Plural Word For Quotes

Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decides this? Does algebra move you to tears? Can plural possessives express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!

What, I wondered, did he mean by “society”? The plural of human beings? Where was the substance of this thing called “society”? I had spent my whole life thinkng that society must certainly be something powerful, harsh and severe, but to hear Horiki talk made the words “Don’t you mean yourself?” come to the tip of my tongue. But I held the words back, reluctant to anger him. ‘Society won’t stand for it.’ ‘It’s not society. You’re the one who won’t stand for it - right?’ ‘If you do such a thing society will make you suffer for it’ ‘It’s not society. It’s you, isn’t it?’ ‘Before you know it, you’ll be ostracized by society.’ ‘It’s not society. You’re going to do the ostracizing, aren’t you?’ Words, words of every kind went flitting through my head. “Know thy particular fearsomeness, thy knavery, cunning and witchcraft!” What I said, however, as I wiped the perspiration from my face with a handkerchief was merely, “You’ve put me in a cold sweat!” I smiled. From then on, however, I came to hold, almost as a philosophical conviction, the belief: What is society but an individual?

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities.

Odd choice of a word, isn’t it? Fish is either singular, or plural. Imagine my surprise when I walked in the study and found not one fish in a tiny fish bowl, but an entire aquarium.” She practically vibrated for the need to fight. “Otto was lonely and you were practicing animal cruelty. He was too isolated. Now, he has friends and a place to swim.” “Yes, nice little tunnels and rocks and algae to play hide and seek with his buddies.

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s’s from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with “That’s not unusual.” But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, “It be’s like that sometimes.

Let no one reduce to tears or reproach This statement of the mastery of God, Who, with magnificent irony, gave Me at once both books and night Of this city of books He pronounced rulers These lightless eyes, who can only Peruse in libraries of dreams The insensible paragraphs that yield With every new dawn. Vainly does the day Lavish on them its infinite books, Arduous as the arduous manuscripts Which at Alexandria did perish. Of hunger and thirst (a Greek story tells us) Dies a king amidst fountains and gardens; I aimlessly weary at the confines Of this tall and deep blind library. Encyclopedias, atlases, the East And the West, centuries, dynasties Symbols, cosmos and cosmogonies Do walls proffer, but pointlessly. Slow in my shadow, I the hollow shade Explore with my indecisive cane; To think I had imagined Paradise In the form of such a library. Something, certainly not termed Fate, rules on such things; Another had received in blurry Afternoons both books and shadow. Wandering through these slow corridors I often feel with a vague and sacred dread That I am another, the dead one, who must Have trodden the same steps at the same time. Which of the two is now writing this poem Of a plural I and of a single shadow? How important is the word that names me If the anathema is one and indivisible? Groussac or Borges, I see this darling World deform and extinguish To a pale, uncertain ash Resembling sleep and oblivion

I began to wonder why I felt like I had to choose one thing over another. I was all of these things. I was a plurality. And I was one thing, one word. I was who I said I was. I had said to Professor Slotten: I'm Phuc. I circled back to my name, the only Phuc I had ever met and the only noun I had for who I was.

Step back, I’m about to hit the CAPS LOCK key. DO NOT EVER ATTEMPT TO USE AN APOSTROPHE TO PLURALIZE A WORD. “NOT EVER” AS IN “NEVER.” You may reapproach.

Should 'sleep' be plural? No, sleep is an idea, like love, no s. So many decisions in a single simple sentence. Exhausting, this elaborate dance of words.

ABSTRACT THOUGHTS in a blue room; Nominative, genitive, etative, accusative one, accusative two, ablative, partitive, illative, instructive, abessive, adessive, inessive, essive, allative, translative, comitative. Sixteen cases of the Finnish noun. Odd, some languages get by with only singular and plural. The American Indian languages even failed to distinguish number. Except Sioux, in which there was a plural only for animate objects. The blue room was round and warm and smooth. No way to say warm in French. There was only hot and tepid If there's no word for it, how do you think about it? And, if there isn't the proper form, you don't have the how even if you have the words. Imagine, in Spanish having to assign a sex to every object: dog, table, tree, can-opener. Imagine, in Hungarian, not being able to assign a sex to anything: he, she, it all the same word. Thou art my friend, but you are my king; thus the distinctions of Elizabeth the First's English. But with some oriental languages, which all but dispense with gender and number, you are my friend, you are my parent, and YOU are my priest, and YOU are my king, and YOU are my servant, and YOU are my servant whom I'm going to fire tomorrow if YOU don't watch it, and YOU are my king whose policies I totally disagree with and have sawdust in YOUR head instead of brains, YOUR highness, and YOU may be my friend, but I'm still gonna smack YOU up side the head if YOU ever say that to me again; And who the hell are you anyway . . .?

En la memoria de Polonio la palabra nadien se había clavado, insólita, singular, como si fuese la suma de un número infinito de significaciones. Nadien, este plural triste. De nadie era la culpa, del destino, de la vida, de la pinche suerte, de nadien.

And here’s an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule:   Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”   This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.

The way grief takes many forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way the word haystack never conjures up the same image twice. The way we assume all tears taste the same. The way our sadness is plural, but grief is singular.

It's ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have got to be twenty-eight years old and about whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, up five flights of stairs, these thoughts on a gray Paris afternoon: Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple? Yes, it is possible. ...Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would at least have been something, with an incredibly dull slipcover, so that it looks like living-room furniture during the summer vacation? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because he was alien and died? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that one believed one has to make up for everything that happened before one was born? Is it possible one would have to remind every single person that he arose from all earlier people so that he would know it, and not let himself be talked out of it by the others, who see it differently? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that all these people know very precisely a past that never was? Is it possible that everything real is nothing to them; that their life takes its course, connected to nothing, like a clock in an empty room? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that one knows nothing about girls, who are nevertheless alive? Is it possible that one says "the women", "the children", "the boys", and doesn't suspect (in spite of all one's education doesn't suspect) that for the longest time these words have no longer had a plural, but only innumerable singulars? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and think it is something they have in common? Just look at two schoolboys: one buys himself a knife, and the same day his neighbor buys one just like it. And after a week they show each other their knives and it turns out that they bear only the remotest resemblance to each other-so differently have they developed in different hands (Well, the mother of one of them says, if you boys always have to wear everything out right away). Ah, so: is it possible to believe that one could have a God without using him? Yes, it is possible. But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility-then for heaven's sake something has to happen. The first person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed; even if he is just anyone, not the most suitable person: there is simply no one else there. This young, irrelevant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit himself down five flights up and write, day and night, he will just have to write, and that will be that.

The word for one in Deuteronomy 6:4 is echad and is a compound unity, a collective sense. It implies plurality in unity, like in “one cluster of grapes.

Pluralism is the word society employs during the transition from one orthodoxy to another.

If you replace the letter "s" with the letter "x," you can make a lot of plural words naughty. For example, "fences" would become "fencex," and I'd say good fencex makes good neighbors.

Gently I pointed out that it should be “sheep,” and though he was so tired that he could hardly keep his eyes open, he launched into an interrogation as to why the singular should be the same as the plural and wanted to know all the other English words which had this peculiarity.

Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone. The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word 'fate' used ten times and the word 'friendship' twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word 'Paris' was said seven times, 'Madrid', eight. The word 'love' was spoken twice, once by each man. The word 'horror' was spoken six times and the word 'happiness' once (by Espinoza). The word 'solution' was said twelve times. The word 'solipsism' once (Pelletier). The word 'euphemism' ten times. The word 'category', in the singular and plural, nine times. The word 'structuralism' once (Pelletier). The term 'American literature' three times. The word 'dinner' or 'eating' or 'breakfast' or 'sandwich' nineteen times. The word 'eyes' or 'hands' or 'hair' fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves of whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the windows and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

In other words: what we call history is the specific form in which the cycles of nature are acted out in man-made form. A quote from Goethe comes to mind as particularly illustrative: ‘Colour is a law of nature in relation with the sense of sight.’[2] By analogy we might say with Spengler that culture is a law of nature in relation with human minds (the plural is an important qualification here).

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn't matter much if we started dropping the s from our plurals. Lots of words get along without it anyway, and in most cases context would be enough to indicate number. Even the distinction between singular and plural verb forms is just as much a polite convention as an essential element of meaning. But the structures, things like passives and prepositional phrases, constitute, among other things, an implicit system of moral philosophy, a view of the world and its presumed meanings, and their misuse therefore often betrays an attitude or value that the user might like to disavow.

The Hebrew word translated here as “God” is “elohim” and elohim is plural, so the first verse of the Bible should actually read:   “In the beginning gods created the heaven and the earth.”   This is no small thing. The difference between God, capital G, and gods, small g, is the difference between monotheism and polytheism.

She hardly cared. They wanted her. They knew her through and through; they knew her fragility and her plurality. And they still wanted her. They had stolen her in order to rescue her. After all her drifting, their straight line. After all her guilt and concealment, their acceptance. After all her words, their action, their abstemiousness, their clear-eyed zeal, their authenticity, their true allegiance, to fill the emptiness that had yawned and screamed inside her like a bored demon ever since she could remember.

It wasn’t that big a deal.” Raziel sat up. He stared hard at Keira until she had no choice but to meet his eyes. He could still see doubt and uncertainty there. “Stop that. If you did what you say you did, you pulled off a hell of a thing. Several hells of things. Or something like that. I’m not sure how to make that plural. The point is...” Raziel had to stop for a moment to figure out what his point was. She was looking at him with curiosity now, the self consciousness somewhat faded. “The point is thank you.” “Thank… you?” “Yeah. You got me away from Alban. You came to help Kusa. You risked your life to keep me and my friends alive. Thank you.” “You… you…” She struggled for words. “You are so weird.

The Egyptian word Pir-em-us meant to them something of great vertical height. From this the Greek form Pyramis, or the plural Pyramides was formed.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The world euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. The the conversation proceeded more smoothly.

From beyond the grave, Hannah says that although living in the world of plurality and natality is no picnic, if we want to avoid Auschwitz or the Gulag or Stonewall or Pol Pot or Attica or ISIS, we as a species have no choice but to embrace it and endure it. In other words, there is no single answer, no single bullet of understanding to guide us, just a glorious neverending mess. The neverending mess of true human freedom.

And every word has at most one inflectional suffix. We never get opensed or opensing, nor do the plural -s and possessive s stack up when several owners own something: the dogs’ blanket, not the dogs’s (dogzez) blanket. Finally,

Transcendental artists are messengers. Their symbolic vocabulary originates from the infinite wisdom of higher spheres, in a non-referential time/space continuum... the way of the shaman. The presence of glyphs speaks a universal language of the soulthat transcends words. If one considers the notion of parallel realities and the plurality of dimensional realms, the premise of art as "consciousness-provoking vessel" can be viewed as an organic and natural occurrence.

I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

More recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. An authoritarian predisposition, one that favors homogeneity and order, can be present without necessarily manifesting itself; its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference, can be silently present too. Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.

Let us, thusly, embrace the assumption that to each advocate of a respective paradigm within his respective bubble, the phenomenological gaps between himself and those in neighboring bubbles are insurmountable. The resident of a given bubble has become so inured to the echoes of his own ‘truth’ as to abandon all terms of commonality with the ‘truths’ of others outside his bubble. The internal terms, concepts, definitions and assumptions underlying each paradigm are different and incommensurate with those of their external counterparts. And so, to debate them would be tantamount to speaking through one another without much mutual understanding. In their communities, they speak different words, abide by different sets of logic, axioms and propositions from those of other communities; they, thusly, do not understand the terminology upholding other paradigms beside their own, and many attempts at translation have become lost in circular discourse for there exists no equivalency of terms. Thus, any gaps between bubbles of paradigm are beyond traversal; all arguments between them remain perplexing and irreconcilable. There, then, evolves, among them, a strong tendency to seek out information that only serves to confirm their own biases, and, in the process, to otherize any alien paradigms as hotbeds of disinformation.

If Samkhya-Yoga philosophy does not explain the reason and origin of the strange partnership between the spirit and experience, at least tries to explain the nature of their association, to define the character of their mutual relations. These are not real relationships, in the true sense of the word, such as exist for example between external objects and perceptions. The true relations imply, in effect, change and plurality, however, here we have some rules essentially opposed to the nature of spirit. “States of consciousness” are only products of prakriti and can have no kind of relation with Spirit the latter, by its very essence, being above all experience. However and for SamPhya and Yoga this is the key to the paradoxical situation the most subtle, most transparent part of mental life, that is, intelligence (buddhi) in its mode of pure luminosity (sattva), has a specific quality that of reflecting Spirit. Comprehension of the external world is possible only by virtue of this reflection of purusha in intelligence. But the Self is not corrupted by this reflection and does not lose its ontological modalities (impassibility, eternity, etc.). The Yoga-sutras (II, 20) say in substance: seeing (drashtri; i.e., purusha) is absolute consciousness (“sight par excellence”) and, while remaining pure, it knows cognitions (it “looks at the ideas that are presented to it”). Vyasa interprets: Spirit is reflected in intelligence (buddhi), but is neither like it nor different from it. It is not like intelligence because intelligence is modified by knowledge of objects, which knowledge is ever-changing whereas purusha commands uninterrupted knowledge, in some sort it is knowledge. On the other hand, purusha is not completely different from buddhi, for, although it is pure, it knows knowledge. Patanjali employs a different image to define the relationship between Spirit and intelligence: just as a flower is reflected in a crystal, intelligence reflects purusha. But only ignorance can attribute to the crystal the qualities of the flower (form, dimensions, colors). When the object (the flower) moves, its image moves in the crystal, though the latter remains motionless. It is an illusion to believe that Spirit is dynamic because mental experience is so. In reality, there is here only an illusory relation (upadhi) owing to a “sympathetic correspondence” (yogyata) between the Self and intelligence.

Is it possible that one knows nothing of girls, who are nonetheless living? Is it possible that one says ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘boys’ without any suspicion (none whatsoever, despite all one's education) that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?

Let us consider an even simpler example of a random variable, the number obtained when you throw just one die. (Pedantic note : this is the singular of the word whose plural is dice. Two dice, one die. Like two mice, one mie.)(Well, two mice, one mouse. Like two hice, one house. Peculiar language, English.)

The word for woman is Gy (pronounced hard, as in Guy); it forms itself into Gy-ei for the plural, but the G becomes soft in the plural like Jy-ei. They have a proverb to the effect that this difference in pronunciation is symbolical, for that the female sex is soft in the concrete, but hard to deal with in the individual.

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality.

