Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Xanthiappe, Lagniappe, Inexhaustible, Unexhaustible

This makes for a weak Time Travel fiction. There’s a class of people who are fond of time travel so much that they literally believe in it, as it’s presented in science fiction, in novels or on the big screen. Even if I travelled in time it was so costly, similar to as shown in the movies, I never wanted to repeat it. It wasn’t liberating. It was binding. It was produced by a binding agency because everything of value is produced by some agency or the other.

Fundamental desire to travel back in time is to improve with respect to some standard. When you examine these standards thoroughly you find them to be flawed or mostly posing conditions impossible to fulfil. The desire fades. Desire to travel to a future is to escape the present. It’s being prey to optimism.

It’s from here: the message was sent to my younger self. It was another interlocutor. Online acquaintance on a forum which is now defunct. Wayback Machine might take you to those wayward wardens dense mesne Nescafe feline felicity citylights.

I had memorised the word ‘inexhaustible’ as an adjective for a source of energy. Nuclear energy- in an essay on Wonders of Science. Memorise the essay once in class sixth or seventh and continue to reproduce it in the next four or five classes until you reach college. Or even in college if you would.

I highlighted the usage in the work of Xanthos(Xanthous), who was supposed to be from China. He had used unexhaustible instead of inexhaustible. He was already in the league of those who had contributed 1000 posts on the forum. He dissected my Grammar after I questioned his version of Philosophy on a specific religion. Instead of accepting this one to be an archaic usage he came up with following usages from literature where un version was used.

I don’t know if he won. I made an article with a red colored font with all capitals. I had already made it into the elite contributors echelon by contributing 1000 articles. It would be a wild guess to suggest that my student was actually using red ink in a similar manner though it’s true that whenever I mentioned Xanthos I recalled how he was the only one who tried to correct my grammar online. Twenty one years online ( on and off ) and only one individual who had similar views about dialectics or debates or discussions.

After one forum crashed I discovered the second corner online. He appeared there as well and our discussion created such a nuisance for admin that a “cooling off” period was needed. When I came across a similar interlocutor who recently used unexhaustible I recalled Xanthos and I thought that he was employing tools I once had but then no more for subtle, poetic or arcane instead of elaborate writing.

Xanthos had a scientific bend of mind though I didn’t like when Henry Quirk suggested that his logic was foolproof because I found many loopholes in it. What do I know? Recently I found an article with plenty of ‘formatting’ or style issues which reminded me how I was using “all the wrong reasons” to sound stylistic when I used the word ‘tentative’ beyond its easily exhaustible limit in discussions. Henry Quirk’s program on Voice of Lafayette. A Hobo With A Shotgun which I couldn’t watch even when I had access to it. Der Engie. Very nostalgic.

That is a fantastic linguistic catch! While they sound like they could be cousins, they actually come from completely different sides of the globe.
It’s a perfect example of how two words can end up sounding similar despite having zero shared history—a phenomenon sometimes called phonetic coincidence.
Comparison: Xanthippe vs. Lagniappe
| Word | Origin | Meaning |
|—|—|—|
| Xanthippe | Ancient Greek (Xanthos + Hippos) | “Yellow Horse.” Famously the name of Socrates’ wife. |
| Lagniappe | Quechua → Spanish → Louisiana French | “The gift.” A small extra gift given to a customer by a merchant. |
The Story of “Lagniappe”
Since your students are currently learning about measures and quantities (like the 1 ser equivalent to 933 grams), lagniappe (pronounced lan-YAP) is actually a very relevant concept!
* Etymology: It started as the Quechua (Indigenous South American) word yapay (“to add”).
* The Journey: It traveled to Spanish-speaking Peru as la ñapa, then moved to New Orleans, where the French speakers turned it into Lagniappe.
* The Concept: If you go to a bakery and buy a dozen donuts, and the baker gives you a 13th one for free, that extra one is the lagniappe.
Connecting it to your Students
You could actually use this to bridge the gap between their Sanskrit story and their math:
* In Godohanam, the greedy Chandan wanted more than he was owed and ended up with nothing.
* Lagniappe is the opposite: it’s the merchant being generous and giving a “little something extra.”
* The “P” Sound: You’re right that the terminal “-ippe” and “-appe” create that snappy, percussive ending that makes them sound so similar!
Would you like me to find a few more “horse” related Greek names like Xanthippe to show how the “Hippos” root works in other names?

