Говори и пиши как The Eсonomist

A man invents a new game, chess, and presents it to hi ikes it so much that he offers the inventor a reward of his choice. The man asks for one grain of rice for the first square of his chessboard, two for the second, four for the third and so on to 64. The king readily agrees, believing the request to be surprisingly modest. They start counting out the rice, and at first the amounts are tiny. But they keep doubling, and soon the next square already requires the output of a large ricefield. Not long afterwards the king has to concede defeat: even his vast riches are insufficient to provide a mountain of rice the size of Everest. Exponential growth, in other words, looks negligible until it suddenly becomes unmanageable E (18 446 744 073 709 551 616 grains).

Not that The Economist does not occasionally face linguistic problems: a cover story entitled "The meaning of Lula" (see article) in October 2002 resulted in a huge mailbag, not from Brazilians who were impressed at our analysis of the recent election, but from Pakistanis eager to tell us that the meaning of lula in Urdu is penis.

It's the old philosophy of buying straw hats in December.

If Noah took two of every animal on his ark, he must have had dinosaurs. Could dinosaurs have fitted into a boat only 300 cubits (about 135m) long?

Nothing is as good as solitude. The only thing I need to make me perfectly happy is someone to whom I could explain this.

And yet the institution the caliphate had been in decline long before Turk­ish republicans deposed Abdul-Majid II, the last Ottoman sultan and titu­lar caliph, who ended his years in Paris painting and collecting butterflies.

A Bible in a bedside table drawer does not constitute a state es­tablishment of religion.

Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites represent­ing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

Victor Hugo supposedly said, "He who opens a school door closes a prison."

One of the contractors in question is Aker, a listed Norwegian firm no more related to Reliance than Roald Amundsen was to Gandhi.

The world's 1.6 billion Muslims have produced only two Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics. Both moved to the West. In the ninth century Muhammad al-Khwarizmi laid down the prin­ciples of algebra, a word derived from the name of his book, "Kitab al-Jabr".

The sight of a southerner in the Vatican will be as important, in its way, as the arrival of the first black man in the White House.

"Atheisf' has many negative connotations: irreligious, ungodly, un­holy, graceless, sceptic, doubter, and so on. But ask a question about what atheists subscribe to — rationalism, logic, science and positiv­ism — and a majority of people will admit that they adhere to such principles. Then ask an alternative question covering the prevalent aspects of most religions: "Do you subscribe to metaphysics, supersti­tion, bigotry or dogmatism?', and the majority will deny such practice.

The rulers of ancient Rome were ruthlessly pragmatic in matters of re­ligion. When a tribe was subdued and its lands added to the imperial realm, Rome would appropriate the subject-people's gods and add them to an ever-growing pantheon of exotic divinities.

There's something for everybody, which means there's some­thing for everybody to hate.

The Mormon church is probably the best-organised in the world and certainly the most cost-effective. The president and his 12 advisers sit at the top like the board of a multinational. Below them, the church de­pends on a throng of lay volunteers. Church members begin to perform in public at the age of three. They become "deacons" at 12 and are given more demanding jobs as they grow older. The faithful are expected to give 10% of their pre-tax income to the church. No one knows how much money it has, but unofficial estimates are in the billions.

Beast, a clothes shop, makes T-shirts celebrating local speech that are famed city-wide (and sold to homesick Bristolians world­wide). Top-selling shirts proclaim "Gert Lush" (slang for "good"), "Ark at ee" (look at/listen to that) and "Cheers Drive" (used when stepping off a Bristol bus).

Wanted: man of God; good at languages; preferably under 75; extensive pastoral experience; no record of covering up clerical sex abuse, deeply spiritual and, mentally, tough as old boots. It is a lot to ask, but that is the emerging profile of the man many of his fellow-cardinals would like to see replace Benedict XVI as the next pope.

After all, as most of those who have been bitten by the philosophy bug will know, philosophers philosophise mainly because they cannot help it.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound, or a greyhound. The real root of wisdom is this: do not assume, little grasshopper, that your prejudices are correct.