The Endless Basketball Games

This is Presidents' Day and I was just reading an article about what we've learned over the last several decades. While this isn't the only lesson, in the end, it may be the most important: We've learned to turn the clock back to pre-New Deal days and unleash the rich and powerful on everyone who isn't rich and powerful. There are no rules for these folks and they fear no one. The politicians are their servants. There is no failure for them, because they get rewarded whether their companies perform well or not; not so for the peasantry. We are all playing one-on-one against Lebron James one day, and Kobe Bryant the next, every day of our lives. Not only are we not their equal, there's no referee, and we can't call the games off.

WORD HISTORY:
Nigh-This word, meaning "near," seems to only have forms in the Germanic languages. I was unable to satisfactorily trace it back to any base/root word from Indo European (although that doesn't mean there wasn't one). Old Germanic had "nehwa," which meant "near." It is closely related to other English words, "near" and "next," as well as the "neigh" of "neighbor." Old English had at least two forms, "neah" and "neh," which later became "nigh."  Other Germanic forms: German has "nah," which means "near/close," as does Low German Saxon "na/nah," Dutch has "na" (meaning "after"), Icelandic has "ná" (meaning "near," but now used in compounds). Danish, Norwegian and Swedish have forms that are more closely related to English "near," which itself was derived from the ancestor of "nigh," so they all trace back to the original Old Germanic form. I could not find a form in West Frisian.