[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system. 

Dan Quayle

 

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you
pure? 

Harry Shearer

 

The trouble with normal is it always gets worse. 

Bruce Cockburn

 

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. 

Thomas Mann

 

Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your
shoes. 

Mickey Mouse 

 

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity. 

Albert Camus

 

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Buff

 

This simple word has a wide variety of senses, of which a couple turned up
in headlines: "Men of iron strip to the buff" and "Opera plays
blindman's-buff".

 

Most of the meanings are linked to buffalo. One reference book suggests that
the word originated in the US as the result of the great buffalo hunts of
last century. The word itself is very much older, being recorded from about
the middle of the sixteenth century.

 

So the buffalo referred to was almost certainly not the American one,
probably unknown to Europeans at the time, but one of the several species of
Asiatic wild oxen (and buffalo buffs will know that the American plains
buffalo technically isn't a buffalo anyway, but a species of bison that's
most closely related to the wisent or European bison). The origin of buffalo
is the Greek boubalos, though that didn't refer to the buffalo either, which
the Greeks didn't have, but was instead the name for a species of antelope.
The word was later taken up in Latin for the Indian buffalo, or water
buffalo, which was introduced into Italy as a draught animal about the year
600. This animal was widely used in the warmer parts of southern Europe and
in North Africa in medieval times.

 

To add to the confusion the short form buff, usually in the spelling buffe,
came into English before buffalo, in about 1550, being derived from the
French version of the word, buffle. Buffalo itself is only recorded in 1588,
and seems to have arrived via the Portuguese, who came across various such
species during their explorations in Asia (they'd reached India in 1499).

 

>From here on there are a series of changes verging on the bizarre. The first
was to use buff (or buffe) as the term, not only for the animal, but also
for its hide, specifically its tanned hide turned into leather. Later the
term was transferred to another very stiff kind of leather made from ox
hide, which was softened with oil and used for military uniforms. This sense
is used in one translation of Dumas' Three Musketeers: "The baldric was
glittering with gold in the front, but was nothing but simple buff behind".
So buff-coat was a nickname for a soldier and to wear buff or be in buff was
to be in the army. Buff leather was a characteristic light color, not unlike
that of the skin of Europeans exposed to the sun, so it soon led to the
expression to be in the buff, or naked. Thomas Dekker is first recorded as
using it in 1602: "I go in stag, in buff" (the first part of that line
brings to mind the much later expression buck naked, from buckskin, a
similar sort of derivation). Strips of leather were once used in various
metal finishing trades to bring goods to a high polish, so leading to our
verb to buff meaning "to polish", and to the noun meaning a device to do the
polishing with. And the color of buffalo leather was, of course, the source
of the word's meaning of things yellowish-brown.

 

In turn, this led to one of the more famous military nicknames in the
British army, the Buffs, for a regiment originally raised in 1572 to serve
against the Dutch but which later became the Royal East Kent Regiment, and
which got its nickname from the color of their uniform facings, when this
was a new thing to have. The old catchphrase Steady the Buffs!, a term of
encouragement or warning to oneself or others, fairly common in the early
part of this century, was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his Soldiers
Three of 1888: "I'd like to see Mr Khan being rude to that girl! Hullo!
Steady the Buffs!". It's firmly stated in several reference books that the
expression originated in an incident in the regiment's history. The trouble
is, nobody seems to know for sure what it was. Some say it was through an
encouraging cry by the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, but the
Buffs weren't there; some others apply it to the foundering of the troopship
Birkenhead off the Cape in 1852, when the Buffs were ordered to stand firm
and let the women and children off first, but the Buffs weren't there
either. Gregory Blaxland, the historian of the regiment, says it was an
exhortation to the second battalion of the Buffs by its adjutant while in
Malta not to be shown up in the presence of his former regiment, the Royal
North British Fusiliers. His cry of "Steady the Buffs", Blaxland says, was
taken up in mockery by the Fusiliers, followed the Buffs to Dublin some
years later, and became a catchphrase. It would seem that Kipling came
across it at some point.

 

The last of this curiously-connected batch is that for the avid devotee of
some activity. This is where we do cross the Atlantic, since it allegedly
derives from New York volunteer firemen of the early part of last century.
They wore buff-coats as a uniform, or heavy buffalo robes as winter wear,
and so were known as buffs. Their enthusiasm in rushing to fires became a
byword and so a permanent part of the language.

 

Just to tidy things up: blindman's buff has nothing to do with any of these,
but derives from the same source as the word buffet for a blow. This game
was at one time for adults (Pepys records in his diary that he played it),
and a rather rough one at that, which often involved the blindfolded person
fending off blows from those around him. This is also the source of buffer
in its various senses of something that resists blows or reduces the effect
of an impact. This turns up in buffer zone and railway buffers, in the
chemists' usage of a compound that resists changes to the acidity or
alkalinity of a solution, and the computer sense of a block of memory that
evens out the rate of communication between two devices.

 

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The Navy's bell-bottom trousers are commonly believed to be introduced in
1817 to permit men to roll them above the knee when washing down the decks
and to make it easier to remove them in a hurry when forced to abandon ship
or when washed overboard. In addition, the trousers may be used as a life
preserver by knotting the legs and swinging them over your head to fill the
legs with air.

 

The Coast Guard seizes 169 pounds of marijuana and 306 pounds of cocaine
worth $9,589,000.00 every day.

 

The Coast Guard is smaller than the New York City Police Department.

 

The Marine Corps motto, "Semper Fidelis," was adopted in 1883 as the
official motto. It is Latin for Always Faithful.

 

The nickname "Leatherneck" originates from the stiff leather stock that
early Marines wore around their necks, probably to protect their jugular
vein against saber blows.

 

The English Bulldog, also known as "Teufel-hunden," or "Devil Dogs," is the
unofficial mascot that symbolize the ethos of the Warrior Culture of the
U.S. Marines. The U.S. Marine Corps earned this unofficial mascot during
World War I, when many German reports called the attacking Marines
"teufel-hunden," meaning Devil-Dogs. "Teufel-hunden" were the vicious, wild
and ferocious mountain dogs of German Bavarian folklore.

 

The U.S. Army was in charge of exploring and mapping America. The Lewis and
Clark Expedition was an all Army affair. Army officers were the first
Americans to see such landmarks as Pike's Peak and the Grand Canyon.

 

The Air Force's F-117 fighter uses aerodynamics discovered during research
into how bumblebees fly.