For The Archives -- Townships -- March 26, 2025

Locator: 48377ARCHIVES.

Thomas Jefferson and a link to the present.

From my school notes, eighth grade, Central Junior High School ["Junior High"], Williston, ND, my eighth grade teacher, Mr Hoglund (sp?):

A reader is interested in Thomas Jefferson. Of note, from a North Dakota publication:  

Additional information:

• North Dakota Trust Lands

Maybe more later.

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Word of the Day

Remember the shah (monarch) of Iran (Persia)?

Chess.

Checkmate.

Wiki entry.

The term checkmate is, according to the Barnhart Etymological Dictionary, an alteration of the Persian phrase "shāh māt" which means "the King is helpless".

Persian "māt" applies to the king but in Sanskrit "māta", also pronounced "māt", applied to his kingdom "traversed, measured across, and meted out" thoroughly by his opponent; "māta" is the past participle of "mā" verbal root. [Lousy sentence.]

Others maintain that it means "the King is dead", as chess reached Europe via the Arab world, and Arabic māta means "died" or "is dead".

Moghadam traced the etymology of the word mate. It comes from a Persian verb mandan, meaning "to remain" which is cognate with the Latin word maneō and the Greek menō, which means "I remain").

It means "remained" in the sense of "abandoned" and the formal translation is "surprised," in the military sense of "ambushed".

"Shāh" is the Persian word for the monarch. Players would announce "Shāh" when the king was in check. "Māt" is a Persian adjective for "at a loss", "helpless", or "defeated."

So the king is in mate when he is ambushed, at a loss, helpless, defeated, or abandoned to his fate.

In modern Persian, the word mate depicts a person who is frozen, open-mouthed, staring, confused and unresponsive. The words "stupefied" or "stunned" bear close correlation. So a possible alternative would be to interpret mate as "unable to respond."A king being in mate (shah-mat) then means a king is unable to respond, which would correspond to there being no response that a player's king can make to the opponent's final move. This interpretation is much closer to the original intent of the game being not to kill a king but to leave him with no viable response other than surrender, which better matches the origin story detailed in the Shahnameh. In modern parlance, the term checkmate is a metaphor for an irrefutable and strategic victory.

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Bernard Lewis

I haven't heard  of him lately.

Until the March 25, 2025, edition of Victor Davis Hanson. 

See this post. Perhaps one of the best historians ever. A must-read. 

Wrestling: 

• once you have wrestled, everything in life is easy. -- Dan Gable. Wiki entry for Dan Gable.

Over at x: link here.