Thursday Night
Two of my friends who also have birthdays at the end of May and I had a party at my place last night. It was a typical sort of party. We bought a case of beer and several bottles of wine, made some fruity alcoholic punch, and invited a slew of friends over. I hooked up my iPod to my friend's speakers and - voila - party.Among the hot topics last night: the origin of the word 'democracy'. My friend's teacher insisted to her that the word has a partial Arabic root, with 'cracy' coming from the Arabic word for chairs, 'kuwarsi'. Another hot topic: tarantulas. Recently quite a few of my friends and I have seen quite a few large, fist-sized furry spiders around the Old City. We've wondered if they're tarantulas. They're certainly rather scary, especially when you run across one scampering across a cobblestone street late at night.
We didn't come to any conclusions on either of these topics and the conversation shifted abruptly when a friend got a call from his journalist friend saying there had been an explosion in Mezzeh, a neighborhood in Damascus. We couldn't find any information on Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya (and, over 12 hours later I still haven't seen anything on the tv or internet news). Since there was no moreinformation, though, we went back to drinking and joking. What else do you do?
posted by Travel Chick @ 2:20 AM
2 Comments:
The etymology of democracy is well-known, and Greek (thus Indo-European, not Semitic): demos, 'people', and krat-, 'power', with the substantive suffix -ia. Its use to describe a system of governance dates to the 6th century B.C.E.
The stupid claim about the Arabic origin of the word "democracy" was originally made by the Colonel Qaddafi of Libya, who was crazy about Arabism before deciding to work on uniting Africa.
The explosion yesterday, according to the Syrian TV, was caused by a burning car in a garage near the University campus. There were no casualities.
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