[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Always keep an 'out' in your hip pocket.

Bevo Howard

 

The Cub is the safest airplane in the world; it can just barely kill you.

attributed to Max Stanley, Northrop test pilot

 

A pilot who doesn't have any fear probably isn't flying his plane to its
maximum.

Jon McBride, astronaut

 

If you're faced with a forced landing, fly the thing as far into the crash
as possible.

Bob Hoover

 

It occurred to me that if I did not handle the crash correctly, there would
be no survivors.

Richard Leakey, after engine failure in a single engine Nairobi, Africa,
1993.

 

Though I Fly Through the Valley of Death I Shall Fear No Evil For I am
80,000 feet and Climbing.

sign over the entrance to the SR-71 operating location on Kadena AB Okinawa

 

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Shindig

 

Many researchers have theories about the origin of this interesting little
word, but few can supply firm facts. With a bit of guesswork, though, we can
get somewhere near the source.

 

The usual spelling today is without the hyphen, shindig, and means a noisy
or merry dance or party, often one that is celebrating something (to define
it, the OED uses the informal British English phrase knees-up for a similar
sort of party, taken from the music-hall song Knees Up, Mother Brown).
Shindig appears for the first time in American writing of the 1870s and the
oldest example found is in the Idaho Statesman of 30 October 1871.

 

Shindig is a modification of the older shindy, which could equally be a
noisy party or gathering, but in its first examples instead referred to a
commotion, ruckus or brawl, as in to kick up a shindy. In that form it dates
from the 1820s; an example from later in the century is in Jerome K Jerome's
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, published in 1886: "I always do sit with my
hands in my pockets except when I am in the company of my sisters, my
cousins, or my aunts; and they kick up such a shindy - I should say
expostulate so eloquently upon the subject - that I have to give in and take
them out - my hands I mean." This idea was often taken over into shindig, as
you can tell from Stephen Crane's Active Service of 1899: "You have noted
that there are signs of a few bruises and scratches? ... Well, they are from
the fight. It seems the people took us for Germans, and there was an awful
palaver, which ended in a proper and handsome shindig."

 

You can see how the idea of a ruckus could have become modified into that of
a noisy party. It's less obvious how shindy turned into shindig. An entry in
Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms gives the clue, because it says that
shin-dig was used literally in the Southern states to mean a kick to the
shins. You can see how popular etymology could have added that to the sense
of a brawl and created shindig from shindy.

 

That leaves us only to explain the origin of shindy. Here we get on to shaky
ground. It is possible that it's from the Scots game of shinty or shinney, a
bit like hockey and likewise played with a bent stick, a cousin of Irish
hurling that some say is also the origin of ice hockey. If that's so, shindy
may be from the Gaelic sinteag, a bound or leap, or possibly from one of the
rude cries uttered in the game, such as shin ye, shin you, shin t'ye. By all
accounts it was a rough game, often with 100 or more men on each side and no
holds barred in the quest for supremacy. The Penny Magazine of 31 January
1835 described it with muted horror: "Large parties assemble during
Christmas holidays, one parish sometimes making a match against another. In
the struggles between the contending players many hard blows are given, and
more frequently a shin is broken, or by rarer chance some more serious
accident may occur."

 

It's not hard to imagine the name being borrowed in North America for a
commotion.

 

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The longest recorded champagne cork flight was 177 feet and 9 inches, four
feet from level ground at Woodbury Vineyards in New York State.

 

In the 1800's, rum was considered excellent for cleaning hair and keeping it
healthy. Brandy was believed to strengthen hair roots.

 

The purpose of the indentation at the bottom of a wine bottle is to
strengthen the structure of the bottle.

 

In the U.S., a barrel of beer contains 31 gallons, which is equivalent to
about 330 twelve-ounce bottles or cans. 

 

Bubbles in Champagne were seen by early wine makers as a highly undesirable
defect to be prevented.

 

Liquor stores in the US are called "package stores" and sell "package goods"
because of laws requiring that alcohol containers be concealed in public by
being placed in paper bags or "packages."

 

Methyphobia is fear of alcohol.