wow that is actually an insult in Greek “do you have a callus in your brain?= are you stupid?”
Anywhere else?
I got the rest, but what is this?
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Does bourgeois have less of a pejorative meaning in German? A party would never be called the “Bourgeois-Democrats” in the modern Anglophone world, because the word has negative undertones. It reminds me of when there were companies called things like “General Exploitation”.
On a tangential note, I was recently reading about the reign of Emperor Commodus (it’s a wild ride) and came upon this linguistically interesting sentence:
One of the ways he paid for his donatives (imperial handouts) and mass entertainments was to tax the senatorial order, and on many inscriptions, the traditional order of the two nominal powers of the state, the Senate and People (Senatus Populusque Romanus – SPQR) is provocatively reversed (Populus Senatusque…).
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I’m thinking about the mental equivalent of calluses that develop on your hands after rough usage. More about desensitizing over time.
The world series is the American baseball championship. That year the New York Mets defeated Baltimore in what was considered a major upset.
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My mind went to Mundial, and although I don’t always remember details, my mind went “wait, was one in 1969? 
”
Cultural differences. 
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Yeah, the next world cup was played the following year. It was Pele’s last appearance in an international tournament I believe.
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In German there’s the French loan bourgeois in the Marxist sense, which is indeed pejorative. Here, it’s bürgerlich, and when a party talks of “the bürgerlichen values”, they mean economical liberalism and social conservativism, generally the interests of entrepreneurs, employers but also farmers. This specific party here is called Bürgerlich-demokratische Partei. Interestingly, the Popular Party i mentioned, the right-wing nationalists, used to be called Bürger-, Gewerbe-, und Bauernpartei, the party of Bourgeois/burghers, the business, and farmers.
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The trouble with being older is I have too much I could write about. I will stick primarily to national and international news events. The first news I recall was the early days of the Berlin Wall with people shot and hanging from the barbed wire. I was in 3rd grade during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Our classes marched down to the boiler room (with a windowless concrete wall on the outside) and hunkered down in a daily exercise. My father explained it all in some detail (he was associated with the military), and I passed that on to some fellow students, which reassured the hysterics while making the oblivious students nervous. When President Kennedy was assassinated, I was at home with the mumps watching some inane TV show, so I saw the first shocking announcement of the shooting. A minute later my father called my mother from work to tell her. The 1964 Watts riot was also shocking because it seemed unprecedented—most of the country had forgotten the Bonus March riot and the Coal Field War earlier in the century. The Washington DC riot following the assassination of MLK was much more personal, as our father kept me and my brother at home all weekend, with his shotgun and (presumably) his Luger at hand (I didn’t know about the Luger at that time). The Hippie movement is just one long blur, with the Mayday (1970) march on the Pentagon probably the most memorable event for me. As for Viet Nam, too much could be said. One of my cousins and a teammate were wounded there, and I knew people who fled to Canada. I was in the top 100 in the last lottery (draft fodder), but they stopped calling people up.
Throughout the 1960s and early 70s we had Air Raid (Emergency) siren exercises at noon on the first Saturday of every month. When I was young (7 or 8 years old), I used to sprint home in terror about a quarter mile from the woods in which we usually played. Soon I realized the schedule, but wondered, what if they attack on the exercise day—so I kept sprinting home. I sometimes wonder if this is what started me on distance running. This Cold War fear culminated with the North Korean seizure of the USS Pueblo in international waters in January 1968. I learned of it as I entered my “home room” in 8th grade. My home room teacher was also my Social Studies teacher. He told us what had happened as we entered the room, and all our time until the first bell was spent talking about the real prospect of war, which would likely go nuclear. It was actually scarier than the Cuban Missile Crisis, probably because I was older.
I think some happy events should be mentioned, though they probably have less emotional impact and tilt more toward the personal. I fondly remember marveling at Peter Snell and Abebe Bikila in the 1964 Olympics, seeing Bob Beman’s incredible long jump record in 1968, and watching Lasse Viren’s “double double” in the 1970s. On the scientific front, the moon landing had less impact on me than on my contemporaries because of my science fiction reading. However, I was greatly impressed by the first artificial heart (bionic people here we come!) and by the advances in Mayan archeology (discovery of the irrigation system revealed by aerial photography and the tremendous decipherment of Mayan hieroglyphics). One of my treasured memories of the latter is my “private” breakfast with David H. Kelley, one of the primary decipherers. He asked if he could sit at my table for two in a crowded diner, and I said yes. I recognized him and opened the conversation. He was absolutely friendly and eager to discuss epigraphy with a member of the general public. It was a golden experience.
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The landing on the moon, don’t ask me when , I was a child and we watched it home on a brand new black and white TV.
A hungry child with his “balloon” belly, somewhere in Africa. I think that image did stick longer in my head as the twin towers.
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As a child you are more vulnerable to such images, when you grow up (and had your load of human kind atrocities) you got used to it.
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