We’re all familiar with the greats of antiquity and their Greco-Roman names. Your Maximuses and your Augustuses and countless others whose names litter our high school history texts with dates we can hardly remember. During the 15th and 16th centuries, rich, fancy Renaissance Europeans used some strange naming conventions. Foregoing their family names, it was…
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I promise not to get too far away from languages, but I wanted to take a little bit of time (and I really do just mean a little) to talk about the symbolism of the little infinity symbol we all know and love. The bulk of this mini-article appeared in a previous and much larger work…
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Books are a generally happy and wholesome topic that most people who aren’t Kanye West agree are interesting, valuable, or otherwise just generally positive elements in our lives. I very recently wrote a lengthy article about Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press and, despite its enormous impact on European life and the trajectory of the world thereafter,…
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Not long ago I was wandering through the exhibits at Hamburg’s Museum der Arbeit, or Museum of Work – the second most quintessentially German thing to have ever existed, right ahead of Lübeck’s annual Kartoffeltage (potato days festival) and just behind a giant statue of David Hasselhoff smashing a wall with a musical sledgehammer. This…
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