The arts of the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and those of the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy) were fragments preserved against the ruinous loss of classical knowledge.
The song was written by the five boys and five girls who sing it - they are all between 10 and 16 - and it tells of the dangers of mines, of a friend killed by one, of the ruinous loss of family livestock - and of the daily ordeal of finding water in an arid environment where even the river banks are mined.
And 12 million Chinese citizens who opened share-trading accounts in May were nursing potentially ruinous losses.
But analysts remain wary of further nasty surprises, particularly among less well-known banks like IKB Deutsche Industriebank of Germany, which needed to be rescued after ruinous losses.
Now, Deutsche Bank, having avoided the ruinous losses of Citigroup, UBS and others, is seeking acquisitions, while Citigroup is selling off assets to shore up its capital adequacy ratio.
He said, however, "it is important to understand that Mr. Chais and his family have suffered astounding and ruinous losses from the Madoff scheme".
That Britain's oldest merchant bank should have run up such ruinous losses was remarkable enough; that it had done it through the activities of a lone 27-year-old derivatives trader in Singapore was mind-boggling.
The former boss of BAWAG, an Austrian bank, lived in a penthouse flat with a swimming pool, built for him on top of the bank's office in the heart of Vienna.That bank nearly collapsed last year, after ruinous losses from risky speculation.
The pockets of good feeling in Scottish rugby were dynamited and the sense that the national team, under Vern Cotter, was moving beyond the kind of ruinous losses that have dogged them for 16 years has now been stopped dead in its tracks.
But insurance underwriters, fearing ruinous losses if the facility were hit by a fire or an art heist of the kind that struck Rotterdam's Kunsthal museum earlier this month, are raising the cost of insuring any more paintings under its roof, or even refusing cover altogether.
Moreover, a short-seller can be subject to a ruinous squeeze and unlimited losses.
