The unusual etymology of five simple words

This Sunday, I want to share my fascination for the English language. I’ve done it before, of course, but when third waves, winged horses, limping economies and less-than-thrilling Olympics are depressing our spirits, this could be the little boost you need. What I intend is not fiercely cerebral or complicatedly grammatical. Nor does it have anything to do with the illogical pronunciation of the language. It’s about five simple words we probably use every single day: Pretty, tall, silly, naughty, and sad. But it is about their etymology.

Now, it’s not surprising to find that words change their meanings over time. For instance, to be gay today is very different to what that adjective meant in the 1920s. Mummy, as a 90-year-old, would often introduce generals with the line, “We first met when he was a gay young man”. For her, gay was always merry and carefree.

A recent article by Simon Horobin, a professor of English at Oxford, reveals that, when they first came to be popularly used, each of the five words I’ve chosen meant something very different to what it does today. It’s a bit like “disinterested”. We use it to mean not interested. Originally, it meant impartial. Or “fulsome”. Historically, it meant insincere. Today, fulsome praise is taken as a compliment

Tall” in Old English meant swift or active. By the 15th century, it came to mean handsome or elegant. Its usage relating to height began a century later. From there spring its metamorphic extensions to mean large as in “tall order” or exaggerated as in “tall story”.

These changes in meaning may seem surprising but they’re really not. Professor Horobin says, “Several common adjectives that describe physical appearances began life referring to dexterity and pliancy”. “Handsome”, for example, originally meant easy to handle, while “clever” meant dexterous. Believe it or not, “buxom” meant obedient. That’s definitely no longer true!.

Radhey radhey...

What if Olympics were held in space? Nasa astronauts, cosmonauts offer a glimpse

While the Tokyo Olympics is nearing its end, a different set of games were held in space by astronauts and cosmonauts. Based on the spacecraft they took to the International Space Station (ISS), the crew members of the orbiting laboratory split into teams for the first-ever space games, including synchronized floating and no-hand ball.

Nasa astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, JAXA astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who arrived at the space station aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, were on Team Dragon. Nasa astronaut Mark Vande Hei and cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov of Roscosmos were on Team Soyuz.

In the video, the two teams can be seen competing against each other in no-hand ball. As per the game rules, the players must get the ping pong ball through the hatch seals without touching the ball with any of their body parts. They were allowed to use only their breath to move the ball around. The second round was ‘synchronised floating’, a game similar to synchronised swimming.

The ISS has now more than 20 years of continuous human presence. According to Nasa, people from 19 countries have visited the space station, which has hosted more than 3,000 research investigations from scientists, researchers, and students from more than 108 countries and areas. In April, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Soyuz spacecraft delivered the seven-member crew for a six-month science mission in microgravity.

Planning to relax more curbs, call on local train travel soon: Maharashtra CM.. Radhey Radhey.

Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray said on Saturday the state government is planning to bring in more relaxations in the ongoing restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) but utmost caution is needed at this step. “The Maharashtra government is going to grant more relaxations but we are taking every step cautiously. A decision will be taken for local train passengers as well. We need to ensure that these relaxations do not trigger another wave of Covid-19,” Thackeray said while addressing a function organised by BEST, according to news agency PTI.

The Maha-Vikas Aghadi government on August 2 eased Covid-19 restrictions in 25 districts of Maharashtra, including the capital Mumbai, where the rate of infection is lower than the state average. Some of these relaxations include allowing essential and non-essential shops to stay open till 8pm and permitting hotels and restaurants to function with 50 per cent of their seating capacity till 4pm. Gyms, spas, yoga centres and salons can now remain open till 8pm with 50 per cent of their capacity and government and private offices can function with full attendance.

There has also been a constant demand for allowing fully vaccinated people to travel on local trains, which is one of the most crucial modes of public transportation in Mumbai.

There are 11 districts in Maharashtra, including Pune, Kolhapur, Satara, Sangli, Solapur, Ratnagiri, where no relaxations have been given as per the August 2 order, since their Covid-19 positivity rate is greater than the state’s average.

Is Afghanistan paying for Zalmay Khalilzad’s oversights? Shri Radhey Shri Radhey..

As the Taliban makes advances across Afghanistan capturing villages and key cities and the US prepares to complete its withdrawal from the country before the end of the month, the focus has landed on Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad, the Afghan-born US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, said earlier this week that the Afghan government is too weak to win a negotiated settlement without a new military strategy.

The special envoy’s comments came on a day a car bomb blast was reported followed by sporadic gunfire in Kabul near the heavily fortified Green Zone. Several civilians and Taliban members died in that attack. Afghan defence minister General Bismillah Mohammadi survived an assassination attempt involving a car bomb and Taliban hit squad.

