(NEP-uh-tiz-um)

Means: Handing out jobs and favors to your relatives.

Etymology: From Italian nepotismo, from nipote, "nephew." Renaissance popes loved to make their "nephews" cardinals and give them power and money, and plenty of those nephews were really the pope's own sons. There was even a semi-official title for it: the cardinal-nephew.

"The new VP is the owner's 24-year-old nephew. I'm not saying it's nepotism, but I'm not not saying it."

Danish architect Arne Jacobsen got to design the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, which opened in 1960, down to the last detail: the building, the lamps, the door handles, the cutlery, and the chairs. The Egg and the Swan were made for its lobby. That's Scandinavian modern: clean lines, soft curves, natural materials, and every object treated as worth designing. His flatware looked so futuristic that Stanley Kubrick used it in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Room 606 is still kept the way Jacobsen did it.

410 days. That's about how long the Empire State Building took, from the start of work on March 17, 1930, to opening day on May 1, 1931. All 102 floors. At its fastest, the steel frame climbed about four and a half floors a week. Photographer Lewis Hine hung off the beams with the crews to document it, and that's one of his shots below. It stayed the tallest building in the world for almost 40 years.

I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes.

She hugged me.

What do these five words have in common?

CHINA · SHINDIG · ARMADA · LEGEND · HIPPO

Answer in tomorrow's issue.