Word of the Day : of noxious stench from atmospheric pollution _________ The word mephitic has appeared in four articles on nytimes.
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On Caustic, burly vocalist and guitarist Ethan McCarthy rages against racism, corruption, structural inequality, and depression in his imposing roar, laying down juddering, noise-soaked riffs for the rhythm section—drummer Joe Linden and bassist Jonathan Campos—provide mephitic fuel for the blast furnace.
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Founded by Lord Ashdown and other like-minded public figures (including Martha Lane Fox, an internet entrepreneur), it takes its name from a phrase in the maiden parliamentary speech given by Jo Cox, the Labour MP whose murder in the mephitic final days of the referendum campaign brought thousands out on the streets in protest at the darkly divisive atmosphere.
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More than that, perhaps the worst thing, was a sort of mephitic fog, moistureless and invisible, that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself.
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The sites often seem to have been chosen because the presence of naturally occurring mephitic vapors was thought to indicate an opening to the underworld.Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, "Reconstructing Change: Ideology and the Eleusinian Mysteries," in Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient World (Routledge, 1997), p. 137; Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, 2006, 2nd ed.), p. 505.
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The discovery of nitrogen is attributed to the Scottish physician Daniel Rutherford in 1772, who called it noxious air.Rutherford, Daniel (1772) "Dissertatio Inauguralis de aere fixo, aut mephitico" (Inaugural dissertation on the air [called] fixed or mephitic), M.D. dissertation, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. English translation: Though he did not recognise it as an entirely different chemical substance, he clearly distinguished it from Joseph Black's "fixed air", or carbon dioxide.Aaron J. Ihde, The Development of Modern Chemistry, New York 1964.
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The museum continues to add to its growing collection. In recent years acquisitions have included a version of Edward Hicks's (1780–1849) famed The Peaceable Kingdom. Notably, this painting, which Hicks gave to his daughter, remained with Hicks's descendants for many years. The portraits Increase Child Bosworth and Abigail Munro Bosworth by Sheldon Peck (1797–1868), Pickman's Mephitic Models by Paul Laffoley (1935–2016), Plantation Life by Clemmentine Hunter (1886/87–1988), and Heavenly Children by William Matthew Prior (1806–1873).
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Writing for The Daily Telegraph, Jane Shilling wrote... > Self writes here with an adroit impersonation of coarse exuberance that > makes The Butt as readable as a blokeish airport novel (though with a > fuddlingly large vocabulary). But just beneath the brash surface shimmer the > unmistakable apparitions of Self’s masters: Swift, Voltaire and Lewis > Carroll are all partly responsible for the ingenious, mephitic invention > that is The Butt. Michael Bywater, writing for The Independent wrote... > Hard to enumerate what Self has sodded up here, right? Australia. Aboriginal > councils.
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Joseph Priestley, in Observations on different kinds of air, was one of the first people to describe air as being composed of different states of matter, and not as one element. Priestley elaborated on the notions of fixed air (CO2), mephitic air and inflammable air to include "inflammable nitrous air," "vitriolic acid air," "alkaline air" and "dephlogisticated air". Priestley also described the process of respiration in terms of phlogiston theory. Priestley also established a process for treating scurvy and other ailments using fixed air in his Directions for impregnating water with fixed air.
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The etymology of the name Mefitis is controversial but according to the Italian linguist Alberto Manco the system of the epithets that identified the goddess from place to place would prove her relationship with a water-based dimension.Alberto Manco, "Mefītis: gli epiteti", AION Linguistica 31/2009, 301-312. In Roman mythology, Mefitis (or Mephitis; Mefite in Italian) was the Minor Goddess of the poisonous gases emitted from the ground in swamps and volcanic vapors. "Mephitic", derived from Mefitis, is now an adjective in the English language meaning "offensive in odour"; "noxious"; and "poisonous".
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The following month at the Beaugency Conference they discussed the Somme Offensive. "For heaven's sake put every ounce you have got of will power into this offensive" he told Maurice Hankey.Journals, Esher to Sir Maurice Hankey, Paris, 3 August 1916 He often travelled to France to leave the "mephitic" atmosphere of the War Office,Esher to Haig, 6 August 1916 on a trip to Liaison Officer, Colonel Sidney Clive at Chantilly. He learnt first hand the French government's scheme for a "Greater Syria" to include British controlled Palestine.
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Claudia Quinta is described as a sanctissima femina (most virtuous woman) and Cato the Younger as a sanctus civis (a morally upright citizen).Huguette Fugier, Recherches sur l'expression du sacré dans la langue latine, Archives des sciences sociales des religions, 1964, Volume 17, Issue 17, p.180 Servius glosses Amsancti valles (Aeneid 7.565) as loci amsancti, id est omni parte sancti ("amsancti valleys: amsancti places, that is, sanctus here in the sense of secluded, protected by a fence, on every side"). The Oxford Latin Dictionary, however, identifies Ampsanctus in this instance and in Cicero, De divinatione 1.79 as a proper noun referring to a valley and lake in Samnium regarded as an entrance to the Underworld because of its mephitic air.
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The hall was especially popular in the city's underworld, not only in the Bowery but throughout Manhattan, and was referred to by James William Buel in Mysteries and Miseries of America's Great Cities (1883) as "an eating cancer on the body municipal, and within its crime begrimed walls have been enacted so many villainies, that the world has wondered why the wrath of vengeance did not consume it. But with all its festering and mephitic odors and criminalities, together with its votaries of Jezebel and Nana Sahib, the proprietor prospered and waxed rich. His rat and dog pits were known far and wide, and nowhere could the molochs and thugs find such delectable divertissement as Burns' pits afforded".Buel, James William.
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Among other works, he wrote Observaciones meteorológicas [Weather observations] (1769), Observación del paso de Venus por el disco del Sol [Observation of the passage of Venus by the disc of the Sun] (1770), Modelo y descripción de los hornos de Almadén [Model and description of the furnaces of Almadén], notes, additions and maps for the Historia Antigua de México [Ancient History of Mexico], written by Francisco Javier Clavijero, and a Mapa de la América del Norte [Map of North America]. Astronomy, physics, meteorology, antiquities, and metallurgy, were among the topics on which he wrote, but he also devoted serious attention to certain industries. Thus the growing of silk in Mexico was the subject of several of his papers. He wrote a dissertation on the use of ammonia in combating mephitic gases in abandoned mines, and also prepared maps of New Spain (Mexico).
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