And prove your knowledge of Greek!

I've never encountered anyone displaying the fish symbol who knew from where it derived. Yes, I ask them. I don't think I cold wear a symbol if I didn't know exactly what it meant.

I had lost track of the third, nickel-plated set of Commandments, given after the stone and clay ones went to eBay.

And the t-shirt with the "blood of innocent people" dripping from the American flag seems to me to send an astoundingly confused signal, even for this sort of thing.

RE item #1: If Abe and George aren't about to slam the Shrub's head into the microphone, I'll be very disappointed.

They ought to get rid of the three soldiers with national flags, too. It's beautifully rendered, but the Spanish have sent exactly zero troops into the fight.

The America with God shirt bothers me because they've differenced their heraldry. Also because every time I look at it, I imagine the fish is going to swim over and start eating the stars. Meanwhile, the Air Force Holy Beanie Bear's slogan just makes me feel like the Air Force needs a lot more target practice to improve their accuracy.

Ter: icthys. Not that I wear one.

T was trying to do Greek letters in a roman font, and IXOYE is about as close to ΙΧΘΥΣ as you'll get. Ichthos or Ichthus is a good transliteration.

Erik: Ichthys or ichthus are both valid transliterations (the Y being upsilon, which kinda sounds like the German u-with-umlaut). Ichthos, though, is just wrong.

"Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind."

And with regard to pins, as a working molecular biologist of sorts, I want a Lysenko fish.

The Air Force bear scares me. Mainly because, having grown up in an Air Force family, I actually knew people who would think it was positively darling.

Although I'm also fond of the "Preying on" pisstake on those "Praying for Greater Portland" (or Cleveland, or Northampton, or etc.) homilies.

But: best such bumpersticker seen in a dog's age: "My carpenter is a bossy Jew."

Emmet, I like the shirt idea. What does a Lysenko fish look like?

Mike, I sat there with my mouth hanging open when I found that thing. AYKB the conflation of "Christian" and "American" is theologically dubious to start with. And maybe it's just me, but I just can't think the image of an American flag dripping with innocent blood makes a very positive statement.

As far as the last T-shirt: I'd be wondering what he wanted us to *do* with the hamsters...

I can't get Nehemiah Scudder out of my mind, for some reason.

Thoughts? I'd love for somebody to tell me I'm scared for no reason. But I don't think that anybody can honestly say that.

This bothers me a lot. I have to confirm a quote I glaced at quickly in the news....but I think it bothers the Pope, too.

Now stop being afraid, and get angry.

Even more icky: Lots and lots of folks will *happily embrace* that perception, and take it as a sign of a new Great Awakening that gives them leave to (stealing a line from Sinclair Lewis) try to make the rest of the world look like Kansas.

Flat and covered with cornfields?

Seriously, if that's all that happened, we'd be OK. But I fear much worse.

Are we "riding for a fall"? If there is a God, will he punish us for hubris?

No mention of cornfields, though.

Emmet, that's absolutely hilarious! Do it, do it!

Teresa, seven (same as Roman, since in this case there are no mismatches like 'ch' for chi in the Greek). That's assuming it should be pronounced lee-S'EN-ko. If it's more like lai-S'EN-ko, results may vary. I couldn't find a Cyrillic representation of his name on the net.

Well, I have heard of variations on the 23rd Psalm joke, on the lines of "...but I will fear no evil, because 2 Para is with me."

And there will, I expect, be new variations on the World Tour tshirt.

I think we are inoculated against blatant religion in England, and prone to certain darkness of humour on the subject of war.

I'd grab a few of the "praying for" bumper stickers and do a cut-up.

The ending doesn't sound particularly Russian, though the first part of the word does. It might be Ukranian--the scientist himself was Ukranian--or some other language from that language family, but I don't know enough to tell. In Russian, the "lai" root means "bark," like a dog.

I've always wondered whether Lysenko was playing for position, or just barking mad....

I think the fact that we say Lai for the first syllable is just our misinterpretation of the 'y' - often used to distinguish the Russian high-back-unrounded vowel (ы) from the high-front-unrounded vowel (и), usually written 'i'. (The initial 'L' is "hard" (unpalatalized) or "soft" (palatalized), respectively, depending (actually the phonological conditioning goes the other way, but who's counting).)

However, I have not seen this man's actual name in Cyrillic, and could be completely wrong.

In Russian, I back-transliterate this to Лысенко, and in Ukrainian it would be Лисенко. Seven letters either way (I presume ы counts as one letter). If there were a ц instead of с it would transliterate as "Lytsenko" with a ligature over the "ts".

So how do you represent cyrillic letters in HTML? I've got a reference for the regular ASCII but can't find a reference listing the codes for cyrillic.

So, um, a Lysenko fish would be really, really offensive in a way that the Darwin Fish isn't.

