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...many years ago when he smoked pot on his boat outside the U.S. territorial limits and talked about it later, he was asked where he got it. He used a word that meant something like "it materialized from thin air."
Does anybody know what that word would be? I read it in the paper and laughed so hard and tried to remember it, but too much time has passed. TIA
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knowing a little bit of Buckley, it might well have been the Latin phrase Ex nihilo - from or out of nothing.
-joe (ex cathedra) friday
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or, Bill actually said wrote this:
"The psalmists were great spiritual poets, but it is
more credible that their words were inspired than
that they were exnihilations."
- W. F. Buckley Jr., Nearer, My God
Last edited by tsuwm; 05/18/08 12:17 AM.
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Some of us who lag behind on Latin are apt to see such a word and try to fit nihilism into the meaning somehow.
I now wish that I had not played so much chess and otherwise misbehaved in my two years of high school Latin.
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Pooh-Bah
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Hi idjit
welcome on behalf of the nuklheds
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tsuwm, thanks...you're correct in that he used a word that meant "from or out of nothing" but I don't believe he used a Latin word. I don't know Latin and I wouldn't have appreciated the beauty of the word he did use if it had been foreign (I remember looking it up in the dictionary, it possibly started with a "v").
Zed, thanks for the welcome, but what is a "nuklhed"? ROFL
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or, Bill actually said wrote this:
"The psalmists were great spiritual poets, but it is
more credible that their words were inspired than
that they were exnihilations."
- W. F. Buckley Jr., Nearer, My God Surely Father Steve, our expert in all things biblical, could splain us from which psalm Buckley got his pot. I know he's busy today preaching on the Trinity but I'll see if I can scare him up.
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tsuwm, thanks...you're correct in that he used a word that meant "from or out of nothing" but I don't believe he used a Latin word. I don't know Latin and I wouldn't have appreciated the beauty of the word he did use if it had been foreign (I remember looking it up in the dictionary, it possibly started with a "v").
?? exnihilation (something created out of nothing) *is an English word, derived from Latin ex nihilo.
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or, Bill actually said wrote this:
"The psalmists were great spiritual poets, but it is
more credible that their words were inspired than
that they were exnihilations."
- W. F. Buckley Jr., Nearer, My God Surely Father Steve, our expert in all things biblical, could splain us from which psalm Buckley got his pot. I know he's busy today preaching on the Trinity but I'll see if I can scare him up. ??? why do you assume a specific psalm, rather than psalms in gerneral?
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Ex nihilo
Another Latin phrase seen in English is nihil obstat 'nothing hinders'. It's the sort of thing one used to see on the copyright side of the title page in books which had been approved for printing by a Catholic bishop. Usually accompanied by the imprimatur 'it may be published'. In the Middle Ages, there was a tendency to spell nihil as nichil, pronounced a bit like our nickel.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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tsuwm....getting closer! But exnihilation isn't in my unabridged, and back when I first looked up this word (oh, maybe 40 years ago), I do remember it was a fairly common word although seldom used.
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Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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??? why do you assume a specific psalm, rather than psalms in gerneral?
Wull ... I know pot selling isn't one of the major themes of the psalms but I don't know them well enough to say that there isn't one specific one that touches on the subject. That's all I'm saying. You're the one suggested the psalms might could have something to do with the subject. Or either you or Dickie his own se'f, one.
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Faldo, I made no direct connection between WFB's (alleged) pot usage and the WFB quote. I merely found it interesting that I found him using a really, really abstruse and obscure word meaning 'something created out of nothing' - and yet that seems to not be the word in question.
I hope this clarifies my bemusement.
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dalehileman
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WOO HOO!!! Didn't take long to find! parthenogenesis (so much for my feeble memory thinking it started with a "v")... "RESTORATION: One final question in regard to drugs, if you don't mind my asking. Have you ever done any drugs that are banned in America? BUCKLEY: Yes I have. That question was asked of me--I was on the Johnny Carson show, and David Suskind asked me that. Where I had it was on my boat outside of American jurisdiction. He said, well, how'd you get it on your boat? And I said, "parthenogenesis." Carson thought that was so funny. I was off Nassau and it was a bad trip because the other two guys on my boat--we all took it jointly--and they just laughed, everything they thought was just hilarious. I just got sleepy. Maybe you have to get more used to it." http://www.marijuananews.com/news.php3?sid=43Thanks everybody! I hate it when that happens, you hear a word and decide you'll remember that one, but poof, it's gone forever. Thanks Dalehileman! Now I can sleep! LOL
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boy, howdy. that's a typical Buckley reach.
maybe Carson laughed just because it was altisonant.
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I know Carson was no dummy, but I bet he laughed to cover up not knowing.
