今週はReader's Digest 6月号を読みます。まず脳についての記事The Amazing Brainに出てきた単語を採り上げます。
Serrell is an acquired savant - someone for whom a brain injury has unlocked astonishing mental powers, ones that scientists believe lie latent within all of us.
"savant" の説明が文中にありますが、辞書あるいはWikipediaに記述があるか調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A learned person, especially a distinguished scientist.: They're obsessed with systems, and they're good at systemizing, even when they don't happen to be mathematics profssors or savants.
・Vocabulary.com: You know that girl in your school with a GPA over 100? She is a savant in the making. A savant is someone over-the-top smart, a scholar. It might take a savant only five minutes to do an entire math test.
Savant is the French word for "learned" and it goes back to the Latin word "to be wise", sapere. There are savants who are wise and learned, and then there are idiot savants, who are brilliant in very specific areas, but not in others, like an idiot savant who knows absolutely everything about the American Civil War but has no ability with learning a foreign language.
どの辞書も大体上のような説明で記事で使われているような特殊な状況による知能の持ち主ではありません。しかし、Wikipediaに "Savant syndrome" の項で次の説明がありました。
Savant syndrome is a condition in which a person with a mental disability, such as an autism spectrum disorder, demonstrates profound and prodigious capacities or abilities far in excess of what would be considered normal. People with savant syndrome may have neurodevelopmental disorders, notably autism spectrum disorders, or brain injuries. The most dramatic examples of savant syndrome occur in individuals who score very low on IQ tests, while demonstrating exceptional skills or brilliance in specific areas, such as rapid calculation, art, memory, or musical ability. In spite of the name "syndrome", it is not recognized as a mental disorder nor as part of mental disorder in medical manuals such as the ICD-10 or the DSM-V.
記事での "savant" はこの "savant syndrome" による "savant" の様です。
What does a clock do when it's hungry? It goes back four seconds.
Japan Times Online July 2 の記事GM is no transformer and that’s the problem に出てきた "lifer" と言う単語が気になりました。
GM’s inability to look outside of itself for talent, still relying on company lifers even in the face of undeniable evidence of deep cultural rot, demonstrates how far the firm is from a genuine transformation. In the latest corporate reshuffle, Barra named GM’s North American manufacturing chief to a new position in charge of “product excellence,” and replaced him with yet another company lifer.
GMは外部の優秀な人材を探すことができず "lifer" に頼っていると言うことは "lifer" に内部の人材の意味があるようですが、辞書で確かめます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A person serving a life sentence in prison.: ‘Before most lifers die in prison, they grow old, get sick, and must be cared for.’someone who has been sent to prison for the rest of their life
・Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: 1.a person who spends an entire career in the same job 2. a criminal who has been sentenced to spend the rest of his or her life in prison: He was a lifer at the factory.
・Cambridge English Dictionary: someone who has been punished by being put in prison for a very long time or until they die
GMは牢獄ですか？ 米国では転職して待遇のより良い会社、身分になるのが好まれることが良く分かります。
パソコンを使い始めたのは３０年程前で主にワープロとして使用していた記憶があります。パソコン用語の "default" の意味を知ったのもその頃ですが、当時は紙の辞書で "default" を引いても怠慢、不履行などの意味しかなく、パソコン用語としての既定値、初期設定値との関係が謎でした。その謎が解けたのは１０年程前にブログを始めた頃から英英辞書を引く習慣になり、 "default" の次の説明を見つけたからです。
・Merriam-Webster: a selection made usually automatically or without active consideration due to lack of a viable alternative: remained the club's president by default
・Wiktionary: A selection made in the absence of an alternative. The man became the leader of the group as a default. (often attributive) A value used when none has been given; a tentative value or standard that is presumed. If you don't specify a number of items, the default is 1.
債務不履行でもパソコン用語のデフォルトでもない意味の "default" がThe Creationに次の様に出てきました。
Much as I would like to think otherwise, I see no hope for compromise in the idea of Intelligent Design. Simply put, this proposal agrees that evolution occurs but argues that it is guided by a supernatural intelligence. The evidence for Intelligend Design, however, consists solely of a default argument.
...
The odds powerfully favor such an outcome. In science, as in logic, a default argument can never replace positive evidence, but even a sliver of positive evidence can demolish a default argument.
神が生命を創造したと説く宗教の教えを "default argument" と著者は明言しているのですね。
The Creationを読んでいます。今日取り上げる単語も見ただけで何だろうと興味の湧く言葉です。
As the information comes together online, the big picture of Earth's biodiversity will emerge as a mosaic at high resolution. Despite their modest outward appearance, the all-species inventories are in fact collectively "big" science, a moonshot effort that will eventually engage many times the number of professional and citizen scientists now active.
"moonshot" は月を目指すロケットを連想させますが、ここでは月とは関係はないはずです。辞書を見ます。引用文での意味に合っている説明を載せているのは次の辞書しか見当たりませんでした。
・Urban Dictionary: awesome, fantastic, almost impossible to achieve, the best, the reason for success, reaching the highest point, right on target: This new product was the moonshot for our company. It was extremely successful and sent our sales to the moon.
