[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Education is not received. It is achieved.

Author Unknow

 

Once in a while you have to take a break and visit yourself.

Audrey Giorgi

 

Life is too short for traffic.

Dan Bellack

 

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.

Harold Wilson 

 

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of
policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Edward Abbey

 

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order
to save us.

Peter De Vries

 

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Losing one’s marbles

 

The earliest example given in the standard references is from It’s Up to
You; A Story of Domestic Bliss, by George V Hobart, dated 1902: “I see-sawed
back and forth between Clara J. and the smoke-holder like a man who is shy
some of his marbles.”

 

That certainly sounds like the modern meaning of marbles, which refers to
one’s sanity. But in an earlier appearance, the writer used it to mean
angry, not insane (mad, that is, in the common US sense rather than the
British one). It was printed in the Lima News of Ohio in July 1898: “He
picked up the Right Honorable Mr Hughes on a technicality, and although that
gentleman is reverential in appearance as Father Abraham and as patient as
Job, he had, to use an expression of the street, lost his ‘marbles’ most
beautifully and stomped on the irascible Harmon, very much à la Bull in the
china shop.”

 

The origin must surely come from the boys’ game of marbles, which was very
common at the time. To play was always to run the risk of losing all one’s
marbles and the result might easily be anger, frustration, and despair. That
would account for the 1898 example and it’s hardly a step from there to the
wider meaning of mad — to do something senseless or stupid.

 

Death toll

 

The Oxford English Dictionary has its first example of this phrase from
1981, which might suggest that it’s modern. But a search in another
newspaper database turned up lots of examples from the end of the nineteenth
century in American newspapers. The oldest found is dated 1897 and is in a
report sent via London: “Special dispatches from Bombay say that from 600 to
1,000 rioters were killed during the recent rioting in the vicinity of
Calcutta and it is added that native circles put the death toll as high as
1,500.” By 1910 it had become common and has remained so ever since.

 

The two words were put together because the word toll then didn’t
necessarily mean death, but any loss or injury or cost in health. It was a
development of its original sense of a tax, charge or imposed cost and seems
to have appeared in American English in the 1870s, often in the phrase to
take its toll that we still use. The OED quotes Blackwood’s Magazine in 1909
as an example of the broader meaning: “Nott’s gallant division ... paid its
toll of killed and wounded.” Death toll was created to clarify the sense.

 

Incidentally, though the tolling of bells is often associated with death
(remember John Donne: “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved
in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it
tolls for thee”), the verb comes from another source, probably a special use
of the dialect toll, meaning to drag or pull, which was transferred from the
pulling of the bell rope to the sound of the bell.

 

These days it has to be classed as a fixed phrase that’s virtually an idiom,
but one that’s still useful to make clear what’s meant.

 

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What was Lucy Ricardo's maiden name in "I love Lucy"?

A:  McGillicuddy

 

November 28th, 1948, what was the first TV western in the United States?

A: Hopalong Cassidy

 

The Beverley Hillbillies came from what Ozarks town?

A:  Hooterville

 

On TV, in 1964, who did Fess Parker play?

A: Daniel Boone

 

Who described TV as "Chewing gum for the masses"?

A: Architect Frank Lloyd Wright

 

What character stayed in Korea at the end of TVs MASH?

A: Corp Maxwell Klinger

 

Which children's TV series is narrated by Ringo Star?

A: Thomas the tank engine