Rather than trying to remember Unicode values, there is a HTML subset of named entities, they can be found here. It's not ∞ but it does give you most of the other roman characters, the greek letters, and a nice set of mathmatical and other symbols, in a much easier to remember form -- just use "&NAME;" -- thus, "¥" gets you ¥, "þ" gets you þ, and, in case your wondering how I did this, "&" gets you the &. The trailing semicolon is required.

I was going to say that the older white folks in our parish tend to be extremely patriotic -- many are vets -- then I remembered how, after September 11, one of the Asian ladies bought a bunch of scarves printed with the American flag and was giving them to some of the women at morning Mass, so it's not just the whites.

However, I can't see myself buying any of these items unless I want my husband to divorce me!

I certainly knew whence it came when I sewed it onto my Confirmation stole, complete with Greek acronym. But that was another land, and besides, the Spirit is dead.

Anti-war protestor

Civil & human rights activist

Conscientious objector

Signboard of your choice is available upon request.

--Rose (formerly of Tor and Tekserve)

But the slogan itself was so bizarre, ridiculous and wrong that actually promoting it like that would make me feel downright evil.

But it would STILL sell like hotcakes. It would still be wildly popular. It would still make me a million bucks.

I could use a million bucks.

I tell you, it was one of the few times where sheer greed has tempted me to do something I would know to be wrong. But moral integrity finally triumphed.

Oh, the slogan? Okay:

JESUS WAS AN AMERICAN

(Ummm, I don't suppose anyone would want to give me a million bucks to NOT promote the slogan?)

(And yes, sometimes I scare myself.)

One could certainly make the same arguments about people who have committed various unpleasant acts while claiming to do so in the name of Christ. However, the appropriate appearance of a Savonarola fish or a Torquemada fish is not clear to me.

Does the designer of this shirt have a wicked sense of irony, or is this just another specimen of how people quote the Bible without bothering to read it?

The dangling bumper comment was not meant in jest.

And I'm not disputing your right to hold an informed view on the matter, it's just... regarding the offensiveness of Lysenko fish: Darwin fish and Lamarck fish are subtle modifications of the Christian fish - symbological modifications which require more than a moment to appreciate.

A Lysenko fish, as I think it should be constructed, would be offensive to Christians the same way that a Mogen David with planks hammered on to form a six-armed clockwise swastika would be offensive to Jews.

Xopher wrote:
Cassandra: My search turned up several people of that name, but not the one in question. Some were spelled with и, others with ы. All, however, used с, not ц...I think if that sound were intended, the transliteration would be Laitsenko or Lytsenko.

Yes--I just added that in as an option. Russian transliteration is quite odd. I know it's standard to substitute "i" for "и" and "y" for "ы"--but in my opinion, anything translated over from Cyrillic into English is always going to lose the different nuances of those two sounds, so whether you use "i" or "y", there's still going to be people who will say it wrong unless they know Russian. (My favorite example of this is the announcers for professional ice skating, who butcher the names of Russian competitors on a regular basis.)

Thanks for finding that it's ы (which is indeed one letter). That's really hard to transliterate...the "y" doesn't get the wonderful "back-of-the-throat" feel and sound that ы really has. Do you know where the accent is?

Useful links if you want your computer to be able to write in Russian:
Standard and Phonetic Russian Keyboard Layouts, and Configuring your omputer to write in Russian. NB: the last site only talks about PCs running various versions of Windows; sorry.

Gah. I'm tired and the words won't come. I want to say something about appreciating the civility of discourse on strongly felt issues here, by comparison with the standard to which much recent discussion in avrious parts of the net has devolved, but am having difficulty finding a formulation that might not read as patronising or as having a rudely low default expectation of civil conversation. The nervous-verbose thing is happening, I should stop now.

Think of the way that the metaphors transfer?

Admittedly, most of the blogs I read are lefty, but it seems most have had outbreaks of especially nasty and semi-literate freeper infestation.

Have others experienced this, or is it just my imagination?

Of course, the name could have been transliterated into Russian as well.

Cassandra -- thanks for the links!

No, it isn't just you. Human behaviour being multiply based as it is, there are number of reasons for this. I think some of them include: increased anxiety and the general all round bad temper this encourages, heightened emotional involvement on whichever side you embrace, the less than stellar examples of our alledged leaders and their press lackeys, and general all round exhaustion in my case.

MKK

Teresa: Don't tell him I threatened to tell someone else to FOAD in another thread, ok?

MKK

Hm. Now I want to translate the rest of the name. Russian names are generally quite fun, they're often suprisingly literal.

