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For some reason, I receive a considerable amount of
correspondence with questions. Often the question is along
the lines of Mr. Quillen, when can we expect you remit
this delinquent amount so that we can settle this matter
without further injury to your credit rating?
Most other inquiries are easier to answer, though, and to save time and postage, I'll try to answer them here.
Q. What's this Juneteenth
festival that got our
governor attacked for his insensitivity?
A. Our governor hails from Texas, also the birthplace of Juneteenth. Texas, a slave state, seceded from the Union on Feb. 1, 1861, and then joined the Confederacy.
The Union's Civil War strategy was isolate Texas from the rest of the Confederacy (by getting control of the Mississippi River), rather than to control Texas. So Texas had no invading Union armies for slaves (one third of the state's population) to flee to.
By May of 1865, after the surrenders of Robert E. Lee in Virginia and Joe Johnston in North Carolina, the only functioning Confederate army department was Texas under Gen. Kirby Smith, who formally surrendered on June 2. Later that month, the Yankee occupation army arrived under the command of Gen. Gordon Granger.
Texas historian T.R. Fehrenbach writes that on June 19,
1865, Granger proclaimed that the authority of the
United States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the
Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were
free. This was the historic 'Juneteenth,' afterward
celebrated by Texas Negroes as Emancipation Day.
As to why it is celebrated in Colorado, whose soil has not been under the Lone Star flag since 1850, we have other ethnic celebrations -- Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick's Day come to mind -- so why not?
As to whether Gov. Bill Owens erred by scheduling a conference on youth violence at the same time as Juneteenth, there's so much going these days that everything conflicts with something.
Q. What's the K
stand for in Y2K
?
A. Y2K is short for Year 2000,
and the K
is an abbreviation for kilo,
the somewhat familiar
metric prefix that means 1,000 of something, as in
kilometer
or kilowatt.
It comes from the
Greek word khilioi,
which means, you guessed it,
1,000.
Note that kilometer is abbreviated km
and
kilowatt is kw.
So if we're talking about how
computers handle dates of two kiloyears, doesn't
consistency demand that it be the 2KY problem?
Bytehead jargon is inconsistent in other respects.
Recall that k
is supposed to stand for 1,000, then
note that a kilobyte is not 1,000 bytes, but actually 1,024
bytes.
That's because computers, being binary machines, work internally with powers of 2, and 1,024 is 2 raised to the 10th power. This is close to 1,000, and thus the kilo prefix in the argot of programmers.
I can remember that much, but I can never remember whether a megabyte is a million bytes, a thousand kilobytes, or 1,048,576 (1,024 x 1,024) bytes. The same holds for gigabyte, in theory a billion bytes (although in Britain that's a milliard).
The letter K also stands for a strikeout if you're keeping score in a baseball game and for potassium if you're in a chemistry class. It's almost as versatile as the fanega, which is 2.75 bushels in Argentina and 8.81 acres in Mexico.
Q. Doesn't a U
always have to follow a Q,
especially in a state with Official English? So why allow
an orthographic anomaly like Qwest
Communications
?
A. Our letter Q,
like the alphabet in general,
began with the Phoenicians, who called it qoph
and
used it for a sound not found in English. The Greeks
adopted it, called it qoppa
and used it for the
k
sound. Their kappa
letter also served for
that sound, so qoppa fell out of use.
The Romans picked it up for the k
sound when it
was followed by the u
sound (the Romans didn't have
the u,
though, and used v
, thus the PVBLIC
LIBRARY
in imitation of Roman inscriptions on public
buildings.)
The Anglo-Saxons in Britain rightly decided that Q was a useless letter (my last name probably comes from the Cuillin Mountains of Scotland), but the French re-introduced it after the Norman invasion of 1066, and English has been stuck with it ever since.
In modern English, the u-less Q indicates a
transliteration from Arabic, as in Iraq.
It
represents a guttural sound not found in English, and we
use several representations. I've seen the Libyan leader
as Qaddafi, Kaddaffi, Khaddafi and Gaddafi.
The most useful term along this line is qat,
an
obscure levantine stimulant also rendered qhat, kat and
khat -- good words to know when you're playing
Scrabble.
To finish answering the question, Qwest
is
acceptable in Official English, providing that it is
pronounced properly: not quest
but more like
Gkh-west.
Any more questions?
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