Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

A business traveller in Istanbul may pop by the kuafor for a hair­cut ahead of a randevu with a client, board a vapur (steamship) to beat the afternoon trafik and finish the day relaxing in a sezlong on her hotel teras.

The Gregorian calendar has a number of problems. It is based on the birth of Jesus, which is not a universally relevant event; the years before Christ are counted backwards; and there is no year zero: 1BC is followed directly by 1AD.

A famous story tells how, in a previous life, the Buddha took pity on a starving tigress, who might otherwise have had to eat her newborn cubs. He sacrificed himself instead. The agonising ques­tion, however, is whether these brave acts do anybody any good at all.

Alas, just because something is irrational does not mean it will not hap­pen.

The Prophet Muhammad is even said to have shied from entering Damascus, otherwise called al-Fayha, "the fragrant", for fear of entering Paradise twice.

Sherlock Holme's maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.

But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

That wraps the maple syrup of truth in the waffle of propaganda.

There's a simple rule. You say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and you say it again, and then again and again and again and again, and about the time that you're absolutely sick of saying it is about the time that your target audience has heard it for the first time.

Any truth, it is said, passes through three stages: first it is ridiculed, then violently opposed and finally it is taken as self-evident.

A decent man with some liberal instincts and a lot of personal courage was just what the doctor ordered.

This Anonymous, the publishers claim, is someone who has been in the room with Barack Obama, though whether that's the men's room or a ballroom, they are not saying.

There is nothing worse than a know-all who is sometimes right.

Play the players, not the cards, he would say. Watch them from the minute you sit down. Play fast in a slow game, slow in a fast one. Never get out when you're winning. Look for the sucker and, if you can't see one, get up and leave, because the sucker is you.

He wants to sell the family silver.

At the University of Missouri at Columbia a petition drive calls for the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, which has been adorned with sticky notes reading "racist" and "rapist", in a refer­ence to his ownership of slaves, with one of whom he fathered a child.

How could anybody dislike the notion of fairness? Everything is better when it is fair: a share, a fight, a maiden, a game and (for those who think have more fun) hair. Even defeat sounds more attractive when it is fair and square.

There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of po­liteness. The first is a "bald, on-record" approach: "I'm going to shut the window." The second is positive politeness, or a show of re­spect: "I'm going to shut the window, is that OK?' The third is nega­tive politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intru­sion or an inconvenience: "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window." The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at all: "Gosh, it's cold in here."

If you preach absolute moral values, you will be held to absolute moral standards.

This is the land of smiley faces and the "have a nice day" greet­ing — Americans like to be liked.

There is life in the old dog.

Hacking is, nevertheless, a useful reminder of an old adage: if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

But being right and being seen to be right are different things.

Sherlock Holmes once remarked that: "It is my business to know what other people don't know".

Ask people what they think of statistics, or try to use some in an argu­ment, and you will often get the quote attributed to Benjamin Disraeli that lists them alongside lies and damned lies.

Odd that a meaningless phrase can be used so meaningfully by so many people.

The Cyrenaics, or egoistic hedonists v. egoistic hedonists, the Epicureans and universalistic hedonism.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs in one.

Bharat Mata's iconography remained vague. Did she have four arms or ten? Was she accompanied by a lion, or a map of India? And which map at that?