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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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Hi idjit
welcome on behalf of the nuklheds

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idjit Offline OP
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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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 Originally Posted By: tsuwm
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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 Originally Posted By: idjit
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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 Originally Posted By: Faldage
 Originally Posted By: tsuwm
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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