July 18, 2007
Momentary
In one of our southern states, there’s a law that requires in all the public schools a moment of silence at the start of each day.
The law says that a moment should be no more than sixty seconds, and that the silence is “not intended to be, and shall not be conducted as, a religious service or exercise.” Simple, but not so simple.
The meaning of silence seemed easier to define than to keep. But not so with moment. Some resented defining a moment at all, thought it should remain its usual pleasant and ambiguous self, like “just a moment” when on the phone you get put on hold and treated to another endless concert of elevator music, or like when the dentist starts in on you and says, “this’ll only take a moment.”
Moment (from momentum) was originally about motion, not time at all. Later, it came to mean a “movement of time.” It has varied all the way from “twinkling of an eye” to an “historical moment” to “he has his moments.”
Mathematicians define a moment as “the mean of the nth powers of the deviations of the observed values in a set of statistical data from a fixed value” or, if you prefer, “the expected value of a power of the deviation of a random variable from a fixed value.”
Their definitions are usually easily followed by a moment of silence.
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