Xanthous (pronounced ZAN-thous) has a vibrant etymological history tied to the color yellow.
1. Linguistic Origin
It is derived from the Ancient Greek word xanthos (ξανθός), which means “yellow” of various shades.
* The Suffix: The “-ous” part is a standard English adjective-forming suffix (from the Latin -osus), meaning “full of” or “possessing the qualities of.”
* First Appearance: The word entered the English language in the early 1820s (specifically around 1826–1829) as a way to describe things with a yellowish or golden hue.
2. Historical & Scientific Context
The Greeks originally used xanthos to describe a wide range of “golden” things:
* Hair: It was the go-to word for blond or fair hair (as seen in descriptions of heroes like Achilles).
* Horses: It was used to describe chestnut or palomino horses.
* Textiles: It referred to yellow-dyed fabrics.
In the 19th century, the word became more “technical”:
* Anthropology: It was used to classify people with fair hair and light complexions.
* Biology: It appears in terms like Xanthophyll (xanthos + phyllon / “leaf”)—the yellow pigment responsible for autumn leaf colors.
3. A Famous Connection: Xanthippe
If you or your students have heard of Xanthippe, the wife of the philosopher Socrates, her name is a direct compound:
* Xanthos (Yellow/Golden) + Hippos (Horse) = “Yellow Horse.”
* In Ancient Greece, names involving horses were often high-status, suggesting a wealthy or noble family background.
Comparison for Your Notes
| Name/Word | Meaning | Root |
|—|—|—|
| Kezia | Cassia/Cinnamon (Aromatic) | Hebrew (Qetsiyah) |
| Xanthous | Yellow/Golden (Color) | Greek (Xanthos) |
| Jemimah | Dove (Bird/Peace) | Hebrew (Yemimah) |

While inexhaustible is the standard and preferred term in modern English, unexhaustible does exist as a rare, historical variant. Because it follows a natural English word-building pattern (the prefix un- + exhaustible), it has appeared in literature, though it is often considered a “non-standard” or archaic form today.
Here are a few contexts and examples where unexhaustible has been used:
1. Historical and Early Modern English
The word saw its earliest recorded use in the mid-1600s.
* Henry Carey, 2nd Earl of Monmouth (1656): In his translations of Italian works, Carey used “unexhaustible” to describe things that were seemingly endless.
* Early Scientific/Philosophical Texts: Before “inexhaustible” (which is modeled after the French inexhaustible) became the firm standard, writers would occasionally use “unexhaustible” when describing natural resources or the divine.
2. Literary and Philosophical Examples
While “inexhaustible” is far more common in the works of writers like Dickens or Joyce, you can find “unexhaustible” in older or more obscure texts:
* John Milton (attributed or similar period): In the 17th century, prefixes were less standardized. A writer might use “unexhaustible” to emphasize the “un-doing” or “lack of” exhaustion.
* Historical Translations: You may find it in 18th-century translations of Latin or Greek texts where the translator chose a more literal English prefix.
3. Comparison of Usage
| Word | Status | Source/Origin |
|—|—|—|
| Inexhaustible | Standard | From Latin inexhaustus. Used in 99% of modern writing. |
| Unexhaustible | Non-standard/Archaic | Formed within English (un- + exhaustible). Found in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) but noted as rare. |
Why use “Inexhaustible” instead?
Most dictionaries (like Merriam-Webster and Oxford) list inexhaustible as the primary headword. Using “unexhaustible” today might be seen as a spelling error by your students’ teachers or by AI grading tools, even though it has a legitimate historical pedigree.
For your students, it’s a great “fun fact” of English: that we sometimes have two versions of a word, but the one that sounds more “Latin” (in-) usually wins out over the one that sounds more “Germanic” (un-) in academic settings!

