voluntaryXchange

An Amazing and True Tale for Tolkien Junkies

Maybe Tolkien got the idea for a engraved ring lost for millennia … from actual archaeology in the 1920’s.

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I love Tolkien; maybe almost as much as Stephen Colbert.

Here’s my favorite story.

Tolkien’s son collected and mildly edited all of his father’s unpublished work.

In it is a single usage of the word “ruel”, as in a ruel bone blade.

This word appears essentially nowhere in the English language.

Except for one spot. It is in the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language (the really huge multi-volume one).

One of Tolkien’s first academic jobs was working on this. He did the early part of the coverage of words that begin with w.

Ruel isn’t in the w’s.

It’s in the notes.

For walrus.

Ruel-bones were used to make ceremonial and decorative blades. They’re too fragile for actual work, but they are very rare because descendants of Vikings started trading a few of them in the later Middle Ages. No one else knew where ruel-bones come from. Turns out they are walrus tusks.

Buying Local Quote

Russ Roberts:

We tried buying local once; it was called the Middle Ages.

From How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.

Flying Saucer Rebuttal from 1952

JF Ptak Science Books, an antiquarian blog, reproduced a two page report from 1952 in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society regarding the large number of flying saucer sightings over the previous 6 years.

It’s a short, even-handed, and fascinating read. Here’s an excerpt:

I couldn’t agree more. I’d rather like if the sightings that are still happening to be extraterrestrial.

For my part, what age has done for me is convinced me that the speed of light can’t be exceeded, and we’re unlikely to ever find anything that wasn’t launched from another star system as an inhabited probe. I’m also much more inclined to think that if observations are real, that they are something interdimensional rather than interstellar, perhaps even something from our own neighborhood of space but from a different neighborhood of time. When I was younger I put much more weight on interstellar and much less on interdimensional. Too much Star Trek I suppose.

A Home Run from Cold Spring Shops

Cold Spring Shops notes that the inability of 21st century California to provide a 20th century innovation was presaged in a 1979 novel:

Mr Hailey wrote a series of books centering around troubles in a commercially important sector.  The plot of Overload fit the pattern … it was environmental terrorists causing blockouts, by the expedient of bombing generating stations, while the more respectable useful idiots kept any plans to invest in new capacity or expanding power lines tied up in process.

Gee … these days the environmental extremists operate through the political system, but the idea of destroying productive capacity is still there.

And … hmmm … interesting that Hollywood made movies based on many of Hailey’s books, but never showed interest in Overload. Perhaps it hit too close to home.

FWIW: I was too young to be interested in reading any Arthur Hailey. But my first real job was at the public library starting in 1981, and I re-shelved them plenty of times.

Thomas Friedman Gets What Scares Me

He’s worried that Trump will get re-elected, possibly easily. Me too.

Dear Democrats: This is not complicated! Just nominate a decent, sane person, one committed to reunifying the country and creating more good jobs, a person who can gain the support of the independents, moderate Republicans and suburban women who abandoned Donald Trump in the midterms and thus swung the House of Representatives to the Democrats and could do the same for the presidency. And that candidate can win!

But please, spare me the revolution! It can wait. Win the presidency, hold the House and narrow the spread in the Senate, and a lot of good things still can be accomplished. “No,” you say, “the left wants a revolution now!” O.K., I’ll give the left a revolution now: four more years of Donald Trump.

That will be a revolution.

I tend to think of Friedman as a twit who can turn a phrase well enough to be worthwhile reading once in a while.†

But here I think he gets the broader point: just because Republicans have a candidate many people will vote against (me included), this does not mean the Democrats should also come up with a candidate that people will vote against.

I would add two things. First, incumbents rarely lose, which plays to Trump’s advantage. Second, Democrats love Obama, and yet he put up the third worst showing of an incumbent running for re-election since Hoover: he should not be viewed as an ideal.

† I still tell this story. I highlight books. A lot. Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century is a book I read cover to cover, enjoyed very much, and highlighted not one thing. It was intellectual cotton candy.

Learned a New Word: Moiety

In describing the Haida, John Valleant used the word moiety.

Generically, it means a half.

Specifically in this case, it meant the anthropological usage:

Either of two kinship groups based on unilateral descent that together make up a tribe or society.

The Haida tribe is organized as two super-clans, so this makes sense.

Quote On Writing

Erich Eichman, quoting Fowler’s The King’s English:

‘Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched … the concrete word to the abstract … the single word to the circumlocution … the short word to the long … and the Saxon word to the Romance’. As rule lists go, this one is difficult to improve upon — or, as the Saxons might say, hard to beat.

This appeared in an article entitled “A Golden Age of Words About Words” which appeared in The Wall Street Journal on January 7, 2000.

Tsundoku (There’s a Word for That)

Tsundoku, “a Japanese word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read”.

Taleb claims that although people tend to place a higher value on the things they know than on the things they don’t know, it is the things we don’t know, and therefore can’t see coming, that tend to shape our world most dramatically.

A person’s library is often a symbolic representation of his or her mind. …

Taleb argues that a personal library “should contain as much of what you do not know …  Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

That’s from The Black Swan. The author adds to that:

People like Taleb, Stillman and whoever coined the word tsundoku seem to recognize only two categories of book: the read and the unread. But every book lover knows there is a third category that falls somewhere between the other two: the partially read book.

Keep those books:

The sight of a book you’ve read can remind you of the many things you’ve already learned. The sight of a book you haven’t read can remind you that there are many things you’ve yet to learn. And the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.

Perhaps the Japanese have a word for that.

Do note that I don’t object to digitizing some books, particularly those I’ve read but am not certain to reference at a later date.

And, in truth, my antilibrary has gotten bigger with the advent of ebooks. I am not sure that’s a good thing; you know, letting intent have more relevance than reading.

Homes and Wealth

Gianni La Cava takes Piketty at face value, but looks at where increasing capital income is coming from.

He found that most of the increases in wealth are from owner-occupied housing in locations with inelastic supply.

The rich really are different — they bought in the OC.

Piketty asserts that the increase is mostly from inheritance. La Cava’s point is that you won’t have much to inherit if your parents don’t buy in a quantity-constrained residential market.

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On a personal level, our life has been one of moving to more quantity-constrained regions (New York to Alabama to Utah to Louisiana before going back to Utah).

And it’s been part of my plan (at least) to benefit from the constraint that water puts on home building in Utah — although it now looks that our little valley won’t hit its water limit until I’m in my 90’s.

Via Marginal Revolution.

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R.I.P. Ursula Le Guin

Important parts of my childhood were spent at a resort in the off-season. There was not much to do sometimes. Somewhere in the rainy autumn of 1979 or 1980 I bought a book there, trying to recreate the feeling of the first time I read Tolkien. That book was A Wizard of Earthsea.

I was hooked by the time the Kargs disappeared into the mist. And by the simplicity of Ogion. And the school was definitely not Hogwarts. And my kids know I still talk about the low stone wall on the slope …

This is still one of my favorites. It’s part of a series that eventually grew to 6 novellas and several short stories. I reread the whole thing several years back, and highly recommend it.

I lost my copy of the Bantam paperback shown above, featuring the dragon of Pendor, to a leak a few years back.

Honestly, I love body surfing, but beyond that the ocean doesn’t interest me that much. But this ocean does:

I read a bit of Ursula Le Guin’s other stuff over the years, but did not find it as good as this.

She passed away this week at 88.