In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one’s own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them. The stage is common to all who are alive, but it seems different to each species, different also to each individual specimen. Seeming—the it-seems-to-me, dokei moi—is the mode, perhaps the only possible one, in which an appearing world is acknowledged and perceived. To appear always means to seem to others, and this seeming varies according to the standpoint and the perspective of the spectators. In other words, every appearing thing acquires, by virtue of its appearingness, a kind of disguise that may indeed—but does not have to—hide or disfigure it. Seeming corresponds to the fact that every appearance, its identity notwithstanding, is perceived by a plurality of spectators. The

The Silmarils are Eorclanstánas (also treated as an Old English noun with plural Silmarillas). There are several different forms of this Old English word: eorclan-, eorcnan-, and eorcan- from which is derived the 'Arkenstone' of the Lonely Mountain. The first element may be related to Gothic airkns, 'holy'. With middangeard line 37 cf. my father's note in Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, in A Tolkien Compass, p. 189: 'The sense is ''the inhabited lands of (Elves and) Men'', envisaged as lying between the Western Sea and that of the Far East (only known in the West by rumour). Middle-Earth is a modern alteration of medieval middel-erde from Old English middan-geard'.

The operative word here is 'gifts', plural, meaning not everyone will necessarily have the same combination of gifting that God has ordained for them to utilize in fulfilling their purpose within the Body of Christ. In other words, we all have different gifts and therefore niches within which we fit in The Body of Christ 'universal' ". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

LEM-ON-CHOLY noun (lim-uhn-kol-ee) plural lem-on-chol-ies 1. The habitual state in which one makes the best of a bad situation. … Word Origin & History circa: yesterday, a fabrication of the author’s twisted mind that combines the phrase “if life gives you lemons” with the word melancholy to represent the state of being in which one makes the best of a bad situation.

He says we will graduate knowing how to read and write because we'll spend a million hours learning how to read and write. "Why not spend that time on art: painting, sculpting, charcoal, pastel, oils? Are words or numbers more important than images? Who decided this? Does algebra move you to tears?" (Hands raise, thinking he wants answers.) "Can the plural possessive express the feelings in your heart? If you don't learn art now, you will never learn to breathe!!!

It had also already certain definite forms at the time when the record of those termed comic poets begins. Who it was who supplied it with masks, or prologues, or a plurality of actors and the like, has remained unknown. The invented Fable, or Plot, however, originated in Sicily, with Epicharmus and Phormis; of Athenian poets Crates was the first to drop the Comedy of invective and frame stories of a general and non-personal nature, in other words, Fables or Plots.

Culture is a vulture but there's also vulture culture and cultured vultures and cultured yougurt (cherry, peach, pear, pineapple, grape, vanilla, plain, cherry vanilla, pineapple orage, cranberry, orange, mandarin orange, coffee, apricot, raspberry, blueberry, boysenberry, prune). And speaking of vulture culture there's counter-culture and under-the-counter culture, too. But whether you call it kulchur with a k and a ch and without the e it's still the same thing and you can't disguise it with pretty frills and a gallon of dog sweat. It still has two syllables and TWO-SYLLABLE WORDS SUCK so you can just forgetit, man. It's no fun at all and even fun wouldn't be fun if it was called funjure or funion or funching. But somehow fucking is still loads of fun even though there's that extra 3-letter cluster of vowels and consonants. Proof positive that there are exceptions everywhere you look. But don't look too hard, you might get eyestrain.

HUSAM There is a way of passing away from the personal, a dying that makes one plural. A gnat lights in buttermilk to become nourishment for many. Your soul is like that, Husam. Hundreds of thousands of impressions from the invisible world are eagerly wanting to come through you! I get dizzy with the abundance. When life is this dear, it means the source is pulling us. Freshness comes from there. We're given the gift of continuously dying and being resurrected, ocean within ocean. The body's death now to me is like going to sleep. No fear of drowning, I'm in another water. Stones don't dissolve in rain. This is the end of the fifth book of the Masnavi. With constellations in the night sky, some look up and point. Others can be guided by the arrangements: the Sagittarian bow piercing enemies, the Water Jar soaking fruit trees, the Bull plowing and sowing its truth, the Lion tearing darkness open to red satin. Use these words to change. Be kind and honest, and harmful poisons will turn sweet inside you.

In other words, the Reformers only recovered the priesthood of the believer (singular). They reminded us that every Christian has individual and immediate access to God. As wonderful as that is, they did not recover the priesthood of all believers (collective plural). This is the blessed truth that every Christian is part of a clan that shares God’s Word one with another. (It was the Anabaptists who recovered this practice. Regrettably, this recovery was one of the reasons why Protestant and Catholic swords were red with Anabaptist blood.)

We need a new lodestar, a new map of the world that once again includes a distant, uncharted continent – “Utopia.” By this I don’t mean the rigid blueprints that utopian fanatics try to shove down our throats with their theocracies or their five-year plans – they only subordinate real people to fervent dreams. Consider this: The word utopia means both “good place” and “no place.” What we need are alternative horizons that spark the imagination. And I do mean horizons in the plural; conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy, after all.

When each precedes the noun or pronoun to which it refers, the verb should be singular: ‘Each of us was …’. When it follows the noun or pronoun, the verb should be plural: ‘We each were …’. Each not only influences the number of the verb, it also influences the number of later nouns and pronouns. In simpler terms, if each precedes the verb, subsequent nouns and pronouns should be plural (e.g., ‘They each are subject to sentences of five years’), but if each follows the verb, the subsequent nouns and pronouns should be singular (‘They are each subject to a sentence of five years’).

And then there are colors. The truth is that the brain knows far less about colors than one might suppose. It sees more or less clearly what the eyes show it, but when it comes to converting what it has seen into knowledge, it often suffers from one might call difficulties in orientation. Thanks to the unconscious confidence of a lifetime's experience, it unhesitatingly utters the names of the colors it calls elementary and complementary, but it immediately lost, perplexed and uncertain when it tries to formulate words that might serve as labels or explanatory markers for the things that verge on the ineffable, that border on the incommunicable, for the still nascent color which, with the eyes' other bemused approval and complicity, the hands and fingers are in the process of inventing and which will probably never even have its own name. Or perhaps it already does -- a name known only to the hands, because they mixed the paint as if they were dismantling the constituent parts of a note of music, because they became smeared with the color and kept the stain deep inside the dermis, and because only with the invisible knowledge of the fingers will one ever be able to paint the infinite fabric of dreams. Trusting in what the eyes believe they have seen, the brain-in-the-head states that, depending on conditions of light and shade, on the presence or absence of wind, on whether it is wet or dry, the beach is white or yellow or olden or gray or purple or any other shade in between, but then along comes the fingers and, with a gesture of gathering in, as if harvesting a wheat field, they pluck from the ground all the colors of the world. What seemed unique was plural, what is plural will become more so. It is equally true, though, that in the exultant flash of a single tone or shade, or in its musical modulation, all the other tones and shades are also present and alive, both the tones or shades of colors that have already been name, as well as those awaiting names, just as an apparently smooth, flat surface can both conceal and display the traces of everything ever experience in the history of the world. All archaeology of matter is an archaeology of humanity. What this clay hides and shows is the passage of a being through time and space, the marks left by fingers, the scratches left by fingernails, the ashes and the charred logs of burned-out bonfires, our bones and those of others, the endlessly bifurcating paths disappearing off into the distance and merging with each other. This grain on the surface is a memory, this depression the mark left by a recumbent body. The brain asked a question and made a request, the hand answered and acted.

Saudade is presented as the key feeling of the Portuguese soul. The word comes from the Latin plural solitates, “solitudes,” but its derivation was influenced by the idea and sonority of the Latin salvus, “in good health,” “safe.” A long tradition that goes back to the origins of Lusophone language, to the thirteenth-century cantiga d’amigo, has repeatedly explored, in literature and philosophy, the special feeling of a people that has always looked beyond its transatlantic horizons. Drawn from a genuine suffering of the soul, saudade became, for philosophical speculation, particularly suitable for expressing the relationship of the human condition to temporality, finitude, and the infinite.