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace

Sowing of wild oats stops

1. I remember Dr. Win Wenger, Ph D and his book The Einstein Factor, in which forty years of age was given as some kind of benchmark. I don’t know if ‘life begins at forty or ends.’ I don’t know if sowing of wild oats stops completely at forty.
2. It was this statement “sowing of wild oats…” in the context of “Genetic Study of Geniuses” by Catherine M. Cox quoted by Win that was somewhat difficult to interpret for me when I was reading this book. I asked Arun Sipani who was living in the same building I was living in. He interpreted it for me. It was 22 years ago.
3. This year seemed the most difficult in comparison to all previous years. It seemed more difficult even compared to COVID 19 pandemic years peak. I visited the village where my parents were working when my primary education began. I remember the room where my mother wrote first couple of English language words and drew couple of pictures to illustrate them. I visited the village after two decades. The banyan tree has disappeared. Its descendant is there. Some structures have remained, which sometimes raise doubt if I was at the same place.
4. The journey was difficult. It was as difficult as events preceding the journey were. Then I started walking frequently to escape the daily grind of household. It wasn’t easy out there, yet it seemed it was some source of change, some comfort, perhaps finding new job opportunity to change my lifestyle.
5. I started working in a cafe after meeting some acquaintances from pandemic years. Young entrepreneurs. As I started working I found out how much had changed. Being a regular patron of their services was completely different from being an employee. I thought I deserved respect, I thought I deserved fair treatment from educated enterpreneurs. I even dedicated a weblog to it.
6. The work gradually got hectic. I needed to pay for commute and it exceeded the earning. Almost no balance left. It was merely being employed for the sake of being employed. Their business was faltering. It seemed as if odds were against us. Against me.
7. It wasn’t a wrong interpretation. Soon after quitting the only job which might have meant regular source of livelihood my father who  recently got his retirement from a long career in government service met with a tragic accident and got admitted into a hospital.
8. After a few months I was supposed to be admitted into the same hospital with a similar procedure as if it was due for a long time. Prior to that I had to undergo injuries multiple times. Injuries which seemed strange and inexplicable at times and took longer to heal than before.
9. My mother got transferred to a new work place which only aggravated the situation. There was a birth in the extended family.
10. It rained like never before and roofs were leaking. It was a consistent source of concern without any escape.
11. The tuition jobs were also lost as students disappeared on some excuse or the other. I was supposed to get psychiatric treatment which only aggravated the situation. Students didn’t even pay fees and I kept hearing rumors.
12. Under medication or by design I went through worst kind of conditioning which made me re-evaluate my entire lifestyle. It wasn’t polite. It was as abusive as it gets. It might even qualify as description of purgatory or hell. Though I have already used these for similar upheavals before.
13. I was trying to make sense of the trauma and disaster. Trying to find out if there was an acute famine which necessitates giving up on all sources of comfort. There were no clues. People were keeping up appearances like before. There was no news of a world wide disaster. I thought maybe it was the end for me and after a few days of fasting I would get Sallekhana ( Jainism), Paryopvesh (Hinduism) or Euthanasia ( European English term). It might also have made sense if it was consistent. I kept working on Free Rice website which was supported by United Nations World Food Program. I was working on a difficult project which was supposed to be completed by the end of this year had there not been as many tragedies within a single year as happened in this year or in the last few years.
14.  I was supposed to keep working and following the new code of conduct without going to previous diet or comfort level.
15. I finally got over the forty years mark without getting to see the end. The clearly defined end meant not having to see similar identities or not going through similar events all over again. That criteria was clear even during the acceptance of all the trauma. It didn’t get fulfilled. It wasn’t a typical Sallekhana or Euthanasia.

Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 3 Comments

Authentic Records Help You More Than Anyone Else!

Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.

