No, I didn’t have my elbow on the keyboard – that apparently means in Inuit:
“I should try not to become an alcoholic”.
I don’t necessarily agree with this article, from which I learnt this, but it is a piece of info the like of which you don’t acquire every day.
But it doesn’t tell you how to pronounce the word…
We’ve lost their words, and are highly unlikely to be able to recover them, but we can at least remember their names:
Megalostrata, who is described by Alcman as “a golden-haired maiden enjoying the gift of the Muses”. He was reportedly madly in love with her, and she also reportedly had several other lovers attracted by her conversation. (Which might be taken as part of an eroticising tradition rather than fact – I suspect you didn’t mess with Spartan maidens.)
Cleitagora, whose name is used to identify a skolion (drinking song). She’s mentioned in Aristophanes’ Wasps and Lysistrata. (“Of all Greek women, Spartans alone drank wine not only at festivals but also as part of their daily fare.”)
They were roughly contemporaries of Sappho.
Among other notable Spartan women were the philosopher Chilonis, whose father Chilon was a follower of Pythagoras. (Of Pythagoras’s 235 disciples named by Iamblichus, 17 or 18 are female.
Cynisca was the first female star of the Olympics, her four-horse chariot, quadriga, winning in 396 and 392. Her name may be a nickname for a “tomboy”, and the names of her mother, Eupolia (“well horsed”) and her sister Proauga (“flash of lightning”) suggest a family interest.
Other Spartan women soon followed her lead, among them Euryleonis, who won the two-horse chariot race in 368.
(From Spartan Women, Sarah B. Pomeroy, OUP, 2002.)
It is interesting that down through the centuries Athens has been celebrated as the founder of “democracy” and Sparta reviled in the comparison, but if you were born female, there’s no doubt where you would want it to be in ancient Greece. You got to run around, ride horses, often become a heiress (all those soldiers getting killed off), and a great deal of general freedom in Sparta. (Well at least if you were a “proper” Spartan, not a helot.) In Athens, you got locked up in the house, and that was that.
… an option both environmentally friendly AND a hell of a lot better than braving the high street, an Organic search engine – yes it is shopping, but shopping pretty well as ethical as you can get. (And it looks like it is kept pretty up-to-date – couldn’t find any dead links.)
Can’t say I entirely approve of such things – what is the POINT? I can’t help asking – but interesting that a British woman is about to break the record for walking to the south pole unassisted. No, that’s not the women’s record, that’s THE record. I must find an occasion to use this on Comment is Free some time, where a certain set of commentators always get very exercised about how I’m being “unrealistic” about women’s physical capabilities.
Two years after giving up her job as a marketing manager in Berkshire, Ms McKeand, 33, was on course to knock a full day off the previous record of 41 days 8 hours.
To complete her trek Ms McKeand, from Newbury, Berkshire, has spent nearly six lonely weeks dragging a 100 kilo (220lb) sledge across 690 miles of ice plains in temperatures as low as minus 35C.
President-elect Rafael Correa appointed seven women to his Cabinet on Wednesday, including Ecuador’s first female defense minister, saying he wanted to promote gender equality in his South American nation.
In other appointments to his 17-member Cabinet, Correa named women to head the foreign, health, housing, and social welfare ministries. He said he would keep outgoing President Alfredo Palacio’s ministers of tourism and the environment, the only women in the current Cabinet.
Correa, who takes office Jan. 15, said he would “try to achieve gender equality.” He acknowledged it was “something we are not going to reach, but at least we will get close.”
Makes the number of British female senior ministers look pretty paltry, doesn’t it? As a writer on Comment is Free today noted, women are still notable only for their tiny numbers in so many areas of public life.
Queen Elizabeth … a studious intellectual who would spend three hours a day reading history books if she could … she could also spit and swear ’round, mouth-filling oaths’ as was the habit of most great ladies of the age. Cecil once spirited away a book presented to the Queen by a Puritan, Mr Fuller, in which ‘Her Gracious Majesty’ was censured for sreading ‘sometimes by that abdominable idol, the mass, and often and grievously by God and by Christ, and by many parts of His glorified body, or by saints, faith and other forbidden things, and by Your Majesty’s evil example and sufferencance, the most part of your subjects do commonly swear and blaspheme…”
Yeah, go Liz!
So what happened? As so often, Cecil fixed things… “Elizabeth demanded to see the book, but with the connivance of one of her ladies it had fortunately been ‘lost’.”
Possibly very luckily for Mr Fuller…
(From Elizabeth the Queen
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