[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I went to school, majored in theatre, and said 'Mom, I have to choose my own
destiny. I want to be an actor.' A couple of weeks after I graduated college
I called my mother up and said 'Can I borrow $200?' and she said 'Why don't
you act like you've got $200.'

Arsenio Hall

 

By the way, did you ever realize that if Moses would have turned right
instead of left, we'd have had the oil, the Arabs would have had the sand?

Golda Meir

 

If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100
million, that's the bank's problem.

J. Paul Getty

 

Coffee isn't my cup of tea.

Samuel Goldwyn

 

How is it possible to have a civil war?

George Carlin

 

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster
than anybody who can write better.

J. Liebling

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Beyond the pale

 

Pail is a common misspelling here because the word that really belongs in
the expression has largely gone out of use except in this one situation. The
phrase is properly beyond the pale. It means an action that's regarded as
outside the limits of acceptable behaviour, one that's objectionable or
improper.

 

I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of
society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct.
- Mr Pott to Mr Slurk (we never learn their first names) in The Pickwick
Papers by Charles Dickens, 1837. This is a classic example of the expression
but by no means the earliest. That's more than a century older, in 1720, in
the third volume of The Compleat History of the Lives, Robberies, Piracies,
and Murders Committed by the Most Notorious Rogues, by a man hiding, perhaps
wisely, under the pseudonym of Captain Alexander Smith.

 

Pale has nothing to do with the adjective for something light in colour
except that both come from Latin roots. The one referring to colour
originates in the Latin verb pallere, to be pale, whilst our one is from
palus, a stake (also the name of the wooden post that Roman soldiers used to
represent an opponent during fighting practice). Pale is an old name for a
pointed piece of wood driven into the ground and - by an obvious extension -
to a barrier made of such stakes, a palisade or fence. Pole is from the same
source, as are impale, paling and palisade. This meaning has been around in
English since the fourteenth century and by the end of that century pale had
taken on various figurative senses - a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an
enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go. The idea of
an enclosed area still exists in some English dialects.

 

The History of Polindor and Flostella, by the Elizabethan courtier and
author Sir John Harington, written sometime before 1612 but published in
1657. This uses pale in its literal sense of a boundary or enclosure. In the
poem, Ortheris and his beloved risk going beyond the boundary (the pale) of
their quiet park lodge with the result that Ortheris is attacked by five
armed horsemen. Harrington is best remembered now for his Metamorphosis of
Ajax (this last word being a pun on a jakes, meaning a privy) of 1596, a
scatological and satirical work that contains the first description of a
water closet, more than 200 years before anybody built one.

 

In particular, the term was used to describe various defended enclosures of
territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale in France in
the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais, the last English
possession in that country. The best-known example is the Russian Pale,
between 1791 and the Revolution of 1917, which were specified provinces and
districts within which Russian Jews were required to live.

 

Another famous one is the Pale in Ireland, the part of the country which
England directly controlled - it varied from time to time, but was an area
of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of the Irish Pale
is in a document of 1446-7. Though there was an attempt later in the century
to enclose the Pale by a bank and ditch (which was never completed), there
never was a literal fence around it. The expression has often been claimed
to originate in one or other of these pales, most often the Irish one, but
the earliest appearance of 1720 for beyond the pale is very late if it's
linked to the Irish one and much too early for the Russian one.

 

The earliest figurative sense that's linked to the idiom was of a sphere of
activity or interest, a branch of study or a body of knowledge, which comes
from the same idea of an enclosed or contained area; we use field in much
the same way. This turned up first in 1483 in one of the earliest printed
books in English, The Golden Legende, a translation by William Caxton of a
French work. This is a much later example:

 

By its conversion England was first brought, not only within the pale of the
Christian Church, but within the pale of the general political society of
Europe. - The History of the Norman Conquest, by Ernest A Freeman, 1867.

 

Our sense seems part to have grown out of this, since people who exist
outside such a conceptual pale are not our kind and do not share our values,
beliefs or customs.

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Frankenstein trivia

 

Q: What are the official sequels to the 1931 Frankenstein film?

A: The "Universal Studios series," as it's known, runs as follows:

Frankenstein (1931)

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

House of Frankenstein (1944)

And because they're Universal films from the same era that also feature The
Monster, some lists also include:

House of Dracula (1945)

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)