It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Christ. Unity – interpretive agreement and mutual understanding – is, it would appear, something that only God can accomplish. And accomplish it he does, but not in the way we might have expected. Although onlookers thought that the believers who received the Spirit at Pentecost were babbling (Acts 2:13), in fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages (Acts 2:8-11). Note well: they were all saying the same thing (testifying about Jesus) in different languages. It takes a thousand tongues to say and sing our great Redeemer’s praise. Protestant evangelicalism evidences a Pentecostal plurality: the various Protestant streams testify to Jesus in their own vocabularies, and it takes many languages (i.e. interpretive traditions) to minister the meaning of God’s Word and the fullness of Christ. As the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body of the biblical text. Why else are there four Gospels, but that the one story of Jesus was too rich to be told from one perspective only? Could it be that the various Protestant traditions function similarly as witnesses who testify to the same Jesus from different situations and perspectives?

*To illustrate, humans are in the domain eucarya, in the kingdom animalia, in the phylum chordata, in the subphylum vertebrata, in the class mammalia, in the order primates, in the family hominidae, in the genus homo, in the species sapiens. (The convention, I’m informed, is to italicize genus and species names, but not those of higher divisions.) Some taxonomists employ further subdivisions: tribe, suborder, infraorder, parvorder, and more. †The formal word for a zoological category, such as phylum or genus. The plural is taxa. ‡We are actually getting worse at some matters of hygiene. Dr. Maunder believes that the move toward low-temperature washing machine detergents has encouraged bugs to proliferate. As he puts it: “If you wash lousy clothing at low temperatures, all you get is cleaner lice.

Confident pluralism has a very simple premise, namely, that people have the right to be different, to think differently, to live differently, to worship differently, without fear of reprisal. Confident pluralism operates with the idea that politics has instrumental rather than ultimate value. In other words, politics is a means, not an end. No state, no political party, no leader is God-like, or can demand blind devotion. Any attempt by political actors to create social homogeneity by compelling conformity, by bullying minorities or by punishing dissent, whether in religion or in policy, is anti-liberal and undemocratic. As Australian political leader Tim Wilson writes: ‘A free society does not seek to homogenise belief or conscience but instead, affirms diversity and advocates for tolerance and mutual respect.’43

They pray. To whom? To God. To pray to God, - what is the meaning of these words? Is there an infinite beyond us? Is that infinite there, inherent, permanent; necessarily substantial, since it is infinite; and because, if it lacked matter it would be bounded; necessarily intelligent, since it is infinite, and because, if it lacked intelligence, it would end there? Does this infinite awaken in us the idea of essence, while we can attribute to ourselves only the idea of existence? In other terms, is it not the absolute, of which we are only the relative? At the same time that there is an infinite without us, is there not an infinite within us? Are not these two infinites (what an alarming plural!) superposed, the one upon the other? Is not this second infinite, so to speak, subjacent to the first? Is it not the latter's mirror, reflection, echo, an abyss which is concentric with another abyss? Is this second infinity intelligent also? Does it think? Does it love? Does it will? If these two infinities are intelligent, each of them has a will principle, and there is an "I" in the upper infinity as there is an "I" in the lower infinity. The "I" below is the soul; the "I" on high is God. To place the infinity here below in contact, by the medium of thought, with the infinity on high, is called praying. Let us take nothing from the human mind; to suppress is bad. We must reform and transform. Certain faculties in man are directed towards the Unknown; thought, revery, prayer. The Unknown is an ocean. What is conscience? It is the compass of the Unknown. Thought, revery, prayer, - these are great and mysterious radiations. Let us respect them. Whither go these majestic irradiations of the soul? Into the shadow; that is to say, to the light.

God is found in the collection of Many . . . rather than in the One. “Elohim,” Langdon said suddenly, his eyes flying open again as he made an unexpected connection. “I’m sorry?” Katherine was still gazing down at him. “Elohim,” he repeated. “The Hebrew word for God in the Old Testament! I’ve always wondered about it.” Katherine gave a knowing smile. “Yes. The word is plural.” Exactly! Langdon had never understood why the very first passages of the Bible referred to God as a plural being. Elohim. The Almighty God in Genesis was described not as One . . . but as Many. “God is plural,” Katherine whispered, “because the minds of man are plural.” Langdon’s thoughts were spiraling now . . . dreams, memories, hopes, fears, revelations . . . all swirling above him in the Rotunda dome. As his eyes began to close again, he found himself staring at three words in Latin, painted within the Apotheosis. E PLURIBUS UNUM. “Out of many, one,

The criticism of the Soetoro administration kept rolling, mixing with a broad criticism of liberalism and federal judges. “I am sick of federal judges deciding that the United States Constitution requires abortion and same-sex marriage,” a state senator from Enid said. “I challenge you to read that document from end to end, and if you can find the word ‘abortion’ in it I will kiss your ass tomorrow at high noon on the capitol steps. Ditto gay marriage. What’s next? Plural marriages? Legalizing infanticide? We’re practically there now. I say it’s time we seized control of our own lives here in Oklahoma. Anyone wanting an abortion or to marry a homosexual partner can move to California or New York. We shouldn’t be forced to put up with it, and my constituents don’t want to. The real problem here is federal judges who enshrine their liberal philosophies in federal decisions instead of letting individual states vote their consciences in open, fair elections.

You are the lifemate of a senstive, modern male. Julian's lazy amusement warmed her further, confirming what she already suspected, that he often stayed a shadow in her mind. How fortunate for me. Desari smiled at herself in the mirror. Her dark hair cascaded in waves down her back. There was a sparkle in her eyes. She knew Julian had made her feel more alive than she had ever been. Sensitive, modern men are so to my liking. Men? I am certain I did not hear my lifemate use the word men.The plural.No man is allowed to be to your liking other than myself. He sounded stern, the fierce Carpathian male at his most menacing. Desari laughed aloud. I suppose I can see your point, Julian, but really, it is so difficult to keep from noticing all of those handsome hunks in the audience. Handsome hunks? His voice dropped low with the affront. They are more like lovesick fops. If they could feel the vibrations in the air, they would show sense and run for their lives. It is bad enough to read their fantasies and hear them talk their trash, cara,but it is altogether worse to hear that my woman is looking back. One smile at the wrong man, lifemate, and trouble will find the man quickly. You sound jealous,she accused him, amusement curving her soft mouth. The first rule for all women to know and never forget is that Carpathian makes do not share their lifemates. Your brother has much to answer for that this was not drilled into you since birth.It was his job to prepare you for my coming. It was said somewhere between jest and complaint. Desari drew in her breath sharply, finding herself wavering between laughter and exasperation. My brother had no idea of your existence, you arrogant male. Besides, how could he possibly prepare me for your total ignorance of women? More likely, had he known you were coming to speak your ritual words, he would have been waiting to ambush you.I myself would have burrowed deep within the ground until you passed beyond my surroundings. You would have burst from the ground staight into my arms,cara mia, and you know this to be true. Now he was laughing, that smug, taunting, male amusement that should have set her teeth on edge but instead made her laugh. I think you are trying to find something to dictate to me about just so you do not lose your ability. Go away and practice this male art form on someone else. You will be singing to me tonight, piccola,and to no other man. You are a spoiled little boy,not a grown man. Should I come show you what a grown man I am? His voice was suddenly low and warm, so sexy she felt a rush of answering heat. She could feel the brush of his fingers against her throat, trailing down the valley between her suddenly aching breasts. Go away,Julian, she laughed in answer. I cannot have you getting me hot and bothered just now. As long as I know you re hot and bothered for me, I will do as you request and go back to work. I can only hope.

