Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2009 January 12

= January 12 =

children's book about little girl making footsteps in the flour?
I need help trying to remember a book from my childhood. I'm 29 in 2009, so that would be 1980 – 1990 roughly. I don't remember much, maybe not enough for an identification.

It's very murky. It was about a little girl. I think she might have been a little ghost or a witch. Or witch in training. Or maybe not. I only can remember this one scene, and only dimly. The girl had gotten into some house she was not supposed to be in. Maybe she was hiding in a barrel full of flour. Or somehow there was flour in the story. I remember the footprints through the flour which covered the room. Either she walked through the flour or else she saw someone else's footprints.

The illustrations might have been black and white, or if not, they were generally dark. I thought it might have been an Edward Gorey book, but I've been looking through his list of publications on Amazon and nothing looks right. Maybe I'm just making that association because he also publishes books with macabre black and white illustrations.

So that's it. Little girl, hiding in barrel in house, footprints in the flour. Ring any bells?


 * NO idea. The idea of the footprints in the flour, however, is one of the stories in the Tristan and Iseult cycle. СПУТНИК CCC  P 13:25, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Update: I asked my sister. She also remembered the book:


 * "Yes, I remember that one. Hiding in barrel full of flour.  And there were thieves with jewels, which i think she found in the flour.  And she had a funny little cat friend.  And the illustrations were mostly black and white, i think with pieces in color.
 * Don't remember what it was called though. Or what the witches name was.  There should be a website for this... a collection of children's books and you just have to type in a few key words."


 * My sister found the book. It is Dorrie and the Haunted House, published 1970, by Patricia Coombs.  Part of a series called Dorrie the Little Witch.  All seem to be out of print today.


 * Thanks for your help, all!

What religion
I was talking about the BBC program Around the World in 80 Faiths with a fiend and we remember that the first program had an minor Abrahamic faith whose members followed John the Baptist. Their ceremonies included baptism every week and the members looked as though they were of middle-eastern origin. The program showed a large group of followers of this faith somewhere in Australia (Sydney?). We cannot remember what this faith is called! Can any wikipedians help? -- Q Chris (talk) 12:12, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry, can't help, missed that bit of the programme, but I can't help thinking it must be fun to discuss comparative religion with a fiend. ;-) Itsmejudith (talk) 13:09, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I've never seen the program but to me that sounds like Mandaeism. I don't know if there are so many of them in Sydney, but that's my guess. There are only so many Abrahamic faiths ;-) СПУТНИК CCC  P 13:25, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks, that's it. A google search for the program name and Mandaeism returned [This site http://www.bbc.co.uk/80faiths/locations/australasia.shtml] confirming that it was indeed the religion covered. -- Q Chris (talk) 13:53, 12 January 2009 (UTC)

