[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be
understood.

Mark Ardis

 

We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld 

 

Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if
you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.

Alfred Hitchcock

 

A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I’m afraid of widths. 

Steven Wright

 

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. 

Mark Twain

 

I wrote a few children’s books
 not on purpose. 

Steven Wright

 

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Give someone the sack

 

The strangest thing about this colloquial expression is how ancient it is.
Though recorded in English only from early in the nineteenth century, it’s
very much older in both French and Dutch.

 

In 1611, Randall Cotgrave recorded a French equivalent, On luy a donné son
sac in his French-English dictionary and explained it as “he hath his
passport given him (said of a servant whom his master hath put away)”.
Clearly, the expression was even older, though it has since died out in
French in that form. A Dutch form den zak krijgen was recorded even earlier.

 

The usual explanation is that a workman almost always had his own tools,
which were often very valuable. It’s argued that presenting a workman with a
sack to carry them away in, either figuratively or literally, was a
well-understood signal of dismissal. It sounds too much like an explanation
created in desperation for us to accept it uncritically, but no other
suggestion has been found.

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Sixpenny nails

 

In the United States the length of a nail indicated by a number of pennies.
A 6d nail is 2 inches long, for example. It may be that in England, at one
time, sixpence was the price of a hundred 6d nails.

 

The UK once did use the same system — it was invented there and taken to the
US by colonists — but it died out early in the twentieth century. The UK has
gone over to measuring nails by length and have adopted the metric system.
So an American 6d nail is a 50mm one. As in other matters, the US
conservatively holds on to things abandoned in Britain.

 

Many enquirers have found the length story to be unbelievable and have
sought others. One holds that nails were actually sold by weight and that
the measure was the pennyweight; the abbreviation for a pennyweight was dwt
(the d is from Latin denarius, a penny) and it is argued that this became
shortened still further to d, which was the symbol for the British
pre-decimalization penny coin, hence the confusion.

 

A second suggestion was put forward here and has been quoted since:

 

The term penny, when used to mark the size of nails, is supposed to be a
corruption of pound. Thus, a four-penny nail was such that 1000 of them
weighed 4 lbs., a ten-penny such that 1000 weighed 10 lbs. - The American
Cyclopaedia, edited by George Ripley and Charles Dana, 1875.

 

With Ripley, you may believe it or not, but you had best not. Neither the
pound nor pennyweight stories are right. The length one is.

 

In the fifteenth century, nails were sold by number and, for example,
fourpenny nails were indeed 4 pence for a hundred. This was proved when in
1904 Henry Littlehales edited and published the accounts of a church in the
City of London (St Mary at Hill). This showed that in 1426, 400 sixpenny
nails did indeed cost 24 pence and 300 tenpenny nails cost 30 pence. (You
may like to compare these prices with a nearby item which recorded that a
man named Elymesford and his mate were together paid 10 pence for a day’s
work.) Other accounts show that nail prices fell around the end of the 1400s
and stayed lower — in the 1570s, you could have bought a hundred fourpenny
nails for just 3 pence.

 

However, the old names for the sizes were kept. Although they lost their
direct equivalence to the cost of the nails, they remained a useful way of
identifying the various sizes.

 

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What was Henry Ford's first mass-produced car?

A: The model N--which sold for $500 in 1906.

 

What fast-food chain founded in 1964 was named for brothers Forrest and
LeRoy Raffel?

A: Arby's. The name stands for RB--Raffel Brothers.

 

On the New York Stock Exchange, what is the ticker-tape symbol for the
Anheuser-Busch company?

A: BUD. The company makes Budweiser beer.

 

Frank W. Woolworth started selling 5-cent goods in 1878 and added 10-cent
items in 1880. When did he begin offering 20-cent items?

A: In 1932.

 

What was produced when sewing machines were first set up in a French factory
in 1841?

A: Uniforms for the French army. Rioting tailors--fearing they'd be put out
of work--broke into the factory and destroyed the machines.

 

What was Lifebuoy soap called when it was first introduced in 1897?

A: Lifebudy soap.

 

In the 1925 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, who was credited with
writing the article on mass production?

A: Henry Ford, although the entry was actually written by the Ford Motor
Company's official spokesman, William Cameron.