Essay --

How Christianity shaped lives during Medieval times. Late at night when bedtime draws near, we turn off the lamp, shut off our productivity and slumber into quietness. We become productive and energetic again with the sun rise. What happens when the lamp, used here as a metaphor for civilization, does not switch back on and we are forced to live in complete misery and darkness. That is how the Middle Ages can be described. It was a time of darkness, misery and pain and not even the sun could bright the day up. The vast limitations that the church had on society can be blamed for thousands of deaths during that time. In this essay i will discuss the responsibility the church had for an uncountable amount of deaths by leading you through the main occurrences where the church came into play. I will also discuss how different the social groups were affected with the church’s behavior. During the early years of a time so dark, catholicism emerged and started setting, what is known today as ’‘The Middle Ages’’ into motion. As far back as (590) AD, the Catholic church started to dominate Rome, its influence was so strong that in a matter of years, when Roman empires crumbled, it had the whole western world under control. Christianity was more than a religion during that time, it was all they knew. It was their morning, their afternoon and their night, it was all they were allowed to know. The immense authority the church had on the people left them unable to function freely in society, it was as if they were held captive by what seemed moral to them. The church almost served as a tyrant government, they had their own lands, taxes and laws. They say that with power comes money, this was the case with the church, they were gaining in b... ...daily life of every social group, therefore it was beyond influential. But why were they so powerful and dominant? Well because they assured you that your after life was going to be pleasant and that you were going to Heaven instead of Hell. The church gave them hope, they convinced people, especially the peasants that all their hard labor was for good use.The peasants saw Sunday as a bliss, something to look forward to, the two hour sermon offered highly intellectual wordings and made the peasants feel worthy. As a conclusion, we know through literature and art that it is evident and clear that the church had immense power and control over the people . With their political schemes and agriculture authority, they did not only, directly or indirectly, kill hundred of thousands of people but they put the Middle Ages in a frozen time, where no developments occurred.

Benefits of Two Years Mandatory Military Service

With the present constant threat to national security and the many advantages that military service imparts to the individual, I take the position that every able-bodied citizen (male and female) should have a two-year military service. The first advantage of military service is that it pushes a man to develop personal discipline. In American society today, many youths were not able to develop any personal discipline (Armstrong, 2006). People who are undisciplined are usually the cause of trouble and more likely to commit many criminal offenses. That is because, people like them do not know how to take care of themselves and their society. They are lazy and just want to hang out in the streets and having nothing else to do, get themselves into drugs or other illegal activities. They are usually the ones who cannot find jobs or were constantly got fired.   In the end, they became a menace to society.   In reality, parents of this youths often cannot make them reform. Requiring this kind of people to enter military service for two years is the best means   for them to develop personal discipline, whether they like it or not. In military, failure to obey commands or follow rules means facing the corresponding military consequences. As I came from a military family (my dad, mom and step mom and three uncles are working in the military), I can attests that people from this service are well-disciplined individuals. Next, military service helps to â€Å"structure† a youth’s life. Most youths after high school will still be confused or unsure of what career to take in life. The underlying cause may be because they do not know themselves very well yet. They still do not know their strengths, weaknesses and what they really want in life. In short, their life still lacks â€Å"structure† from which to build a foundation. Having no compulsory military service to look forward to, these youths may waste their time with unnecessary experimentations, doing drugs or getting into close intimate relationships resulting to unwanted pregnancies (Armstrong, 2006). Mandatory military service will help these youths think of their options in life. In the military camps and training grounds, they will come to know their weaknesses, fears as well as strengths and the skill how to handle them. Free educational opportunities will also help them to get better acquainted with their interest and provide direction to their civilian life later on. Entering military service includes teaching     combat skills and survival methods (Armstrong, 2006).   The individual will come to know how to protect himself or others in danger. When he become a civilian later on, these skills will be helpful to ward off rapist, gang assaults, and other personal emergencies. He will also develop the skills how to be alert, to be able to detect suspicious activities around him. This is especially helpful in stopping or intercepting terrorist activities that is now constantly threatening the country. The military and the police had always wanted the civilian to cooperate and be on the alert regarding terrorism but most often than not the citizens were not of a much help due their ignorance or incapability. The best benefit of military service are the many lessons it will impart to the individual that may take a longer time to be learned   if he is   not in the military. He will get to have the chance to travel to many places and meet many kinds of people. He will learn independence, courage, self-determination, loyalty, responsibility and attention to details. Many men in history, US presidents specifically, made the right decisions because of the lessons they learned in the frontlines. For example, George Washington as a general knew the seriousness of the threat of British invasion, so that as a President in spite of much opposition to his decision he signed an unpopular treaty that prevented the British from ever successfully invading the country. Andrew Jackson was a major general who fought against the mighty British Army, and when he won, it had given him the courage to face other personal and political foes of his life. And lastly ( although there are still others), John F. Kennedy, as a lieutenant had acquired the ability to pay attention to details and how one slight mistake can cause larger problems .This attitude had helped him   make better decision during the Cuban missile crisis( Kliff, 2008). Many feared that to enlist in military service is to make an     early appointment with death. However, it must be understood that many men, young and old, died outside of military service. Their deaths were often due to lack of personal discipline. In fact, whatever disadvantage a man may think about military service, the advantages outweighs the disadvantages. Take for example the lessons he learned in two years in the frontlines. These briefly learned lessons will guide him throughout the many years of civilian life ahead of him. The conscript will become a better mother or father later on.   Aside from that, if military service is mandatory, the military will benefit because they will have many members who will protect the country and the millions of money originally allocated for recruitment will be channeled for training. The country, on the other hand, will benefit because its citizens will be well disciplined, mature, and able to defend themselves (Armstrong, 2006). References: 1.     Kliff, Sarah.(February 2008).   Lessons From the Front Line.   Newsweek. 151(6). 2. Williams, Armstrong. (June 2006).   Mandatory Military Service will Benefit the US. Newsmax. Retrieved February 14, 2008   