descriptive grammars, that is, they set out to account for the language we use without necessarily making judgements about its correctness. However, the word ‘grammar’, as we have seen, can be used to indicate what rules exist for combining units together and whether these have been followed correctly. For example, the variety of English I speak has a rule that if you use a number greater than one with a noun, the noun has to be plural (I say ‘three cats’, not ‘three cat’). Books which set out this view of language are prescriptive grammars which aim to tell people how they should speak rather than to describe how they do speak. Prescriptive grammars contain the notion of the ‘correct’ use of language. For example, many people were taught that an English verb in the infinitive form (underlined in the example below) should not be separated from its preceding to. So the introduction to the TV series Star Trek …to boldly go where no man has gone before is criticised on the grounds that to and go should not be

examples of what are called nostos narratives. Nostos is the Greek word for “homecoming”; the plural form of this word, nostoi, was, in fact, the title of a lost epic devoted to the homecomings of the Greek kings and chieftains who fought in the Trojan War. The Odyssey itself is a nostos narrative, one that often digresses from its tale of Odysseus’ twisty voyage back to Ithaca in order to relate, in brief, the nostoi of other characters, as Nestor does here—almost as if it were anxious that those other nostoi stories would not themselves make it safely into the future. In time, this wistful word nostos, rooted so deeply in the Odyssey’s themes, was eventually combined with another word in Greek’s vast vocabulary of pain, algos, to give us an elegantly simple way to talk about the bittersweet feeling we sometimes have for a special kind of troubling longing. Literally this word means “the pain associated with longing for home,” but as we know, “home,” particularly as we get older, can be a time as well as a place. The word is “nostalgia.

We’re all—trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria—pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship. Because life is network, there is no “nature” or “environment,” separate and apart from humans. We are part of the community of life, composed of relationships with “others,” so the human/nature duality that lives near the heart of many philosophies is, from a biological perspective, illusory. We are not, in the words of the folk hymn, wayfaring strangers traveling through this world. Nor are we the estranged creatures of Wordsworth’s lyrical ballads, fallen out of Nature into a “stagnant pool” of artifice where we misshape “the beauteous forms of things.” Our bodies and minds, our “Science and Art,” are as natural and wild as they ever were.

Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved. Ambiguous use of pronouns. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.” Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.” Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.” Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.” The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.” The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.” False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.” Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.” Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.” The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.” Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.” Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.” Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its. Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.

According to Buddhist tradition, the Buddha Gotama is not merely one unique individual who puts in an unprecedented appearance on the stage of human history and then bows out forever. He is, rather, the fulfillment of a primordial archetype, the most recent member of a cosmic “dynasty” of Buddhas constituted by numberless Perfectly Enlightened Ones of the past and sustained by Perfectly Enlightened Ones continuing indefinitely onward into the future. Early Buddhism, even in the archaic root texts of the Nikāyas, already recognizes a plurality of Buddhas who all conform to certain fixed patterns of behavior, the broad outlines of which are described in the opening sections of the Mahāpadāna Sutta (Dīgha Nikāya 14, not represented in the present anthology). The word “Tathāgata,” which the texts use as an epithet for a Buddha, points to this fulfillment of a primordial archetype. The word means both “the one who has come thus” (tath̄ ̄gata), that is, who has come into our midst in the same way that the Buddhas of the past have come; and “the one who has gone thus” (tath̄ gata), that is, who has gone to the ultimate peace, Nibbāna, in the same way that the Buddhas of the past have gone.

Something I'm working on, a possibly helpful spell to cast on yourself in adverse environments... Maybe a self compassion spell that might invite the ancient intelligences in their minute plurality to emerge from the tree line. I am alright in the essenceless stream of becoming I apprehend myself actually dancing with amazing terror while driving the shy and alone animal body itself imagining the breathing maze of dreaming mirrors it dreams itself lost in No one could be expected to do this properly your body in its suchness momentarily in paradise dreaming up all this agonic psychic carnivalia all over again "as the words rain down" like the feathers of birds of paradise that heartbreaking in their naked individuality and that incalculably fine, impossibly necessary to some really friendly abyss you never expected when you were that person sentenced to the futures your bad moods subjugated you to endless hotel hallways the room numbers in no order realizing you will never find yours again and that you must never stop searching laughing like an infant in a bathtub to enjoy the evanescent cartoon pandemonium of awareness while having kinds of relationships We do fine with our sentience for the most part. Thanks anyway. Void yet appearing overthinking sometimes.

I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book. The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose. The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here. I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.

[T]he awakened one, the knowing one, says: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body.” The body is a great wisdom, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd. An instrument of your body is also your small wisdom, my brother, which you call “spirit” — a little instrument and plaything of your great wisdom. “Ego,” you say, and are proud of that word. But the greater thing — in which you are unwilling to believe — is your body with its great wisdom; it says not “ego,” but does it…. …Ever hearkens the Self, and seeks; it compares, masters, conquers, and destroys. It rules, and is also the ego’s ruler. Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage — it is called Self; it dwells in your body, it is your body. There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. And who then knows why your body requires your deepest philosophy? Your Self laughs at your ego, and its proud prancings. “What are these prancings and flights of thought to me?” it says to itself. “A by-way to my purpose. I am the leading-string of the ego, and the prompter of its notions.” The Self says to the ego: “Feel pain!” And thereupon it suffers, and thinks how it may put an end thereto — and for that very purpose it is meant to think. The Self says to the ego: “Feel pleasure!” Thereupon it rejoices, and thinks how it may ofttimes rejoice — and for that very purpose it is meant to think.

With the term vita activa, I propose to designate three fundamental human activities: labor, work, and action. They are fundamental because each corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man. Labor is the activity which corresponds to the biological process of the human body, whose spontaneous growth, metabolism, and eventual decay are bound to the vital necessities produced and fed into the life process by labor. The human condition of labor is life itself. Work is the activity which corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence, which is not imbedded in, and whose mortality is not compensated by, the species’ ever-recurring life cycle. Work provides an “artificial” world of things, distinctly different from all natural surroundings. Within its borders each individual life is housed, while this world itself is meant to outlast and transcend them all. The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life. Thus the language of the Romans, perhaps the most political people we have known, used the words “to live” and “to be among men” (inter homines esse) or “to die” and “to cease to be among men” (inter homines esse desinere) as synonyms.

Americans were deluded, Arendt insisted, if they thought their political institutions were meant to establish a democracy. That was never the intent of the Founding Fathers, who had read the ancient Greeks attentively and worried as much about tyrannical majorities as did German-Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s popular and populist regime. They were kindred spirits. “What men” they were, Arendt exclaimed in breathless admiration of the Founders, and how little understood in modern times, with its ethos of democratic egalitarianism. The recent arrival felt obliged to lecture her native-born countrymen by reminding them about their true history. “It’s a great mistake if you believe that what we have here is democracy, a mistake in which many Americans share. What we have here is republican rule, and the Founding Fathers were most concerned about preserving the rights of minorities.” Such words had an oddly familiar ring at the time, though emanating from a political corner far removed from Arendt and her friends. “A republic, not a democracy” was the rallying cry of the extreme, often loony, reactionaries gathered around the John Birch Society during the 1950s and after. But though Arendt, with her stress on individual freedom, shared language and even long-term worries with the far right, she could never be mistaken for one of them—not with her contempt for bourgeois, money-obsessed self-interest, her support for trade unions, her identification with the weak and vulnerable, her anti-anti-Communism, her determined pluralism, and her praise of immigration as the means by which the United States continually revitalized itself. The “magnificence” of the country, she said, “consists in the fact that from the beginning this new order did not shut itself off from the outside world.” (She also said that the attempt to equate freedom with free enterprise was a “monstrous falsehood.”) In

