Xah's A Word A Day — the making of belles-lettres

Actually, you rarely see Greek goddesses nude. Only Aphrodite was regularly portrayed nude, the rest had their clothes on, and quite prim and proper mind you! A woman portrayed in art in a state of undress or in a sexually compromising position was generally a hetairai (a high class prostitute), not a proper wife - wives who were to bear citizen children were betrothed in arraigned marriages, kept cloistered and separate from the men, other than family or their husband. And clothed from neck to toe.
(I'm talking about the Athenians here, the Spartans were a bit different about dress and social morals between men and women)
Portrayal of male nudity was quite common, though.

HER: Andrew Carnegie... this is bedrock history 19th century robber-baron un-imaginable wealth

ME: why aren't you a Noble laureate?

HER: every damned American KNOWS this stuff — I am telling you this is bedrock info.

men are all bluster and have no stamina at all I have learned

...He is a homosexual, and he doesn't understand that, either, but strange feelings fill him when the neighborhood drag queen sashays by.

Heilbrun tells of her initial fascination with the idea of writing a biography of a woman ‘simultaneously the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution’ who ‘confronted all the shibboleths of a patriarchal culture.’
...
Indeed, the reader finally realizes that it is Heilbrun who remains fixated on Steinem as ‘the pretty one.’ I counted more than a dozen voyeuristic comments on Steinem as a ‘looker,’ on how paradoxical this was for a feminist, and how nevertheless it gave Steinem confidence and cachet.
...
If we discount collections of articles, the one serious book Steinem has written is Revolution from Within, a best seller that was panned by feminist intellectuals as distracting from sexual politics but even more for its pop psychology and platitudinous self-help nostrums.
...
Steinem posted “Express, don't persuade” on her bulletin board, and Heilbrun seems not to worry that with this Steinem has arrogated to herself an illegitimate license to speak out without having to present arguments.

His last message on this subject was 8/10/04, and I have appended it below. I have been remiss in not answering him, but...

Travis Bickle is a Vietnam veteran who cannot sleep at nights, so he decided to work long shifts at night driving a taxicab. As Travis drives around New York City, his feelings and emotion soon show: he is disgusted and angry at sleaze in the world, he hates pimps, and he is prejudiced against blacks.

“It's all oil,” said Larry Wachtel, senior market analyst at Wachovia Securities. “As oil goes so does the market, and after the inventory figures came out and showed an unexpected rise,” the market was able to rally, he said.

over the three-week investigation, the multi-agency task force fielded 138000 calls and enlisted everything from geographic profilers to Pentagon reconnaissance planes to help catch the quarry. But in the end it was old fashioned gumshoeing—and several helpful hints from the snipers themselves—that brought the arrest.

unwieldy is a close synonym of ungainly. Unwieldy emphasizes the “difficult to handle with” part, while ungainly emphasizes the ugly part.

one could say that penises are unwieldy or ungainly. Likewise vaginas. On the other hand, both can and have been seen to be beautiful by different cultures throughout history. Oftentimes worshipped as a fetish. These copulation organs have been much the subject of art too, from Rodin's phallic Balzac to Georgia O'Keeffe's flowery vulva. The opposite of ungainly is engaging or comely. Whether human genitalia is seen as ugly or beautiful is much to one's upbringing.

Taste, smell, and visual enjoyment are also major contributions to the enjoyment of smoking, in addition to camaraderie with other smokers.

i'm an egoist, not egotist.

The term for words derived from people is called eponym.

The interesting ones are those imbued into the language in usage outside of specialized settings. For example, Freudian, Dickensian, Jeffersonian, Hegelian... are not interesting ones to etymologist, lexicographer, or word buffs like us. Better are: Christian, Buddism, machiavellian, draconian, sadistic, masochist, quixotic.

Nurse! I need 50ccs of Prozac, STAT!

As researchers on aging noted in a position statement this past May, no treatment on the market today has been proved to slow human aging—the buildup of molecular and cellular damage that increases vulnerability to infirmity as we grow older.

Battleship Row was the grouping of eight battleships in port at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese launched the Attack on Pearl Harbor. These ships bore the brunt of the Japanese assault.

The suspect in a rash of thefts of surveillance cameras at local businesses was still at large Thursday, but investigators are pretty sure they know what he looks like. One picture taken by a camera before it was removed shows a man reaching up towards the device.

Darrell Issa, who bankrolled the recall effort and said he would run for governor, abruptly dropped out of the race on August 7 among accusations that he had bankrolled the recall effort solely to get himself into office.

(AP) - Initial shares of Google Inc. were priced late Wednesday at $85, the low end of a range revised downward just hours earlier, somewhat dampening expectations for the most ballyhooed Internet company public stock offering since the dot-com boom went bust. Still, the offering remains one of the biggest and most highly anticipated for an Internet company, surpassing most of the hot issues of the dot-com boom.

“Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinish'd?
Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth?
If springing things be any jot diminish'd,
They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth:
The colt that's back'd and burden'd being young
Loseth his pride and never waxeth strong.

“You hurt my hand with wringing; let us part,
And leave this idle theme, this bootless chat:
Remove your siege from my unyielding heart;
To love's alarms it will not ope the gate:
Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flattery;
For where a heart is hard they make no battery.”

“What! canst thou talk?” quoth she, “hast thou a tongue?
O, would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing!
Thy mermaid's voice hath done me double wrong;
I had my load before, now press'd with bearing:
Melodious discord, heavenly tune harshsounding,
Ear's deep-sweet music, and heart's deep-sore wounding.