Word Of The Day: Sybaritic

Lobster feast at Pigeon Island Beach Resort. As close as I’ve gotten to Sybaris.

Sri Lanka In Style is offering a tour package called the Sybaratic [sic] South Coast. In contrast to the Syphilitic South Coast tour, this is a luxury trip. Sybaritic has become a synonym for luxury, but it used to be a people. The ancient Greeks of Sybaris.

Here’s some funny rumors/stories about them:

One story, mentioned in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), has a Sybarite sleeping on a bed of rose petals, but unable to get to sleep because one of the petals was folded over. The best known humorous anecdote of the Sybarites concerns their defeat in battle. It is said that to amuse themselves the Sybarite cavalrymen trained their horses to dance to pipe music. Armed with pipes, an invading army from nearby Crotonia assailed the Sybarite cavalry with music. The attacking forces easily passed through the dancing horses and their helpless riders, and conquered the city. (Wikipedia)

The people of Sybaris were known as some of the wealthiest of the time. They also seemed to live well, developing the first street lighting and concept of intellectual property. The latter is notable is because it was for food – the idea was that cooks could ‘copyright’ their signature dishes for a year. So they must have eaten well.

There is a connection between luxury, opulence, and an almost celebration of the negative aspects. ‘Shop till you drop’, pouring out champagne for your homies, making it rain at the strip club. My main connection to luxury seems to be through rap videos, perhaps that colors things. Still, it remains that opulence and luxury are socially (and religiously) negative things that we nevertheless aspire to.

So nevermind that the Sybarites may have fallen cause their horses were dancing. The idea of loving luxury and sensuous pleasure is their legacy to the world, and apparently one way to experience the southern coast of Ceylon.

Posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 in History, Word Of The Day.

RSS feed | Trackback URI

Comments »

No comments yet.

email indi AT indi.ca.

Recent Comments

Monolithic Islam (5)

tastyjujubes: The Religion of Peace at work again: http://www.guar dian.co.uk/uk/2 013/may/22/wool wich-two-shot-i n-police-incide nt-live-coverag e

sharanga: Racial profiling is not racist if it works. Similarly, identifying groups among people is not wrong if it allows you to predict reality with reasonable accuracy. When you don’t know everything, you play the odds. For example, if I...

Dark Lord: Why is it so hard to buy pork anywhere in Sri Lanka? Most sellers don’t sell pork at all, or sell it only to known customers from a hidden storage at the back of the store, which goes like “don̵ 7;t tell anyone, we are...

40 Under 40 (6)

sharanga: Congratulations !

Malik: Looks like Mara and Co has blocked GossipLanka.com ????? What’s going on here??????????

Diyath: Congratulations Indi!.. All the best for your future tech endeavors!

Anti-Social Marketing (Nibras Bawa) (19)

David Blacker: Who cares, man? you’re still moaning on about a fight you lost months ago. It’s like the kid who gets his ass kicked then talk big later. You lost, you ran away like a whiney ponneya, and now you’re actually...

sharanga: A more accurate description would be I had my penis up your because you were refusing to answer a simple question. Now the fact that you thought I was not just Heshan, but also meechum just shows that you are stupid, and therefore your...

Chi Chi Hits The Scene, And A Referee (5)

sack: Indiz post about Gotabhaya had much more comments. http://indi.ca/ 2012/07/gotas-p uppy-hate/

Liberal One: He he, the article with the least number of comments out of Indi’s recent ones. Looks like no body wants to put their lives at risk by commenting on the wrong article. I’m off as well.

Monolithic Islam

Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice op-ed in the Guardian. Money quote for me was ‘Individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion’. If you go buy news reports Muslims or Jews or Sri Lankans or any number of groups can appear monolithic and uniform. When you meet people, however, you find that they’re not. If you meet enough people you hopefully become aware of that tendency and judge people less by group identity in advance. Muslims, however, are quite publicly tarred with the same brush these days, and it really isn’t fair. Or accurate.

40 Under 40

I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and Kottu but also YAMU) but also in that the magazine takes a bit of a critical stance. It’s worth reading the editorial (which I can only find in print) where they describe that only a few women are included and that all of the 40 are from middle to upper middle class backgrounds.

Chi Chi Hits The Scene, And A Referee

I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the Daily Mirror Life section, which is well worth a read. In other news, he also recently slapped a referee around in full public view at a rugby match. At least it seems that his elder brother restrained him.

Anti-Social Marketing (Nibras Bawa)

In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from Kottu. He also published some plagiarized stuff on Groundviews. He flamed out a bit more then disappeared. Until now. Now he’s back hosting a rather expensive social media event in Colombo, which is a bit ironic, seeing as he was known for being the most anti-social person the blogosphere had seen at the time.