3
" In 1963, when I assigned the name " quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been " kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word " quark" in the phrase " Three quarks for Muster Mark." Since " quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with " Mark," as well as " bark" and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as " kwork." But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the " portmanteau words" in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry " Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be " Three quarts for Mister Mark," in which case the pronunciation " kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature. "
4
" Our way would seem quite familiar to the Romans, more by far than the Greek way. Socrates in the Symposium, when Alcibiades challenged him to drink two quarts of wine, could have done so or not as he chose, but the diners-out of Horace's day had no such freedom. He speaks often of the master of the drinking, who was always appointed to dictate how much each man was to drink. Very many unseemly dinner parties must have paved the way for that regulation. A Roman in his cups would've been hard to handle, surly, quarrelsome, dangerous. No doubt there had been banquets without number which had ended in fights, broken furniture, injuries, deaths. Pass a law then, the invariable Roman remedy, to keep drunkenness within bounds. Of course it worked both ways: everybody was obliged to empty the same number of glasses and the temperate man had to drink a great deal more than he wanted, but whenever laws are brought in to regulate the majority who have not abused their liberty for the sake of the minority who have, just such results come to pass. Indeed, any attempt to establish a uniform average in that stubbornly individual phenomenon, human nature, will have only one result that can be foretold with certainty: it will press hardest on the best. "
― Edith Hamilton , The Roman Way
