Notes From HPS
BY Herschel Smith
10 years, 5 months ago
That last part is especially important. I went to see “America” yesterday and found it is nothing like the snotty and insulting put-downs on sites like U.S. News & World Report (“the paranoid style in conservative politics”) and Salon.com (“Dinesh D’Souza’s laughable embarrassment”). If anything, those attack pieces serve to bolster the thesis of the film, that there are two different visions of what America has been, is and should be about, with detractors relying heavily on one of the main subjects of the documentary, hard-left “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, particularly through their obvious and heavy-handed employment of his Rule Five “ridicule” tactic specified in “Rules for Radicals.”
I didn’t post this in time for you to listen live, but you can listen to the archives here.
Word of the day.
So Ben-Yehuda followed up with a suggestion: “Another name we can call this tool and truthfully we say that this name is more pleasant. For as the name of this tool in French (Fusil), German (Flinte) and Italian (Fucile), is derived from the stone from which one forages fire[Flint], since in the beginning pistols would be ignited by a pound on the above mentioned stone. It is true that this had already changed and there is no reason to call it after this characteristic. But we in Hebrew have a word for a stone of this type, and also of flames of fire.”
He went on to describe the word we had discussed: “The root is K-D-KH. And the name is ekdakh. Up to now linguists have been unable to define well what kind of stone this is. In Arabic kaddakh – a stone from which fire is struck. Anyway, even if we do find out what stone an ekdakh is, or decide on a stone to use it as a name for, this name is uncommon in speech, and its form and meaning of starting fire which it contains in it, is well equipped to designate the tool we are discussing. And thus we think and feel that it would be good to designate it with the name ekdakh.”
And so it was that the word ekdakh became the Hebrew word for pistol.
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