Still, I think that one of the most fundamental problems is want of discipline. Homes that severely restrict viewing hours, insist on family reading, encourage debate on good books, talk about the quality and the morality of television programs they do see, rarely or never allow children to watch television without an adult being present (in other words, refusing to let the TV become an unpaid nanny), and generally develop a host of other interests, are not likely to be greatly contaminated by the medium, while still enjoying its numerous benefits. But what will produce such families, if not godly parents and the power of the Holy Spirit in and through biblical preaching, teaching, example, and witness? The sad fact is that unless families have a tremendously strong moral base, they will not perceive the dangers in the popular culture; or, if they perceive them, they will not have the stamina to oppose them. There is little point in preachers disgorging all the sad statistics about how many hours of television the average American watches per week, or how many murders a child has witnessed on television by the age of six, or how a teenager has failed to think linearly because of the twenty thousand hours of flickering images he or she has watched, unless the preacher, by the grace of God, is establishing a radically different lifestyle, and serving as a vehicle of grace to enable the people in his congregation to pursue it with determination, joy, and a sense of adventurous, God-pleasing freedom. Meanwhile, the harsh reality is that most Americans, including most of those in our churches, have been so shaped by the popular culture that no thoughtful preacher can afford to ignore the impact. The combination of music and visual presentation, often highly suggestive, is no longer novel. Casual sexual liaisons are everywhere, not least in many of our churches, often with little shame. “Get even” is a common dramatic theme. Strength is commonly confused with lawless brutality. Most advertising titillates our sin of covetousness. This is the air we breathe; this is our culture.

How I Turned a Troubled Company into a Personal Fortune. How to ________ This is a simple, straightforward headline structure that works with any desirable benefit. “How to” are two of the most powerful words you can use in a headline. Examples: How to Collect from Social Security at Any Age. How to Win Friends and Influence People. How to Improve Telemarketers' Productivity — for Just $19.95. Secrets Of ________ The word secrets works well in headlines. Examples: Secrets of a Madison Ave. Maverick — “Contrarian Advertising.” Secrets of Four Champion Golfers. Thousands (Hundreds, Millions) Now ________ Even Though They ________ This is a “plural” version of the very first structure demonstrated in this collection of winning headlines. Examples: Thousands Now Play Even Though They Have “Clumsy Fingers.” Two Million People Owe Their Health to This Idea Even Though They Laughed at It. 138,000 Members of Your Profession Receive a Check from Us Every Month Even Though They Once Threw This Letter into the Wastebasket Warning: ________ Warning is a powerful, attention-getting word and can usually work for a headline tied to any sales letter using a problem-solution copy theme. Examples: Warning: Two-Thirds of the Middle Managers in Your Industry Will Lose Their Jobs in the Next 36 Months. Warning: Your “Corporate Shield” May Be Made of Tissue Paper — 9 Ways You Can Be Held Personally Liable for Your Business's Debts, Losses, or Lawsuits Give Me ________ and I'll ________ This structure simplifies the gist of any sales message: a promise. It truly telegraphs your offer, and if your offer is clear and good, this may be your best strategy. Examples: Give Me 5 Days and I'll Give You a Magnetic Personality. Give Me Just 1 Hour a Day and I'll Have You Speaking French Like “Pierre” in 1 Month. Give Me a Chance to Ask Seven Questions and I'll Prove You Are Wasting a Small Fortune on Your Advertising. ________ ways to ________ This is just the “how to” headline enhanced with an intriguing specific number. Examples: 101 Ways to Increase New Patient Flow. 17 Ways to Slash Your Equipment Maintenance Costs. Many of these example headlines are classics from very successful books, advertisements, sales letters, and brochures, obtained from a number of research sources. Some are from my own sales letters. Some were created for this book.

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

Do you think the United States is currently a united or a divided country? If you are like most people, you would say the United States is divided these days due to the high level of political polarization. You might even say the country is about as divided as it has ever been. America, after all, is now color-coded: red states are Republican; blue states are Democratic. But, in Uncharted, Aiden and Michel note one fascinating data point that reveals just how much more divided the United States once was. The data point is the language people use to talk about the country. Note the words I used in the previous paragraph when I discussed how divided the country is. I wrote, “The United States is divided.” I referred to the United States as a singular noun. This is natural; it is proper grammar and standard usage. I am sure you didn’t even notice. However, Americans didn’t always speak this way. In the early days of the country, Americans referred to the United States using the plural form. For example, John Adams, in his 1799 State of the Union address, referred to “the United States in their treaties with his Britanic Majesty.” If my book were written in 1800, I would have said, “The United States are divided.” This little usage difference has long been a fascination for historians, since it suggests there was a point when America stopped thinking of itself as a collection of states and started thinking of itself as one nation.

The Apostrophe To grant possession to a singular noun, simply add an apostrophe and s: The student’s love of punctuation is boundless. If a plural noun that already ends in s needs to become possessive, slap a single apostrophe on the end of that word:

To write with truth, I’ve been known to slow dance my words over graves of buried prayers, to drink my words under the shadow of my grandfather’s whiskey bottles, to lift my words from under the gaze of my daddy’s gentle eyes. I’ve had to write from the seeding syllables of my gardens, from the ammunition of my ancestors’ battlegrounds, and from the misery of my families’ tattered Bibles. I’ve pulled stories from the soil of my homeplace, from the juice stains of freshly-picked blackberries, and from the bottom of my bare feet. I write with the barbed-wire nouns and plural verbs of my mistakes, with the cast iron consonants and silent sugary vowels of my mother’s kitchen. But in the end, the only thing that matters is that I write.

A word of new information is based upon a strong source, in order to carry a neutral, peaceful and plural interpretation.

What this means in terms of church worshippers is that, in learning to acknowledge and prioritize them in their individuality, too much has been lost of that group identity which Paul recognized as the body of Christ – the ultimate image of individuality-in-plurality. Church worship is not about – or at least not only about – individual Christians and their spontaneous overflows of powerful spiritual feeling. It has an indissolubly corporate aspect; and there have to be physical ways of expressing that in-corporation (or ‘em-bodyment’) not only in corporate singing, but in corporate action, speaking and listening too. And that kind of corporate action depends absolutely on repetition.

Thus despite the best efforts we rebels can mount, God will not be gagged. We invent new ways of gagging God, of silencing him, of marginalizing or dismissing his revelation. But God has spoken, and by his Spirit through the Word still speaks.

I peered hard, trying to make out what was perched, as the realization of the most Gothic and brutal of horrors bound right through my body in an instant once I realized what we were seeing! We were looking at the dead bodies of Ned and Amanda! Hoisted as in byzantine ritual, his eyes shut and body motionless, her body naked and unmolested, her head missing in the night air as a group surrounded them on the ground below! “Oh god!” I said, my voice and body quivering. “My God! They’ve got bodies hanging up in the air!” Harold said as he tried to reconcile what he was looking at before flooring the vehicle and barreling toward the on ramp! Jess stood beside Nathaniel Williams, at the foot of the bodies, laughing wildly! The throws and pitch of her voice penetrating the vehicle, as we passed, as in a chant mocking of the horror that we were witnessing in modern times! Her hair was blowing wildly in the wind and her eyes menaced the shear vice of evil as Nathaniel looked on with curious intent in our charging direction! “They should not get far I would suppose, but we shall see. I do think my better arrangements of decency hope they escape, but then again I’m not decent!” he extolled as he watched the vehicle move out of sight and onto the interstate with Jess laughing and shouting words of irreverence next to him.

