[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

Gary Thewlis gthewlis at comcast.net
Mon Nov 4 09:38:50 EST 2019


Take the diplomacy out of war and the thing would fall flat in a week.

Will Rogers

 

Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried.

Author Unknown

 

Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

Oscar Wilde 

 

A hypocrite is a person who--but who isn't?

Don Marquis 

 

A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, "You should
make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk
dancing."

Sir Arnold Bax

 

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won't
cross the street to vote in a national election.

Bill Vaughan

 

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Bated breath

 

Which is it - bated or baited? We have baited hooks and baited traps, but
bated - what's that? Bated doesn't even seem to be a real word, where else
do you hear it? Having said that, 'baited breath' makes little sense either.
How can breath be baited? With worms?

 

There seems little guidance in contemporary texts. Search in Google and
you'll find about the same number of hits for 'baited breath' as 'bated
breath'. In one of the best selling books of all time, Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of Azkaban (whose publisher could surely have afforded the services
of a proof-reader), we have:

 

"The whole common room listened with baited breath."

 

As so often is the case, help is found in the writings of the Bard. The
earliest known citation of the phrase is from Shakespeare's Merchant of
Venice, 1596:

 

What should I say to you? Should I not say

'Hath a dog money? is it possible

A cur can lend three thousand ducats?' Or

Shall I bend low and in a bondman's key,

With bated breath and whispering humbleness, Say this;

'Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;

You spurn'd me such a day; another time

You call'd me dog; and for these courtesies

I'll lend you thus much moneys'?

 

'Bated' is simply a shortened form of 'abated', meaning 'to bring down,
lower or depress'. 'Abated breath' makes perfect sense and that's where the
phrase comes from.

 

Geoffrey Taylor, in his little poem Cruel, Clever Cat, 1933, used the
confusion over the spelling of the word to good comic effect:

 

Sally, having swallowed cheese

Directs down holes the scented breeze

Enticing thus with baited breath

Nice mice to an untimely death.

 

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Who said "I've watched a lot of baseball - on the radio"?

A:  Gerald Ford

 

In Michigan it is illegal to chain what to a fire hydrant?

A:  An Alligator

 

Where are 40,000 Americans injured each year?

A:  In the toilet

 

In 1987 the Jockey Club disqualified a horse that had eaten what?

A: A mars Bar

 

Mr. Cat Poop was the Chinese translation of what Jack Nicholson movie?

A: As Good as it Gets

 

In Connecticut, a pickle must do what to be legal?

A:  Bounce



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