Allan Metcalfe's new book . . . devotes a chapter to trying to explain why readers of the Boston Morning Post might have been amused to see “o. k.” used as a jokey abbreviation for “oll korrect,” an intentional misspelling of “all correct.”

The house was a big elaborate limestone affair, evidently new. Winter sunshine sparkled on lace-hung casement, on glass marquise, and the burnished bronze foliations of grille and door.

The advantage of adopting an abandoned drug is that the former patentholder has usually done the chemical analyses, animal studies and, sometimes, early human trials, saving millions of dollars.

This includes buen vivir (or sumak kawsay or suma qamaña), a culture of life with different names and varieties emerging from indigenous peoples in various regions of South America; ubuntu, with its emphasis on human mutuality (“I am because we are”) in South Africa; radical ecological democracy or ecological swaraj, with a focus on self-reliance and self-governance, in India; and degrowth, the hypothesis that we can live better with less and in common, in western countries.