Growing beer demand using wild grain bread for the yeast source ⟩ settling permanently allowed increased agriculture ⟩ agriculture necessitated protection from thieves and raids ⟩ establishment of nobility (military) and temples (religion, math, and literacy ⟩ money is invented to facilitate the collection of taxes for protection and public works (yes, government and organized religion started as a parasitic voluntary protection racket) ⟩ life got harder, nourishment got worse, but hey, at least they had beer.
As a fan of both authors I’d just like to point out the quote is from Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
I’ve never really thought about it and I don’t have the vocabulary to describe it, but they have similar humour in the way they look at humans and social interaction.
Likewise in one of the later books they visit “God’s last message to the universe” or something like that and if I recall correctly it’s “Sorry for the inconvenience”
I was listening to the audiobook and had tu de cypher it by writing onto the paper. Almost shat myself laughing when I realize what it said. You will be missed Douglas.
At least per my copy of The Ultimate Hitchhikers’ Guide Complete And Unabridged (a hardcover with all five books plus the short story Young Zaphod Plays It Safe):
The first book, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, starts out with the passage that begins “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.” Later in this passage, you find: “Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe starts with a preface: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.” The beginning of Chapter 1 reads “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I might be one of the very few people under the age of 50 to know THHGttG as a radio play first and a series of books second; All of the above and more in the books comes straight from the radio play, but their places shuffled around.
I would say we disagree with the premise of the question. Mathematics is not a singular noun. It’s a plural. It’s the field of all mathematics. Therefore you preserve the “s” because you abbreviate the singular and re-pluralise it.
So somebody in the UK might (not commonally) say “it’s a math(matic) concept”, but more likely to say “it’s a concept from math(ematic)s” or “it’s a mathematical concept”.
That’s interesting. What about talking about it as a subject or a class? Would you say maths are my favorite subject(s?) in school? Maths are my favorite class?
To the best of my understanding, mathematics isn’t referencing a singular object but is used as an encompassing term to refer to content from multiple schools of mathematics e.g. geometry, statistics, calculus, algebra etc. Or in other words, all the subjects covered in math/maths class! 😊
There’s usually a long explanation for these types of things which most of the time boils down to “because that’s how people have been saying it and it’s become the norm.”
Many linguistical mistakes have been overused to the point of them changing their meaning. Take “decimation”. It used to mean to kill 1 in every 10. Because it sounds cool and has been used in a lot of media, it now mainly means to kill or destroy a large part of something.
The meaning of “siege” has gone from sitting outside a castle or town until everyone starves to just about any kind of military action involving a building. Probably partly because the Iran embassy Siege off the 80s was endlessly represented on TV by footage of the SAS breaking the siege by abseiling through the windows.
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