h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What and unnecessarily clumsy word to add to such an elegant list?!?!

Can't we just say Greed? It was good enough for Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in Bedazzled!

A fine shade of meaning here, covetousness has to do with lusting after other people's stuff.

Hi, ITIWBS:

Certainly there are always shades of meanings, but I had to wonder if one couldn't also covet something one already has. You remember Gollum, in Lord of the Rings? He certainly seemed covetous.

I found these definitions on line:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:covetousness&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title

I also found lists (mostly catholic) that included Greed among the deadly seven, instead.

Either way, it's a terribly clumsy sounding word.

It certainly is a rather archaic word. As for Smeagol and the ring, after all it was never properly his in any way to begin with. Certainly a well selected illustrative archetype.

I think that archaic sense was intended to justify greed so long as what one had, one had rightfully,(in an age before Marxism), though charity was considered a virtue.

Another way of putting it is in terms of sins of the spirit, that the commandment not to covet is one not to harbor desires for anything belonging to anyone else.

Or yet another, as I heard it put in a Presbyterian Sunday school class once upon a time, "Don't even think about laying hands on other people's stuff."

I like that you referred to it as a sin of the spirit. It brings up a question I used to bring up without ever getting a satisfactory answer.

To what level must one be covetous for it to be sinful?

As an illustration, if I'm hungry, I need food; is it covetous to see a dinner laden table through a window and want what I see?

If you got a new car, is it covetous to want one just like it or just if I want yours?

Would it be covetous for me to have carnal thoughts for your spouse (perhaps a sin in its own right), even if I don't really want them but just find pleasure in imagining myself with them?

It is covetousness only to want specifically what some else has, not to want something like it. This can get tricky with unique items, especially if the owner doesn't want to sell.

Items 3 - 5: Maybe, no and yes, no, though there are other biblical prohibitions on this.

On my own religious outlook, syncretic. Includes everything except unquestioning belief in anything.

I'm reminded of an invite once upon a time by a member of Anton La Vey's Church of Satan. There came a moment when I remarked I couldn't see any reason why I should want to dedicate my life to a process of reaction against a belief system that had never meant anything to me in the first place. He took it remarkably well. Usually when I say things like that the result is temporary manifestations of insanity.

Returning to where I came in, archaicisms like "covetousness" important to remember that this is a preindustrial concept dated to a time when most commerce was in unique items.

I'm currently re-reading Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and finding the reading easy by comparison with my first reading of the book back in my teenage years, so that in part accounts for my (currently) elevated interest in archaic useages.

Tell me more! I have an interest in how language changes over time, too.

It'd be great to hear what you find in Canterbury Tales.

Middle English Greats besides Chaucer, Thomas Moore of course, though doing some studies on late precolonial and early colonial history recently and comparing the marital disasters affecting Henry VIII of England and Louis XII of France, I'm beginning to understand why Henry VIII hated him.

More to the point, another Middle English Great, Ben Caxton. His "Aesop's Fables" is still the finest version ever written in the English language.

The shift to Modern English began with Henry VIII, who was very insistent that people communicate in "The King's English", meaning his own. Popular example, Henry VIII wrote the music and lyric for "Greensleeves".

I'm not so well versed on the transition from Old English to Middle English, but know that it took place during the period from Alfred the Great through the end of the Norman Dynasty and that Middle English was firmly established by the advent of the Angevin dynasty (the Age of the Plantagenets).

Your nominal differentiation of English English and American English begins with The 1st Judiciary Act of Congress, nominally the formatting document for American English. The original text of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are still in English English.

There has been an ongoing effort since the Second World War initiated by Winston Churchill to bring the two variants back into mutual conformity, along with others standards of usage including weights and measures and technical drawing conventionalisms on account of some of the confusions engendered in the war by incommensurate usages and standards.

Sounds as if you're making tremendous headway!

You're right about Ben Caxton, of course; but I've never really understood "Greensleeves". I believe that I'd be throttled if I referred to my wife as "Redshoes".

Gee, I wonder who described the differentiation of Eng-Eng and Amer-Eng as "nominal"!

Have you been able to determine who was correct about the U.S. Constitution? Is it inalienable; or should it have been unalienable? Apparently there was disagreement even then.

Sometime I think trying to commonize measurements is more dangereous than learning conversions. I'd cite the recent shuttle disaster as a prime example!!!

"Greensleeves" ...I think that was intended as a private allusion to a pet-name for someone. Just whom, I couldn't say.

"nominal" ...Just me so far as I know.

The "inalienable"/"unalienable" controversy had to do with wording of the third clause of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence on the point that while people's rights can be taken away from them, its something that's not to be done.

What about the shuttle disaster? Which one?

Tentative outline on the evolution of the English language:

King Arthur to Alfred the Great: The Romanized Britons are expelled from England to Wales. Old English is spoken.

Alfred the Great to Edward the Confessor: The Anglo-Saxons are driven back to southern England by the Danes: Still Old English with increasing Danish and Norwegian usages.

In consideration of a political asylum provided himself and his brother, Edward the Confessor leaves England to William the Conqueror in his will.The language of the Normans was Norwegian with some French admixture.

