They are evergreen shrubs and small trees growing to 1–15 m tall. The leaves are opposite or in whorls of three or four, 5–50 cm long and 3–25 cm broad, dark green and glossy with a leathery texture. The flowers are solitary or in small clusters, white or pale yellow. Flowering is from about mid-spring to mid-summer and many species are strongly scented.
Gardenia plants are prized for the strong sweet scent of their flowers, which can be very large in some species.
Gardenias have a reputation for being difficult to grow. Because they originated in warm humid tropical areas, they demand high humidity.
Frangipani
Plumeria (common name Frangipani) is a small genus of 7-8 species that grow in tropical and subtropical Americas. The genus consists of mainly deciduous shrubs and trees. "P. rubra" (Common Frangipani, Red Frangipani), that grows in Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela, produces flowers ranging from white, yellow to pink. From Mexico and Central America, "Plumeria" has spread to all tropical areas of the world, especially Hawaii, where it grows so abundantly that many people think that it is native there.
"Plumeria" is related to the Oleander, "Nerium Oleander", and both possess poisonous, milky sap, rather similar to that of "Euphorbia".
Religious conversion
Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religious identity, or a change from one religious identity to another. "Conversion" can take place not only from one religion to another, but also between different denominations, within the same faith, when this involves a felt change of spiritual identity rather than other reasons such as convenience.
Min Nan
Min or Miin (Minnan in Mandarin Chinese), more commonly referred to as Hokkien, Taiwanese, Holo, or Hoklo, is a group of languages that is spoken in southern China. It is spoken in the southern part of Fujian. It is also spoken in Taiwan, Singapore, Guangdong, and Hainan. The name of the language comes from the Min River that is in Fujian.
Radical (Chinese character)
A Chinese radical (Chinese: 部首; pinyin: bùshǒu; "section header") is the part of a Chinese character used to list the character in a Chinese dictionary.
The radical is usually a semantic indicator: a piece that gives hints to the reader about what the whole character means. Later, the term was given a "second" meaning, the 部首 (Pinyin: "bùshǒu", Japanese "bushu", Korean "busu"). This means "section header", which refers to the place where a character is listed in the dictionary.
Radicals are typically simpler characters, or different variants of simpler characters, which combine with other radicals to make a more complex character. People can only make so many unique ideographs for the huge number of words and morphemes that make up a language. Combining already existing ideographs together to form a compound ideograph is a very convenient solution to make many more words. While there are thousands of Chinese characters (well over 45,000) that exist, it is said that nearly all characters used in daily life are made up of just 214 radicals.
One example of simpler characters combining to form a more complex one is the complex character 明 "míng" meaning "bright" or "tomorrow", which is made up of the radicals 日 "rì" meaning "sun" or "day" and 月 "yuè" meaning "moon" or "month", both of which are simple characters that can exist by themselves, and the putting together of sun 日 and moon 月 to make one character show that either the sun and moon pass before tomorrow comes, or that they are the bright objects in the sky that shine light on the earth. An example of characters with radicals that don't exist by themselves is the complex character 休 "xìu" meaning "to stop", “to cease” or "to rest", which is made up of the radical 亻, which is a variant of the simple character 人 "rén" meaning "person" or "human", though the variant never exists as by itself must therefore attach itself to another character to form a complete character, and the radical 木 "mǔ" meaning "wood" or "tree", hinting what a person might want to do after he/she ceases working (like lying on a tree).
A more complex is the character 媽 "mā" meaning “mother” (shown right), in which the left part 女 "nǚ" meaning "woman" or "female" happens to be the semantic component, and also the section header under which dictionaries list the graph. However, not all section headers function in a particular character as the semantic component. Some are based on phonetics, or hint as the character's pronunciation, like the right part 馬 "mǎ" meaning "horse" of the character 媽. Although the meaning of the character 媽 has no clear, obvious connection to a horse, 馬 is included to help the reader remember its pronunciation. Other section headers are merely chosen for convenience of finding the character in a dictionary, and play neither a semantic nor a phonetic role, like 二 "èr" "two" in 亞 "yà" "second" or "inferior",亅 "jué" (no meaning) in 了 "liào" "past tense marker", and 一 "yī" "one" in 丁 "dīng" "fourth". These two meanings of “radical” are not synonymous, though they may coincide in a particular example, causing a lot of confusion. (For clarity, both semantic component and section header terms are used here.)
The equivalents in cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics are called determinatives.
Chinese character components, whether semantic or phonetic in role, are the building blocks for all Chinese Hanzi as well as in the derived forms of Japanese Kanji, Korean Hanja, and Vietnamese Chữ nôm and Chữ nho.
Since the Kangxi dictionary of 1716 was indexed using the 214
"Zìhuì" section headers, the standard list thereof has remained unchanged. Section headers are foundationally important for the organisation and use of Hanzi, Kanji, and Hanja dictionaries.
Gladwyn Jebb
Hubert Miles Gladwyn Jebb, 1st Baron Gladwyn, GCMG, GCVO, CB, known as Gladwyn Jebb (–), was a prominent British civil servant, diplomat and politician as well as the first Acting Secretary-General of the United Nations.
After World War II, he served as Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in August 1945. He was appointed Acting United Nations Secretary-General from October 1945 to February 1946 until the appointment of the first Secretary-General Trygve Lie.
Returning to London, Jebb was Deputy to the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin at the Conference of Foreign Ministers before serving as the Foreign Office's United Nations Adviser (1946-47). He represented the United Kingdom at the Brussels Treaty Permanent Commission with personal rank of Ambassador. He became the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950-1954 and to Paris from 1954-1960.
In 1960 Jebb was made a hereditary peer and as Baron Gladwyn became involved in politics as a member of the Liberal Party. He was Deputy Leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords 1965-1988 and spokesman on foreign affairs and defence. An supporter of the European Union, he served as a Member of the European Parliament 1973-1976 where he was also the Vice-President of the Parliament's Political Committee. He tried to be elected to the European Parliament in 1979.
When asked why he had joined the Liberal party in the early 1960s, he replied that the Liberals were a party without a general and that he was a general without a party. Like many Liberals, he passionately believed that education was the key to social reform.
He died in 1996, and is buried at St. Andrew's, Bramfield in the county of Suffolk.
Jebb's wife, Cynthia, Lady Gladwyn, was a noted diarist of their times in Paris and a hostess of Liberal and London politics. She was the great-grand daughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Publications by Baron Gladwyn include:
Trygve Lie
Trygve Halvdan Lie () (16 July 1896 – 30 December 1968) was a Norwegian politician. From 1946 to 1952 he was the first elected Secretary-General of the United Nations.