Quote of non fiction “I peered hard, trying to make out what was perched, as the realization of the most Gothic and brutal of horrors bound right through my body in an instant once I realized what we were seeing! We were looking at the dead bodies of Ned and Amanda! Hoisted as in byzantine ritual, his eyes shut and body motionless, her body naked and unmolested, her head missing in the night air as a group surrounded them on the ground below! “Oh god!” I said, my voice and body quivering. “My God! They’ve got bodies hanging up in the air!” Harold said as he tried to reconcile what he was looking at before flooring the vehicle and barreling toward the on ramp! Jess stood beside Nathaniel Williams, at the foot of the bodies, laughing wildly! The throws and pitch of her voice penetrating the vehicle, as we passed, as in a chant mocking of the horror that we were witnessing in modern times! Her hair was blowing wildly in the wind and her eyes menaced the shear vice of evil as Nathaniel looked on with curious intent in our charging direction! “They should not get far I would suppose, but we shall see. I do think my better arrangements of decency hope they escape, but then again I’m not decent!” he extolled as he watched the vehicle move out of sight and onto the interstate with Jess laughing and shouting words of irreverence next to him.

Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp – harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept – than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations (see here). Moral and cognitive ambiguities are luxuries we allow ourselves which most of our forebears eschewed. Whether from an historical angle of approach, along which reconstruction is attempted of the thought of the earliest sages we know about, or from an anthropological direction, lined with examples from primitive societies which survived long enough to be scrutinized, early world-pictures seem remarkably systematic, like the ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun. The ambitions these images embody betray the inclusive and comprehensive minds which made them. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnographers’ fieldwork seemed ever to be stumbling on confusedly atomized world-pictures, shared by people who reached for understanding with frenzied clutchings but no overall grasp. This was because anthropologists of the time had a progressive model of human development in mind: animism preceded polytheism, which preceded monotheism; magic preceded religion, which preceded science. Confusion came first and categories, schemes and systems came later. People of the forest saw trees before they inferred wood. Coherence, it was assumed, is constructed late in human history. It now seems that the opposite is true. Coherence-seeking is one of those innate characteristics that make human thought human. No people known to modern anthropology is without it. ‘One of the deepest human desires’, Isaiah Berlin has said, ‘is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience is symmetrically ordered.’ Two kinds of coherence seem to come easily to primitive cosmogonists: they can be called, for convenience, binarism and monism. (For binarism, ‘dualism’ is a traditional name, but this word is now used with so many mutually incompatible meanings that it is less confusing to coin a new term.) Binarism envisages a cosmos regulated by the flow or balance between two conflicting or complementary principles. Monism imagines an indivisibly cohesive universe; the first a twofold, the second an unfolded cosmos. Equilibrium and cohesion are the characteristics of the world in what we take to be its oldest descriptions: equilibrium is the nature of a binarist description, cohesion of a monist one. Truth, for societies which rely on these characterizations for their understanding of the world, is what contributes to equilibrium or participates in cohesion. They

Why do we pray in the plural, 'Give us' [i.e. Lord's Prayer]? Why is it not said, give me? . . . It reproves narrow-spirited men who move within their own sphere only; who look only at themselves, and mind not the case of others; who leave others out of their prayers; if they have daily bread, they care not though others starve; if they are clothed, they care not though others go naked. Christ taught us to pray for others, to say, 'Give us;' but selfish persons are shut up within themselves, as the snail in the shell, and never speak a word in prayer for others.

Unexpectedly charitable treatment is one of the features of the kingdom. Disciples should be those who act charitably and will be treated charitably. It is easy to think, “What is the least I have to do?” or, “I do a lot more than other people” (19:27), or, “Those others did less than I did—why do they get the same treatment?” Such thinking is unworthy of disciples in the kingdom. First and last (Matt. 19:30; 20:16). These words are in the plural, indicating they are not an assessment of an individual. “The last” could be the poor, vulnerable, or self-sacrificing, and “the first” those who are wealthy, privileged, or ambitious. Given Matthew’s emphasis on discipleship, disciples are the ones who are last but will be first, in contrast to those whose priorities make them uncommitted disciples.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier’s call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The word euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves or whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the wind and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and the lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid.

we had it on a cake. Keik. Or more properly, in that relaxed, African Spanish of Cuba, kei. That’s what we called them, keikes, or keiis, in the plural. Not tortas or pasteles, the proper Spanish names. Never, ever, ever did we call a cake a bollo, as in other Spanish-speaking countries. In Cuba bollo had somehow evolved into the swear word for a woman’s

Well-meaning white parents tend not to point out race or bring up racial issues, in the belief that such “color-blind” behavior will lead to nonracist children. The message, channeling Martin Luther King Jr., is that a person’s character counts, not the color of their skin. But black parents regularly discuss race and racial matters with their children. To be color-blind is to willfully ignore the obvious—and fail to see how it affects everyday life, from walking down a store aisle to being pulled over for a traffic stop. Black kids are taught to see the “colorful,” to be aware of race. Sociologists believe that “color-blindness,” as a frame, is actually a significant source of racial discrimination. By suggesting that race all of a sudden should not matter, white people with the best intentions are inadvertently denying the experience of people of color who live with daily discrimination. The frame of absolute color-blindness erases variation and disregards diversity, turning a rainbow into indistinguishable shades of gray. It neglects the reality that people live and vaunts homogeneity, the very opposite of frame pluralism. The alternative frame, “colorfulness” (in the words of sociologists of race), not only acknowledges variation but in so doing highlights the pain, hardships, and tensions that the differences signify, eventually translating them into the diversity that human framing thrives on. The goal of education and socialization is to see the actual differences in our society as both a responsibility and an opportunity.

Thus in the plural use of the word “age” there is an element of optimism, in sharp contrast to its use in the singular, which identifies it with an inevitability, a fate with no future

Actually,” I offered, sliding back across the seat, “I like to see y’all as an efficient and socially conscious way to handle the English language’s lack of a second-person plural pronoun.” The mother raised an eyebrow. I continued, “I could have used the word you to address the two girls, but I wanted to make sure your daughter knew I was including her in the conversation. I could also have said you guys, which has become surprisingly customary in casual conversation, but to my knowledge, neither of these children identifies as male, and I try to avoid using masculine terms to address people who aren’t men, as it ultimately works to promote the sort of linguistic sexism many have been fighting for years. I mean, if neither of these girls is a guy, then surely together they aren’t guys, you know?

Definitions By etymology poly-gamous marriage means “many marriages” (polus, many and gamos, marriage or wedding) and thus the functional meaning of patriarchal marriage in Western civilization has always been “plural marriage with many wives.” In other words, the husband is the polygynous and the wives are monogamous to him. Patriarchal marriage is not group marriage, which has a communal basis, nor polyamory ("many loves"), which consists of multiple sexual relationships

Now, as soon as I wake up, I check my iPhone for the New York Times Spelling Bee, a find-a-word game that is both compelling and maddening (What?! You’re telling me “ottomen” isn’t a word? Then what’s the plural of “ottoman”?!). Before going to sleep, I do Wordle and the Times crossword puzzle.

The use of im at the end of the word signifies plurality.

The doctrine of Non-Identity aims at bringing to light the inter-dependent nature of things; at the same time it demonstrates to us the fact that the concepts we have of things, as well as the categories such as existence/non-existence, unity/plurality, etc. do not faithfully reflect reality and cannot convey it. It shows us that the world of concepts is other than the world of reality in itself. It forewarns us that conceptual knowledge is not the perfect instrument for studying truth; that our words are incapable of expressing the truth about that which concerns ultimate reality.

