[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

The Washington Bullets are changing their name. They don't want their team
to be associated with crime. From now on, they'll just be known as the
Bullets.

Jay Leno

 

Some people stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

William Dean Howells

 

I offer my opponents a bargain. If they will stop telling lies about us, I
will stop telling the truth about them.

Adlai Stevenson

 

Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.

Tom Lehrer

 

I'd rather be over the hill than under it.

George Burns

 

The older you get, the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your
body and your fat are really good friends.

Bob Hope

 

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>From whence (redundant?)

 

This is another of those grammatical shibboleths, like avoiding a plural
verb with none or not splitting one's infinitives, that are open to
linguistic debate, to put it mildly. The argument against this form is that
whence already includes the idea of coming from some place, so that
including from makes it tautological.

 

The debate is complicated by the fact that whence is not that common a word
these days, being rather literary; it was difficult finding a modern example
that wasn't prefixed by from. This is from Newsday of 11 November 2004: "He
is a legendary figure in his native England, whence I have just returned."
That's a good example of the "proper" use.

 

Objectors to from whence have support in logic, but logic doesn't feature
much in English constructions, especially idioms, which is how one perhaps
should regard the phrase these days. One newspaper archive consulted, hardly
comprehensive, contained more than 250 cases of from whence just in 2004. It
succeeds because it is informal and colloquial compared with whence used
alone, a construction that is unusual enough to force readers to stop and
work out the meaning.

 

And even a brief look at historical sources shows that from whence has been
common since the thirteenth century. It has been used by Shakespeare, Defoe
(in the opening of Robinson Crusoe: "He got a good estate by merchandise,
and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York; from whence he had
married my mother"), Smollett, Dickens (in A Christmas Carol: "He began to
think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the
adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine"),
Dryden, Gibbon, Twain (in Innocents Abroad: "He traveled all around, till at
last he came to the place from whence he started"), and Trollope, and it
appears 27 times in the King James Bible (including Psalm 121: "I will lift
up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help").

 

Though Dr Johnson objected to it in his Dictionary of 1755, calling it "A
vicious mode of speech" (he meant it was reprehensible, not depraved or
savage), most objections to it are no earlier than the twentieth century.
One reason may be that its critics are unaware of its long pedigree.

 

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Ethnic

 

Ethnic has had an interesting history. It started its life in English as
long ago as the fourteenth century; it came from the Greek ethnikos,
heathen, from ethnos, nation. It meant the same in English as it did in
Greek, and it was applied indiscriminately to anyone who was not a Christian
or a Jew: a pagan. Thomas Carlyle used it this way in 1851 in his Life of
John Sterling: "I find at this time his religion is as good as altogether
Ethnic, Greekish, what Goethe calls the Heathen form of religion".

 

By that time, it seems that for most people the word had lost the connection
with religion - disparaging in effect if not in intent - and had adopted a
more neutral one of a person belonging to an identifiable culture with
common racial, social, religious, or linguistic characteristics, very much
the way we use it now when we speak formally. By the time Carlyle was
writing, the Greek root had been used to make ethnography and ethnology for
the study of other cultures. The word never quite lost its disparaging edge,
however, being so often attached in Europe and North America to people who
were considered "lesser breeds".

 

It was only from the 1950s onwards that the term started to be applied
widely and generally to aspects of cultures, especially from non-Western
traditions. By the seventies ethnobotany, ethnoarchaeology, ethnoscience and
others had been invented. We also began to see phrases like ethnic music and
ethnic clothing in this period, causing ethnic to soften in sense until in
everyday use now it often means little more than "exotic" or "foreign". But
by 1991 the awful term ethnic cleansing had begun to appear, first in the
former Yugoslavia, probably as a loan translation of a Serbian term dating
from the 1940s, a usage from which ethnic may never quite recover.

 

By then we had also seen ethnic minority coined to describe a distinctive
minority group within another, dominant culture, where many local people
have their origins in a specific geographical area.

 

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At what standard level above ground -- in feet-- do meteorologists measure
wind speed?

A: 33 feet.

 

What planet has the greatest number of known satellites?

A: Saturn, with 20. Close behind are Jupiter, with 16, and Uranus, with 15.

 

How much further from Earth does the moon's orbit move every year?

A: About 1.5 inches. Scientists believe the moon has been inching away from
Earth for billions of years.

 

What word was spelled out in the first neon sign?

A: Neon. The small bright red sign was created by Dr Perley G. Nutting, a
government scientist, and exhibited at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition in St. Louis,  Missouri---15 years before neon signs became
widely used commercially.

 

By definition, what is the lifting capacity of one unit of horsepower?

A: The ability to raise 33,000 pounds one foot high in one minute.

 

What is the softest mineral known?

A: Talc.

 

Where were the first objects in the solar system discovered by means of a
telescope?

A: The four largest satellites of Jupiter--Ganymede, Io, Callisto and
Europa.