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In common parlance, a “prophecy” is a special kind of utterance. Perhaps an oracle about the future, words of approval or condemnation, critique or consolation. Scholars often define prophecy as a kind of message, issued from a deity to their people and mediated through an individual called a prophet.
Perhaps the most popular command in the Bible is to “love your friend”—or “neighbor,” as it’s commonly translated— “as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Less popular today are the preceding verses, which command friends to rebuke each other if one has sinned. In ancient Judaism, a good rebuke was a mark of friendship, although it had to be done the right way.
A reader asked me to explain how I choose words for my essays. It is a long story, but I will try to make it short. When more than thirty years ago I began working on a new etymological dictionary of English, I compiled a list of words about which dictionaries say “origin unknown” and came up with about a thousand items. My other list contains “words of uncertain origin.”
Who was Charles Darwin the geologist? Was he a nephew, or maybe a cousin, of the illustrious naturalist, who first published the theory of evolution by natural selection? I know they had big families… But no, this is the one and the same. It is often forgotten that, early in his career, Charles Darwin was a ‘card-carrying’ geologist.
How does Artificial Intelligence (AI) affect climate change? This is one of the unprecedented questions AI raises for societies, challenging traditional perspectives of fairness, trust, safety, and environmental protection.
Approaching present-day Paris from the south, the ‘rue-Saint-Jacques’ passes through the Latin quarter near the Pantheon and the Sorbonne (Paris IV) on its way to the Petit Pont bridge that crosses to Île de la Cité near Notre Dame Cathedral. For many centuries, this was the avenue of approach to the city for travelers from all points south.
If I met you at a party and we started chatting and telling each other about our favourite authors, and I mentioned Colette, you might look blank.
Inspired by fellow philosopher Anthony Weston, I often ask my ethics students to create a diabolical toolkit of rules that would torpedo public dialogue. The idea here, I explain, is to spell out rules that would maximize the distance between “us” and “them,” ensuring that possibilities for cooperatively setting and achieving social goals—like peace, security, justice, public health, or sustainability—go forever unnoticed. For example, consider things like “prepare your comeback instead of listening” or “be angrier and talk louder than others.”
Reading is good; rereading is better. I can’t say with certainty how many times—forty? fifty?—I’ve read James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” only that for more than thirty-five years I’ve been reading and teaching the story, each time with an undiminished sense of awe and appreciation for how Baldwin issues a prophetic warning about the outcome of racism while making deeply felt gestures of hope and reconciliation.
Human civilization has always celebrated movement. Whether as recreation in everyday life, or elite competition to honour the gods of Olympus, sport has been a cornerstone of human culture for both spectator and competitor since records began. From the cricket crease to the athletics track to the All England Lawn Tennis Club, discover the history of sport in 8 books and bibliographies from Oxford University Press.
Rump and runt are not twins, but they sound somewhat alike, and they may be “distantly related,” to use a phrase sometimes occurring in dictionaries, though this phrase is too vague to be useful. Rump surfaced in texts only in the fifteenth century, and but for the Rump Parliament (1648-1653), famous in British History, the word would probably have been relegated mainly to talks about animals and bird.
This blog post introduces readers to the well-traveled remains of an Egyptian mummy now residing in Houston, Texas. If old Ankh-Hap still had his original hands and an endless supply of papyrus, he might have made entries like these in a diary of his afterlife.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is Germany’s greatest poet, then and now. At the age of thirty-seven he was on the way to being the centre of a national culture, and a European celebrity.
The title of this post embodies everything I despise about cheap journalism, but the temptation was too strong, because today’s topic is indeed the origin of the word whale. I was planning the story for quite some time, and then suddenly the media informed the world that a spade-toothed whale had been washed up on South Island beach (Australia).
One hundred twenty-five million years ago, the earth exploded with a kaleidoscope of color with the rapid evolution of flowering plants, the angiosperms. The explosion coincided with the rapid increase and diversification of bee species, the new artists of the landscapes.
It’s an eventful time in the OUP Music office, as we’ve just sent to press the latest editions of the Piano Time method books by Pauline Hall. It’s always exciting to see the publication of a new title, but these books feel extra special.