[Buddha-l] Pew religion dist. map

[Richard Hayes]

On Apr 1, 2012, at 1:49 AM, "Alex Wilding" <alex at chagchen.org> wrote:

> I'll order my pasty now

Lucky you. Humble pie is my favorite meal—or at least the meal I am most often served. I appreciate the experiment you conducted with the universal resource locators (which our lazy cousins call URL). They both appeared as proper links on my device (an iPod Touch). My guess is that it depends on what program (which our trendy cousins call an app) one is using to read email. Some older email clients may be less adept at recognizing a URL and may render some of them as plain text. My guess is that your hypothesis would hold true for one of those older email clients, such as the UNIX mail program vintage 1992 or so.

Speaking of food, I have noticed that in many 17th century English texts I have read, "meat" is used as the metonymic word for food, much as "meal" is now used, at least in North American English. I recently read a work by George Washington written in 1746 in which he uses the word "meat" metonymically for food in general. I am curious about this usage and wonder when it stopped being used. And I wonder whether the diatribe against eating animal flesh in the Lankāvatāra sūtra is the cause of the change from "meat" to "meal" as the English speakers' metonym of choice. 

Richard Hayes