Round the Sphere Again: Origins

Not So Illogical
Where did the term near miss (two aircraft avoiding a mid-air collision) come from (World Wide Words)?

If you love words and especially word trivia, you’ll want to subscribe to the World Wide Words feed so you don’t miss any of the featured “new words, word histories, the background to words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech” that are posted there.

Not All European
“[H]ow well do you know your favorite cheeses’ backgrounds? In this quiz, we’ll give you a cheese, and you’ll tell us where it originated” (mental_floss Blog). I scored 7/10.

No Conversion Necessary

You thought this was going to be a soteriological post, didn’t you?

Nope, it’s about my outdoor digital thermometer, which registers to -40. It didn’t register anything this morning.

The nice thing about -40 (Yep, -40 is good for something.) is that it requires no conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit. (Thank goodness for spell-check.* My original spellings of both of those were wrong.) Forty below zero is similarly cold in any language.

A woman in a parka and snow pants just trotted by my house. I think she’s trying to get home as soon as possible. And there goes my neighbor, walking home for lunch. She has hoarfrost on the hair that’s peeking out from under her tuque.

It could be worse. At least there’s no ice fog at my place. The sky is bright and clear and beautiful.

I wanted to take a photo from the second story so you could see the mountains, but the door to the upper deck was frozen shut. So I’ve made do with a photo of the backyard from the back door. This is what cold looks like.

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*Did you know that spell-check can be spelled either spell check or spell-check? I know that because my spell-check says spellcheck is wrong.

This Week in Housekeeping

A recently updated Theological Term of the Week:

Trinity

• Added links to two talks by J. I. Packer: The Trinity - Part 1, The Trinity - Part 2 (mp3s). (I recently listened to these and highly recommend them. They are the impetus behind my two recent lists:  Reading Romans 8 As a Trinitarian and Reading Ephesians 1 As a Trinitarian.)
• Updated the links to Wayne Grudem’s Sunday school lessons: The Doctrine of the Trinity: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 (mp3s)
• Added related terms: economic Trinity; ontological Trinity; hypostatic union; person; being.