[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.

- Dean Martin

 

The Pope! how many divisions has he got?

- Stalin

In 1935, a French visitor asked Soviet leader Josef Stalin if he thought
Pope Pius XI might prove to be an ally.

 

Tell my son Josef that he will meet my divisions in eternity.

- Reply from the Pope when he heard the story years later.

 

Men don't get cellulite. God might just be a man.

- Rita Rudner

 

Now, they say that New Zealand is beautiful and I do not know - because
after 22 hours on a plane any landmass would be beautiful.

Anonymous

 

It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general.

- Ferdinand Foch

 

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Left in the lurch

 

There are two quite different senses of lurch with no connection between
them. Both can - or once could be - either a verb or a noun.

 

The sort of lurch that means a sudden, uncontrolled movement, comes from a
naval expression, variously lee-larch, lee-latch or lee-lurch. It described
a ship that suddenly heeled over or shifted abruptly sideways to leeward.
Landsmen borrowed it around the beginning of the nineteenth century.

 

The lurch one may be left in is actually from a sixteenth-century French
gambling game. It was played with dice and was supposedly a bit like
backgammon, though nobody now knows the details. It was called lourche or
l'ourche, which the Oxford English Dictionary suggests may be from a
regional German word recorded as lortsch, lurtsch, lorz and lurz. A phrase,
lurz werden, meant to fail to achieve some objective in a game. The term was
taken over into French, not only as the name of the game but also in the
phrase demeurer lourche, to lose embarrassingly badly.

 

We're fairly sure about this last part because lurch was borrowed into
English around the end of the sixteenth century to refer to a situation at
the end of a game in which one player is beaten by a very large margin,
perhaps even a maiden game in which a player scores nothing at all. There is
also a reference to cribbage: this was a similar situation, in which a lurch
meant that one player had pegged out before the other had reached halfway
around the scoring board. This usage of lurch is now rare.

 

To be in the lurch was to be severely discomfited. Various phrases built on
the idea, including to give someone the lurch and to have someone at the
lurch, respectively to get the better of a man or to have the advantage of
him. By the final years of the sixteenth century, within a short time of the
word arriving in the language, to be in the lurch had appeared, meaning to
be in difficulty and without assistance. After all, it wasn't the job of the
other player to give any help to the loser.

 

The game has long since gone completely out of memory, as have most of the
usages of lurch for a bad playing position, but the idiom survives, nearly
always as to leave in the lurch.

 

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In Bonanza, Hoss Cartwright was afraid of what?

A:  The Dark

 

Who Sergeant Joe Friday was the hero of what old TV cop series?

A:  Dragnet

 

Hopalong Cassidy was created by what western writer?

A: Louis L'Amour

 

"Good bye Margaret" was the last line of which TV show?

A:  MASH

 

Daffy Ducks middle name is what?

A: Dumas

 

With what name did Nathan Burnbaum become famous?

A:  George Burns

 

Ian Fleming created what TV series?

A:  The man from UNCLE