short takes

[cellio]

Larissa: I'm sorry. I can cast four third-level spells per day, but the only third-level spell I know is Fireball.

Turok: That's ok. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every bugbear looks like a nail.

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The Hebrew word "z'vuv" (or maybe "zevuv"; didn't see it written) means "fly", so "z'vuvim" are "flies".

The word "ba'al" means "master".

Sometimes "b" and "v" sounds are semi-interchangable. Akiva and Akiba are the same person.

Putting all of this together, we can now see the probable origin of "Bealzabub" -- "ba'al z'vuv". Except that that's the lord of one fly, which isn't nearly so intimidating. :-) (And yeah, I know I probably misspelled the conventional name.)

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I finally found out recently why someone has been having trouble sending me mail. (That is, I was finally able to look at a bounce message.) It seems that this person didn't understand that user names are case-sensitive, becuase Outlook helpfully capitalizes things in its presentation of your address book.

Perhaps Microsoft is baalzevuvim; that's often a safe bet. Maybe a fireball would help.

Comments

[jerusha.livejournal.com]

I like the way my alma mater handled it. All the email addresses were of the form [your three initials][serial number]@po.cwru.edu. If you don't have (or didn't provide to the University) a middle initial, they'd use an 'x'. I don't know how high the serial numbers can go, but they'd already broken the three-digit barrier without problems by the time I graduated and left. They apparently aren't that worried about namespace, though - they don't deactivate alumni accounts. So all of the "same name" or "common name" problems are circumvented.