But that was before the Celts got squeezed out to the insular fringes by Julius Caesar and co. Roman revenge, probably. Latin had already squelched the other Italic languages.

But my guess here is that 'Vindebona' is a Roman approximation of some older placename - a kind of topological (uh, *toponymical* is what I mean - the other thing is mathic) 'false friend'.

Ireland is full of placenames whose anglicized versions are misleading, to put it mildly. 'Skull', for instance, is not an Erse Golgotha: it derives from 'scoil', meaning 'school'.

The 'vin' bit might be a river in Celtic. The same prefix occurs in Irish, Welsh and old British names -- 'Avon' is cognate to the Gaelic word for river, abhainn.

So we postulate a Kontinental Kelt name such as "Evan Dezhelbonh*!'*", or De Selby's River. Enter Crismus Bonus and his legion, fails to get his tongue round it, and says "well, at least the wine's good - Vindabona it is, chaps".

Just a theory, ma'am.

There's a very readable play by Brian Friel, called "Translations" - in which characters are assumed to be speaking Irish, English and Latin, and sometimes actually do. It's about the liberties occupying armies take with placenames, in the belief that they're eradicating gibberish and spreading civilization.

You have your own Winnebagoes, Winnipegs, Windigo psychosis and Windy Bagels.

River names seem to last longer than anything else. This is probably because the people living on the banks usually refer to it as 'the river'. It's always the invading tourists who look for meaning.

"Semper Unum Est."

(There's Always One)

Possibly you should bring your unique style to the Wikipedia pages. They could do with more substantial entries on just about every topic.

FACT: In Ontario, "Golden Winnebagos" means big bazoombas.

That "pursued (eaten?) by bear" bit in the Shaggy liner notes has produced some of the most voluminous, and silly, writing in the history of English literary criticism.

This is one of the reasons the field is perhaps best left to the Krauts, such as <August and Wilhelm Schlegel>.

They were stellar on Shagspr.

Instead, people say "shaped like a bagel/ doughnut/ donut", when these are mostly just toroidal.

(1) Two residents of St Louis, about the same age, who travelled to 1930s Germany and, despite their youth, got married to a European.

One was William Seward Burroughs, a moderately wealthy American born in 1914, grandson of the inventor of the adding machine, future author of 'Junkie' and 'Naked Lunch'. After Harvard - vaguely wanting to be a spy or a writer, but having been turned down by the forerunner of the CIA, Bill headed for Europe. He married a woman named Ilse to help her escape the Nazis.

Meanwhile young Regina Wender, from a working class immigrant family in St Louis, exactly a year older than Burroughs, also headed for Berlin, where she met and married one Gerhard Fischer.

Imagine if they'd met ... "A fellow Midwesterner, my God I can't believe it, these Europeans are ghastly, let's get married, darling".

So a slight twist in the historical narrative, and William Burroughs becomes the father of Bobby Fischer?

<"Where did I go wrong, son? I was absent for years, I took drugs of all kinds, turned to boys, killed your mother. You shoulda been an addict like me, son. Instead this chess ... what is chess to take over a man's life?

It seems the New Yorker magazine was criticized for a cover cartoon of Steve Jobs arriving in heaven, and waiting patiently while St Peter fiddled with his iPad/iPod/e-meter.

But, they shrieked, Jobs was a Buddhist, and a Xtian cartoon is worse than racist -- it's *culturally insensitive*.

Utter tosh. To start with, all the Buddhists I know - and I lived with one for ten years, so I know whereof I speak - would be amused by the joke. A primary trait of Buddhists is *not minding*. And the Saint Peter trope isn't really religious: it's a trope, a painted backdrop for jokes.

In any case, objections are somewhat swamped by the fact that the Buddha himself spent 700 years as an official Saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Saint Gautama the Good, patron saint of chess players.

OK, I added the chess bit (it would fit, though). And the Buddha *was* canonized by a medieval pope.

The misunderstanding arose when a Christian visitor to India, around the 8th century AD, heard the story of the Buddha, in which a wealthy young man indulges a few vices, then has an epiphany and travels in search of truth and goodness. And sits under a tree, which is a bit like a cross.

So the enterprising tourist wrote down the story - tweaking some of the more Buddhistic bits to make them reader-friendly - and sent it off to Rome. Where the Pope *loved* it.

"Gautama sanctus est" he said - which loosely translates as "My darling cardinals, this Gautama chap is a godly fellow, the bee's knees, reminds me of Augustine. Exactly what we're looking for in a wog if we want to maximize throughput. I declare him a Saint."

And it was so. For seven hundred years, until somebody figured out the mistake and they struck him off the register.

Vagueness doesn't travel.

Speaking of Romans, can anyone recall the name of the Roman General - around the time Hadrian built his wall - who took a legion to North Wales and killed anyone he could find on the island of Anglesey? Thus ending possibly thousands of years during which the island was the HQ of the Druidic religion? Its Mecca/ Rome/ Jerusalem/ Salt Lake City, but with more rain?

Of course the Guyana mass poisoning was a Great American Tragedy, in which hundreds of godly Americans died to satisfy the perverted ego of an evil wannabe messiah.

*And* an insecticide.

Meanwhile, I've discovered the perfect actor to play the 'mature' Bobby Fischer: Slavoj Zizek, the eccentric Slovenian straggly-bearded philosopher, currently making a movie in which he explains his theories by reenacting scenes from old movies.

I'd like Von Trier to direct, with Bjork as Yoko Ono and Whoopi Goldberg as the Rev Wm Lombardy. And Jean-Luc Picard as Harry Golombek.

It'll be a slow, brooding tale, where the viewer gradually realizes that sheep are a metaphor for chess. Apart from the fact that very few sheep are actually Jewish.

<The chubby one of the Baldwin brothers who played a general in Star Gate SG-1> as Tigran Petrosian.

<Liam Neeson> as Max Euwe

<Steve Buscemi> as Svetozar Gligoric

and

seems to have been deleted for non-relevance in the place where it was, I'm reconstructing it here, where nothing is irrelevant.>

Such a shame - it was a pearl for the forum.

Do note I did not ask about your favorite <football> team. It was a question in response to your note about the people not knowing about opera ;)

I do, of course. But I prefer firefox.

And <dak>'s tabs will be watched over, by a distant descendant of the diode in room 47 who knew you were awake.

We can decimalize GM norms, awarding 0.0001% of a norm for a mediocre performance.

There will be an end to bothersomeness. I guarantee this personally, on my grandmother's motherboard.

Although that would assume there are multiple levels of indifference. Being a bit neutral, neutral or very neutral. Sure, there is a difference between not caring whether Country A or Country B wins the contest for worst name - or not caring if either country exists. But those are different subjects to be neutral about.

<Hopefully the sentience will be reduced for good behavior.>

Oh dear. A slip twixt the brain and keyboard. I'll leave it up as a historical artifact since nothing is irrelevant here, but it needs work. Hmmmmmmmm.

"Typically, the sentience is <reduced> for good behavior."