COMPLETELY off topic!

[catlady_de_los_angeles]

While I'm here, does anyone know how to tell Yahoo to increase the 
number of groups shown per page of My Groups?

Does anyone here know the history of the now-popular phrase 'X is 
Y's bitch?' Did it come from a movie or something?

The word 'Islam': everyone has been told that it means 'submission' 
(to God) and that the reflexive noun form, Muslim, means 'one who 
submits' (to God's will), also translated as 'slave'. But in the 
barrage of talk after The Events, someone said on the radio that the 
name 'Islam' comes from the word for 'peace', and then I suddenly 
noticed for the first time that 'Islam' and 'salaam' have the same 
three consonant root, SLM. Everyone has been told that 'salaam' means 
'peace' and is cognate to 'shalom'. 

Some years ago I went to a lecture on Ishtar, and the lecturer said 
that one of Her titles is Shulamittu, which is same word as the 
Hebrew name Shulamit [Shlum't] (Babylonian is a Semitic language) 
which is the feminine of Solomon [Shlomo] which we have all been told 
means 'peacemaker', and very reasonable it is for a king who takes the 
throne after winning a civil war to assume a throne name meaning 
'peacemaker'. (Except here I suddenly start to wonder why it isn't 
m'shalom, using the reflexive noun form...)

Except, said the lecturer, that the word 'shalom' which we translate 
'peace' really is more closely related to meanings like 'contentment' 
and 'satifaction' ('equilibrium', he said, but I don't understand 
that at all). And Shulamittu, 'the satisfier', as a title of Ishtar 
had, he said, an explicitly sexual meaning. Ishtar is a very sexual 
goddess, but she *satisfies* by giving food and by giving victory as 
well as by sex...