The Universe of Discourse: 2026/06/27 archive
The Universe of Discourse
Mark Dominus (陶敏修)
mjd@pobox.com
About me
RSS<br>Atom
12 recent entries
It's our language now!<br>I owe my life to a 1913 road rage incident<br>Deciphering basmala<br>My 1992 view of the problems of computer programming in 1992<br>Egyptian fraction multiplication<br>Update: Here I am at the Sagrada Família<br>Egyptian fractions for 2/105<br>Did Ahmes find the best expansions for 2/n?<br>Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other<br>How are John Waters movies like James Bond movies?<br>Documentation is a message in a bottle<br>Bo Diddley
Archive:
2026:<br>JFMAMJ<br>2025:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2024:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2023:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2022:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2021:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2020:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2019:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2018:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2017:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2016:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2015:<br>JFMAMJ JASOND<br>2014:<br>JFMAMJ JASOND<br>2013:<br>JFMAMJ JASOND<br>2012:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2011:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2010:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2009:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2008:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2007:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2006:<br>JFMAMJ<br>JASOND<br>2005: OND
Subtopics:
Mathematics250<br>Programming102<br>Language97<br>Miscellaneous75<br>Book50<br>Tech49<br>Etymology36<br>Haskell33<br>Oops30<br>Unix27<br>Cosmic Call25<br>Math SE25<br>Law23<br>Physics21<br>Perl17<br>Biology16<br>Brain15<br>Calendar15<br>Food15
-->
-->
Technorati Profile<br>-->
Comments disabled
Sat, 27 Jun 2026
It's our language now!
A while back I related how I had been mocked by an English person for using the word “burglarize”.<br>I ended by saying:
Okay, whatever. Brits have been mocking the American language for centuries now. Let them go ahead. We all know who won that argument.
Since then I've been comforted by that thought. I smile to myself and<br>say “It's ours now, we have you outnumbered.”
But for the last few years this has always been followed by another<br>thought: On that logic, it actually belongs to the Indians. And yes,<br>it probably does and we just haven't noticed yet.
But we will.
[Other articles in category /lang]<br>permanent link
I owe my life to a 1913 road rage incident
This is my great-grandfather, born Dominusz Andor in<br>Szeged, Hungary in 1886. In the picture he is in Brooklyn,<br>New York, probably sometime in the early 1950's.
By 1911 Andor had moved from Hungary to Vienna and had changed the<br>spelling of his name to “Dominus” to save confusion. He worked as a<br>goldsmith, and owned his own jewelry shop, so he must have been doing<br>OK.
There's a family legend about why Andor left Vienna for the USA, and I<br>was never sure whether I believed it. But thanks to the Wonders of<br>the Internet, I was able to find out the details, which were all over<br>the Viennese papers in the spring of 1913, and were even reported as<br>far away as Budapest.
In 1913, Andor owned a motorcycle with a sidecar. On March 24 he was<br>driving around Vienna with his wife Rosa when the sidecar came<br>detached. Andor stopped to repair it, and a crowd gathered to watch.<br>Some local youths offered to “help”, rocking the motorcycle and<br>honking its horn.
After the sidecar was re-attached, The youths demanded a tip, which<br>Andor refused to pay. But he also asked the boys to push the<br>motorcycle forward. This they did, but they also hit him and Rosa in<br>the back of their heads; Rosa responded by punching one of them in the<br>face. The boys jeered and shouted insults. As Andor started to drive<br>away, some people in the crowd threw rocks.
Andor, frightened or angry, took out his Browning pistol. He later<br>claimed to have fired two warning shots into the air. Whatever he<br>meant to do, one of his shots his a 22-year-old butcher's assistant in<br>the chest. Fortunately the bullet lodged in the young man's<br>breastbone. The second shot went through the hat brim of a<br>12-year-old boy without hurting him. Andor fled the scene.
The police caught up with him that evening at his home, having traced<br>the owner records of the motorcycle, whose license plate number had<br>been noted by people in the crowd. He was arrested and, as he was a<br>foreigner, was deemed a flight risk and jailed pending trial.
In May he was tried. His claim of self-defense was rejected, since by<br>the time he had fired his gun he and Rosa were already about twenty paces from the<br>crowd. He found guilty of assault, mitigated by the circumstances,<br>and sentenced to a week of prison time, which he had already served<br>several times over. However, the butcher's assistant, by then out of<br>the hospital, announced his intention to sue in civil court for lost<br>wages and for pain and suffering.
I haven't yet found the ship manifest that says exactly when Andor<br>arrived in the U.S., but it was no more than four months later. He<br>either fled to avoid the suit, fled to avoid paying the judgement, or,<br>perhaps, just decided he had had enough of Vienna. (I would have been<br>a bit annoyed too, after serving two months of a one-week sentence.<br>Also, his goldsmith shop had been robbed two years before, by thieves<br>who used the shop's own electric drill to break through the back of<br>the safe.)
Rosa and their son Sándor, then four years old,...