[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but I still keep a long
list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. 

David Sedaris

 

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and
there is some evidence that they can't read them either. 

Gore Vidal

 

He talked with more claret than clarity. 

Susan Ertz

 

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for
anyone. 

John Ciardi 

 

If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing
the thinking.

Lyndon B. Johnson 

 

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever
met.

Abraham Lincoln

 

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Napping

 

Much amusement was caused in England fairly recently by the arrest and trial
in France of a group who all admitted being members of the Garden Gnome
Liberation Front, and of stealing nearly 200 garden gnomes over a period of
two years. What grabbed attention in the headline to the piece - as it was
intended to - was the joyous journalistic coinage of gnome-napping.

 

That's an obvious-enough extension of a suffix which first turned up in the
term kidnapping and which has been extended further to dognapping and other
faintly facetious formations that have taken the fancy of various writers
from time to time, like data-napping (stealing information), art-napping
(making off with some expensive Old Master), kegnapping (pinching aluminium
beer kegs for the metal), space-napping (like kidnapping, only by
pointy-eared aliens), and even headnapping (stealing a human head for some
Burke and Hare-ish purpose).

 

What is particularly excellent about napping is that it still means what it
has all along: stealing. In this it differs from others, like burger, which
originally had nothing to do with food but was just the ending of Hamburger
(something or someone who comes from Hamburg), or -gate (originally the last
syllable of Watergate but now a general - but meaningless - suffix
indicating that some political hanky-panky is afoot).

 

The original, kidnapping, was invented sometime in the latish seventeenth
century, and referred directly to the stealing of kids - that is, children,
in the same way we use the word today, though it was very low slang at the
time - particularly to spirit them abroad to work as forced labour on
plantations in colonies like Bermuda or Virginia. Only later did it lose its
link to children so that it could apply to the abduction of any human being,
and it was only in the 1840s that it lost its slangy origins and became
standard English.

 

The second element, nap, was a dialect word meaning to grab, snatch or seize
and seems to have had close links with nab in the same sense; nobody seems
to know exactly where either comes from, though the Scandinavian languages
have a closely similar word.

 

You might think that another sense of nap is related - a short sleep seized
or grabbed in the midst of other matters - but it seems to be quite
unconnected, coming from the old English hnappian, "to sleep". So
power-napping, which is apparently a recent US slang expression for taking a
quick restorative kip in the office, has no etymological connection with any
word meaning to steal from the electricity company.

 

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Fourteenth century physicians didn't know what caused the plague, but they
knew it was contagious. As a result they wore an early kind of bioprotective
suit which included a large beaked head piece. The beak of the head piece,
which made them look like large birds, was filled with vinegar, sweet oils
and other strong smelling compounds to counteract the stench of the dead and
dying plague victims. 

 

>From the Middle Ages up until the end of the 19th century, barbers performed
a number of medical duties including bloodletting, wound treatment,
dentistry, minor operations and bone-setting. The barber's striped red pole
originated in the Middle Ages, when it was a staff the patient would grip
while the barber bled the patient. 

 

Grand Rapids, Michigan was the 1st US city to fluoridate its water in 1945. 

 

In 1810 US population was 7,239,881. Black population at 1,377,808 was 19%.
In 1969 US population reached 200 million. 

 

In 1865, several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social
club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan. 

 

In 1892, Italy raised the minimum age for marriage for girls - to 12. 

 

In 1947, Toys for Tots started making the holidays a little happier for
children by organizing its first Christmas toy drive for needy youngsters.