Economist, Apr 28, 2018

choi

(1) Buddhist IPOs | Floating Lotuses; China's holy sites meet the stockmarket.
https://www.economist.com/news/b ... es-list-stockmarket

Quote:

"BENEATH a lustrous 33-metre bronze statue of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy, a young monk on Mount Putuo tallies the cash donated by visiting faithful: 'Daily, anywhere between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of yuan,' he says (100,000 yuan is a little under $16,000). Over 8m trips are made yearly to the tiny islet in Zhoushan city 浙江省舟山市, about a four-hour drive from Shanghai (11m visited Shanghai Disneyland in its first year, after it opened in 2016). * * * The Putuoshan Tourism Development Company 普陀山旅游发展股份有限公司 * * * manages tourist facilities in the location, such as ferries, cable cars and joss-stick shops. Since 2012 it has mulled an initial public offering (IPO) of these services on Shanghai's stock exchange; last year it said it hoped to raise 615m yuan.

"Yet business and Buddhism have often been in harmony, says Kin Cheung, who researches Asian faiths and economics at Moravian College in Pennsylvania. China’s earliest pawn shops were run by Buddhist monasteries, who also leased land to farmers.

Note:
(a) Having nothing to do with Flying Lotus, stage name of Steven Ellison,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Lotus

, floating lotus(es) comes from floating stocks. See

float (vt): "to place (an issue of securities) on the market"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/float
(b) Back in my time in Taiwan, nobody there heard of 普陀山.
(c)
(i) Kin Cheung 張健. Assistant Professor of Asian Religions.
https://www.moravian.edu/religion/faculty/cheung
(ii) Moravian College
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravian_College
(1742- ; private; Location Bethlehem, PA; is sixth oldest college in the United States and the first to educate women, as well as Native Americans in their own language )

The name came from Moravian Church of Germany

(d) "After the end of Cultural Revolution, monks * * * co-operated with local authorities and businesses keen to attract visitors, paving roads to their temples and opening shops hawking spiritual tat. Local governments began to charge entrance fees to the country’s sacred peaks: 160 yuan for Mount Putuo."\\

tat (n): "chiefly US slang  : a tattoo on a person's skin"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tat
(e) "It [IPO] is a step already taken by some. The first to float of Chinas four sacred hills—known by Buddhists as 'the pure lands'—was Mount Emei in Sichuan province, in 1997, when its local tourism company went public on the Shenzhen stock exchange under the providential ticker number 000888. It has since opened a cluster of fancy hotels on the mountain, and its revenue has grown twelvefold, to 1bn yuan last year. Mount Jiuhua 九华山, in Anhui province 安徽省池州市青阳县, listed in 2015 on the Shanghai stock exchange (after being rejected twice, in 2004 and 2009). Mount Wutai, in Shanxi province, has mulled IPO plans since 2010"

choi

(2) Johnson | Doing the Split; The ban on split infinitives is an idea whose time never came.
https://www.economist.com/news/b ... n-split-infinitives

Note:
(a) "This spring a new edition of The Economist's style guide is published. Many of its changes are of a kind only a copy-editor would notice; but * * * It says infinitives may be split."

There are copywriter (no hyphen), and there are copy-editor. A copy is an advertisement, which can be printed (tangible) or broadcast (intangible). See
copy (written)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_(written)

It is used in advertising or publishing (to attract people to buy books). Search images.google.com with (copy advertising), and you will see various advertisements.
(b) "John Comly is the first known writer to issue a ban on the split, saying in 1803 * * * At the time this practice was not common, even though such splits had arisen in English almost as soon as “to” started appearing with infinitives. They crop up, for example, in 'Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight' in the 14th century."

Sir Gawain and the Green KnigHt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight
("It describes how Sir Gawain * * * accepts a challenge from a mysterious 'Green Knight' ")
(c) "Samuel Johnson wrote 'Milton was too busy to much miss his wife,' but the usage really took off again in the 19th century."

Samuel Johnson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson
(1709 – 1784; an lexicographer)

, after whom this column (about English) is named.
(d) "Robert Burns wrote 'to nobly stem tyrannic pride' because it has a pleasingly punchy beat to it."

The verse is from the 1786 poem
The Cotter's Saturday Night
http://www.robertburns.org.uk/As ... _saturday_night.htm