William the Conquerer to Henry I: Middle English is born on account of increasing French admixture.

Henry I to Henry VIII: Increasing French admixture. Middle English is spoken.

Henry VIII: Modern English is born.

The 1st Judiciary Act of the Congress of the United States of America: American and English usages diverge.

WW II, Winston Churchill initiates an effort to bring the American and English usages back into mutual conformity.

Perhaps "shuttle near-disaster" would have been more accurate. The story appears many places around the web and news services, including wikipedia.

Here is an abbreviated version from the IEEE Institute:

http://www.theinstitute.ieee.org/portal/site/tionline/menuitem.130a3558587d56e8fb2275875bac26c8/index.jsp?&pName=institute_level1_article&TheCat=1021&article=tionline/legacy/INST2000/feb00/market.xml&;jsessionid=FYhxHqtfDWysy6M4GmlLcx1s2yzPQvYCvL4DPprR2FDFjcS2tJLh!-206324732


A NEAR-DISASTER FROM THE PAST

The same kind of stupid mistake occurred on a Shuttle mission in the late 1980s, but fortunately without disastrous effect. The Shuttle's mission was to roll about its axis while flying over Maui, Hawaii, USA, so that a mirror on board would be pointed at a telescope on the top of Mt. Haleakala. Atmospheric compensation experiments were to be done, using a deformable mirror on the ground, as part of a "Star Wars" laser weapon program.

As the Shuttle approached Maui, it rolled in the direction opposite of that expected, so that the mirror was pointing into space. The problem was that the author of the control program expected the altitude of Mt. Haleakala to be entered in nautical miles. The data-entry person instead used meters. Hence, the mirror was pointed at a target approximately 3000 nautical miles above the earth. The error was quickly corrected and the mission was accomplished on the next pass over Maui.

Richard S. Withers
Sunnyvale, Calif
**************************************

Another testimonial to the importance of comparing notes and making sure everyone is working from the same sheet of music, so to speak. Reminds me of a church musicale in which two different versions of Finlandia were being sung by the same choir; or how shocked I was once when someone broke out an antique US Army manual of regulations bearing a CSA imprimatur. (Turned out on that one to be word for word identical with the Union edition, excepting only title page information.)

Continuing on the evolution of the English language, from Henry VIII, English emerged as a polyglot trade language with a propensity for soaking up loan words like a sponge or creating new ones at need.

The other WW II revolution: Eleanor Roosevelt and alphabet soup: The age of the acronym.

That church event sounds like it must've been a hoot! I have to wonder if anyone there wasn't also singing the Monty Python song: Finland, Finland, Finland!

I presume CSA is Confederate States of America, eh? I guess when you form a country in a hurry, you keep as much the same as possible until you have a reason to tweak!

You will soon have your work cut out for you again! The age of the acronym is nothing compared to the changes coming about because of text messaging!?!?!

I can imagine WWIII starting because of a misinterpretation of a txt msg short-cut.

L8R G8R!

The event was only a practice session. After a brief discussion, people shared music sheets.

Correct on the CSA. The CSA printings continued in use until eventually revised, some of them into the twentieth century, with an official stamp authorizing them on the title page.

You're certainly right about the impact of computer language. (And computers... I just did a fast Google Search for the date of the invention of the printing press. Makes me look a lot smarter than I really am.) ...Its been an interesting 568 years, from Gutenberg's invention of movable type to the present, the advent of the information age. (I'd personally consider it the single most important invention of all time.)

I suppose every generation had its share of geniuses, but as a rule, before mass printings, their insights and discoveries tended to last but a lifetime, and they had little foundation of past knowledge to build on.

I thought we were already engaged in the opening phases of WW III, the war on terrorism a prelude to eventually bringing the piratical multinationals under control. ...Its certainly not without precedent for one mistaken posting to set something like that off.

There is something about the concept of lost knowledge that fascinates me; the knowledge is rarely lost for good. We are constantly discovering advances and inventions created by ancient civilisations that we had previously thought to be the work of more recent minds.

We've just recently begun to figure out how machines depicted in ancient drawings really worked. There's a machine the Romans used to mark miles along roads.

Previous attempts to recreate it from the drawings failed because the engineers assumed that the gears had been rendered 'pointy' because the artist was lazy or stupid. When they built the thing with modern gears, it failed badly; but when the tried again with pointy gears, it works just fine!

DaVinci hid his work well, by adding 'flaws' into his drawings. So many people tried to faithfully recreate his creations were doomed to frustration, but we are no recreating these wonders without the flaws and they work amazingly well.

Da Vinci apparently never took advantage of the printing press. One might reckon him the last of the ancients, in a tradition including Pythagoras, Archimedes....

Other Middle English author of note: Bishop Berkeley. Though an early colonial era figure with a career on both sides of the Atlantic, still wrote in Middle English, as did many of the early American colonials.

Continuing notes on evolving English literature... though this one is more generalized across language barriers. The capacity for posting web site addresses or threads is an enormous improvement over the pre-computer systems involving parentheticals of various kinds, or footnotes. ...This is on literature for the human mind, on an evolving improvement in convenience and capacity.