One of the glories of the English language is its seemingly endless plasticity of style and felicity of phraseology. Among many examples are such usages as "an exaltation of larks", "a pride of lions", “a pod of whales”, or "a gaggle of geese". Experience in a university setting suggests the following:
A byzantine of chancellors.
An evasion of deans.
A timidity of professors.
An opacity of students.
A deviousness of trustees.
From a wider domain, one might add:
A corruption of lobbyists, and
A sty of congressmen.
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Right On! The other aphorismic physicist was Georg Lichtenberg, the only funny German philosopher.
I have to write an obit and some classic quotations surface; Livy writes of Archimedes "Unicus Spectator Caeli Siderumque"(the unique watcher of the sky and the stars)For astronomers there is the classic "Os homini sublime dedit caelumque videri iussit et erectos ad sidera vultus" (Vision sublime he gave to man, bade him to view the sky and raise his face to the stars). When I first found these beautiful lines in the obit of an astronomer its author was not given. I asked two deans, professors of classic languages -- these people are useless -- they didn't know, till a smart Chinese lady googled it for me. It was clearly classic and the God intrigued me because he was, clearly, not the usual one. It was from the finest work of Latin literature, the metamorphoses of Ovid. The God was Prometheus who created animals and men. The animals he created were looking down to Earth but he told men as above. The inference is clear: non-astronomers are animals. ELS
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