Word: englisher
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...English Mathematician Charles Babbage had an idea for a machine that would perform mathematical calculations rapidly and infallibly. This was long before the age of electrical circuitry, so Babbage's plan called for the machine to be executed in brass and steel and powered by a hand crank. If it had been completed, his Difference Engine would have been a magnificent beast, requiring 25,000 parts and weighing about 15 tons. But he ran out of money and patience and had to abandon it unfinished...
Scott Westerfeld, whose Uglies novels are huge best sellers, chose a steampunk setting for his new young-adult series. Leviathan, published in October, tells the story of two teenagers--an Austrian prince and an English girl passing as a boy--in a Europe divided between the Austro-Hungarian Clankers, who are technologists, and the British Darwinists, who are bioengineers. "Leviathan takes place as World War I begins, which is the end of the early era of technological romance," Westerfeld explains. "Those first tanks and other machines of war look almost comical to us now, but to the first soldiers...
...English language is rough on those who are determined to hold on to their money. If your style is to limit your bank withdrawals, get ready to be labeled parsimonious, penny-pinching, miserly, niggardly or cheap: in short, a skinflint. In recent decades, though, there have been fewer and fewer people in those categories. Americans have been more likely to reach for their credit cards, or to scramble to sign new mortgages...
Yang Xianyi's English translation of the Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber is a monumental work still found in libraries and bookstores around the world. What makes his endeavor more remarkable was that it was completed during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when scholars were targeted for their interest in Chinese tradition and foreign learning. Yang, who died Nov. 23 at 94, spent four years in prison at the height of the upheaval, as did his wife Gladys, whom he met while studying at Oxford in the late 1930s...
...couple were devoted to scholarship, not politics. In the early 1950s, Yang declined a prestigious offer to translate Chairman Mao's works into English, "much preferring to translate classical Chinese literature instead," he wrote in his 2002 autobiography, White Tiger. Yang translated works including The Odyssey and Pygmalion into Chinese, and he and his wife collaborated on rendering selections from Sima Qian's Records of the Historian and stories by the 20th century writer Lu Xun into English...