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posted by martyb on Tuesday April 24 2018, @09:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the what's-in-a-name? dept.

Swaziland is no more:

A landlocked, rural nation in southern Africa, Swaziland has significant problems. Nearly a third of the country's population lives in extreme poverty, and about as many are infected with H.I.V., one of the world's highest prevalence rates for the virus. Life expectancy is low, around 50. A recent drought and an infestation of armyworms, an invasive species, devastated crops.

So the kingdom's 1.4 million residents might have been surprised on Thursday when King Mswati III, one of the world's few remaining absolute monarchs, announced the news: The country will henceforth be known as eSwatini, the kingdom's name in the local language. (It means "land of the Swazis" in the Swazi — or siSwati — tongue.)

The king, who has reigned since 1986, announced the name change — an adjustment, really — during a ceremony in the city of Manzini on Thursday to mark his 50th birthday.

Many African countries upon independence "reverted to their ancient, native names," The Associated Press quoted the king as saying. "We no longer shall be called Swaziland from today forward."

According to Reuters, Mswati argued that the kingdom's name had long caused confusion. "Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland," the king said, according to Reuters.

Also at BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-43821512.


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  • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:41PM (1 child)

    by istartedi (123) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @05:41PM (#671246) Journal

    Active ignorance needs to be distinguished from information triage. I've had people trying to push an argument who insisted that I could see their side if only I would read a lengthy book. When I said I didn't have time for that and that brief citations to bolster their argument should be enough, they wouldn't accept that and accused me of being willfully ignorant. In a sense, I am--but this is a good kind of ignorance. We all do it. It's why scientific papers have abstracts. You chose to read or *not* read papers based on abstracts. If we didn't chose to ignore some information, everything would slow to a crawl as everybody tried to digest everything ever written.

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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:51PM

    by pTamok (3042) on Tuesday April 24 2018, @07:51PM (#671292)

    For me the litmus test (or touchstone, if you prefer) is Richard Feynman's aphorism: "If you can't explain it in simple terms, you don't understand it."

    If someone is requesting that you put a lot of time into learning something, they need to be able to demonstrate that they themselves have learned and understood it - in which case, they can explain it in simple terms. For example, Feynman diagrams [wikipedia.org] condense a great deal of complicated mathematics into simple pictures. There is a subtle difference between having the skills and ability to replicate somone's work and simply being able to understand their work.

    I have a lot of sympathy for your view on information triage - nobody can read everything, so you do have to be selective. How to be judicious in choosing your sources is a learnable skill, which I am still working on. It is probably a lifelong exercise. Peddlers of irrational beliefs often try to swamp you with abstruse information overload, which for me is a warning signal.