Lord Larehip

That certainly depends on how you choose to look at it, doesn't it? What constitutes a practical use? Philology is quite a useful pastime. You take a word like "electricity" which is derived from the Greek "elecktor" which means "gleaming" or "the beaming sun." That gave birth to the word "electron" which means "amber" because amber, as we know, becomes attractive if we rub it. It's strange because we have appropriated the Greek word for the particles that orbit the nucleus and those are the particles responsible for why amber becomes attractive when we rub it because it strips off electrons giving it a positive charge making it want to grab electrons. So when we put certain objects next to this charged amber, they stick to it electrically because the amber is grabbing their electrons in an effort to neutralize its own charge.

We can deduce a few things from this:

§ We relate electricity with amber. Seems obvious now but it might not have been obvious to you a few seconds ago if you only just learned that the two words mean the same thing.

§ English scholars bygone centuries knew Greek. This is important because we then have to ask what the connection is and how it developed.

§ The Greeks did not have electricity. The reason we know the Greeks did not have electricity was because if they did, we would have used their word for it rather than using their word for "amber."

Another thing that's strange is that Amber is a girl's name just as we have the Amber Alert in the States. It was named after a missing girl whose name was Amber Hagerman. In Greek, Elektra is a female name. You may remember her as the sister of Orestes. Her name was also Amber. Why the word is related to femininity I am not sure of. Perhaps because of the attractive force of amber is like the attractive power women have over men. Others say because amber was used as jewelry and so acquired a female quality. But then again, ladies wear jewelry to be more attractive to men. We even call that kind of attraction "electric" or "magnetic."

That brings up another point: Our knowledge of electricity either invented new words in our vocabulary or modified old ones to be used in new ways. As examples, such words as battery, broadcast, conductor, current, force, magnet, potential, tension, terminal, wire, etc. have all acquired new meanings or never existed before the harnessing of electricity. For example, if someone claims to have found a hitherto unknown letter written by Shakespeare and it mentions high tension existing between himself and another playwright, we would know the letter is a forgery written centuries after Shakespeare's life. In fact, we could pinpoint the date of the letter to be no earlier than the late 19th century. How? Because the term "high tension" came from our experiments with electricity and was originally used to describe the state of the space between two electrically charged bodies, i.e. the field. Only later was it used metaphorically to describe a type of human relation or interaction.

So there are no dead languages. When you break them open, the evolution of our consciousness comes spilling out. Is that a practical use? I think so.

"Doing what little one can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue." ---Charles Darwin

Not knowing or listening to classical music is like not knowing what your ancestry is, where you came from, what is your ethnicity--in short, who you actually are.

The problem is the young. That's where the music market is. If the young don't listen to classical then it will have a hard time surviving. I see classical CDs marketed all kinds of ways. I found one in the kitchen at work called "Mozart for Your Morning Coffee." They had to find a way to put Mozart's music out there in a way that makes it seem relevant to a younger person's life--listening to Mozart just long enough to sit down and have your morning coffee. Even so, someone left it in the kitchen as a freebie and guess who snapped it up? Classical is fading just as cursive writing is fading. The young see no practical use for it.