It has often been written that pirates commonly killed their prisoners, usually by the picturesque method of making them ‘walk the plank.’ This is untrue. I have ransacked official records, reports of trials, and much other documentary evidence without being able to discover a single case of walking the plank. I do not mean merely that I have not found an authenticated case. In all the contemporary literature on pirates I could not find even an accusation or suggestion that the practice was ever used. The very expression seems to have been invented many years after the Age of Piracy.

We feel as if we are ourselves afflicted or at ease when a son or a wife or an person dear to us is so ... we also misattribute or misown properties which rightly belong not to us as conscious persons but to our bodies.

It was Oakland rapper Keak Da Sneak who claims to have invented the term: upon being told by his mother that he was “hyperactive”, Keak repeated the term as “hyphy”. Since then, hyphy has come to refer to a complex group of cultural activities synonymous with Oakland: it is at once a sound, a behavior, a choice in recreational drugs.

'It is a sea-urchin - a common echinus. Nature repeats itself in many forms regardless of the size. This echinus is a model, a prototype, of the world.'