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4d0342c
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Montana named Triple Divide Peak.
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Simon Winchester |
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748c61a
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No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem'd polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.
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Simon Winchester |
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6fc809c
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or of oats (" a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people"),"
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Simon Winchester |
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d726197
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Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.
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Simon Winchester |
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4f53518
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said. 'To make someone lose face is unforgivable.' The
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Simon Winchester |
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143a2aa
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The first slips of snow white unlined paper, six inches by four, and covered with William Minor's neat, elaborately cursive, and so distinctively American handwriting in greenish black ink, began to drift out from the Broadmoor post room in the spring of 1885.
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Simon Winchester |
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01dcb51
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It was a dispute of such gravity--linguists and philologists were known to be mercurial and hold eternal grudges--that
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Simon Winchester |
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1e3108b
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apostates.
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Simon Winchester |
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63ecb3d
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As it happens, the most fulsome remarks made about the volunteers that night relate to two men who had much in common: Both were Americans, both spent time in India, both were soldiers, both were mad, and though both had been invited, neither one came to the Oxford dinner.
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Simon Winchester |
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f5fbe74
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They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today's middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries... a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow knew was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present.
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Simon Winchester |
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5a08115
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and his youngest sister, Henrietta, lived to a great age, also beside the sea, with a vast collection of cats--having previously traveled around England carrying a portable stove that allowed her to cook her beloved sausages in the privacy of her various bedrooms. She also once mistakenly took an alarm clock to church with her, instead of a Bible, with predictably catastrophic results.
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Simon Winchester |
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294b421
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I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident." Although"
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Simon Winchester |
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c3cc635
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Americans
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Simon Winchester |
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31e9530
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They were a formidable group--the college dean, Henry Liddell (whose daughter Alice had so captivated the Christ Church mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson that he wrote an adventure book for her, set in Wonderland);
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Simon Winchester |
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1d9ebc2
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Sophisticated human beings were on hand to see this volcano's convulsions, they were able to investigate the event, and they were able to attempt to understand the processes that had caused such dreadful violence...their observations, painstaking and precise as science demanded, collided head-on with a most discomfiting reality: that while in 1883 the world was becoming ever more scientifically advanced, it was in part because of these same..
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indonesia
volcanism
tsunami
geology
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Simon Winchester |
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b1ad12a
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The story of Krakatoa had a small beginning--seven newsworthy words, buried well down in the pages of a single London newspaper. As the summer of 1883 wore on, it was to become a very much greater story indeed. And when it was over, three months later, it was to have implications for society--for the laying of the foundations of McLuhan's "global village"--that have reverberated in a far more important way, and for far, far longer, than any..
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Simon Winchester |
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1b29982
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In the aftermath of Krakatoa's eruption, 165 villages were devastated, 36,417 people died, and uncountable thousands were injured--and almost all of them, villages and inhabitants, were victims not of the eruption directly but of the immense sea-waves* that were propelled outward from the volcano by that last night of detonations.
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Simon Winchester |
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337860a
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In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.
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Simon Winchester |
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9ba5b9c
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Despite all the intellectual activity of the time there was in print no guide to the tongue, no linguistic vade mecum, no single book that Shakespeare or Martin Frobisher, Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nash, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Izaak Walton, or any of their other learned contemporaries could consult.
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Simon Winchester |
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d38456f
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is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind working without a single work of lexicographical reference beside him, other than Mr. Cooper's crib (which Mrs. Cooper once threw into the fire, prompting the great man to begin all over again) and Mr. Wilson's little manual, but that was the condition under which his particular genius was compelled to flourish.
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Simon Winchester |
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b99d9a0
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Such a series of hammer blows! Mankind, it seemed, was now suddenly really rather--dare one say it?--insignificant. He may not after all have been, as he had eternally supposed, specially created. The Book of Genesis, believed by so many to be Holy Writ, was perhaps no more than the stuff of myth and ancient legend. And now even the continents themselves, long supposed to be the most reliable and unshifting bedrock of our very existence, ha..
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Simon Winchester |
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eda3aa4
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They are clean to the far more brutally restrictive demands of ISO number 1, which permits only 10 particles of just one-tenth of a micron per cubic meter, and no particles of any size larger than that. A human being existing in a normal environment swims in a miasma of air and vapor that is five million times less clean.
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Simon Winchester |
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b5a97df
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And there are the girls--young, chocolate-skinned, ever-giggling naked girls with sleek wet bodies, rosebud nipples, long hair, coltish legs, and scarlet and purple petals folded behind their ears--who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on their way back home.
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Simon Winchester |
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3853c60
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The original settler in the New World was Thomas Minor, who came originally from the village of Chew Magna in Gloucestershire.
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Simon Winchester |
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8b20d3d
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Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men--and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minie ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The ..
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Simon Winchester |
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4ce053d
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Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.
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Simon Winchester |
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3df1b09
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The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.
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Simon Winchester |
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05a94ad
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worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out.
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Simon Winchester |
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1487691
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fully half a century since the first signs of madness had been noticed, back at the Florida army fort. And yet still the symptoms remained the same--persistent, uncured, incurable.
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Simon Winchester |
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3640ab6
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Discounting every punctuation mark and every space--which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter--there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.
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Simon Winchester |
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c587e90
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after all the years of waiting, the interested world could at least see the magnificent complexity of the undertaking, the detail, the filigree work, the sheer intricacies of exactitude that the editors were bent on compiling.
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Simon Winchester |
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dfa277b
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The explosion itself was terrific, a monstrous thing that still attracts an endless procession of superlatives. It was the greatest detonation, the loudest sound, the most devastating volcanic event in modern recorded human history, and it killed more than thirty-six thousand people.
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Simon Winchester |
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838a409
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Now, seen from a palm plantation high on a green hillside, Krakatoa looks peaceful and serene, with just a thin column of white or gray or on occasion black smoke easing up from its summit. But looks are deceptive: All the while the child-mountain is growing steadily and rapidly, as the elemental fires that created the world rage deep inside.
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Simon Winchester |
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c11e600
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Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the panicked inhabitants--and was promptly caught up in a massive eruption. He died of asphyxiation by volcanic gases on August 24, leaving behind him a vast reputation and, as memorial, a single word in the lexicon of modern vulcanology, Plinian. A Pl..
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Simon Winchester |