[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist....

- Major-General John Sedgwick, 9 may 1864.

Killed by a sniper during the battle of Spotsylvania.

 

'I am' is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it
be that 'I do' is the longest sentence?

George Carlin

 

To err is human--and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

Robert Orben

 

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

Kin Hubbard

 

A Christmas tree--the perfect gift for a guy. The plant is already dead.

Jay Leno

 

The funniest things are the forbidden.

Mark Twain

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Fiasco

 

Fiasco is one of the Italian words for a bottle (it's related to English
flask) and the idiom far fiasco, literally "make a bottle", developed among
Italian theatre and opera people in the eighteenth century to mean
perpetrating a bad performance, from which it moved into English through
reports of Italian productions:

 

But if we may believe the common town talk, it is impossible for a piece not
to make a fiasco on St. Stephen's Day. - The Harmonicon, July 1825. The 1825
annual volume of this London journal, and the volumes following, are so
peppered with references to fiascos we must assume that either its critics
were difficult to satisfy or the standard of Italian theatre was shockingly
low. Early examples, like this one, all translated the Italian into English
as make a fiasco.

 

The first known use of the term is in the same magazine a little earlier:

 

In the letters which he [Rossini] wrote to his mother at Bologna, he was
accustomed to draw a smaller or larger figure of a flask, (fiasco) at the
side of the account of any new opera he had brought out, to indicate the
degree of failure which his work had met with. The reader should be apprised
that fare fiasco is the Italian cant phrase for a failure. - The Harmonicon,
May 1824.

 

This is one version of a common story about its origin:

 

A German, one day, seeing a glassblower at his occupation, thought nothing
could be easier than glassblowing, and that he could soon learn to blow as
well as the workman. He accordingly commenced operations by blowing
vigorously, but could only produce a sort of pear-shaped balloon or little
flask (fiasco). The second attempt had a similar result, and so on until
fiasco after fiasco had been made. Hence arose the expression which we not
unfrequently have occasion to use when describing the result of our private
and public undertakings. - Gleanings for the Curious from the Harvest-Fields
of Literature, by Charles Bombaugh, 1874. Mr Bombaugh's story falls to the
ground because he thought a fiasco was a little bottle, rather than any
bottle. Other versions link it particularly with Venetian glassblowers, who
were alleged to set aside imperfect glass to make a common bottle or flask.
To pre-empt questions, this is not the source of the idiom pear-shaped.

 

Italians are just as puzzled by the idiom as we are. Etymologists in that
country have put forward various incidents in theatrical history to account
for it, such as the dropping of a real bottle, vital to the plot, during a
performance. This is the canonical story:

 

But, touching "fiasco," D. J. obligingly tells me that there was once at
Florence a celebrated harlequin by the name of Biancolelli, whose forte was
the improvisation of comic harangues on any object which he might chance to
hold in his hand. One evening he appeared on the stage with a flask
("fiasco") in his hand. But, as ill-luck would have it, he failed in
extracting any "funniments" out of the bottle. At last, exasperated, he thus
apostrophised the flask: "It is thy fault that I am so stupid to-night.
Fuori! Get out of this!" So saying, he threw the flask behind him, and
shattered it into atoms. Since then, whenever an actor or singer failed to
please an audience, they used to say that it was like Biancolelli's
"fiasco." - Illustrated London News, 22 September 1883. 

 

There is also a tale that connects it with those Chianti bottles with
rounded bottoms that must be encased in a wicker sheath because they won't
stand up by themselves, so perhaps implying something that has been poorly
constructed or which, like trying to stand the bottle up, will surely fail.
This story gains in ingenuity what it loses in credibility.

 

Others have connected it with the long-dead French idiom faire une
bouteille, to make a mistake (literally, again, to make a bottle). It has
been suggested that Italian actors picked it up from French ones in the
eighteenth century and translated it into Italian. If so, this merely takes
the problem from one language to another, but it's hard to explain the loss
of the article. Notably, the Italian expression moved back into French
around 1822 (as faire fiasco), at roughly the same time as it was beginning
to appear in English, so contradicting the standard theory that the
expression got into English via French.

 

Don't believe anybody who claims to have the complete answer; at least not
without incontrovertible written historical evidence.

 

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the US, stated that "It has long
been recognized that the problems with alcohol relate not to the use of a
bad thing, but to the abuse of a good thing." 

 

Beer and Bras. British men have been found twice as likely to know the price
of their beer as their partner's bra size. A poll reported in Britain's
Prima magazine found that 77% of males knew how much their beer costs but
only 38% knew the correct size of their mate's bra. 

 

A labeorphilist is a collector of beer bottles. 

 

Between 1980 and 1996, over 2,300 anti-drunk-driving laws were passed in the
U.S.

 

Like to open a restaurant? Expect to pay over $35,000 for a restaurant
liquor license in Philadelphia. Although that's expensive, it's a bargain
compared to obtaining one in Evesham Township (New Jersey) at over $475,000
or one in Mount Laurel (New Jersey) at over $675,000.

 

Shakespeare referred (in Love's Labour Lost, Act 5, Scent 1) to a game
called "flap-dragon," in which the players snatched raisins from a dish of
burning brandy and extinguished them in their mouths before eating them.

 

When re-arranged, the letters in "whiskey" spell "key wish," those in
"spirits" spell "sip it sir," and those in "moonshine" spell "in no homes."