Re: What others are saying about the Case Former CD!

Hi again Tom,

Realize that the footnote did not refer to anyone in particular, but to
clarify the meaning of "schmuck" for those who have heard the term but
don't know precisely what it signifies.

I'd be inclined to agree that you, I, and a number of the newsgroup
participants would be considered to be a "mensch", another grossly
misunderstood term by many. Here a simple definition of a mensch
extracted from Wikipedia:

"Mensch is a German and Yiddish word originally meaning "human being".
In English, mensch refers to somebody who is altruistic and idealistic,
as opposed to somebody who is selfish and cynically rational.

"Be a mensch!" is uttered several times in the film "The Apartment",
director Billy Wilder suggesting that people retain their human values
even in the cold, inhuman environment of modern city life. Mensch are
people who are "worth the space they're taking up" or "air they're
breathing"--as opposed to the slang phrases to the contrary."

Note that a "mensch" is essentially the total opposite of a "schmuck".
:-)

Tom, I was raised in New Jersey, where the Yiddish words and phrases
are an essential part of the vocabulary of even us 'Goys' raised there.
This was also true in Rochester, NY, although there some of the
French-Canadian expressions rivaled them. Still, nobody beats the
Sicilians when it comes to extreme insults and put-downs, which run off
the tongue so beautifully.

OK Tom, I'll bite. Why does Aristotle's treatise have a latin title?

(I take note of the fact that for many centuries, ALL scientific work
was published in Latin for some damn good reasons. Even I, totally
lacking in language skills, had to perform a word-to-word translation
of an entire chapter of Newton's 'Principia' to earn my degree in
physics! (I only received a C+ for this effort because I had mangled
one sentence in Newton's expression of his First Law of Motion.) [For
the physics enthusiasts here, I had misquoted his expression about
force constituting 'the time rate of change in velocity', when he
actually wrote 'the time rate of change of momentum'. Dhuh!]

Kindest regards, and curmudgeonly yours, Harry C.

.

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