[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Nobody ever fergits where he buried a hatchet.

Kin Hubbard

 

It is a wearisome illness to preserve one's health by too strict a regimen.

La Rouchefoucauld

 

Cut out all of these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like
laughing at your own joke.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

H.L. Mencken

 

Do I contradict myself?

Very well than I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

 

In England there are sixty different religions, and only one sauce.

attributed to Domenico Caraccioulo

 

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Snit

 

A snit is a fit of rather childish temper, a tantrum or perhaps a sulk. All
the dictionaries bar one consulted dismiss the matter with their dispiriting
stock phrase “origin unknown”. The exception is Jonathon Green’s Cassell
Dictionary of Slang, which mentions the name of Clare Boothe Luce.

 

Clare Boothe was a talented woman, variously an editor, playwright,
politician, journalist and diplomat. The Saturday Review of Literature of 23
December 1939 remarked about snit that “nobody in Georgia seems ever to have
heard of either the word or the state of being until Miss Clare Boothe
isolated and defined it”. This must have been in reference to her play Kiss
the Boys Goodbye of the previous year, in which she used it. Through that
play (a successful one that was listed as one of the ten best of the year),
she most certainly popularized it, and may well have invented it (most
dictionaries are cautious about the origin because nobody can actually prove
she did).

 

What she based snit on isn’t known, though it’s a splendidly sharp and
echoic word that nicely evokes the spitting hissy fit of such a temper
tantrum.

 

Briar pipe

 

The wood from which briar (or brier) pipes are made is actually a type of
heather, the white heath, which grows in the south of France as well as in
other parts of the Mediterranean coast. The pipes are carved from the root.
In French, this plant is called bruyer, which is from bruyère, heath.

 

When the wood was introduced into Britain in the 1860s, its French name was
quickly changed because people confused it with the native word that
referred either to the bramble or the wild rose.

 

Panhandle

 

Panhandle is variously said to come from the habit of beggars of soliciting
contributions by thrusting out tin pans, into which generous passers-by
would place their coins; or perhaps it’s from the Spanish pan, literally
meaning “bread” but which could also mean “money” (much as our word bread
can in modern English), or possibly from the idea of some hopeful supplicant
panning for gold.

 

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Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to travel outside the U.S. -
Panama. 

 

Zachary Taylor’s wife, Margaret, learned to shoot a gun when she lived with
her husband on the Western frontier. When she lived in the White House, she
refused to serve as hostess, giving that role to their daughter Betty Taylor
Bliss.

 

William Taft is the only president to also serve as Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court (1921-1930).

 

The tradition of playing "Hail to the Chief" whenever a president appeared
at a state function was started by John Tyler’s second wife.

 

Lyndon B. Johnson rejected his official portrait painting, saying it was the
ugliest thing he ever saw.

 

William Henry Harrison was the first  president  to die in office, about 32
days after elected.