Friday, November 27, 2009

A holiday license

Quoting is something I do sparingly, even of Jan Cox, ---usually, but
I just got the following from a newsletter associated with
wordsmith.org. What grabbed my heart was the Indo European root of the
word 'science.' The info is in the derivation of a word, scienter:
Quote:
scienter
PRONUNCIATION:
(sy-EN-tuhr)
MEANING:
adverb: Deliberately; knowingly.
ETYMOLOGY:
From Latin scienter (knowingly), from scire (to know; to separate one
thing from another). Ultimately from the Indo-European root skei- (to
cut or split) that also gave us schism, ski, shin, science,
conscience, and nice.
End quote.

And this reminds me of one of the astounding things Jan Cox said: and
this is a close quote. He said, if you do not know the etymology of a
word, you cannot use it properly. His example was the 'word cakewalk.'

And quoting Jan, I found this recently, after some comments I made in
an attempt to convey something Jan helped me glimpse, about faith.
Here is a quote from a paper Jan wrote and numbered 6950.
"That which is real and practical requires no faith, but still- a man
must believe in the work or he wastes his time. If a man does not
believe in what he does, nothing will happen. If a man does not
believe in the ideas of the work, he can never think in a new way...No
man can be converted to this work."

end...quote....

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