As the Taliban is rapidly advancing throughout Afghanistan, experts have expressed apprehension that the insurgents aim to re-establish their harsh brand of Islamist rule, including the repression of women and the independent media, by force. Local media reported earlier this week the Taliban dragged a 21-year-old woman out of a car while she was on her way to the Balkh district centre and shot her dead for not wearing a veil.

Shri Radhey Shri Radhey..

Khalilzad, who was appointed as the special envoy three years ago, and the then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said at that time that he would assist “us in the reconciliation effort." A Pashtun like many members of the Taliban, Khalilzad was seen by many as someone who understood the nuances of Afghan culture land and spoke both Pashto and Persian fluently. However, many Afghans have time and again pointed out his advocacy for and business dealings with the Taliban before the September 2001 attacks.

But now the veteran US diplomat has painted a bleak picture of the peace process and said that “at this point, they are demanding that they take the lion's share of power in the next government given the military situation as they see it.”

Shri Radhey Shri Radhey...

Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has said in an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner that it’s time the US recalled Khalilzad home. “His judgment proved wrong, and he has lost control of the process. Rather than interfere where Afghans no longer want him, it is time to investigate the intelligence failures, poor assumptions, and misjudgments that tainted the peace process from day one,” Rubin wrote on Friday.

Radhey radhey..I will be glad and thanked to all the person who support me and follow me with all my ability..

Burying the ghost of retrospective taxation shri radhey.

Amid the disruption in the Parliament, the Narendra Modi government introduced a bill, on Thursday, aimed at correcting a momentous blunder in the contemporary history of taxation laws.

This blunder pertains to the Manmohan Singh government’s notorious retrospective amendment in the Income Tax Act in 2012. After losing a tax dispute to Vodafone on the issue of taxation on indirect transfer of Indian assets, the government nullified the judgement by altering Section 9(1)(i) of the Income Tax Act retroactively. Taxing indirect transfer of Indian assets implies taxing the gains arising out of the transfer of shares by a non-resident in a company incorporated abroad, if the share derived its value, directly or indirectly, substantially from assets located in India.

This regressive legislative development, later extended to Cairn Energy’s internal restructuring, triggered a spate of legal disputes. Vodafone and Cairn Energy sued India before investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) tribunals constituted under the India-Netherlands and the India-United Kingdom bilateral investment treaty (BIT).

Shri Radhey Shri Radhey Shri Radhey Shri Radhey

Making sense of Pegasus-derived data

Thanks to the groundbreaking investigative work of 16 media organisations internationally and The Wire in India, one now knows that the phone numbers of many in India appeared on a list of potential targets of surveillance by the Israeli spyware, Pegasus. This journalist’s name was not just on the list of potential targets of those whose phones may have been hacked. Not only that, his device was also confirmed to have been infected with Pegasus after a forensic test.

So, could the two incidents — the industrialist’s knowledge of the journalist’s private matters and the journalist’s phone having been infiltrated with Pegasus — be related or are they just coincidental? It is likely that the two incidents are linked, which then raises the question — how did the industrialist gain access to this information from this journalist’s phone and who else had and has this access?.

Radhey Radhey ..

In the example of the journalist cited here, Pegasus would have transmitted messages, emails, phone calls, pictures, video, camera, location and other such information from the journalist’s phone. But how exactly was this daily data, which was sent from the journalist’s phone, turned into meaningful information of specific financial transactions and conveyed to the industrialist? Pegasus software can only transmit data, it does not and cannot comprehend it.

The buyer spent such a large sum on each person to be able to listen to phone calls, watch movements, read messages, and capture each element of the individual’s life. But this cannot be done by Pegasus or any other machine. It needs a human on the other end to be able to listen, read and watch the person being spied on by Pegasus. Only a human can make sense of all the information that Pegasus sends from the infected phone.

.

Pegasus transmits information from the infected phone non-stop (24x7x365). To gather all this data, decipher and analyse it, it would take at least a two-three member backend team for each person being snooped on. Given the possibly large-scale nature of the hack, it would take a few more thousand people on the backend to turn all of the Pegasus-transmitted data into meaningful and useful information for the buyer. Surely, the buyer did not spend all that money on Pegasus just to get a daily dump of data with no one to analyse it?.

Making sense of Pegasus-derived data Shri Radhey

More than a year ago, a senior journalist called me and narrated a strange personal experience. He said, one day, he was summoned to meet one of India’s biggest industrialists, ostensibly to discuss his critical reporting of the industrialist and his businesses. During this meeting, the industrialist apparently rattled out intricate details of some of the journalist’s private financial transactions, and spoke in an intimidatory tone. The journalist told me he was shocked that the industrialist — perceived as close to the ruling establishment in Delhi — had access to this private information. But since he had nothing to hide and had committed no crime, he said he walked out of the meeting nonchalantly.

Shri Radhey Shri Radhey..