is more than the day of the Boston Marathon, it’s Patriots Day — the day and date in 1775 when the British army, stationed in Boston, sent a force across the Charles River in the dark of night, planning a surprise march to Lexington to capture Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and from there to Concord to seize gunpowder and other supplies stored by the disaffected citizenry.
Society finds it easier to give up religious belief, than to abandon the traditions and symbols of religion. Eggs have symbolized fertility, birth and rebirth, for a long, long time. And, as you probably know, you can find eggs used symbolically that way in a number of religious traditions. Here and now we’re celebrating Easter and what we have here are Easter eggs.
A friend told me about a new word, apricity – “It means the sunshine on a cold winter day. Something like that.” Later I looked for the word in my Merriam-Webster dictionary. It wasn’t there. The words went from from apre’-ski to apricot but no apricity. I searched online and discovered, Yes, there is a word apricity, a rare word that was first recorded in 1623 by Henry Cockeram. he said the word meant the warmness of the sun in winter.
What are you doing when you do long division? When you do addition, you draw a line under the numbers and add them up. Same for subtraction, except you subtract instead of add. And for multiplication you draw a line under the numbers and multiply. But for long division it’s not so simple. You draw a line above the number you’re dividing and do all sorts of things you memorized to do, and how does anyone know if it really works?
Lust isn’t really that bad. I mean, against the background of the Russian bombing of civilian apartment buildings in Kiev or the slaughter of starving women and children in Gaza it looks like welcome relievf.
Lust has it’s place in the list of the Seven Deadly Sins, but it’s not high on the list. In fact, Lust is the least deadly.
Tacitus, writing around the year 98, reports that as the Roman legions were extinguishing the last free holdouts in Britain, one of the native inhabitants of that land, a certain Calgacus, “superior to the others in bravery and birth,” rallied his troops against the Romans, rousing them before battle by describing the appetite the Romans had to oppress people, to occupy and rule over others everywhere, and then to misname what they did to make it sound honorable.
We appreciate Great Novels, especially Great British Novels, but every now and then our attention flags. And this isn’t limited to Great British Novels; there are also Great Russian Novels in which we’ve found our attention wandering. There are even some Great American Novels —
Much of the country is covered with snow this Valentine’s Day. That’s not unusual for a day in the middle of February in the Northern hemisphere, and when we mark Valentine’s Day on February 14th, we’re talking about Saint Valentine and Western Christianity.