The Master's practice of different religions and his realisation that there are ‘as many ways as there are religions’ are of great importance to humanity, as they give a solution to the problem posed by religious plurality. Because of the lack of insight into, and appreciation of, the essential teachings of different religions among their followers, conflicts between them and attempts at mutual destruction, either by force or by fraudulent conversions, have bedevilled the history of religions in the past. It is true that many of those conflicts really arose from man's cupidity and spirit of aggrandisement. The religious shibboleths they used were only smokescreens for cunning political and military leaders to hide their real intentions. Still, there was a tendency for one religion to stigmatise another as the work of the devil, and consider its followers as reserved for hell. That helped aggressors to find in religion a means for winning mass support and a sanction for their nefarious activities. The Master's realisation of all religions as leading to the same goal would force all honest religious leaders to eliminate from their theological vocabulary words such as heathen, kaffir, mlechcha, etc., indicative of contempt and disrespect. As a consequence, it would encourage their followers to consider the followers of all other religions as fellow pilgrims to the same destination, even though along different roads from different directions.

Shenanigans’ is an utterly delightful word. It sounds as if it should be of Irish origin, but the word comes from North America where it came into common usage in the early 1850’ s. It is a word which seems to exist only in its plural form; there are no records of singularity, no examples of ‘a shenanigan’.

When God created the earth, He demonstrated His genius simply through His Word. Whatever He spoke came into being. Not only did it come into being, but it was also good. In five days, God had created a spectacular earth with all the nuances and idiosyncrasies necessary for life to be lived out to its fullest. On the sixth day, God spoke forth His crowning achievement—humanity. About humanity, we read that first, “God said” (Genesis 1:26), then, “God created” (Genesis 1:27), and next, “God blessed” (Genesis 1:28). God said it, God created it, and God blessed it. Obviously, this is how God intended it. Because we are about to tread into some delicate territory, I don’t want you to just take my word for it—take His. Also in Genesis 1 we read, “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule’” (Genesis 1:26). On the sixth day, God created man in His own image. Both “male and female” were made in the image of God and given rulership. The plurality of “Let Us” and “Our image” refers to God’s Trinitarian nature, indicating the fullness of function found in the creation of humanity as a reflection of Him. Mankind was uniquely created to mirror God’s rule in the visible, physical world as it exists in the invisible, spiritual realm.

The perfect world is contradictio in adjecto. A perfect world is not a world anymore. A perfect world is a dead world. The perfect world contradicts existence. A perfect world, as a multitude, is impossible. A plurality implies meaning and cannot and should not be perfect. Perfect can only be One, but the perfect One is equal to its opposite, which is nothingness. The world, in its plurality, equals life. “Imperfection” secures meaning and purpose in life. In a perfect world, there would be no purpose and meaning. Perfection is only the goal and not the way or mode of the Universe. By becoming perfect, the world becomes nothing since only nothing is perfect. If the Universe were perfect, it would not be the world as we see it but “God” itself. Evolution (as atheists see it) would not be possible in the perfect world because such a world would already be perfect, which would imply that the highest point of “evolution” had already been achieved. Absolute perfection negates any evolution, except if we imagine retrolution (to coin a word), moving backward.

Quantum entanglement Quantum entanglement is a sign and subtle proof of the Universal Mind securing the oneness or singularity of the “material” world. This way, the ultimate immaterial reality operates within the “material” reality. The laws of physics are at work with maximum speed, yet the information is ever-present and omnipresent simultaneously, which is, in a way, proof of quantum entanglement. Einstein described the phenomenon of quantum entanglement (particle entanglement, when a particle is in two places simultaneously) as the “spooky action at a distance.” He also said: “I don't believe in quantum physics because I believe the Moon is there even if I am not looking at it.” We agree with Einstein that the Moon is there, whether we look at it or not. We also believe that we cannot affect the position of a particle, either if we look at it or not. It appears as a particle when we look at it because we identify and recognize it. When we don't look at it, it is a wave, an illusion. We do not make any impact on it. We also agree with Einstein that a particle has a definite spin before being measured. Einstein has shown that one particle can affect the other if the signal travels between them faster than the speed of light. On the macro level, if we disregard the micro level of a micro level at which the smallest immaterial indivisible “particles” (not yet discovered) may travel faster than the speed of light, the signal traveling between the “particles” may be faster than the speed of light. It may be at any place at any time. Information is not lost because, on a micro-level of a micro-level, there is an "absolute" velocity (of immaterial “substance,” “particles,” information, messages, “thoughts,” and underlying oneness of reality) that secures the “absolute spacetime” even in the world of plurality which the Universe is. This principle is oneness in a plurality (or singularity in diversity). In this way, the original oneness (singularity) of the primordial Universal Mind of the Absolute is saved even in the world as its manifestation. There can be no plurality without oneness (singularity) simultaneously; otherwise, the world would not be possible. Without the underlying oneness, the world would be a mechanical compilation of "dead matter," incapable of producing any logical or sustainable physical system or the world, not to mention biology and life. Without oneness or singularity, the world would be “existence” without existing, equal to nothingness. Quantum entanglement, securing the instantaneous interconnectivity among the unimaginable number of “material” entities, is the underlying force in action, uniting everything in one superbly interconnected and alive organism. Quantum entanglement also manifests “absolute speed” and nonlocality; otherwise, particles would not have instantaneous interconnectivity. The Universal Mind (Primordial Immaterial Force) is the uniting force of everything. In partnership with emptiness, the Universal Mind is the creator of everything and reality as we see it. • A = ∞p (Where p is potential) Absolute is infinite potential. 0 = ∞ • W = P (Where W is the world or U—universe and P is plurality) • A = P+p (Plurality) Any existing world (Universe) is finite. The Absolute Mind is immaterial and limitless, but it is still limited in itself and any particular manifestation (the world) and infinite in its potential. In other words, it can appear at any time, anywhere, as a specific manifestation, and it can go on (appearing and disappearing in the form of universes) forever ad infinitum. This potential of the Absolute (and the Nothing) for infinity (as a never-achievable goal) is the leading cause (source) of uncertainty, which, ultimately, is the source and basis of free will. Without uncertainty, there is no free will. Determinism excludes uncertainty and, therefore, free will.

Upon closer inspection, however, we encounter our first surprise. The Hebrew word that is translated as “god”—ʾĕlōhîm—has a plural ending and could also be translated as “(the) gods.” One god or several gods? The same word may express both the singular and the plural, and only the form of the verb indicates which is intended. This ambiguity may perhaps be intended to prevent us from making a firm decision on one of these possibilities to the exclusion of the other.

Theology God is triune, and the church is plural. Philosophy Groups are foundational for transformation. Practice We offer groups that _____, move people to groups by ______, etc. Theology Christ is the Word incarnate, and the Scripture is His special revelation to us. Philosophy The text must be heralded in all teaching environments. Practice We teach the Word to adults, students, and kids by ____________. Theology God became Man (incarnation) to rescue us. Philosophy We must step into our local context and serve. Practice We serve our local community by __________. Theology Christ redeemed us for His own glory. Corporate worship must celebrate what Christ has done. Philosophy We sing songs that focus on His character and work, not ours. Practice We structure singing in our services by ______________. Theology Christ has made all believers priests. Philosophy All believers are qualified by God to serve the body of believers. Practice We challenge our people to serve in the following ways: ______________.

Not a word about the tiny bones. I wondered why a married woman would avoid the plural form.