Not sure what's happening at the Times today ... first there's the Sodom and Gomorrah piece (which follows this), then there's this throwaway remark:
Surely the writer didn't take intros like this one seriously:
... or perhaps they were swayed by a Wikipedia thing about scrapbooking which mentions:
... which looks like yet another attempt to find an ancient source for something utterly modern.
Scrapbooks were invented by the Ancient Greeks but the modern variant was launched in Utah in the 1980s as a way of embellishing family photo albums.
Surely the writer didn't take intros like this one seriously:
Like many things in life, we owe scrapbooking to the Ancient Greeks. Great thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato and Socrates liked nothing better after a hard day's thinking than to dive into their stash and knock up a couple of 12 x 12 layouts whilst tucking into a plate of feta and black olives.
... or perhaps they were swayed by a Wikipedia thing about scrapbooking which mentions:
In ancient Greece hypomnemata were a form of notebook for recording one's own copies of what one had heard, read, or thought that might be worth remembering. There is little evidence in the archaeological and historical record that this practice was undertaken anywhere else previously.
... which looks like yet another attempt to find an ancient source for something utterly modern.