[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I know I am getting better at golf because I am hitting fewer spectators.


Gerald R. Ford

 

Rarely is the question asked "Is our children learning?"

George W Bush

 

That low down scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass - and
I'm just the one to do it!

Texan congressional candidate

 

The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be
worth it except they keep coming back.

Will Rogers

 

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of
Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

 

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it
stop.

P. J. O'Rourke

 

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Doh!

 

Recently the Oxford English Dictionary published an update of the OED web
site and, for the first time, it included a set of 250 new words and senses
from across the alphabet, as well as updating the letter M, its current
preoccupation. Many of these words may not be new to you and me - the list
includes Internet, lifestyle drug, road rage and World Wide Web - but they
are new in the sense that they're too recent to have been featured in the
1989 Second Edition. 

 

The one that has attracted press attention is doh. Most of us would
associate it - or d'oh as Matt Groening would write it and Dan Castellaneta
would say it - with the American cartoon The Simpsons, which has broadcast
it across the world.

 

But, as the OED's entry shows, the little exclamation doh!, with its candid
admission of foolishness on the part of the speaker (or of frustration at
the way things have turned out), has been around rather longer than the
Simpsons. Indeed, Dan Castellaneta has said that he based Homer's noise on
those that were uttered by James Finlayson, a Scots actor who appeared in
many of Laurel and Hardy's comedies. The first example in the OED's entry -
the first time the sound appeared in print with this spelling - is from a
British school story of 1952 by Anthony Buckeridge. After lurking for a
couple more decades, the little noise really burst forth in print from the
early nineties on. Hey, that's just after the Simpsons appeared! Doh!

 

The OED also published an entry for duh. This is probably an older form of
which doh is a variation, but they have distinct senses. The OED defines duh
as "Expressing inarticulacy or incomprehension. Also implying that another
person has said something foolish or extremely obvious". Their first example
was actually first recorded in the Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang; editor John Lighter found it in a Merrie Melodies cartoon of
1943: "Duh... Well, he can't outsmart me, 'cause I'm a moron".

 

It seems to have become playground slang in the late 1950s, as kids realized
it was a neat way to express the idea that something just said was either
totally banal or really, really stupid. It was a great way to score off
someone - there's no good come-back to a scornful duh!. This school usage
gained rare public notice in the New York Times magazine in November 1963:
"A favorite expression is duh. ... This is the standard retort when someone
makes a conversational contribution bordering on the banal. For example, the
first child says, 'The Russians were first in space.' Unimpressed, the
second child replies (or rather grunts), 'Duh'."

 

In the nineties, it turned up more widely, joining not! as a sentence
stopper. Whereas not! means that something isn't so despite the writer just
having pretended it was, duh! means "That's so stupid!", or "How silly of me
not to realize that!". Sometimes it's tongue-in-cheek, as here from the
Guardian newspaper in 1998: "He did it by proving the Taniyama-Shimura
conjecture, which posits the pairing of elliptic equations and modular
forms. (Well, duh)".

 

It's not the first dictionary duh has hit. But it has now received the
Oxford seal of approval and with doh joins an illustrious set that includes
ah, ahem, gee, ha, oho, ouch, ow, tsk, tut and um. Others will no doubt
follow - there's already a draft entry for aargh!, which the researchers
have traced back to 1787.

 

Recording such inarticulate noises is fraught with difficulty. They vary so
much in sense from use to use, and so much depends on the exact intonation,
that merely writing them down is a deeply unsatisfactory process compared
with hearing them said. And their provenance is extremely hard to document -
it is easy to attribute the true origin of doh! to the aggrieved grunt made
by the first ape man down from the trees on realizing that he had left his
club back at the cave.

 

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Like the dickens

 

This goes back a lot further than Charles Dickens, though it does seem to
have been borrowed from the English surname, most likely sometime in the
sixteenth century or before. (The surname itself probably derives from
Dickin or Dickon, familiar diminutive forms of Dick.) It was - and still is,
though people hardly know it any more - a euphemism for the Devil. It's very
much in the same style as deuce, as in old oaths like what the deuce! which
contains another name for the Devil.

 

The first person known to use it was that great recorder of Elizabethan
expressions, William Shakespeare, in The Merry Wives of Windsor: "FORD:
Where had you this pretty weathercock? MRS PAGE: I cannot tell what the
dickens his name is my husband had him of". That pun relied on the audience
knowing that Dickens was a personal name and that what the dickens was a
mild oath which called on the Devil.

 

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The pleasant smell of first rain after a long time (called petrichor) is
actually due to geosmin produced by bacteria present in wet soil. It is also
attributed to an oil released by plants to keep themselves from drying out.

 

Up until the mid-15th century, all children were referred to as girls. Boys
were called "knave girls" and girls were called "gay girls". Previously the
word boy, meant a servant.

 

The brain does not feel pain because there are no pain receptors in the
brain. The pain during a headache is caused by disturbance of the
pain-sensitive structures around the brain.

 

Most bugs/germs are good and we have POUNDS of bacteria. You go to a drug
store and buy hand sanitizer because it kills 99.9% of bacteria. The truth
is that the majority of bacteria is beneficial. In fact, there is more
bacteria in our bodies than the number of cells we have. In fact, humans
carry about 2-9 POUNDS of bacteria normally.

 

Mexico's official name is not Mexico, but United (Mexican) States.

 

The Great Wall of China is not visible from space, contrary to popular
belief.

 

Butterflies taste with their feet.