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...guess that souls were used as some kind of proxy, i.e., a way of saying that every living human on Russian soil was liable for a certain fee. But intuitive problems inherent in taxing souls are borne out by a more rigorous examination of the action at hand. Merriam-Webster traces tax from Middle English, “to estimate, assess, tax;” to Old French taxer, to Medieval Latin taxare; and finally to Latin, “to feel, estimate, censure, (frequentative of tangere to touch).” The tangibility of assets taxed (as well...
...That's it? No wonder adolescents find the dictionary such a poor source of sex education. It's a small word, but how ungenerous can Mr. Webster be? Isn't sex something unbelievably profound: the very issue upon which the shoulder-perched angel and devil debate, the very act by which all of us were forged and, last but not least, the powerful, enigmatic engines in our collective Freudian and Darwinian (or Confucian and Buddhist) boiler rooms? If there are sex maniacs, after all, what are they getting maniacal about? The two divisions of animals and plants...
...That's a word that Webster might think of using to replace that whole "two divisions" thing...
Former FBI Director William H. Webster, 76, who ran the bureau under Carter and Reagan and the Central Intelligence Agency under Reagan and Bush, has consented to lend a little of his luster to FBI Director Louis Freeh, who is struggling to dispel the taint of the FBI's worst spy scandal. As head of an inquiry into the intelligence disaster, Webster says sympathetically that decades of experience have taught him one thing: "There is no absolutely fail-safe setup that will quickly and immediately identify a good man or woman who goes sour. So our focus will...
...believe that is the only answer. More promising, he says, are smarter computer-security systems that signal senior managers whenever an employee without a true need to know tries to access sensitive case files. "Invariably [double agents] are apt to wander into areas where they don't belong," says Webster. "We may not always recognize them when they belong--but we can when they don't belong." In the old days, he recalls, a librarian would report anyone asking for files that they didn't need to see. Says Webster: "We need to have some kind of electronic librarian. Machines...