[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

A UFO!? Quick, grab the worst camera we own. 

Anonymous

 

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other
way. 

Mark Twain

 

My wife dresses to kill. She cooks the same way. 

Henny Youngman

 

I thought about losing weight once, but I don't like losing. 

Anonymous

 

Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. 

Albert Einstein

 

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Anonymous

 

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Skedaddle

  

This archetypal American expression - meaning to run away, scram, leave in a
hurry or escape - has led etymologists a pretty dance in trying to work out
where it comes from.

 

What we do know for certain is that it suddenly appears at the beginning of
the Civil War. Out of the blue, it became fashionable in 1862, with lots of
examples appearing in American newspapers and books. The focus of all the
early examples is the War; without doubt it started out as military slang
with the meaning of fleeing the battlefield or retreating hurriedly. Its
first appearance in print, in the New York Tribune of 10 August 1861, made
this clear: "No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they
'skiddaddled', (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good use the
seceshers make of their legs in time of danger)."

 

A satirical musical item from 1862 in which the pseudonymous author is using
the newly fashionable slang term to point his message. The last lines of the
lyric are "He who fights and runs away, / May live to run another day.""

 

However, it quickly moved into civilian circles with the broader sense of
leaving in a hurry. It crossed the Atlantic astonishingly quickly, being
recorded in the Illustrated London News in 1862 and then being put in the
mouth of a young lady character by Anthony Trollope in his novel The Last
Chronicle of Barset in 1867: " 'Mamma, Major Grantly has - skedaddled.' 'Oh,
Lily, what a word!' "

 

So far so good. Where it comes from is almost totally obscure. Was it Greek,
as John Hotten argued in his Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1874, from
skedannumi, to "retire tumultuously", perhaps "set afloat by some Harvard
professor"? It sounds plausible, but probably not. The English Dialect
Dictionary, compiled at the end of the nineteenth century, argues that it's
from a Scottish or Northern English dialect word meaning to spill or
scatter, in particular to spill milk. This may be from Scots skiddle,
meaning to splash water about or spill. Jonathon Green, in the Cassell
Dictionary of Slang, suggests this transferred to the US through "the image
of blood and corpses being thus 'spilled and scattered' on the battlefield
before the flight of a demoralized army".

 

Crackpot

 

The assumption is this is a moderately obvious compound. It suggests that a
person's brain is like a cracked pot, in other words that he or she is in
some way deranged. Pot was once a slang term for the skull, and something
cracked was obviously defective - a older expression with a similar meaning
that used the same word was crack-brain, and of course we still have the
slang term cracked for someone who's thought to be crazy (a crackhead is
something different, of course).

 

Crackpot has been with us since the 1880s, though its first sense was that
of a stupid person. The London humorous writer F Anstey (a pseudonym for
Thomas Anstey Guthrie) recorded it in this sense in 1891 in a piece about
short farces of the period that were performed in the more minor London
music halls: "Colonel Jinks's ill-used son discovered the will, whereupon
his ecstasy was quite lyrical. 'What!' he cried. 'All that mine? Five
thousand jimmy-oh goblets, five thousand good old golden sorcepin lids!
[i.e. gold sovereigns] To think I've bin sech a bloomin' crackpot all this
time and never tumbled on it! I'll be a gentleman now, and live in stoyle.'"

 

Within a few years, the term had moved to its modern sense of a person given
to eccentric, senseless or lunatic notions.

 

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Herbert Hoover often spoke Chinese to his wife to keep their stories
private. 

 

During their first three years in the White House, the Hoovers dined alone
only three times, each time on their wedding anniversary.

 

Harry S. Truman Read every book in his hometown library.

 

Gerald Ford Held his daughter's High School prom in the White House.

 

George H.W. Bush survived four plane crashes during World War II.

 

Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife, Claudia "Lady Bird" Alta Taylor, were
married with a $2.50 wedding ring bought at Sears Roebuck. 

 

Richard Nixon was the first president to visit all 50 states and the first
president to visit China.