“Bonus question of the night (what Chris Culter would call the ‘Person of the Day’ award): Can anyone tell me, without looking it up (don’t cheat, seriously, I want to know), what the word ‘peripatetic’ means?”
— EmilyMuse, 11:24 PM July 4, 2003
See EmilyMuse’s site for my answer. Her reply on July 5: “Person of the Day is you!”
My response:
More Boring Details
of Greek EtymologyThank you for your comment.
From a website on theology:
“By the fourth century B.C, the verbal form of the root stoicheo was used to mean, ‘to be in a line,’ ‘to march in rank and file.’ The New Testament usage of the verb stoicheo retains an element of this usage in the five times that it is used.* The general meaning of the noun form (stoicheion) was ‘what belongs to a series.’ “
*For instance, “If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk (stoichomen) by the Spirit,” Galatians 5:25.
These remarks, together with my July 5 entry “Elements,” which contains the (implied) Eagles’ verse “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969,” suggest that not I, but Walter Gropius, should be today’s Person of the Day.
Documentation of my answer to Emily, “walking around,” from the site Aristotle:
“Aristotle’s school, his philosophy, and his followers were called peripatetic, which in Greek means ‘walking around,’ because Aristotle taught walking with his students.”