Old man or man-child?

That English mapmakers formerly placed the phrase “here be dragons” at the edges of their known world has somehow become general knowledge… and here is the list of all known historical maps upon which these words appear:

1)

In other words, there aren’t any.

Roman soldiers, among others, were paid in salt, which gave rise to the English word “salary.

Should a spectator reach out on the playing field side of such fence, railing or rope, and plainly prevent the fielder from catching the ball, then the batsman should be called out for the spectator’s interference.

See what physics gives you? Angry Birds strategery.

This extreme shape-shifting was possible because the bone tissue in the frill and horns stayed immature, spongy and riddled with blood vessels, never fully hardening into solid bone as happens in most animals during early adulthood. The only modern animal known to do anything similar is the cassowary, descended from the dinosaurs, which develops a large spongy crest when its skull is about 80 per cent fully grown.

The only way I can think of to get around this problem, to allow journalists to report and analyse politics in an honest and intelligent fashion without worrying about accusations of bias based on the contents of private emails, would be to have a newspaper where the reporters don’t have any bylines, where everything is written in a collective voice. But that’s a crazy idea that would obviously never work.

I agree that language should change over time, but using “addicting” as an adjecting - uh, adjective - is a little too inventing for my taste. At this rate, it won’t be long before I pick up some new rims for my car at my local automoting supply store or sign up for a creating writing class, where I’ll get derising remarks from the teacher for being too derivating. You see? Maybe it’s not technically incorrect, but it is terribly irritative. Anyway, that’s enough of my missing. Sorry. Missive.

It may help if you realize that a dollar isn’t just a dollar, and once you start talking about millions or billions of them the character of a dollar changes in ways that far too few people realize. A dollar is blood, sweat, tears, time spent working instead of with one’s family, a finite and characterizable risk of death in the aggregate, indeed, lifeblood itself converted into currency. Taking a billion of them out of an economy is to doom people to fractionally shorter lives, for marginal people to be lost, and a lot of other very serious things much more important than whether Johnny gets to buy a videogame this week. The extinction of a species and ten billion dollars are far more comparable than you might care to admit, not because you overvalue the species, but because you undervalue the dollars. They’re not just scores in a game. They’re human life.