[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

The engine is the heart of an airplane, but the pilot is its soul.

Walter Raleigh

 

We are going to find a solution to the Middle East conflict as soon as the
Arabs agrees with us..

- Moshe Dayan, Israeli Minister of Defense during the Six Day War (1967)

 

So, you want to become my son-in-law. 

Not exactly. I just want to marry your daughter.

- Anonymous

 

The Ruhr will not be a subject to a single bomb. If an enemy bomber reaches
the Ruhr, my name is not Herman Goering; you can call me Meier!

- Reichsmarshal Herman Goering, 9 august 1939.

 

If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have
schizophrenia.

- Thomas Szasz

 

You want to make God laugh? Tell him your future plans.

- Woody Allen

 

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Ignoramus

 

The ancient legal institution of the grand jury now continues only in the
USA, but it was once the standard way of deciding whether a person should be
charged with a crime. It was called a grand jury because it was made up of
24 men, twice the size of one in a trial, which was a petit jury or petty
jury. Grand juries were originally called from among local men who were
expected to act on personal knowledge. If they felt the evidence was too
weak their foreman wrote the Latin word ignoramus on the back of the
indictment. This literally meant "we do not know", from the Latin verb
ignorare, to be ignorant. In practice it meant "we take no notice of this".
It was the opposite of declaring the indictment a true bill, which meant the
accused person went to trial.

 

How this abstruse foreign form from the specialized language of the law
became an English word is due to George Ruggle. He wrote a play called
Ignoramus, mostly in Latin, which was performed on 8 March 1615 at Trinity
College, Cambridge, before an audience of some 2,000 which included King
James I of England and the future Charles I. It featured a rascally and
ignorant lawyer, the Ignoramus of the title, who used barbarous law Latin of
a kind deplored by the university's academics. The king loved the play but
his judges and law officers hated it. It caused a huge controversy that led
to the name of the play's chief character entering the language.

 

Since there is no lack of ignorance and stupidity in our world, we have to
decide how to create its plural. A slight knowledge of Latin noun plurals
suggests it should be ignorami, to match nucleus, fungus, terminus, cactus,
and stimulus. But ignoramus never was a Latin noun, so the sensible course
is to stick to the rules of English, making ignoramuses. That's a mouthful,
but it will stop you from sounding like an ignoramus.

 

Seven-year itch

 

In the final chapter of Walden, almost at the final paragraph, Thoreau
refers to mankind as human insects and uses the phrase the seven year itch.
This example of the phrase is one of the earliest known. But the sense of
Henry Thoreau's text isn't what you might call limpidly clear to most people
today:

 

There is not one of my readers who has yet lived a whole human life. These
may be but the spring months in the life of the race. If we have had the
seven-years' itch, we have not seen the seventeen-year locust yet in
Concord. - Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry Thoreau, 1854.

 

The seven-year itch that he had in mind was an infection by a mite which
lays its eggs in burrows under the skin. Its medical name is scabies, whose
name comes appropriately from Latin scabere, to scratch. It was once
extremely common in all kinds of situations and historical American sources
are full of names for it, among them Indiana itch, Illinois itch, Jackson
itch, Cuban itch, prairie itch, camp itch, army itch, ship itch, jail itch,
mattress itch, swamp itch, winter itch, barley itch and grain itch. It was
very hard to treat before effective insecticides came along.

 

Many remedies were advertised that claimed to cure the condition. The
earliest example on record is this, which is also the first appearance of
seven-year itch in print:

 

To the Afflicted. Dr. Mason's Indian Vegetable Panacea, which may be taken
with perfect safety, by all ages, for the cure of the following diseases:--
Dyspepsia, Scrofula, afflictions of the Chest and Lungs, Cods, Coughs, Liver
complaints, Mercurial disease, Ulcers, Sores ... also, that corruption so
commonly known to the western country as the scab or seven year Itch, &c. -
An advertisement by Dr John Mason in the Ohio Statesman (Columbus, Ohio), 26
Mar. 1839. 

 

Because it was so hard to get rid of, a story grew up in North America that
those who got the itch were stuck with it for the next seven years. The
phrase was sometimes later reinterpreted to mean that it would recur after
seven years, or would reappear every year for seven years. More recently,
seven-year itch has occasionally been used for the itch caused by poison ivy
and for a while became a figurative term for something or someone that was
persistently irritating or a continual nuisance.

 

The more modern sense, which one work on idioms calls "a real or imagined
longing for other women in a man's seventh year of marriage", appeared a
century after Walden. There's no known example before George Axelrod
borrowed it for the title of his stage comedy of 1952. It was popularized
worldwide by the 1955 Billy Wilder film version starring Marilyn Monroe.

 

In 1992, William Safire recorded a conversation he had had with Mr Axelrod
about why he chose the title. The latter was sure that it had never been
used in a "marital wanderlust connotation" before he borrowed it:

 

How did he come across this Americanism? "I was writing jokes for a
hillbilly comedian called Rod Brassfield," recalls Mr. Axelrod, "who starred
with Minnie Pearl on the 'Grand Ole Opry' radio show. ... One of his
favorite lines was: 'I know she's over 21 because she's had the seven-year
itch four times!' That hideous line," says Mr. Axelrod, "was running through
my head when I was desperately seeking a title for the play I had just
finished ... In the first draft, the guy had been married 10 years (as had
I) but the title, when it came, had a natural ring to it and I changed the
number of years the hero had been married accordingly." - On Language, New
York Times, 29 Mar. 1992.

 

Modern medicine cures scabies quickly. Together with Axelrod's inspired play
title and the success of the film, seven-year itch now refers almost
exclusively to a married man's wandering eye, even in the US where the term
originated.

 

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The city of St. Petersburg, Russia, was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great,
hence the name, St. Petersburg. But it wasn't always that simple. In 1914,
at the beginning of World War I, Russian leaders felt that Petersburg was
too German-sounding. So they changed the name of the city to Petrograd -- to
make it more Russian-sounding. Then, in 1924, the country's Soviet Communist
leaders wanted to honor the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir I. Lenin.
The city of Petrograd became Leningrad and was known as Leningrad until 1991
when the new Russian legislators -- no longer Soviet Communists -- wanted
the city to reflect their change of government.

 

The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.

 

The Jordanian city Amman was once called Philadelphia.

 

The largest desert in the world, the Sahara, is 3,500,000 square miles.

 

The river Danube empties into the Black Sea.

 

The San Diego Zoo in California has the largest collection of animals in the
world.

 

The tallest monument built in the US, the Gateway Arch, in St. Louis,
Missouri, is 630 feet tall.