[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own
opinion.

Ambrose Bierce

 

The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow
out of it.

Doris Day

 

I like sports bars. Sports bars are great because they collect all of the
people I don't want to hang out with, and put them in one room.

Demetri Martin

 

Washington is the only place where sound travels faster than light.

C. V. R. Thompson

 

There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.

Charles M. Schulz

 

When you build bridges, you can keep crossing them.

Rick Pitino

 

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Noggin

 

The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary of 1989 suggested, on
the basis of early examples then known, that it was US slang. A recent
revision online has taken the origin back a century and found that it
started out as British sporting slang, originally from boxing.

 

Noggin has been in the language since the late sixteenth century. The first
sense was that of a small cup or other sort of drinking vessel. This may
well have been regional to start with, but became established as a standard
term. It's much better known, though, as the name for a small quantity of
alcohol, usually a quarter of a pint, in which the name of the container has
been transferred to its measure and its contents.

 

It seems to have been the idea of a container that gave rise to the fresh
sense of a person's head, which started to be used in the eighteenth
century. The first known example is from a farce, The Stratford Jubilee,
which mocked the festival of the same name organised by the actor David
Garrick in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1769 to commemorate William
Shakespeare (during which, by the way, the British weather did not
co-operate: it bucketed down with rain): "Giving him a stouter on the
noggin, I laid him as flat as a flaunder." (A stouter is a stout blow;
flaunder would now be spelled flounder.)

 

Noggin is a good example of that rare and memorable phenomenon, a slang term
that is long-lived, since it has stayed in the language, always as slang,
for two and a half centuries.

 

A word of the same spelling is used in the building trades in various
countries for a horizontal timber brace or support. This was originally
spelled nogging and meant infilling a timber frame with brickwork; its
origin is unknown, though its sense suggests it's unconnected with ours.

 

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Cronyism

 

Political administrations sometimes have characteristic words attached to
them. In the sixties, Harold Wilson was for a while associated with the word
technology (as in the "white heat of technological revolution" that he said
his government was forging). The Thatcher years were linked to TINA ("There
Is No Alternative") and the administration of her successor John Major with
sleaze, a word that seemed almost to be branded on the forehead of several
ministers. A present day Labour government came under attack for what
journalists called cronyism, a term much used\ in reports of the co-option
of a Scottish media magnate, Gus Macdonald, to an unpaid Government post,
but with the promise of a seat in the House of Lords.

 

The word is an obvious compound of the much older crony. This started out as
a wholesome and inoffensive description. It seems to have been invented as a
bit of undergraduate slang at the University of Cambridge in the early 1660s
or thereabouts. Its origins are as vague and undocumented as you might
expect, but the informed guess is that it had nothing to do with the much
older English word crone for an old woman, but was modelled on the Greek
khronios, "long-standing", derived from the better-known khronos "time". The
idea was that someone was a crony if you had been friends with them a long
time, or even perhaps if you were exact contemporaries of theirs.

 

Our first recording of the word is from the diary of Samuel Pepys, a former
Cambridge man, for 30 May 1665: "Jack Cole, my old school-fellow ... who was
a great chrony of mine". Note that his spelling showed the word's direct
relationship with the original Greek. But by 1678 the "h" had gone forever,
permanently obscuring its antecedents. The word continued to exist in a
blameless way for the better part of three centuries, being joined about
1840 by cronyism, which at first meant only the ability to make friends, or
perhaps the desire to do so. It seems from the examples in the OED that both
words long maintained an implication that the friends were from school or
college days.

 

The change came, purportedly, with the Truman administration, which was
accused of appointing friends to government posts without regard to their
qualifications. A journalist on the New York Times described this practice
as cronyism, so modifying the sense of the word. On 17 August 1952, the
newspaper spoke of: "The amount of politically entrenched bureaucracy that
has earned for Mr. Truman's regime its sorry reputation for corruption,
cronyism, extravagance, waste and confusion".

 

After that, innocence was destroyed, and it became progressively more
difficult to use the word in its old sense, which in any case was beginning
to sound more than a little old-fashioned. With the change in cronyism,
crony was dragged along with it and now also often has this derogatory sense
of a friendship with a whiff of political corruption or preferential
advancement about it, not just (or not even) the sense of long-standing
friends who enjoy each other's company.

 

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In Bonanza, Hoss Cartwright was afraid of what?

A:  The Dark

 

What actor starred as the Six Million Dollar Man?

A:  Lee Majors

 

On the Muppet Show what kind of animal was Sam?

A: An Eagle

 

What TV show spawned the phrase "Here comes the judge"?

A Rowan and Martin's Laugh In

 

What TV detective had an arch enemy named Wo Fat?

A:  Steve MacGarett

 

Who created the cartoon character Felix the Cat?

A: Pat Sullivan

 

Magnum PI wore a baseball cap displaying what teams name?

A:  Detroit Tigers