latin words

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

According to a story, probably apocryphal, former US Vice President Dan Quayle once said, "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have is that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."

Latin is a dead language. No people speak it as their everyday language. The area south of the US is called Latin America because most of the people down there speak Spanish, Portuguese, or French, all derived from Latin.

Latin took its name from Latium, a region in ancient Italy. Various dialects of Latin eventually blossomed into the Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, while Latin itself faded away.

Fortunately, you don't have to travel to Latin America to use this week's terms from Latin. They have been borrowed into English and are now part of the language.

locum

PRONUNCIATION:

(LOH-kuhm)

MEANING:

noun: A person filling in for another, especially for a doctor or clergyman.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin locum tenens (holding the place), from locus (place) + tenere (to hold). The full form locum tenens is also used in English.

quotes

The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer.
           -- From the 1985 movie "Bliss"
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
           -- Will Rogers

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
           -- G. K. Chesterton
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
           -- Charles Peters
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
           -- Raymond Chandler

In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known.
           -- Thomas Pickering

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
           -- Arthur Koestler
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
           -- Cyril Connolly

The squeaking wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.
           -- Vic Gold

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
           -- E. B. White




The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
           -- Albert Einstein

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
           -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
           -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owners.
           -- E. Joseph Cossman

quotes

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
           -- Samuel Butler
There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
           -- Arthur Honegger
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
           -- Herbert Hoover

Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
           -- Leo Rosten
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
           -- Bill Cosby

Great part of being a grownup, you never have to do anything.
           -- Peter Blake, House M.D., Safe, 2006
The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.
           -- Maureen Murphy

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
           -- Mark Twain, Letter to Mrs Foote, Dec. 2, 1887

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
           -- George Santayana, Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines"

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
           -- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
           -- Harry Golden
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
           -- Abraham Lincoln

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
           -- James Thurber
If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?
           -- Vince Lombardi

Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.
           -- Cullen Hightower

I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.
           -- George Burns

check this out

http://www.1goodreason.com/blog/2010/01/27/brilliant-thought-provoking-video/

stock market

In today's excerpt - George Soros, one of the
world's wealthiest and most successful
investors, made his early fortune by betting
on the stock market's irrationality in a
world that had long believed in a rational
and efficient market. Investors fell in love
with conglomerates such as LTV Corporation in
the 1960s, and that love translated into
unwarranted high valuations for these
companies and soaring stock prices. For
Soros, that was a golden opportunity:



"Soros's practical experience as a broker and
research analyst convinced him that the
normal market state was, in fact, disequilibrium.
As an investor, however,
he finds it more useful than an assumption of
market rationality,
because it is a better pointer to profit
opportunities. [One] of his
early investment successes [was] crucial to
the evolution of his
thinking.



"[It] was related to the conglomerate
movement in the second half of the 1960s. The
flurry of company takeovers, Soros
saw, merely exploited investors' tendency to
rate companies by
trends in earnings per share (EPS). Start
with modestly sized Company A, and engineer a
debt-financed acquisition of B, a much
larger, stodgy company with stagnant
revenues, a modest EPS,
and a low market price. Merge B into A, and
retire B's stock, and
the resulting combined A/B will have a much
higher debt load,
but a much smaller stock base. So long as B's
earnings more than
cover the new debt service, the combined A/B
will show a huge
Jump in per-share revenues and earnings.
Uncritical investors then
push up A/B's stock price, which helps
finance new acquisitions.
Jim Ling was one of the early exploiters of
the strategy, parlaying
a modest Dallas electronics company into a
sprawling giant (LTV) with
dozens of companies, spanning everything from
steel to avionics,
meatpacking, and golf balls.



"Business schools justified the scam by
theorizing that conglomerates deserved higher
share prices because their diversified business
mix would deliver smoother and steadier
earnings. It was the kind
of dumb idea that underscores the disconnect
between business
schools and real business. If shareholders
want earnings diversification, of course,
they can quickly and easily diversify stock
portfolios in the market. Big conglomerates,
in fact, probably warrant
lower stock prices. They're hard to manage,
are often run by financial operators, and
usually carry outsized debt loads.



"Soros understood that the conglomerate game made no sense,but he also recognized its strong following
among market professionals. 'I respect the herd,' he told me, not because it's right, but
because 'it's like the ocean.' Even the
stupidest idea may warrant
investment, in other words, if it has a grip
on the market's imagination. So Soros
invested heavily in conglomerates, riding up the
stock curve until he sensed it was nearing a
top. Then he took his
winnings and switched to the short side,
enjoying a second huge
payday on the way down."



Charles R. Morris, The Sages, Public
Affairs, Copyright 2009 by Charles R. Morris,
pp. 10-11.