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The Oxford English Dictionary (hereon "OED", for simplicity’s sake) offers several alternative definitions for the term pride . Almost none of them are positive. For present purposes, let’s skip the more obscure leonine variant--and in fact, a "pride of lions " may actually have its etymological roots in the symbolic representation of this animal during the Middle Ages for the biblical sin--and instead turn our attention to the rather slippery semantic aspects, since there’s a lot encapsulated by this peculiarly bipolar word.

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the March 1961 issue of Scientific American. In the days when civilized men believed that the world was flat they had no reason to think about gravity. There was up and down