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Parthenogensis does not mean 'to materialize out of thin air'. It means virgin birth. Something which Wm F'Buckley, as a lifelong Catholic apologist, would've believe in fervently, with or without hempen blood levels. (It's also a biological term having to do with unfertilized eggs developing into organisms.) It was a common enough occurrence in pre-Christian mythologies, too. (The Talmud, in one of its famous expurgated sections, posits that Yeshu (i.e., Jesus) was the son of a Roman legionnaire named Pandera, and was thus known as Yeshu ben Pandera (which some tie to Greek παρθενος (parthenos) 'virgin' and others with πανθηρ (panther) 'leopard'); this is referred to obliquely in the wonderfully funny The Life of Brian by Monty Python.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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You a Python fan, zmjezhd? I have a special place in my heart for all Python fans... :0)
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I don't know the details of Buckley's yacht, but virgins—or maidens, at least—have long been popular as figureheads. And the most prized reefer buds (so I've heard) have not been pollenated. I won't posit that Buckley was implying reference to either, though.
Since the psalmists left the arena, I've doused my conjectural remarks about what may happen in the smoke of a burning bush. I don't think that I could pass Moses off as a psalmist anyway.
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Maybe I should now clear private data and erase free space.
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To indulge in some cross-threading, this is a rather canardous disucssion... 
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I agree <<Parthenogenesis does not mean 'to materialize out of thin air'.>> But I was going by my poor memory and interpretation of what I'd read in a newspaper article all those years ago. I did say whatever word he used "meant something like..." I almost said something like osmosis but I knew that was way off. Using the definition of parthenogenesis as the 'development of an egg without fertilization' is of course stretching it, but to me it was simply quintessential Buckley.
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You a Python fan
Yes, since first being exposed to them in the early '70s.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I've also heard Parthenogenesis associated with the "birth" of Athena (Athena Parthenos) who sprang fully grown (and clothed and armed) from the forehead of her father Zeus (after he had swallowed her mother, Metis). There was a mother involved but it seems rather like appearing from thin air.
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I took Latin all through high school, and through the first couple of years of my undergrad degree in Classical Archaeology, and there was always some serious discussion on how this "c" should be pronounced. Our professors were primarily UK-trained, and used the hard "k" sound when pronouncing Cicero.
Just around 1968-70 we had an influx of American post Doc students, who were used to using a soft "ss" sound when pronoucing Cicero.
This caused consternation in the senior levels of the faculty, and so they instituted an active Latin Conversation Club, for grad students, undergrad Latin students and all faculty, particularly those post-docs who were in tenure-track positions.
Fundamentally, the grad students thought that if anyone hoped to get tenure, they would have to be seen to be participating in this Latin Conversation Club, and using the "proper" pronuciation. A sort of opportunity to "retrain" so that this "ss" sound was not in their spoken vocabulary.
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Most academics (in classical philology) use the reconstructed (or classical) pronunciation, which is based on research done in the second half of the 19th century by linguists. The word cicerone is from the Italian, and it used to be pronounced /tʃitʃɛro:ne/, but is now usually pronounced /sisɛron/ according to the dictionaries which I consulted. (There are some who believe that Latin was pronounced as is modern Italian, as there are more than a few who believe that Classical Greek was pronounced as Modern Greek is, but I do not find their arguments convincing.)
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this discussion of the orthoepy of cicerone seems to have appeared in this thread through some sort of parthenogenic process.
-ron o.
(or was it onanistic?)
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the orthoepy of cicerone
While we're on about inappropriate threadage: how's about French chaperone, cognate with Italian cappuccino; Latin cicer 'chickpea' (aka Italian ceci, Spanish garbanzo); and, unfortunately, chicharrón has no accepted etymology, though it has a idiomatic meaning in Honduras and El Salvador, dar el chicharrón a alguien 'to kill'.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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How did chicharrón get thrown in there? I'm confused... My Spanish dictionary has: chicharra (cicada); chicharro (horse mackerel); chícharro (pea; but I learned guisante for green pea); chicharrón (pork crackling or processed pork). My head spins.... :0)
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How did chicharrón get thrown in there? I'm confused...
It came from a parallel thread, and was mentioned in passing.
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Ah, so. Found it. I'd never even heard "cicerone" used, ever, until the email. I think "tour guide" would have been way less pretentious in that quotation. :0)
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"cicerone"
Interesting factoid, cicerone was used as a verb starting in the late 18th century.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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(There are some who believe that Latin was pronounced as is modern Italian, as there are more than a few who believe that Classical Greek was pronounced as Modern Greek is, but I do not find their arguments convincing.) I don't know about Latin but I agree about the Greek. It is highly unlikely modern Greek pronunciation is very like ancient Greek. Among other things it was heavily influenced by several centuries of Turkish rule. Before that by Latin. The modern pronunciation of upsilon as 'f' (or perhaps 'v') in the diphthong 'eu' for example probably comes from the Turkish period. In ancient times it was probably pronounced as a true dipthong, something like 'you'. And there are many other changes that have occurred.
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