[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Ralph Stilwell]

I must take issue with the dismissal of bootlegging as the origin of "dry
run" because it is much older than Prohibition.  I believe that smuggling
is not only older than Prohibition, it much older than any of the suggested
origins!
Unless of course, the term bootlegging can't be applied to the Rum runners
of the Colonial period.
Ralph

On Mon, Sep 25, 2017 at 11:10 AM, Gary Thewlis <gthewlis at comcast.net> wrote:

> He treats us like men. He lets us wear earrings.
>
> Torrin Polk about his college football coach
>
>
>
> How many roads must a man walk down before he admits he's lost?
>
> Anonymous
>
>
>
> Never judge a book by its movie.
>
> Anonymous
>
>
>
> I didn't mean to push all your buttons, I was just looking for the mute
> button.
>
> Anonymous
>
>
>
> Be careful when you follow the masses. Sometimes the M is silent.
>
> Anonymous
>
>
>
> I stopped understanding math when the alphabet decided to get involved.
>
> Anonymous
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>
> XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
>
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>
> Dry run
>
>
>
> The sense of rehearsal meaning is known in the United States from the early
> 1940s. The oldest example found is from the Gettysburg Times for August
> 1941
> in reference to an army operation: "The occasion was a 'dry run' for the
> maneuvers that will begin within the next ten days."
>
>
>
> One explanation that is often given is that it is linked to a much older
> North American sense of an arroyo, a stream bed that is normally dry or
> almost dry but which floods after heavy rain. These are common in the USA,
> as witness the many places called Dry Run. (Run here just means a course or
> route.) This sense dates back to the 1840s. One might guess that the idea
> behind the rehearsal sense is that it's like a dry river bed before a
> storm,
> in waiting for the big event when the rain comes and it fulfils its
> potential function.
>
>
>
> However, that explanation seems too great a stretch of meaning.
> (Incidentally, there is a story, in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and
> Fable,
> that it refers to "the reconnoitring by bootleggers of the route they plan
> to use before transporting their illicit goods along it". That's so
> stretched it broke the elastic, not least because the expression dry run is
> definitely older than Prohibition.)
>
>
>
> Douglas Wilson of the American Dialect Society found evidence for a much
> more plausible origin.
>
>
>
> The term run, more fully fire run, has for at least the past century been
> used by local fire departments in the USA for a call-out to the site of a
> fire. It was once common for fire departments or volunteer hose companies
> to
> give exhibitions of their prowess at carnivals or similar events. A report
> of one such appeared in the Stevens Point Journal for 8 July 1899:
> "Wednesday night's carnival feature was a grand exhibition fire run by the
> Milwaukee fire department, under the direction of Fire Chief James Foley."
> Companies also competed with each other to show how well they could do.
> These competitions had fairly standard rules, of which several examples
> appear in the press of this period, such as in the Olean Democrat of 2
> August 1888: "Not less than fifteen or more than seventeen men to each
> company. Dry run, standing start, each team to be allowed one trial; cart
> to
> carry 350 feet of hose in 50 foot lengths ...".
>
>
>
> These reports show that a dry run in the jargon of the fire service at this
> period was one that didn't involve the use of water, as opposed to a wet
> run
> that did. In some competitions there was a specific class for the latter,
> one of which was reported in the Salem Daily News for 6 July 1896: "The wet
> run was made by the Fulton hook and ladder company and the Deluge hose
> company. The run was made east in Main street to Fawcett's store where the
> ladders were raised to the top of the building. The hose company attached
> [its] hose to a fire plug and ascending the ladder gave a fine exhibition."
>
>
>
> It's clear that the idea of a dry run being a rehearsal would very readily
> follow from the jargon usage, though it first appears in print only much
> later. Douglas Wilson found that by March 1943 the idea of a dry run as a
> rehearsal had so taken hold that Stars and Stripes created an odd-looking
> compound term in a feature on an airbase crash team: "There aren't any
> brass
> poles, and no false alarms, but there is plenty of authentic firehouse
> atmosphere around the place. Regularly the crash crews go tearing out on a
> dry run; once in a while they empty the 400-gallon tank on their truck in a
> wet dry run."
>
>
>
> He also points out that there is another sense in which dry run is used
> today in the US - that of a call-out of an emergency service, such as an
> ambulance, in which no service is given, either because the patient refused
> help or because no emergency was found. He suggests that this might have
> arisen through an extension of the firefighting term in situations in which
> the crew arrived at the scene of a supposed fire but found either that it
> was already out or that it was a false alarm. In neither case would any
> water be pumped, so they were also dry runs in the firefighters' jargon.
>
>
>
> XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
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> First hard disk of 1 GB capacity was developed in 1980. Weight of the first
> gigabyte hard disk was 249kg and its cost was USD 40,000 at that time.
>
>
>
> The first 1 TB hard disk was developed by Hitachi in 2007.
>
>
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> Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra graphic card contains 222 million transistors.
>
>
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> First microprocessor from Intel was Intel 4004. It contained only 2300
> transistors and it worked at a clock rate of 740 kHz.
>
>
>
> The design team of the IBM PC prototype was code-named The Dirty Dozen.
>
>
>
> On average a human being blinks 20 times in a minute. But while using a
> computer blink rate goes down to 7 per minute.
>
>
>
> If we could turn human brain into a computer, then that computer would be
> able to do 38,000 trillion operations per second and hold more than 3580
> TBs
> of memory.
>
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