South Korean Leader Proposes a Reunification Tax
Excerpt:
But after the divide that lasted more than 60 years, the societies have also drifted apart. North Koreans and South Koreans alike cannot understand much of each other’s vocabularies.
Comment: You've heard this phrase a number of times? What's its origin? Meaning?
Language: Who's got a skin in the game?
Excerpts:
Microsoft's Certified Professional Magazine Online quotes a vice president, Rick Devenuti, saying, "Customers want confidence, especially with this new product wave, that Microsoft has skin in the game." A reader can presume that this means the company will hire new employees in its new-wave consulting business because the executive hints provocatively that "there is some relationship to head count."
At the same time, on the other side of the world, Lachlan McKeough, chief of an Australian insurance brokerage on an acquisitions spree, told The Sydney Morning Herald that the key to the company's success is the way that "front-line staff" retains a substantial equity in the business. Asked to describe his business model, he replied, "They have got skin in the game, so to speak."
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The skin in this case is a synecdoche for the self, much as "head" stands for cattle and "sail" for ships. The game is the investment, commitment or gamble being undertaken. Thus, investors in a company will be more comfortable in their own skins if they know that the managers are personally invested as well - that they share the risk and have an incentive to share the gains.
....
From "Town Talk," The Oakland Tribune, April 20, 1912: "It cannot be said that the latest visit of Eleanor Sears to California was an unqualified success. ... She didn't play polo, though she seemed crazy for a chance. She was very insistent while the men refused to let her hazard her skin in the game, but when they finally consented she was attacked by what the vulgar call 'cold feet' and reneged."
Tech Terms to Avoid
Excerpt:
There are two industries that refer to their customers as "users" –technology and illegal drugs.
A Vote for Latin
Op-Ed Contributor
A Vote for Latin
By HARRY MOUNT
Published: December 3, 2007
None of today’s leading presidential candidates studied Latin at a high level. How things have changed since the founding fathers.
Excerpts:
Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry).
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With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history’s turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of rooms: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America.
Comment: I had 2 years of Latin in High School and afterwards I took 2 years of Spanish. Knowing Latin helped me learn Spanish - and years later when I attended Seminary, it helped me learn Greek!
