Arabs

Arabs (/ˈærəbz/; Arabic: عرب‎, ‘arab) are a major panethnic group whose native language is Arabic, comprising the majority of the Arab world. They primarily inhabit Western Asia, North Africa, and parts of the Horn of Africa. Before the spread of Islam, Arab referred to any of the largely nomadic Semitic tribes inhabiting the northern and central Arabian Peninsula. In modern usage Arab refers to a heterogeneous collection of Arabic-speaking peoples in the Middle East and North Africa. The ties that bind Arabs are linguistic, cultural, and political, and to a lesser extent genetic, with Arabized Arabs displaying genetic admixture from the Arabian peninsula as well as indigenous elements. As such, Arab identity is based on one or more of genealogical, linguistic or cultural grounds, although with competing identities often taking a more prominent role, based on considerations including regional, national, clan, kin, sect, and tribe affiliations and relationships. Not all people who could be considered Arab identify as such. If the Arab panethnicity is regarded as a single population, then it constitutes the world's second largest group of people after the Han Chinese.

Housewife

A housewife is a woman whose main occupation is running or managing her family's home—caring for and educating her children, cooking and storing food, buying goods the family needs in day-to-day life, cleaning and maintaining the home, making clothes for the family, etc.—and who is generally not employed outside the home. Merriam Webster describes a housewife as a married woman who is in charge of her household. The British Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (1901) defined a housewife as: "the mistress of a household; a female domestic manager; a pocket sewing kit".

The related term homemaker has almost the same meaning but is not limited to women and does not connote marriage.

Sociology and economics

Some feminists and non-feminist economists (particularly proponents of historical materialism) note that the value of housewives' work is ignored in standard formulations of economic output, such as GDP or employment figures. Housewives work many unrecorded hours a week, while depending for money on their husband's or partner's employment.

Film festival

A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upon the festival's focus, can include international and domestic releases. Some festivals focus on a specific film-maker or genre (e.g., film noir) or subject matter (e.g., horror film festivals). A number of film festivals specialise in short films of a defined maximum length. Film festivals are typically annual events. Some film historians do not consider Film Festivals as official releases of film, like Jerry Beck. The best known film festivals are the Venice Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, the latter being the largest film festival worldwide, based on attendance. The Venice Film Festival is the oldest major festival. The Melbourne International Film Festival is the largest film festival in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the oldest in the world. A 2013 study found 3,000 active films festivals worldwide—active defined as having held an event in the previous 24 months.

Belly dance

Belly dance is a Western-coined name for a type of Middle Eastern dance. Originally a "solo, improvised dance involving torso articulation," belly dance takes many different forms depending on the country and region, both in costume and dance style, and new styles have evolved in the West as its popularity has spread globally.

Names and terminology

The term "belly dance" is a translation of the French term "danse du ventre", which was applied to the dance in the Victorian era, and probably originally referred to the Arabic tribe Ouled Nail dancers of Algeria, whose dance used more abdominal movements than the dances described today as "belly dance". It is something of a misnomer, as every part of the body is involved in the dance; the most featured body part is usually the hips.

In Arabic, the dance is known as "Raqs Sharqi" ("Eastern Dance") or "Raqs Beledi" ("Country Dance" or "Folk Dance").

Technique and movements

Belly dance is primarily a torso-driven dance, with an emphasis on articulations of the hips. Unlike many Western dance forms, the focus of the dance is on relaxed, natural isolations of the torso muscles, rather than on movements of the limbs through space. Although some of these isolations appear superficially similar to the isolations used in jazz ballet, they are sometimes driven differently and have a different feeling or emphasis.

Wife

A wife is a female partner in a continuing marital relationship. A wife may also be referred to as a spouse, which is a gender-neutral term. The term continues to be applied to a woman who has separated from her partner and ceases to be applied to such a woman only when her marriage has come to an end following a legally recognized divorce or the death of her spouse. On the death of her partner, a wife is referred to as a widow, but not after she is divorced from her partner.

The rights and obligations of the wife in relation to her partner and her status in the community and in law varies between cultures and has varied over time.

Summary

The word is of Germanic origin, from Proto-Germanic *wībam, "woman". In Middle English it had the form wif, and in Old English wīf, "woman or wife". It is related to Modern German Weib (woman, female), and Danish viv (wife, usually poetic) and may derive ultimately from the Indo-European root ghwībh- "shame; pudenda" (cf. Tocharian B kwīpe and Tocharian A kip, each meaning "female pudenda", with clear sexual overtones) The original meaning of the phrase "wife" as simply "woman", unconnected with marriage or a husband/wife, is preserved in words such as "midwife" and "fishwife".