Key signature A minor as each accidental may be notated explicitly as required, or the piece may be modal or atonal. An example is Bartók's Piano Sonata, which has no fixed key and is highly chromatic. If not bound by common practice conventions, microtones can also be notated in a key signature; which microtonal symbols are used depends on the system. The common practice period conventions are so firmly established that some musical notation programs have been unable to show nonstandard key signatures until recently. The use of a one-flat signature developed in the Medieval period, but signatures with more than one
Ascent of the A-Word the book as an "often raucously funny account of what seems to be America’s most popular insult" which manages to be neither "exceedingly snarky" nor "overly academic and pretentious". Ascent of the A-Word Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years is a 2012 book by the American linguist Geoffrey Nunberg which analyzes the history of the epithet "asshole". In "Ascent", Nunberg traces to World War II the origins of the word as an epithet, when it was used as a term of abuse for superior officers considered abusive or self-important. Following the soldiers' return home from the war,