[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[VHFCN1 Pilots and Crew]

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

Marquis de Sade

 

No matter how much cats fight there always seem to be plenty of Kittens.

Abraham Lincoln

 

The United States is at present so demoralized and so corrupted that, like
England and France, it need not be taken into consideration as a military
adversary. The United States will also be forced by Germany to complete and
final capitulation.

Walther Darre, German Minister of Agriculture under Hitler, Book: "Is
Tomorrow Hitler's?", H.R. Knickerbocker, 1941 (Reynal & Hitchcock)

 

I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going
to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.

Lord Brabazon

 

We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

Dan Quayle

 

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers. 

Oscar Wilde

 

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Phenomenon

 

In a review in the Guardian newspaper of a biography of Marie Corelli, the
reviewer remarked that "She was in effect the first of the lady novelist
bestsellers, her books read by everyone from Queen Victoria to shop
assistants. In her day she had been nothing short of a phenomenon".

 

Now Marie Corelli existed - all too obviously as she was a lady of expansive
attitudes and ample construction, though rather short of stature. So she was
a phenomenon, all right, but that was surely something about which no
special note needed to be taken. That is, if you use the word in the
original sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary. There it is grandly
defined as "a thing that appears, or is perceived or observed; an individual
fact, occurrence, or change as perceived by any of the senses, or by the
mind". So anything we can observe is a phenomenon, which is as all-inclusive
a term as one might wish.

 

But of course the writer was using the word in another sense. We find it
further down the entry: "Something very notable or extraordinary; a highly
exceptional or unaccountable fact or occurrence; colloquially a thing,
person, or animal remarkable for some unusual quality; a prodigy". By all
accounts, Ms Corelli was most of those things.

 

What is mildly surprising is that this secondary meaning of the word is so
old. The OED records it from 1771, and by the time that Dickens was writing
Nicholas Nickleby in 1838 it was well established: " 'This, Sir', said Mr.
Vincent Crummles, bringing the maiden forward, 'this is the infant
phenomenon - Miss Ninetta Crummles' ".

 

The word itself goes back to the Greek phainomenon, a thing appearing to
view, which is derived from phainein, to show. It's also a relative of our
phantom, diaphanous, fancy, fantasy and other words. It arrived in English
as the plural, phenomena, which Francis Bacon is credited as introducing in
his Advancement of Learning of 1605. In its early appearances, it was
confined to what was then termed natural philosophy but which we would call
science. Since then, it has acted as the root for John Stuart Mill's
phenomenalism and Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, two theories in philosophy
that I will go to any lengths to avoid explaining.

 

Notably, both senses, the scientific and popular, have survived alongside
each other in the language for the better part of two centuries. Because
they appear in such different contexts, they hardly conflict and neither has
ousted the other.

 

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"There's no free lunch." Pennsylvania outlawed free lunches in 1917 to
prevent taverns from giving free sandwiches to customers who bought beer to
drink with them. This led some shop keepers to sell sandwiches and give away
the beer. 4.13 In West Virginia, bars can advertise alcohol beverage prices,
but not brand names. 

 

There is a cloud of alcohol in outer space with enough alcohol to make four
trillion-trillion drinks. It's free for the taking. . . but it's 10,000
light years away from Earth.

 

The Mayflower, well-known for bringing the Pilgrims to the New World,
ordinarily transported alcohol beverage between Spain and England.

 

Wine has about the same number of calories as an equal amount of grape
juice. 

 

Johnny Appleseed probably distributed apple seeds across the American
frontier so that people could make fermented apple juice ("hard" cider)
rather than eat apples. 

 

White wine gets darker as it ages while red wine gets lighter. 

 

During World War II, a group of alpine soldiers who were stranded in
mountain snows survived for an entire month on nothing but a cask of sherry.