Bonus Word of the Day

Sorry this has drifted away from academic texts but we have a bonus word of the day: Merit.

While reading the guidelines for my dissertation I came across this gem:
"6.13 Examiners shall have the discretion to award a degree with distinction to a candidate who has shown exceptional merit and a degree with merit to a candidate who has shown merit."

One would need to be quite meritorious apparently to be distinct.

Word of the day

While racism is never funny, it sometimes does serve as a way of learning new words to describe people in fantastically unflattering ways.  Here is today's sentence used when a British writer sought to do a study of Dhofar and its people in 1943.

"They are a small limbed, dark skinned race with well chiselled [sic] features, still in a nomadic and troglodytic state."

I needed to look up troglodytic, seeing as I could have easily mistaken it for Mesozoic or some other age of dinosaurs.  It apparently means:

(esp. in prehistoric times) a person who lived in a cave.

• a hermit.

• a person who is regarded as being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned.

Even the word's origin was a bit "racist."

ORIGIN late 15th cent.: via Latin from Greek trōglodutēs, alteration of the name of an Ethiopian people, influenced by trōglē ‘hole.’

And that is my word of the day.

*Definition and origin courtesy of New Oxford American Dictionary

The British are So Polite

Sorry this is not an academic text. It is however a confidential message from the British Consul in Oman from Jan 3, 1965, discussing the lack of development plans for the country, following the discovery of oil.

"He [Chauncy] could not get the Sultan to embark on any serious planning. I do not believe he made any serious effort to do so and I blame him for this and his wife even more. She has a deep influence on the Sultan and keeps on saying that 'oil really must not be allowed to upset the happy little Omani donkey cart' - music to the Sultan's ears but a traumatic incitement to me to pull her hair out by the roots. One must not overdo this.  All of us who have to work with the Sultan know what a stubborn customer he is. It is just a pity that his closest 'advice' at this important time should come from an undistinguished couple who are charming, socially engaging and decent; but who basically share his views, are wholly steeped in a bygone age of India, and are in fact disinclined to tender advice. They are his humble agents and, for practical purposes his unquestioning and loyal servants. I sometimes wonder if this is precisely why the Sultan hired them."

This all came in the midst of a formal letter.

I am Africa

Today another non-academic post but fun nonetheless.  From the musical Book of Mormon here are a bunch of Mormons singing about converting the "Noble Africans" to mormonism.

Such Vulgarity

I have not read this article and seeing as it is from 1996 I secretly hope it is not as bad as it's title.  The title is, "Fuck Chineseness: On the Ambiguities of Ethnicity as Culture as Identity" and was written by Allen Chun.  So you can see that this is not made up click here for the Jstor page.


Thank you Toh for the link.

Academic Adjacent

From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Does Islam Stand Against Science?
"We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science..."

Also for those playing it's Ernest Renan on the right side.

Studying gave me this gem

"The Hamidian period has achieved the reputation of being the most despotic and centralized era in modern Ottoman history.  That it was despotic and that centralization was a major goal cannot be debated..."*

*I do not want to imply that every article/book/source on this blog is without merit.  For example this article is for the most part very good but that doesn't preclude it from making the occasional surprisingly obtuse statement.

From:
The Politics of Unity: Hamidian Policy in Eastern Anatolia by Stephen Duguid