Bond. James Bond.

James Bond is the fictional protagonist of a series of novels and short stories by Ian Fleming. The first Bond story appeared in the 1953 novel Casino Royale. Most of Fleming's twelve novels and two collections of short stories have also been used for film adaptations with many retaining the titles of the novels.

Ian Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) came from a wealthy family, and was educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly attended the universities of Munich and Geneva. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during WWII, he was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. All these aspects of his life are used in the Bond novels.

GoldenEye, the film, was released in 1995 and is the seventeenth James Bond film. It was the first to star Pierce Brosnan as 007 and also the first film in the series not to take story elements from the works of Fleming.

The Bond stories were written at Fleming's Jamaican home, named Goldeneye, and he generally published a book each year. Two of his books were published after his death in 1964.

Goldfinger is the seventh James Bond novel in the series and originally it was titled The Richest Man in the World. Perhaps, Fleming should have used that original title because his revised title used the name of someone he had known, Ernő Goldfinger, who threatened to sue over the use of his name. The matter was settled out of court and the title was used for the novel and the film version.


You Only Live Twice is the eleventh novel Ian Fleming published in the Bond series and is the last published in his lifetime. I am a Bond and a poetry fan, but I didn't know that these two interests ever crossed. That particular title got inspiration from the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. In the novel, 007 tries his hand at writing a haiku in the style of the Japanese master.

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face

"A Diamond Is Forever" was (and might still be) a phrase used in advertising for the company De Beers and probably Fleming just tweaked it slightly for his novel Diamonds Are Forever.

"The World Is Not Enough" is believed to originate from Alexander the Great’s epitaph, and it is found in the 1963 Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as being the family motto of Sir Thomas Bond. James Bond sees that coat of arms in the novel.

The phrase was used for a film of that name, but the plot of the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service became a film of its own. Sean Connery retired from the 007 role after You Only Live Twice and George Lazenby became Bond for only this one film in the series.


Not all of the Bond films are derived from Fleming novels or the novels' titles. A View To A Kill comes from an a non-Bond Fleming short story called "From A View To a Kill" and doesn't really make much sense plot-wise as a title for that film.

The second of the two Timothy Dalton Bond films is License to Kill. Having run out of novels to use, the filmmakers took elements from  two Fleming short stories, a novel, and some Japanese Rōnin tales. The working title for the film was a much more accurate one: License Revoked. In the film, M  suspends Bond and therefore his "license to kill." But after testing the "revoked" title, American audiences associated it with losing a driver's license, so the filmmakers went with the ironic (or just inaccurate) License to Kill.

Another oddball title in the series is Quantum of Solace. This 2008 film is named for a Fleming short story. Though a "quantum" is the smallest possible amount of a physical property, a small amount of solace have no real meaning in the film.

One inside joke became a film title.

In Never Say Never Again (1983), Sean Connery returned to playing James Bond for the seventh time. It was 12 years after Diamonds Are Forever when he "retired" from playing 007, and the film's title is a reference to Connery saying that he would never play Bond again. Now 52 years old, the plot was adapted so that Connery would be an aging Bond brought back into action.

The plot is a second adaption of Fleming's Thunderball novel which had already been filmed in 1965 with Connery.

Sony

Sony's first unbranded transistor radio - TR-55 (1955)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the transistor radio brought rock and roll music to teenagers and spread it more powerfully than the actual records that were being played by the disc jockeys.

Texas Instruments was the first company licensed by Bell Laboratories to use the newly invented transistor for a small radio. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term transresistance. The Regency TR-1 weighed 8 ounces, fit in your pocket, turned on instantly and cost $49.95. More than 100,000 were sold.

The Japanese company Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to get into the transistor radio business but wanted a new name that would work with American consumers. They considered using their initials, TTK, but a railway company, Tokyo Kyuko, was known as TTK. They also considered  "Tokyo Teletech" but discovered an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.

Like many other people seeking a new name, they looked to Latin. Looking up "sound" they found "sonus." This sounded a bit like the word "sonny" which was a loan word used in Japan in the 1950s to refer to "sonny boys" - smart and presentable young men. Dropping one "n" in sonny and being closer to the sonus of sound seemed right.

The first Sony-branded product was the TR-55 transistor radio in 1955. The company officially changed their name to Sony in January 1958.

Sony 8-Transistor Radio, Model TR-84, 1959 

Loan Words

A loan word (also loanword or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language into a different language without translation.

In English we use the French café to mean a small restaurant selling light meals and drinks (from French café, which literally means "coffee").

The Persian bāzār, meaning a market, is also a loan word to English.