上記の意味も、月を目指して打ち上げられたロケットからの連想でこれからは思い出せそうです。
今日の単語が示すことは、The Creationの著者、Edward O. Wilson、の知る限り、１９９８年に初めて実施されたとのことなので、単語としては新参者です。
The engagement of citizen scientists in biodiversity exploration often starts with bioblitzes, which are treasure hunts designed to find and identify the largest number of species possible in one place during a twenty-four-hour period.
The first bioblitz was, to the best of my knowledge, the one held out of Walden Pond in Massahusetts on July 4, 1998, and in addition covered adjacent areas in Concord and Lincoln.
上に引用した文に出てきた "bioblitz" はオンライン辞書の検索では掲載している辞書は見つかりませんでしたが、Wikipediaには次の説明がありました。
・Wikipedia: A BioBlitz, also written without capitals as bioblitz, is an intense period of biological surveying in an attempt to record all the living species within a designated area. Groups of scientists, naturalists and volunteers conduct an intensive field study over a continuous time period (e.g., usually 24 hours). There is a public component to many BioBlitzes, with the goal of getting the public interested in biodiversity. To encourage more public participation, these BioBlitzes are often held in urban parks or nature reserves close to cities.
The mountains of suouthern Appalachia compose the most ancient range in North America never blanketed by continental glaciers. Their forests are correspondingly the richest in biodiversity. In the upland streams swarm mayflies, stone flies and other delicate and ephemeral insets, with ancestral lines older than the Age of Reptiles.
まず "mayflies" を調べます。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A short-lived, slender insect with delicate, transparent wings and two or three long filaments on the tail. It lives close to water, where the chiefly herbivorous aquatic larvae develop. Order Ephemeroptera: several families and many species
・Collins English Dictionary: Also called: dayfly. any insect of the order Ephemeroptera (or Ephemerida). The short-lived adults, found near water, have long tail appendages and large transparent wings; the larvae are aquatic: Roads near to streams could damage the local mayfly これはカゲロウのようですね。
次に "stone flies" の説明を辞書でみます。辞書では "stone" と "fly" の二語ではなく "stonefly" の一語にしているのが大半です。
・Oxford English Dictionary: A slender insect with transparent membranous wings, the larvae of which live in clean running water. The adults are used as bait by fly fishermen. Order Plecoptera: many families
・Collins English Dictionary: any insect of the order Plecoptera, in which the larvae are aquatic, living beneath stones, and the adults have long antennae and two pairs of large wings and occur near water
これでは "stonefly" と余り区別が付きません。Wikipediaで写真を見ると羽の形がちょっと違うようです。英和辞典ではカワゲラとなっていました。
My first day on the job at an IKEA store, I was told by my boss that employees needed to go to the meeting room before every shift. I asked why. He said, "Assembly required. このジョークはイケアの家具を買ったことのない方には分からないでしょうね。 私は３０年程前にイケアで子供用の机を買って組み立てた経験一度あります。
今日覚えたい表現、"Sapere aude" は外来語です。The Creationから "Sapere aude" が出てきた個所を引用します。
There is, in my opinion, an inevitability to the unity of knowledge. It reflects real life. The trajectory of world events suggests that educated people should be far better able than before to address the great issues courageously and analytically by undertaking a traverse of disciplines. We are into the age of synthesis, with a real empirical bite to it. Therefore, Sapere aude. Dare to think on your own.
"Sapere aude" の意味と思われる英語が後の文に示されていますが、辞書で確認します。
・Urban Dictionary: Latin for "dare to know"; is used commonly as a motto for various institutions.
・Wikipedia: Sapere aude (pronounced sap-er-reh ow-day) is a Latin phrase meaning "dare to be wise", or more precisely "dare to know". Originally used by the Roman poet Horace, it has become closely associated with the Enlightenment after being cited by Immanuel Kant in his seminal essay, What is Enlightenment?. Kant claimed it was the motto for the entire period, and used it to explore his theories of reason in the public sphere. Later, Michel Foucault took up Kant's formulation in an attempt to find a place for the individual in his post-structuralist philosophy and to come to terms with the problematic legacy of the Enlightenment. In Episteme baroque: le mot et la chose, Jean-Claude Vuillemin proposes to make "Sapere aude" the motto of the Baroque episteme.
こじつけかも知りませんが、私が英英辞書でしつこく調べるのも "Sapere aude" と言えるかな？
Create a Tree of Life for all species and for major gene ensembles within them, thereby tracing the pathways of past evolutionary histories. Meanwhile, combining this information with paleontology and environmental history, establish definitive principles concerning the origin of biodiversity.
さて "paleontology" はどんな学問でしたっけ。
・Oxford English Dictionary: The branch of science concerned with fossil animals and plants.‘Not only is phylogeny important for understanding paleontology, but paleontology in turn contributes to phylogeny.’
・Vocabulary.com: That five-year-old dinosaur expert who can tell a trilobite from a pterodactyl and tell you which thrived during the Jurassic period? She’s a budding paleontology expert.
Scientific language aims at clarity, and scientists generally speak to each other in Greek and Latin. The commonly used suffix -ology comes from Greek, and it means "the study of." The prefix paleo means "old." So, paleontology is the study of that which is old?really, really old. The word paleontology entered the English language in the nineteenth century, just as scientists were making a systematic effort to analyze fossil records.
ついでに前者の辞書の例文に出てきた "phylogeny" も覚えたい。
・Collins Dictionary: (biology) the sequence of events involved in the evolution of a species, genus, etc
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