A Ton of Crap (94 page)

Hindi Vocabulary
The formal vocabulary in Standard Hindi comes from Sanskrit. This is the language used in radio, TV, literature, and public addresses. The language spoken by the people, however, is based on the vernacular of the various regions. This vocabulary is largely influenced by Arabic, Persian, and even English. Vocabulary can be broken down into five categories: Ardhātatsam (words that were borrowed from Sanskrit), Tatsam (words that are spelled the same way in Hindi and Sanskrit), Tadbhav (words derived from Sanskrit but spelled differently), Videshī (words that are borrowed from languages that are not Indo-Aryan), and Deshaj (words that were neither borrowed nor derived from other Indo-Aryan words).

THE HOLOCAUST

Pogroms
Pogroms, or violent attacks on Jewish populations, began in Russia in the 1800s. During the Holocaust, with the increasing resentment toward the Jewish people growing, pogroms began appearing once again. Pogroms were encouraged by the Nazi regime, leading to entire communities killing all of the Jewish people in their towns. Even when the war ended, pogroms still persisted. The most famous postwar pogrom was the Kielce Pogrom of July 4, 1946, in Poland. The surviving Jewish were met with angry mobs and forty-two Jews were killed, and fifty injured.

FAIRYTALES

The Brothers Grimm
Jakob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786, respectively. Intrigued by the Romantic movement occurring in Germany, the two brothers began collecting fairytales in the early 1800s. In 1812, the first volume, consisting of eighty-six stories, was published, and two years later, another volume of seventy stories was published. The stories were told to the brothers by peasants and villagers, and the brothers edited these stories and added footnotes to many. The work of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm brought stories like “Cinderella,” “The Frog Prince,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Rapunzel” to the masses, and their work became incredibly popular.

CHAOS THEORY

Strange Attractors
When there is a long-term pattern within a bounded chaotic system, and it is not a simple orbit or periodic oscillation, it is known as a strange attractor. With strange attractors, patterns that are not obvious will appear. The Lorenz Attractor is an example of a system that is nonlinear and dynamic, and it corresponds to the Lorenz oscillator, a three-dimensional system that evolves over a pattern that doesn’t repeat.

GEOLOGIC PERIODS

Cretaceous
The Cretaceous period occurred 144 to 65 million years ago. It is the longest period found in the current eon, the Phanerozoic eon. While dinosaurs still thrived, and Pangaea continued to separate, it is during this time that flowering plants and new kinds of birds (which still could not fly) and mammals began to appear, as well as the first lizards and snakes. This period ended with the K-T extinction, one of the largest mass extinctions, in which all of the dinosaurs and large marine reptiles died off.

HINDI

Dialects
There are currently eighteen languages recognized by the Indian Constitution, and each of these languages features a wide array of dialects. There are more than ten variations of Hindi, and the dialects can be divided into two main categories: Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi. Khari Boli, which became the standard language, is a Western Hindi dialect. The dialect spoken in Mumbai (or Bombay), known as Bambaiya Hindi, is a vernacular language that is associated with the poor or young. However, due to Mumbai’s role in the Indian film industry, Bambaiya Hindi appears in many of the films that come from India.

THE HOLOCAUST

The “Final Solution”
In June of 1941, Germany began to enact the “Final Solution.” Mobile killing groups were created, and they gathered up all of the Jews of towns, lined them up, and shot them one by one. By 1942, six death camps, or killing centers, were established near railway lines so that the Jewish people from concentration camps could be easily transported. The Jewish people, who at this point were forced to wear yellow stars on their clothing so they could be identified as Jewish, were gathered up and taken to these death camps, where they would be gassed to death. Around 3.5 million Jewish people were killed in these camps. The largest of these camps was Auschwitz.

FAIRYTALES

Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve was a French author who lived from 1695 to 1755. She is most widely recognized as the author of “Beauty and the Beast,” which was featured in a collection called
La jeune américaine, et les contes marins
(told by an old woman during a long sea voyage), published in 1740. Her story was much longer (a total of 362 pages), and the Beast was much more ferocious. A French aristocrat, Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, took the story and rewrote it, dramatically cutting it down to size and creating the “Beauty and the Beast” that we know today.

CHAOS THEORY

Misconceptions of Chaos Theory
There are several misconceptions related to chaos theory. Chaos theory is not about proving disorder or disproving determinism. Chaos theory is not used to show ordered systems are not possible. While chaos theory shows that slight changes can have dramatic impacts, and that prediction of a state is not possible, chaos theory still states that it is plausible and possible to create a model of a system based on the behavior overall. While systems might be unpredictable, the only way to express this is with representations of a system’s behaviors.

GEOLOGIC PERIODS