Many words are loaned from Latin. Modus Operandi  refers to someone’s habits or method of operating. It is heard most commonly in police investigations to to describe someone’s criminal profile and is usually abbreviated to "MO."

A number of legal and business terms are taken from Latin but have found their way into common usage. Mea culpa (my own fault) is used by a person who is admitting guilt or blame. Quid pro quo (literally, "something for something") is often used in negotiations . The idiom "You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours," is a variation on this.

"Loan" itself is a bit of an odd choice of a word to describe this language  transfer since the ordinary meaning of loan is something borrowed that will be returned. No returns on these words

From German, we borrowed "kindergarten" (children's garden) for that first year of school that was once a kind of pre-school where play and socialization was originally emphasized.

Foods offer many examples of loan words as we borrow dishes from other cultures. The Spanish taco, burrito and the rest of a Mexican restaurants menu are examples.

If you want to dig deeper into this linguistically, you will find that a loanvword is distinguished from a calque (loan translation), which is a word or phrase whose meaning or idiom is adopted from another language by translation into existing words or word-forming roots of the recipient language.

Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley

One flower commonly referred to in America as a "Rose of Sharon"

The Rose of Sharon and Lilies of the Valley are two of a number of flowers referenced in some translations of the Bible. However, there are many translations and interpretations of what the actual flower being referenced is in our modern taxonomy.

Rose of Sharon is a common name used to describe different species of flowering plants. It is not an actual rose but generally a member of Rosaceae.

The name "rose of Sharon" first appears in English in 1611 in the King James Version of the Bible. In the song of Solomon ch2 v1 the speaker (the beloved) says "I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley".

Earlier translations had called it “the flower of the field.” Other translations of the Hebrew word hasharon are translated as rose, lily jonquil and crocus and some scholars have suggested that the Biblical "rose of Sharon" may also be a tulip or narcissus or simply a sprouting bulb.

The Biblical interpretations are many, including:
- A kind of crocus growing as a lily among the brambles ("Sharon", Harper's Bible Dictionary)
- A crocus that grows in the coastal plain of Sharon (New Oxford Annotated Bible);
- Lilium candidum, more commonly known as the Madonna lily, a species of lily suggested by some botanists, though likely in reference to the lilies of the valley mentioned in the second part of Song of Solomon 2:1.

Lily of the valley (or lily-of-the-valley) has the scientific name Convallaria majalis. It is a sweetly scented, but highly poisonous woodland flowering plant that is native throughout the cool temperate Northern Hemisphere in Asia, and Europe.

Scientists place it in the subfamily Nolinoideae which was formerly the family Ruscaceae - which sounds very similar to the Rosaceae of the Rose of Sharon and earlier it had been in the lily family Liliaceae.

This is also known as Our Lady's tears or Mary's tears. These names come from Christian legends that it sprang from the weeping of the Virgin Mary during the crucifixion of Jesus.

The name "lily of the valley" is used in some English translations of the Bible in Song of Songs 2:1, but the Hebrew phrase "shoshannat-ha-amaqim" in the original text (literally "lily of the valleys") does not refer to this plant but probably some other true lily.

The modern flower given this name is used symbolically as a symbol of humility and a sign of Christ's second coming and a vision of a better world.

Titles from Shakespeare

William Shakespeare has not only been credited as being the source of many words in English that he either coined or made popular, but he also is the source many writers have gone to for their own book titles.

His play Antony and Cleopatra gave Joyce Carol Oates her title New Heaven, New Earth. Eva Figes's Seven Ages and Francoise Sagan's Salad Days also used that play with phrases that entered the language.

Hamlet may be the most popular play for grabbing titles: Richard Matheson: What Dreams May Come; Edith Wharton: The Glimpses of the Moon; Peter Spence: To the Manor Born; Philip K. Dick: Time Out of Joint; Isaac Asimov: The Gods Themselves; Aldous Huxley: Mortal Coils; Graham Greene: The Name of Action.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest comes from Hamlet's speech: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

For his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley went to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  In that play, the very naive Miranda who has lived her whole life on an island knowing only her father (the wizard Prospero) and some "spirits," meets men her own age for the first time when they are shipwrecked. Seeing them, Miranda says: "O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

The popular young adult novel (and film), The Fault in Our Stars by John Green takes its title from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The scheming Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  Though cassius was referring to why their rank and power were below Caesar's, the novel is more on the idea that we should not blame fate for our state, but ourselves.

Pale Fire, a novel by Vladmir Nabokov, references the more obscure play Timon of Athens.
“The sun ’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon ’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun...”

Titles have also come from lines in Shakespeare's sonnets, such as Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.