[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[VHFCN1 Pilots and Crew]

I don't understand the sizes anymore. There's a size zero, which I didn't
even know that they had. It must stand for: 'Ohhh my God, you're thin.'

Ellen DeGeneres

 

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for
granted.

Aldous Huxley

 

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

Ingmar Bergman

 

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin

 

Today you can go to a gas station and find the cash register open and the
toilets locked. They must think toilet paper is worth more than money.

Joey Bishop

 

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>From whence

 

This is another of those grammatical shibboleths, like avoiding a plural
verb with none or not splitting one's infinitives, that are open to
linguistic debate, to put it mildly. The argument against this form is that
whence already includes the idea of coming from some place, so that
including from makes it tautological.

 

The debate is complicated by the fact that whence is not that common a word
these days, being rather literary; it is hard finding a modern example that
isn't prefixed by from. This is from Newsday of 11 November 2004: "He is a
legendary figure in his native England, whence I have just returned." That's
a good example of the "proper" use.

 

Objectors to from whence have support in logic, but logic doesn't feature
much in English constructions, especially idioms, which is how one perhaps
should regard the phrase these days. One newspaper archive consulted, hardly
comprehensive, contained more than 250 cases of from whence just in 2004. It
succeeds because it is informal and colloquial compared with whence used
alone, a construction that is unusual enough to force readers to stop and
work out the meaning.

 

And even a brief look at historical sources shows that from whence has been
common since the thirteenth century. It has been used by Shakespeare, Defoe
(in the opening of Robinson Crusoe: "He got a good estate by merchandise,
and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York; from whence he had
married my mother"), Smollett, Dickens (in A Christmas Carol: "He began to
think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the
adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine"),
Dryden, Gibbon, Twain (in Innocents Abroad: "He traveled all around, till at
last he came to the place from whence he started"), and Trollope, and it
appears 27 times in the King James Bible (including Psalm 121: "I will lift
up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help").

 

Though Dr Johnson objected to it in his Dictionary of 1755, calling it "A
vicious mode of speech" (he meant it was reprehensible, not depraved or
savage), most objections to it are no earlier than the twentieth century.
One reason may be that its critics are unaware of its long pedigree.

 

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Ronald Reagan was taken to what hospital after the 1981 attempt on his life?


A: George Washington Hospital.

 

"You let a bully come into your front yard, and the next day he'll be on
your porch?" was a statement by which U.S. President? 

A: Lyndon Johnson.

 

President Marcos of the Philippines was deposed in what year? 

A: 1986.

 

Malcolm Baldrige, Ronald Reagan's secretary of commerce from 1981 to 1987
was also a what? 

A: rodeo professional.

 

George Bush defeated what TV evangelist to win the Republican nomination in
1988? 

A: Pat Robertson.

 

What piece of clothing did Hillary Clinton abandon during her hubby's run
for national office in 1992? 

A: Head Band.

 

What was Herbert Hoover's Vice President's name? 

A: Charles Curtis