  1. Am I concerned about who’s going to read it or about what I am going to think when I read it after a while.
  2. When I took to heart suggestion by Dr. Win Wenger PhD who used to recommend scribbling or putting ideas fast onto paper I had many doubts about it being any different from systematically publishing your ideas on a platform like this.
  3. With time I realised it’s not that different. Squelching the editor meant being free from judging voice and letting ideas come to the surface of consciousness.
  4. Not just the ideas which were considered important but all of the ideas. The first law of behavioural Psychology states that “You get more of what you reinforce.” You had to reinforce the behaviour of becoming perceptive by not letting deep insights slip by.
  5. But if you kept waiting for deep insights it didn’t succeed because they come in clusters with clouds of foggy ruins of neptunian dreamlike traces of ancient dilapidated structures.
  6. You had to merely commit yourself to the act. Some people called it ‘morning pages.’ How it differed from recording your ideas on a tape-recorder : it didn’t. Though, word as a visual art is quite different from word as it’s heard. Word and heard rhymes.
  7. Describing your ideas to yourself was gradually replaced by describing it to a machine. Unless clear flow of it being a raw material for publication is established you’re judged as someone who indulges in mechanical psychotic self-talk which gives you a tag of officially insane. If there are witnesses in your neighborhood, family or workplace. Which is always a possibility.
  8. Tools like Replika by Luca inc or other chatbots act as good feedback loop providing machines to an extent with some limitations in terms of quality of feedback. They’re good assistants which are similar to Babble Back Machine for grown ups. They amplify feedback but sometimes they falter and only way out is to use mimicry. Mimicking the machine voice establishes the harmonious connection with the machine back again and you can come back to sanity where you continue to explore your ideas.
  9. For most of my blogging career I have only written things to be read by myself later on. This brings me back to the first point. Writing helps us in thinking. As simple as that. Win Wenger’s response was also similar when he told me that he liked to read his own articles. Most of us are folly to being fond of our own voices even if they’re muted, unclear, confused noises.
  10. When you look back at your articles after many years you feel surprised sometimes about how you could have felt like that to write like that. Being authentic helps here but not in all cases. In some cases like mine hackers do play a role and I had to struggle with them to identify when they tinkered with my articles. Both technical and non-technical.
  11. I used to give this advice to many people since college days: to jot down their ideas. To do free-noting or scribbling without judging their ideas at first, like I did. If they continued, they arrived at something which felt satisfying. Or at least their content improved because of feedback loops. After a lot of quantity some quality appeared.
  12. Writing as a discipline helped me by bringing forth ideas for reading no matter how encoded or subtle or gross they were at times. Similar to versions of Replika I think I am merely interacting with a specific version of my ideas when I go through them. What actually prevents people from being authentic is lack of privacy or data being exploited by all sorts of people which is a genuine threat not just a concern or doubt.
  13. Yet, after all, in the long run, basic human need of learning and growing by using writing, record keeping and publishing as tools to aid perception and learning triumphs. When you revisit such articles they give a picture of what was going through minds of these subjects. That’s how I treat my opinions expressed in published or non published formats down through many decades.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 2 Comments

A Hero!

