Forward, September 23rd, 2005
Philologos Forward 09-23-2005 Avi Atias, my computer technician in Israel, has a small company called Abacus. The other day, I asked him how he came to choose the name.
"A friend suggested it," he said. "I was looking for a word that wasn't Hebrew and that had an international sound. But, hey, you're the word man. What language does 'abacus' come from?"
Having no idea, I pulled out a dictionary and took a look. Then I chuckled. "What's the joke?" he asked.
"The joke," I said, reading from the dictionary, "is this: 'Abacus. A manual computing device consisting of a frame holding parallel r...
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