Poem-of-the-Week: "Then we will fight in the shade"

A good line can last forever. (Well, for 2500 years, at least.) And it can appear in different media, in different languages, and in both classic literature and popular culture.

Here's a scene from pop culture that's hitting it big at the box office this month, with a famous 2500-year-old line at the end:



Here's another version of the very same scene from about 100 years ago, and even then it was “news that men have heard before”:

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
His fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air,
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.

A prize can go to anyone who finds on the Library's shelves the next and final line of this verse, or identifies its author. (Or perhaps identifies "The King with half the East at heel.")

Silent Cops and Sleeping Policemen

A colloquial term for speed bumps placed across a road to slow down traffic is "sleeping policemen." This is apparently a variant of the term "silent cop" used to designate upright posts often set in the middle of intersections to channel traffic and prevent car jams. When was the term "silent cop" first used for these structures? According to one linguistic researcher, the term "silent cop" first appeared in 1914 in the Fitchburg Sentinel.

Have any other English words or expressions originated in Fitchburg? There's a good research question for someone.

A visitors map for us

I've added a visitors map to the blog sidebar so we can see where people are coming from who visit the FPL blog. Click on it to get a bigger view. (Once a page appears on the web, people from all over the world find it.) These little additions are called "blog widgets" and there are lots of them out there, from visitors maps to weather stickers to clocks and much more.

Poem-of-the-Week

[Here's an example of the kind of thing that could appear in the FPL blog as a regular feature. It would require keeping a bag of candy in the reference desk so appropriate rewards could be given out. Feel free to edit or delete as you see fit.]

Here's a timely poem for us in the month of March. The first ten people who come to the information desk with with the name of the author (maybe shown in a book) will get a piece of chocolate (to be eaten outside), so start searching! You can't leave the answer as a comment; you have to come to the desk in person to receive your reward.

TOSSING his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and 'thwart all the hollows and angles
Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.

But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow
Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift
Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow,
Deep in the oak's chill core, under the gathering drift.

Nay, to earth's life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire
(How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes—
Rapture of life ineffable, perfect—as if in the brier,
Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.

The New York Times on LibraryThing

The New York Times has a story today about LibraryThing.com, the online cataloging system for personal libraries that some people from FPL participate in.

Words of Wisdom

Are you interested in words, phrases, slang expressions and colloquialisms? Check out Michael Quinion's website to learn the definition and origins for words such as cockamamie, eleemosynary, and floccinaucinihilipilification or from where the phrase "push the envelope" comes.