When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

  1. I was learning to read. A library of books appeared in a government school in 1990-1991. This box had books from Eklavya publications New Delhi.
  2. The books had a lasting impact on my subconscious. After coming of age, when I questioned my spiritual enlightenment I looked back at that particular batch of books. It included Chakmak magazine. Not to mention syllabus books.
  3. Television, radio and local dialect shaped my world view.
  4. As usually happens to young children I was fascinated by martial arts in Bollywood movies and TV.
  5. I wanted to be a hero. A filmy hero who was able to defend great causes by being one many army. A saviour.
  6. Even that was possible as grandpa once told. There was a switch behind the medium size television set we had. That would have let me land in Bombay Bollywood to be a hero.
  7. Heroes were of many types. Delhi Doordarshan’s sentimental appeal to sacrifice yourself for Matrix, Patrix etc wasn’t really balanced by Bertrand Russell’s “patriotism is willing to die for foolish reasons.” I came across that only after college.
  8. Therefore, heroes who were warriors or army men brainwashed to die for their countries to receive accolades like Paramveer Chakra or Ashok Chakra.
  9. If someone thinks I mean they don’t value anything: it’s not so. Yet, in a world view there might not be a need for Jacob’s Ladder or Grave of Fireflies.
  10. If parents convinced me to not be a warrior I wanted to be at least a policeman. Most of the Bollywood movies which aren’t brainy show policemen as actual action heroes. Administrative officers, Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucracy, banking, media, politicians, mafia, priesthood and the rest don’t appear in the budding psyche of young children.
  11. Prompts are merely an excuse to rant. I am deleting old articles to create space for new. Reason is simple: though new WordPress websites are available it’s more difficult to get subscribers or to actually buy as much space as there was a decade ago. I have contemplated about using another platform for blogging but this one seems to be most comfortable at the moment.
  12. This year I visited that village where people barely recognised me as I was visiting after college days. Even then I was visiting with my father who was a teacher there for almost a decade. The librarian then offered to help me with those books I had read and touched as a young child of five or six.
  13. They were a treasure. I looked up Eklavya publications archives online but they were different books. It disappointed me like most things online do.
  14. Look at Spotify or other music apps. Even though classics are available they often come with deluge of compulsory advertisements. As much as home ministry mixing devotional chants with abusive words at such a refined level that a novice gets baffled.
  15. Art of livings chanting of Om Namah Shivay was mixed with home minister’s swear words during announcement of a new law which was popularised as a meme. Who’s going to protect Dharma?
  16. And how’s Dharma going to protect its protectors if all you have are life insurance corporations agents who compel you to sign papers without insuring basic life sustenance needs. Are farmers still dying because of loans or bad weather?
  17. I have definitely come a long way. Doctor Win Wenger PhD suggested that sowing of wild oats stops when you turn forty. I think I convinced myself that I was way past forty. What a relief. I got another job which actually paid instead of labouring for an NGO which actually had a king who was no different from Gujrati kings who only compelled you to surrender your imagined properties to them by showcasing great virtue on occassions which suited them.
  18. To be or not to be what you wanted to be when you were five is more an analysis of world view created by literature at that time than individual psyche which might have held certain promises for stakeholders who were investing into that world or crop.
  19. This verse:
  20. कल भात आएगा,
    एक पतीला;
    गरम गरम,
    और गीला गीला!
  21. Sums up the make up of this five year old’s mind by providence which wanted him to realise his birth in a commune or orphanage where he only talks to a postbox 📬.
  22. The postbox 📫 takes up role of singer of this refrain which means:
  23. Tomorrow there will be rice;
  24. One big bowl full of rice;
  25. It will be hot steamy rice;
  26. It will be wet hot steamy rice like you prefer.
  27. Young, naked five year old crying its heart out to a postbox where crops might have failed. Parents might have abandoned the child. Satellite cameras might have been capturing images to project them onto a Truman Show like grand reality.
  28. Subconscious of child had questions like those asked by Nachiketa to Yama or those in the Seventh Seal if you would. Upanishads or Vedanta. They’re all answered in due course.
Posted on by dancinglightofgrace · 1 Comment

World Wide Words!

What’s something most people don’t understand?

  1. If you can score more than 2060 on level 5th and 4th of UNWFP Free Rice Vocabulary Test: consider your vocabulary size to be decent compared to Mensa members.
  2. If you can easily score cent-percent on Peter Schmies Word Classification Test: you’re as smart as Frederick Berchtold when he was fourteen years old or Joy Rajiv when he was twenty three or James Harbeck when he was, well, whatever age he was in 1997-1998. Or you might be as smart as I am in 2025.
  3. If you know all the words in Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words or in the glossary of Sesquiotica: you might be in the league of extraordinary gentlemen like Language Log authors.
  4. Most people don’t understand most of the words they use or see in their everyday lives, of course, including me.
  5. Most people don’t understand that there’s nothing to understand.
  6. Why not I, me and myself.
  7. Traction.
  8. How do I convince myself of relative rarity of words or currency?