How Places Get Their Names

A  place name is a general term for the proper name of a locality. Also known as a toponym. In 1967, the first United Nations Congress for the Unification of Geographical Names decided that place names in general would be geographical name. This term would be used for all geographical entities. It was also decided that the term for natural locations would be toponym,  and  place name  would be used for locations for human life (Seiji Shibata in  Language Topics: Essays in Honour of Michael Halliday, 1987). These distinctions are commonly ignored. A transfer name is a place name copied from another locality with the same name. New York, for instance, is a transfer name from the city of York in England. Examples and Observations Place names are  . . .  a kind of fossil poetry, but, once affixed to a map, they tend to change rather less, and rather more slowly, than do other kinds of words. Because of this conservative quality, they afford a kind of folk history, a snapshot in time that enables us to read in them a record of important events and to reconstruct something of the culture of the namers at the time they assigned names to the places they saw.(Gregory McNamee,  Grand Canyon Place Names. Johnson Books, 1997)Words From Place Names[T]he process of making a word out of a place-name (a toponym) is  widespread. Tell someone a limerick? Drive in a limousine? Own an alsatian or a labrador? Play badminton or rugby? Run in a marathon? Dance the mazurka? You never quite know where a place-name is going to turn up.(David Crystal,  The Story of English in 100 Words. Profile Books, 2011)Transfer Names in the U.S.Many exotic American  place-names are  derived from transfers of place names, as Athens in Georgia and Euclid in Ohio indicate. The giving of classical place-names to American cities and towns was once fashionable. Many of them occur in the state of New York (e.g., Ithaca).(Zoltan Kovecses,  American English: An Introduction. Broadview, 2000)Presidential Place NamesNaming places was a virtual art form during the nineteenth century, as the westward movement opened up vast territories for settlement and spawned literally thousands of new incorporated places of all sizes.  Befitting the burgeoning  nationalism of the early Republic, American presidents contributed more than their share of place-names as the nation moved west. More than 3 percent of all American place-names, in fact, contain the names of the presidents from Washington to Lincoln.  Today, five presidents dominate  the list of presidential place-names, contributing their names to a total of nearly 1,200 states, counties, townships, cities, and villages across the United States. Lincoln is fourth on the list, behind Washington, Jackson, and Jefferson, and he is followed by Madison.(Kenneth Winkle, The Great Body of the Republic: Abraham Lincoln and the Idea of a Middle West.  The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, ed. by  Andrew R. L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray. Indiana University Press, 2001)American Indian Place Names[In the U.S.,] multitudinous cities, towns, villages, counties, mountains, plateaus, mesas, buttes, hills, lakes, ponds, rivers, streams, bays, and other geographical locations and features have Indian-related place-names. It is estimated that New England alone has 5,000 names derived from Indian languages.The etymology of Indian place-names takes various forms.  Some  place-names are  English spellings of spoken Indian words or word-phrases—the original Indian names for geographical features, altered over the centuries through usage. Others are Indian tribal names. Some are personal names,  after celebrated individuals or even mythic al and fictional characters. Others are named after Indian-related events. Still others are English, French, or Spanish translations of Native concepts or objects.(Carl Waldman and Molly Braun, Atlas of the North American Indian, 3rd ed. Infobase, 2009)Can Do!Sometimes a controversy serves as the basis for a place name. Cando, North Dakota, got its name after county officials proclaimed they could name the town anything they chose. Others in the community did not think that way. In time, the officials got their way and chose to use the combined words can and do in the name, reflective of their claim.(Gerald R. Pitzl,  Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Greenwood, 2004)The Changing Sounds of Place NamesSounds of place names are changed  as languages change, and even when the languages remain the same in an area, the sounds of a place name are in a continual process  of shortening and simplification. Adramyttium, a Roman city, over the centuries changed to Edremit, Turkey, and the Roman colony of Colonia Agrippina became Cologne (or more properly, Koln), Germany. Constantinopolis became Constantinople and eventually Istanbul, Turkey.