I occasionally link to wikipedia entries here, knowing full well the pitfalls of seeming to endorse a sometimes unreliable source of information. For a nearly random reason this morning, I searched for Panini, looking for a pretty trivial bit of information on Pāṇini, the Sanskrit grammarian. As someone who loves to eat and doing this at lunchtime, it crossed my mind that I'd probably get mostly hits for stuff on the pressed sandwich. Wikipedia came up near the top of the list and you kind of know you'll get one of their "disambiguation pages". But I didn't expect
this much ambiguity:
Panini can refer to:
- Pāṇini, 5th century BC Sanskrit grammarian
- a type of Italian sandwich
- a zoological tribe containing chimpanzees and their relatives (usually considered obsolete)
- Panini (stickers), a brand of collectible stickers, created by the same company as Panini Comics
- Panini Comics, a publisher of comic books and magazines
- Giovanni Paolo Panini, an Italian artist
What, no link to the
Panini Museum (classic cars)?!?!? And I didn't know about the chimps OR the stickers.
I occasionally link to wikipedia entries here, knowing full well the pitfalls of seeming to endorse a sometimes unreliable source of information. For a nearly random reason this morning, I searched for Panini, looking for a pretty trivial bit of information on Pāṇini, the Sanskrit grammarian. As someone who loves to eat and doing this at lunchtime, it crossed my mind that I'd probably get mostly hits for stuff on the pressed sandwich. Wikipedia came up near the top of the list and you kind of know you'll get one of their "disambiguation pages". But I didn't expect this much ambiguity:
2 comments:
The chimps thing makes enough sense. Pan is the name of the... genus, family (I don't know my taxonomic hierarchical terminology) that contains Pan Paniscus (Bonobo, or Pygmy Chimp), and Pan Troglodytes (Common Chimp - even though they aren't too common anymore). Given how close we are to either of them, we should prbably have been called Pan Sapiens or something.
I think we are actually close to one or the other of the chimps than the chimps are to each other... but I could just be making that up.
Thanks. Yeah, it does make sense.
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