origins of Islam
What religion was Muhammad? (As Jesus was Jewish but founded Christianity, what religion did Islam spring from?) I have read the article but I'm not really finding the right place I guess - there is mention once about nature spirits, but that doesn't seem to jibe with the tradition of the prophets in the line of Abraham being honored. Thank you for your help.HMAccount (talk) 16:32, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Being that the Arabs were a Semitic people, he probably practiced some form of Ancient Semitic religion. While it is true that many of these religions had "died out" by AD/BC border, or within a few hundred years of it, it is entirely likely that some descendent of them was still practiced throughout the semitic world, especially on the Arabian Peninsula, which was isolated from the rest of the Western world, and thus it is likely that the older relgions held on much longer.  Many of these semitic religions recognized some form of the Hebrew god Yahweh, even if they didn't recognize him as the sole God in the universe.  Muhammad's creation of Islam was twofold; that he recognized Yahweh (in arabic "Allah") as the sole God, and that he also recognized that earlier religions that recognized the one creator God were "close" but not "right".  Islam, right back to Muhammad himself, recognized that Jews and Christians and Muslims all worshiped the same deity, but from the Islamic perspective, the Jews and Christians understanding of God and how to properly worship Him was flawed.  If you read our article on Allah, and especially Pre-Islamic Arabia you will likely find lots more information on arabic religion during and prior to the time of Muhammad.  --Jayron32. talk . contribs  17:53, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually, YHWH was the name of the national god of the Israelites, just as Chemosh was the national god of the Moabites, Milcom was the national god of the Ammonites, Qaws was the god of the Edomites, etc. Many early Semitic-speaking peoples probably had the concept of a head of the pantheon whose name was a variant of "El", but identifying this El with the name YHWH was only done by the Israelites and those who have been influenced in some way by Israelite religion, as far as is known... AnonMoos (talk) 18:21, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * "Allah" was worshipped in pre-Islamic Arabia, but as the head of the pantheon (not as a monotheistic God), and supposedly accompanied by a number of other idols in the sanctuary at Mecca. The main divinities other than Allah (at least in the memory of the Arabs of the early Islamic period) were the three goddesses mentioned in the so-called Satanic verses: Allāt, al-`Uzzā and Manāt.  By the way, the particular manner in which Muhammad was influenced by Judaism and Christianity was partly due to the fact that Muhammad never read a single line of Jewish and Christian scriptures, and got all his information about those religions purely orally (from people who were not always the most orthodox or knowledgeable about their own religions, or were eager to slander other religions).  This is why Muhammad does not distinguish between the contents of the Bible itself and much later extra-Biblical pious legends and midrash, and how such absurdities as the accusation that Jews worship Ezra as the son of God in the same sense that Christians worship Jesus as the son of God crept in... AnonMoos (talk) 18:21, 12 January 2009 (UTC)
 * There's a small bit of information about this at Allah. AnyPerson (talk) 03:31, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
 * A Moslem I know said that before Muhammed, the people in the region worshipped rocks and anything else and were quite pantheistic. Muhammed introduced them to the monotheism already well known to Jews and Christians, and it was quite a dramatic revelation. Edison (talk) 03:46, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
 * There were Christian and Jewish Arabs before Muhammad, but mainly to the north and south of the Hejaz. The influential families of the city of Mecca (of whom Mohammad's Quraish tribe was one) had a vested interest in maintaining Mecca as a pagan religious center... AnonMoos (talk) 16:08, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you everyone for the answers so far, I am learning a lot.HMAccount (talk) 12:52, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Name for rhetorical device
What's the name for a rhetorical device where someone says the opposite of an obvious truth. For example an aeroplane is on fire and someone asks the pilot how things are going and he says "excellent!"

I need an answer (ideally) which describes this whether or not the statement is ironic/sarcastic. In my example it's obvious how that could be sarcasm, but I'm looking for an answer which would equally cover (for example) the situation where the pilot is acknowledging that we've got a big problem but by "excellent" he means it is excellent that he has worked out how we are going to deal with it. AndyJones (talk) 22:09, 12 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Rhetoric is designed to create an effect in the audience. If the speaker's intention can be one thing or the other, no rhetoric is possible, unless he wants to engender mere confusion. There is a wonderful site called "Silva Rhetoricae" that calls the inverted case irony. That's pretty much straight from Greek, and means, according to them, "affectation of ignorance". Sarcasm is a different animal. It too is Greek, and it means, literally, "to tear flesh" (the "sarco-" prefix we all know), figuratively, "to speak bitterly". Sarcasm is irony with the gloves off. Sarcasm is an attack, irony need not be. And a single word of plain truth is not rhetoric. --Milkbreath (talk) 00:11, 13 January 2009 (UTC)
 * The technical term for the device is antiphrasis (here are some links to other online resources). Although the device is most often used ironically, I see no reason why the name couldn't be applied to nonironic uses. I'm not sure that your second example qualifies, though—if the pilot thinks that, given the situation, it is fortunate that a way of dealing with it has been formulated, he could literally mean that "things are going" excellently. Deor (talk) 13:39, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Consider 'enantiosis', which denoted 'opposition' in antiquity, including total negation. That's because 'antiphrasis' applies to a short, ironic substitution, as when one might substitute 'lowest common dominator' for 'lowest common denominator'. Billhattalmiyd (talk) 11:38, 18 January 2009 (UTC)