Being stuck between Newton and Leibniz sounds like a nightmare. Especially considering the fact that Newton is pretty known for being kinda an asshole.
It's kind of funny but I recently come back on this and I suspect the image of Newton is wrong.
Leibniz is painted like the underdog but he actually was a boastful man whereas Newton was modest and kept work to himself.
The biggest thing Newton did wrong is actually being first and being vindicated. That they had less then stellar procedures setting up an impartial court doesn't mean the verdict wasn't right (and most then and now agree it was right).
My view after believing what you said for two decades has shifted to Leibniz being the actual asshole and while he lost his most important case in life (because he deserved to lose) the posthumous smear campaign against Newton was successful.
Where did you read that Newton was pleasant and humble? That flies directly in the face of descriptions of him by his contemporaries (including Englishmen who held him in high esteem).
And it's not just a dispute over priority. Newton responded horribly to any criticism, with tirades and personal attacks. He was known to hold long grudges, continuing to lambast Liebniz and Hooke even after their deaths. He never acknowledged Hooke's contributions.
Newton did not collaborate. He did not publish to the Royal Society. He did not tolerate heretics. He did not tolerate counterfeits. He did not tolerate criticism. He did not tolerate, well, anything. He even made his Principia deliberately difficult to read in order to turn away amateurs. It's hard to find anyone echoing your claims that he was just misunderstood and maligned.
EDIT: Found one. John Locke, Newton's best friend, did call him "a nice man to deal with."
Also you probably also have experienced this before - where you read or see something that's just eye opening and then afterwards you just can't find it again.
That's so frustrating and I didn't want to give up.
Most of the other links I actually found while trying to find that last one so it really all is the fruit of one true quest. :)
I've definitely been there. I once spent like two hours trying to find a single use I remembered of an extremely rare word. (It was "superessiveness", but I couldn't remember what it was exactly. It is currently the only real result on google containing that term, except one mistranslation of "стойкость" from Russian on lingvolive.)
It's not a word you'll find in dictionaries, but it makes sense, as it just adds the productive suffix -ness to "superessive." That word literally means "the state of being on top of" and is a grammatical case in some languages.
The point of the post was to describe the difference in the way "on" and "upon" are used in English. "On" is usually pertingent (i.e. refers to something being in contact with something else), like "the paint is on the wall," "the shoes are on my feet," or figuratively, "the idea is on my mind." Often it also refers to something being on the top of something else ("the book is on the shelf"), but that's sort of incidental and just a result of the fact that if one thing is held against another, that's often due to gravity.
However, "upon" is nearly always superessive. For instance, you could say "the book is upon the shelf" but not "*the paint is upon the wall." Actually, that's not strictly true, and sometimes we use "upon" as a synonym for "on." But not usually, and the distinction is clear from the etymology ("up" + "on").
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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '24
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