Dictionary De - En
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De - Pt| Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
| ...One thing is that, unlike any other Western democracy that I know of, this country has operated since its beginnings with a basic distrust of government. We are constituted not for efficient operation of government, but for minimizing the possibility of abuse of power. It took the events of the Roosevelt era -- a catastrophic economic collapse and a world war -- to introduce the strong central government that we now know. But in most parts of the country today, the reluctance to have government is still strong. I think, barring a series of catastrophic events, that we can look to at least another decade during which many of the big problems around this country will have to be addressed by institutions other than federal government. - Bobby R. Inman, Admiral, USN, Retired, former director of Naval Intelligence, vice director of the DIA, former director of the NSA, deputy directory of Central Intelligence, former chairman and CEO of MCC. [the statist opinions expressed herein are not those of the cookie editor -ed.] | |
| MAFIA, n: [Acronym for Mechanized Applications in Forced Insurance Accounting.] An extensive network with many on-line and offshore subsystems running under OS, DOS, and IOS. MAFIA documentation is rather scanty, and the MAFIA sales office exhibits that testy reluctance to bona fide inquiries which is the hallmark of so many DP operations. From the little that has seeped out, it would appear that MAFIA operates under a non-standard protocol, OMERTA, a tight-lipped variant of SNA, in which extended handshakes also perform complex security functions. The known timesharing aspects of MAFIA point to a more than usually autocratic operating system. Screen prompts carry an imperative, nonrefusable weighting (most menus offer simple YES/YES options, defaulting to YES) that precludes indifference or delay. Uniquely, all editing under MAFIA is performed centrally, using a powerful rubout feature capable of erasing files, filors, filees, and entire nodal aggravations. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP Dictionary" | |
| The Worst Lines of Verse For a start, we can rule out James Grainger's promising line: "Come, muse, let us sing of rats." Grainger (1721-67) did not have the courage of his convictions and deleted these words on discovering that his listeners dissolved into spontaneous laughter the instant they were read out. No such reluctance afflicted Adam Lindsay Gordon (1833-70) who was inspired by the subject of war. "Flash! flash! bang! bang! and we blazed away, And the grey roof reddened and rang; Flash! flash! and I felt his bullet flay The tip of my ear. Flash! bang!" By contrast, Cheshire cheese provoked John Armstrong (1709-79): "... that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste of solid milk..." While John Bidlake was guided by a compassion for vegetables: "The sluggard carrot sleeps his day in bed, The crippled pea alone that cannot stand." George Crabbe (1754-1832) wrote: "And I was ask'd and authorized to go To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co." William Balmford explored the possibilities of religious verse: "So 'tis with Christians, Nature being weak While in this world, are liable to leak." And William Wordsworth showed that he could do it if he really tried when describing a pond: "I've measured it from side to side; Tis three feet long and two feet wide." -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures" | |
