Maslow's grea t quotation

Laurence Urdang urdang at SBCGLOBAL.NET
Sat Jun 23 12:50:06 UTC 2007


Yes, maslo is Polish for 'butter.'  It is pronounced something like "mass woe": the "l" is so-called "dark," hence pronounced like an English "w"; there is no "w" at the end, for that would make it "mass love," "w" being pronounced (as in most Slavic and some Germanic languages) as "v."  The second vowel is more like "aw" than the "o" in "woe."
  Of course God only knows what happens when the spelling reaches American hands.
  Larry

RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
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Is "Maslow" the Polish word for 'butter'?

In a message dated 5/24/07 1:38:30 PM, goranson at DUKE.EDU writes:


> >> According to the staggeringly informative Yale Book of Quotations, the
> >> quotation is the following:
> >>
> >> It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat=20
> everything
> >> as if it were a nail.
> >>=A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissa=
nce ch. 2
> >> (1966)
> >>
> >> Fred Shapiro
>=20
> Small comments. FWIW, I looked for earlier citations, but found none. The
> sentence (p.15-16) begins "I imagine it is tempting...." I found no=20
> indication
> in the book (acknowledgements, notes, etc.) that he is consciously quoting
> someone earlier. Elsewhere he uses quotation marks relatively frequently.=20
> The
> text above this mentions an automatic car washing machine that is quite
> good at
> that job. "But it could do _only_ that, and everything else that got into=20
> its
> clutches was treated as if it were an automobile to be washed." The senten=
ce
> following our quotation: "In a word, I had either to give up my questions,=
=20
> or
> else to invent new ways of answering them." I heard Maslow speak
> decades ago at
> Brandeis; an estimable man, I think.
>=20
> Stephen Goranson
> http://www.duke.edu/~goranson
>=20
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>=20
>=20




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