I love expanding my vocabulary, and this article on the modern history of swearing has a number of interesting words for obscene acts that should come back — no one would understand what I was talking about until they reach wider currency.
Category Archive: History
Apr 21 2013
François Jacob has died
Jacob and Jacques Monod, who won the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their work on the lac operon, were the fellows who really put gene regulation on the map, working out the mechanisms behind switching genes off and on in response to environmental cues. I always talk about their work on day one of my …
Apr 04 2013
Jewish women master retroactive invisibility!
It’s too bad it came too late to help them. Here’s a famous photo of Jewish civilians being herded out of the Warsaw ghetto by Nazis. Awful, horrifying stuff, right? Yet when a conservative Haredi newspaper in Israel published this photo, they edited it in interesting ways. Isn’t it ironic that the Jewish women who …
Mar 30 2013
The last intelligent creationist
Earlier today, Maggie Koerth-Baker posted this tweet: I dig this graph, but I think it misses an outreach opportunity by ascribing common misconceptions to creationists only bouncingdodecahedrons.tumblr.com/post/17808416988 It links to a diagram showing evolution as a linear path rather than a branching tree, and it got me thinking about terribly popular misconceptions about evolution that …
Mar 19 2013
Fair’s fair
I was mean to the History Channel yesterday — I mocked them for portraying Satan as a dark-skinned man with a resemblance to Obama. But you know, that wasn’t fair. It’s not as if that show about the Bible is full of coded racist references to appeal to the yahoos of America. Why, look here: …
Mar 16 2013
Happy St Patrick’s Day to you all!
Oh, look, I found the perfect cartoon to illustrate the day: the evolution of Irish heroes. Those Christians ruin everything, and I don’t know why we should celebrate Irish culture by honoring a horrible old saint and getting drunk. Why not name it after a hero worth remembering and reciting poetry, for instance…something Ireland is …
Mar 11 2013
This surprises me
I guess I wasn’t aware of how deeply down a people could be held. In her fearless defense of lynching victims and African Americans’ right to due process, Wells often bucked the backward conventional wisdom of the era. When she began her campaign against lynching in the late 19th century there wasn’t consensus among African …
Feb 13 2013
Pwning David Barton
Barton is such a lying tool. Chris Rodda catches him in an outright lie: Barton claims that gun accidents didn’t occur in 18th century America, and that he could only find two accounts of such problems. I guess he must be a very bad historian, then, in addition to lacking any sense, because Chris just …
Feb 12 2013
Happy Darwin Day!
I hope you all have grand plans to celebrate. I’m a bit swamped with work today, so I think I’ll be deferring my holiday to this weekend. I think I’ll go to Florida. We’ve just dug out from a blizzard, so I think it’s brilliant of me to flit down to Fort Lauderdale. Hmm. Maybe …
Feb 07 2013
A story
She stormed into the living room, throwing her tools at the storage bench. The clatter would have startled him, if he hadn’t heard her cursing all the way up the hill. “Vile-assed, scum-eating, mouth-breathing idiots!” She pointed an angry finger at him. “They wouldn’t know competence if it dropped a hammer on their toe, and …
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