[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.

Greg Norman

 

Religion is like going out to dinner with friends. Everyone may order
something different, but everyone can still sit at the same table.

Dali Lama

 

A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you
into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed
by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart
attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?

Robert Heinlein

 

Silence is golden, unless you have kids, then silence is just plain
suspicious. 

Anonymous

 

Just because I can't sing doesn't mean that I won't sing. 

Anonymous

 

It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on. 

Marilyn Monroe

 

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Lobbyist

 

A piece on the NBC Nightly News included the origin of the word lobbyist.
The host, Brian Williams, explained that the word originated with President
Ulysses S Grant, who liked to get out of the White House and often went to
Washington's Willard Hotel for brandy and cigars. Anyone who wanted access
to the President to make their mark on Presidential politics would know to
find him in the lobby there. President Grant was the first to refer to these
DC power brokers as lobbyists. 

 

This old tale has become so embedded in the unconscious of the US nation
that it sometimes appears in quite reputable reference works. But it isn't
true; even a perfunctory look at the history of the word shows it can't be.

 

The first example given in the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in the
Cornhill Magazine in January 1863. Grant was president from 1869 to 1877, so
the word was in use before he took office. A further nail in the coffin of
the tale might be that the Cornhill Magazine was British, not American.
However, examples of it showed up in US newspapers a few years earlier
still, including this from The Lafayette County Herald of Shullsburg,
Wisconsin, dated 15 January 1857:

 

In classifying the lobby members of Congress the female representatives of
the 'third house' occupy no unimportant position. Indeed, I may say that one
experienced female lobbyist is equal to any three schemers of the other sex
with whom I am acquainted.

 

It would not be surprising to find still earlier examples. The job of the
lobbyist had by then existed, unnamed, for many years (though third house,
the humorous collective term for them mentioned in the piece above, is known
in the US from the 1840s). The OED's first example of the collective term
lobby meaning "persons who frequent the lobby of the house of legislature
for the purpose of influencing its members in their official action" is
dated 1808.

 

The original lobby was the one attached to the chamber of the British House
of Commons, in which members could meet and talk to outsiders. This sense
(and function) is recorded from the middle of the seventeenth century and
was adopted in Congress when it was established more than a century later.

 

Caught red-handed

 

We must thank (or conceivably blame) the famous Scottish writer Sir Walter
Scott for having popularized this term, which was until his time purely a
Scots expression. He used it first in his novel Ivanhoe of 1819: "I did but
tie one fellow, who was taken redhanded and in the fact, to the horns of a
wild stag". Before then it was usually written as red-hand or redhand as in
"if he be taken redhand". It dates back to the fifteenth century.

 

The meaning was then the same as now. Somebody taken redhand was either in
the act of committing a crime or with clear evidence of it about him. The
original reference was to literal red hands, those of a murderer stained
with the blood of his victim. But it soon became broadened to refer
figuratively to other crimes, for example to a thief being caught carrying
stolen items.

 

The term has no connection with a red hand in heraldry, such as the famous
Red Hand of Ulster, which derives from the ancient device of the O'Neills,
once high kings of Ireland.

 

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Calvin Coolidge was the only president sworn into office by his father, a
justice of the peace and notary public.  

 

Bill Clinton was the first U.S. Democratic president to win reelection since
Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

 

George W. Bush was the first son of a president to take the office since
John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams.

 

Ulysses S. Grant said he knew only two songs. "One was Yankee Doodle and the
other wasn't."

 

John F. Kennedy was the youngest American elected president and the youngest
to die in office. 

 

Thomas Jefferson was an avid inventor who is credited with inventing several
items including the coat hanger, hideaway bed, and dumbwaiter.

 

Warren Harding played poker at least twice a week and once put an entire set
of White House china up to stake his hand -- he lost the hand and the china.