(Joel F. Mann,  An International Glossary of Place Name Elements. Scarecrow Press, 2005)Definite Articles With Place NamesCertain types of place-names are frequently preceded by the capitalized or lowercased article the:1.  Names of rivers (the Susquehanna, the Nile), mountain ranges (the White Mountains, the Alps), island groups (the Aleutian Islands, the Malay Archipelago), and regions (the Midwest, the Arctic).2.  Place-names that are plural in form  (the Great Plains, The Netherlands).3.  Place-names that are also general vocabulary terms  (the South, the Continent).4. Place-names that are adjective/noun compounds (the Western Hemisphere, the Red Sea).Some place-names fall into more than one of these categories, while others, such The Bronx, the Ukraine, occur with the article for obscure, usually historically-roo ted reasons.(Merriam-Websters Geographical Dictionary, 3rd. ed., 2001)Fossilized Words in British Place Names-[M]ost place names today are what could be called linguistic fossils. Although they originated as living units of speech, coined by our distant ancestors as descriptions of places in terms of their topography, appearance, situation, use, ownership, or other association, most have become, in the course of time, mere labels, no longer possessing a clear linguistic meaning. This is perhaps not surprising when one  considers that most  place names are  a thousand years old or more, and are expressed in vocabulary that may have evolved differently from the equivalent words in the ordinary language, or that may now be completely extinct or obscure.(A.D. Mills,  A Dictionary of British Place-Names, rev. ed. Oxford University Press, 2011)-  The modern form of a name can never be assumed to convey its original meaning without early spellings to confirm it, and indeed many n ames that look equally obvious and easy to interpret prove to have quite unexpected meanings in the light of the evidence of early records. Thus in England the name Easter is the sheep-fold, Slaughter the creek or channel, and Wool the spring or springs.(A.D. Mills, Oxford Dictionary of British Place Names. Oxford University Press, 2003)Names Ending in -chesterMany place names of British origin consist of a Celtic stem to which has been added an English (or other) suffix. There is the large class of names ending in -chester (or -caster, -cester, etc.). Although the majority of names with this termination refer to former Roman towns or military stations, the ending is not directly derived from the Latin word castra, camp, as is sometimes thought, nor was that term used by the Romans for naming purposes, except for one place in Cumberland (Castra Exploratorum, camp or fort of the scouts). Old English ceaster was adapted from the Latin word by the Anglo-Saxons while they were still on the Continent and was used by them in their new homeland to designate former Roman towns. Not every modern ending in -chester belongs to this class.(John Field, Discovering Place-Names: Their Origins and Meanings, 4th ed., rev. by Margaret Gelling. Shire, 2008)Bill Bryson on British Place Names[N]owhere, of course, are the British more gifted than with place names. Of the thirty thousand named places in Britain, a good half of them, I would guess, are notable or arresting in some way. There are villages that seem to hide some ancient and possibly dark secret (Husbands Bosworth, Rime Intrinseca, Whiteladies Aston) and villages that sound like characters from a bad nineteenth-century novel (Bradford Peverell, Compton Valence, Langton Herring, Wootton Fitzpaine). There are villages that sound like fertilizers (Hastigrow), shoe deodorizers (Powfoot), breath fresheners (Minto), dog food (Whelpo), toilet cleansers (Potto, Sanahole, Durno), skin complaints (Whiterashes, Sockburn), and even a Scottish spot remover (Sootywells). There are villages that have an attitude problem (Seething, Mockbeggar, Wrangle) and villages of strange phenomena (Meathop, Wigtwizzle, Blubberhouses). There are villages without number whose very names summon forth an image of lazy summer afternoons and butterflies darting in meadows (Winterbourne Abbas, Weston Lullingfields, Theddlethorpe All Saints, Little Missenden). Above all, there are villages almost without number whose names are just endearingly inane--Prittlewell, Little Rollright, Chew Magna, Titsey, Woodstock Slop, Lickey End, Stragglethorpe, Yonder Bognie, Nether Wallop, and the practically unbeatable Thornton-le-Beans. (Bury me there!)(Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island. William Morrow, 1995) Alternate Spellings: placename, place-name