[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings
Gary Thewlis
gthewlis at comcast.net
Mon Dec 2 08:51:25 EST 2019
Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.
Anonymous
My health is good; it's my age that's bad.
- Roy Acuff
I had arrived at the airport one hour early so that, in accordance with
airline procedures, I could stand around.
Dave Barry
We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to
form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn in this life that we
tend to meet any situation by reorganizing. And a wonderful method it can be
for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion,
inefficiency, and demoralization.
-Wrongly attributed to Petronius Arbiter, Roman hedonist, about 60 A.D.
It is possible to live in San Francisco for $35,000 a year. Obviously, that
doesn't include food or lodging.
- Kenn Carlson
We ain't making no goddamn cornflakes here.
-Col. Charlie Beckwith, founder of Delta Force
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Out of sorts
The most common story about this phrase refers to the printer's word sorts
for the individual metal characters in his boxes of type, so called because
they have been arranged, each into its own compartment, with all of one kind
together. It would obviously be a substantial inconvenience if a printer
were to run out of a sort during composition. The problem with this story is
that the figurative expression out of sorts is recorded much earlier than
the printers' term; the first recorded use of it for printers' type in the
big Oxford English Dictionary is from as late as 1784, from Benjamin
Franklin: "The founts, too, must be very scanty, or strangely out of sorts".
It would seem he was attaching an already well-known idiom to the printer's
trade, not the other way around.
A second idea is that it has something to do with playing cards. A pack that
hasn't been shuffled is said to be out of sort and not suitable for playing
with. The problem with this is that the OED doesn't give any example of its
being used in this connection, which it surely would if the expression had
been common.
The Latin original of our word sort was applied to a piece of wood that was
used for drawing lots. Later, still in Latin, it developed into the idea of
one's fate, fortune or condition. This was the first meaning of sort in
English, in the thirteenth century. It survived until shortly after
Shakespeare's time, until about the point that out of sorts is first found.
But sort soon evolved another meaning in English that related to rank,
order, or class. It was used to describe people, especially their qualities
or standing. There were once phrases such as of sort that implied high
quality or rank. Others that we still use today, such as of your own sort,
the right sort, or of all sorts, evolved out of the same idea.
It would seem out of sorts developed from this idea of quality (lack of it
in this case), perhaps influenced by the other meaning of fate or one's lot
in life, so implying that fortune wasn't smiling on one, or that all wasn't
well.
Welfare
The word welfare, like the closely-related wealth, has moved a long way
since it first appeared in the fourteenth century. It was formed as a
combination of well, in the sense we still use it, with fare. The latter was
originally a verb meaning "to travel" (the modern German verb fahren is a
close relative). So the phrase "fare well" was a wish on parting that you
should have a safe journey, which later became our farewell (in Julius
Caesar, Shakespeare uses both forms in one sentence: "Farewell my dearest
sister, fare thee well"). Our modern sense of the price of a journey rather
than the journey itself is a classic case of a transferred meaning. A
figurative sense grew up of how you were doing or how well you were being
provided for ("how are you faring?"), and this was the origin of the word in
its sense of "food" (as in bill of fare).
Originally welfare meant the state or condition of how well one was doing,
of one's happiness, good fortune or prosperity. Shakespeare has Queen
Margaret say in Henry VI: "Take heed, my lord; the welfare of us all / Hangs
on the cutting short that fraudful man". And John Locke, in An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1690): "Thus the being and welfare of a
man's children or friends, producing constant delight in him, he is said
constantly to love them".
This remained so until the beginning of this century, when changes in the
relationship between individuals and the state caused an extended sense to
appear of an organised effort to maintain the members of a community in a
state of well-being, both physical and economic. One reason for this new
usage was that older terms, particularly charity, had too many unacceptable
overtones relating to recipients' loss of self-respect and dignity in
accepting help. So welfare was useful in expressing similar ideas but
without this historical baggage of associations.
Its rise was fairly meteoric, with welfare work being spotted first in 1903,
welfare manager in 1904, welfare policy in 1905, and welfare centre in 1917.
The defining term in this lexicon, at least in Britain, welfare state, is
first recorded in 1941.
One result of this new usage was that the word moved from being a term for a
condition to one for a process or activity. For example, Arnold Bennett
wrote in Pretty Lady in 1918: "Canteens, and rest-rooms, and libraries, and
sanitation, and all this damned 'welfare' ". It also took on the penumbra of
associations that charity had before it; many examples are recorded of
people in need refusing to take assistance, despite being firmly told that
"you're entitled to it; it's not charity".
These days it often generates negative associations quite foreign to those
who pioneered the welfare revolution and which users of the word before this
century would not have understood. This was amply demonstrated this week
when Harriet Harman, the British Social Security Secretary partly
responsible for the Green Paper, wrote in the Guardian concerning welfare
reform that "Voters ... have resoundingly rejected high taxation and hand-
outs for the poor". It's a view of welfare in its modern sense which the
veteran Labour politician Roy Hattersley described in a stinging reproof in
the same newspaper two days later as one that "even a mildly radical
government should not tolerate" and which led to policies having "an ugly
undertone of resentment".
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The Great Lakes are Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Superior, Lake Erie and
Lake Ontario.
The Great Lakes are the most important inland waterway in North America. All
the lakes, except Lake Michigan, which lies entirely in the United States,
are shared by the United States and Canada and form part of the border
between these countries.
The Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of fresh water, one-fifth of
the world's fresh surface water. The Great Lakes are the largest group of
freshwater lakes in the world.
The Great Lakes have a combined area of 94,230 square miles - larger than
the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, and Vermont combined.
The largest body of fresh water in the world is Lake Superior.
The seven hills of Rome are the Palatine (on which the original city was
built), the Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, and Aventine.
The smallest island with country status is Pitcairn in Polynesia, at just
1.75 square miles.
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