Word: alien
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Sick Man of Europe. The torch of Islamic empire-building passed in time from Arab to Seljuk to Mongol to Ottoman Turk. All the while, Islam was intellectually withdrawing from engagement with alien thought, under the influence of the mystical Sufis, and the orthodox ulama (scholars) who saw all wisdom in the Koran and Moslem tradition. By the 19th century, Islam was enfeebled in body as well as spirit; lands once ruled by Saladin and Suleiman the Magnificent became European protectorates; Turkey, resident of the impotent caliphs, was the "sick man of Europe...
Hogben's book is full of clues to understanding alien but associated tongues. He urges the amateur linguist to forget the vowels and concentrate on the consonants, those "fossils" in the evolution of any language. The German word Zunge, for instance, might mystify the uninitiated unless he follows Hogben's advice to substitute T for the German Z. Similarly with the Spanish halcon, which leaps into intelligibility with Hogben's advice to trade...
Jeanne's parents became a divided family. First the war separated them. Her father was in the south of France; her mother, as an enemy alien, was obliged to stay in Paris to register daily with the police. During the occupation, the family moved into a Paris apartment above a brothel; when Jeanne ran down to the street, she would hurry past a long queue of waiting German soldiers. "I was happy enough," Jeanne says, "but I was a miserable brat. I wouldn't eat unless my mother danced for me and the poor woman had to dance...
Tillich pointed out that the ideas behind Pacem in Terris, being strictly Western and Judaeo-Christian, are alien to religious traditions that do not consider the dignity of man as an ultimate value, and should not be forced onto the rest of the world willy-nilly. As for the sweeping condemnation of war, Pacem in Terris, said Tillich, did not consider the problem of resistance to violations of human dignity. "There are situations," he warned, "in which nothing short of war can defend or establish the dignity of the person...
...died in a detention camp. A heart attack, an official spokesman blandly explained, but in nearby Nigeria the newspapers were full of allegations of death by torture. Snapped Nigeria's President Nnamdi Azikiwe, an old friend of Danquah: "If independence means the substitution of indigenous tyranny for alien rule, then those who struggled for independence have not only desecrated the cause of freedom but have betrayed their peoples...