The suffix "-enko" often denotes a Ukrainian name, but there are Russian last names of that form, too. BTW, there is a Ukrainian vowel "i" that corresponds to the Russian vowel for "yee" ( printed backwards-N, cursive u), but I think they use the same vowel for the "y" sound in Lysenko (kind of looks like an 6 with an open loop connected to a l).

Now that you know more than you wanted to about the Russian-Ukrainian pronunciation, I wanted to comment on something that no one has mentioned 97 the "hero" chocolate bars. People who are sending care packages to the troops are specifically asked NOT to send chocolate, as it melts too readily in the Iraqi heat!

The orthographic symbol for the 'e' as in 'pet' does indeed indicate the palatalization of the prior consonant, but in fact phonologically it's the presence of the "soft" consonant that conditions the quality of the vowel, not the other way around. I chose to render it with an apostrophe (and sometimes a j), because the 'y' was in use as a vowel.

If you look at the Russian spelling I gave upthread, you'll see that the n is hard, with no mn'akiznak. However, it is somewhat backed (like 'ng'); this is because it's followed by k (a back consonant), not because of palatalization. In fact if it were soft, it would be less backed!

And that final vowel is indeed reduced, but not quite all the way to shwa; my Russian officemate gave it a sound halfway between 'o' like English 'bought' and shwa.

Bruce, I know that feeling. Someone I used to work with went through the same gyrations about ten years ago over the idea of packaging and selling "anti-AIDS soap". She knew it would sell like crazy. She'd just have to live with herself afterward. And when Jim Macdonald and I are hunting scam agents, we periodically observe that we could do a much better job than they're doing, and make more money than either of us is making now.

But it would be wrong.

Emmett, Torquemada and Savonarola fish look just like the standard ΙΧΘΥΣ model, only they've got huge sharp fangs.

Kevin Murphy, Mormons know perfectly well that Jesus wasn't an American.

David, I don't think a Lysenko fish would bother most Christians; first because they wouldn't have any idea what it meant, and second because their fish is an emblem of Christian-ness, not of the man himself.

Chuck, the public discourse has been getting more brutal for some time now. Political hate radio has been the chief polluter, but the nastiness has spread outward from there.

I believe that groups can't have interesting conversations if the incidence of rudeness gets too high, which is why incivility is sternly discouraged here. I'll note that since Patrick reopened his comment threads on a moderated basis, he's been getting a lot more posts to them, and they're not as aggravating.

The Daily Kos, which has enormous message threads, is moderated and kept in line somehow, though I haven't yet figured out what its rules are. I saw that issue come up at one point, when one poster misread another's post as potentially being far more offensive than it was. He didn't immediately flame him for it, but rather asked whether it was meant to be read that way -- good man -- and was reassured by others there that it wasn't, and furthermore that if it had been that offensive, Kos would have dealt with the guy.

Janice, I don't have much to say about Russian and Ukrainian pronunciation, so I'm sitting back and watching with interest. (I swear, I found the BRAMA forum while looking for some other thing entirely.)

I had the same reaction you did to the idea of sending chocolate to troops in the Middle East. For added effect, tuck a nice fresh fish into the package -- they can't get it over there, you know. It's an expression of kindness they'll never forget.

This is an open thread, but I want to explain something.

The trolls have been out in force the past few days and I have been forced to ban several people from the message boards. I want to make clear that the integrity of these message boards is paramount to me. This is a site by a liberal, for liberals, to discuss issues.

I have always welcomed rational, respectful conservatives to the boards, but I have no patience for dittoheads and their ilk. If people on the left get irrational or even lose their temper, I happily look away. If conservatives do, I ban them -- they can take their act to the Free Republic.

I think the quality of the boards speaks for itself. They are the best part of this site. But they are not a bastion of great debate by accident. It takes vigilance, and I will continue to exercise it. I don't apologize for banning anyone.

I can't get Nehemiah Scudder out of my mind, for some reason.

You and me both.

Xopher adds:

Now stop being afraid, and get angry.

All that's necessary for that is to pay attention. (The next step, I'm guessing, is to get organized.)

I'm curiou sto imagine Ayn Rand's reaction if she were alive. She was a brilliant capitalist and would be undoubtedly amused, but disturbed by the religious element as she had a large contempt for religion.

Theresa> Interesting youmention the Daily Kos. Little Green Footballs had soem troll problems a while back, mainly someone sending e-mails trying to crash the site. I wish there was more civility between the political spectrums.

Spekaing of policies, a right-wing humor web-site Scrapple Face has a no-profanity policy on its comments and there is a mix of views there, and one poster called Frenchman strikes me as a possible joke poster :)

It's the fluttering wings that do it, I think.

And after "enjoying" the "poll" -- which turned out to be not at all about the war -- take a peak at the bottom of the page too. The goodies there don't qualify as "religious" or "patriotic" but are funny examples of strange advertising or labeling. The glue gun company could use a proofreader.