[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I prefer someone who burns the flag and then wraps themselves up in the
Constitution over someone who burns the Constitution and then wraps
themselves up in the flag.

Molly Ivins

 

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back
everything is different.

C. S. Lewis

 

The Democrats are going to change the name of the Hoover Dam.

That is the silliest thing I ever heard of in politics . . . Lord if they
feel that way about it, I don't see why they don't just reverse the two
words.

Will Rogers

 

There are some remarkable parallels between basketball and politics.

Michael Jordan has already mastered the skill most needed for political
success: how to stay aloft without visible means of support.

Margaret Thatcher

 

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of
Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

 

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their
principles for the sake of their party.

Winston Churchill

 

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Teetotal

 

The first part of teetotal makes no obvious sense, and as a result some
people have assumed that it's a misspelling, suggesting that those who
abstained from alcohol turned to tea for their refreshment, on which they
became totally reliant - hence tea-total.

 

Where it comes from has puzzled people to the extent that other odd stories
exist. It has been argued that those who signed the pledge at temperance
meetings had their names marked with the letter T to indicate their total
abstention. Lansing, New York, is often quoted here, where it is said to
have first happened in January 1827, but there's no contemporary evidence
for it - the story only surfaced much later in the century.

 

However, this story is not too far from the truth of the matter. It's
accepted that the word, at least in the abstinence sense, was coined by
Richard "Dicky" Turner in a speech he gave to a temperance meeting in
Preston, Lancashire, in September 1833. Turner was an illiterate working
man, a fish hawker, who had visited one of the early Preston temperance
meetings in 1832 as a joke while half-drunk, but who came out of the meeting
a convert. He was one of the founding Seven Men of Preston who signed the
pledge and became a fervent advocate of that form of temperance that
demanded total abstention from all forms of alcoholic drink, not just
spirits as some more moderate reformers urged. There's no formal record of
what he said at the meeting - one report had it that his words were "nothing
but the tee-total would do" but it is also claimed that he said in his
strong local accent, "I'll be reet down out-and-out t-t-total for ever and
ever".

 

Here's where it all gets a bit murky. Did Dicky Turner stutter, did he
invent a new word by adding t as an intensifier to the front of total, or
was he using one already known? We will probably never be entirely sure.
What is certain, though, is that his word caught on in the local temperance
movement, was often quoted in its journal, the Preston Temperance Advocate,
giving the credit to him as inventor, and soon became a standard word in the
language. Richard Turner died in 1846 and is buried in St Peter's churchyard
in Preston; he may be the only person in the world whose claim to have
invented a new word is cited on his tombstone.

 

What confuses the issue is that a related word, teetotally, already existed.
That certainly did use an extra t at the front to emphasise what followed,
so the first form would have been t-totally. It's first recorded in North
America in 1832, the year before Dicky Turner's speech, and is common there
throughout the following decades. The sense, though, is "completely;
utterly", with no link to alcohol. The Nova Scotian writer Thomas Chandler
Haliburton put it into his book The Clockmaker of 1836: "I hope I may be
tee-totally ruinated, if I'd take eight hundred dollars for him". There's a
strong suspicion that this was an Irish dialect form that had been exported
to North America some time earlier, since it also appears in British writing
at the same period and with the same sense, and there is anecdotal evidence
that it was known in Ireland much earlier. It appears, for example, in a
story by Thomas de Quincey in 1839: "An ugly little parenthesis between two
still uglier clauses of a teetotally ugly sentence".

 

However, no evidence has been put forward that teetotally was known at the
time in the Lancashire dialect. If they were, Dicky Turner would hardly have
been given the credit for teetotal that he received from Preston people
during his lifetime. He does seem to have created the word anew.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Under federal food labeling regulations, how much caffeine must be removed
from coffee for it to be called decaffeinated?

A: 97 percent.

 

How many quarts of whole milk does it take t make one pound of butter?

A: Almost 10--9.86 to be exact.

 

What shortbread cookie is named for the heroine of a nineteenth-century
English novel?

A: The Lorna Doone. The novel Lorna Doone, by R. D. Blakmore, was published
in 1869.

 

Christmas is the biggest candy-selling season in the U.S. What holiday ranks
second?

A: Easter--which surpasses Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Halloween.

 

How much money did American Airlines claim it saved in 1987 by eliminating
one olive from each of the salads served in first class?

A: $40,000.

 

What was the name of the breakfast cereal Cheerios when it was first
marketed 50 years ago?

A: Cherrioats. The name was changed the following year at the urging of the
folks at Quaker Oats.

 

What popular soft drink contained the drug lithium--now available only by
prescription--when it was introduced in 1929?

A: 7-Up, which originally was marketed under the name Bib-Label Lithiated
Lemon-Lime soda. Lithium, now used to treat manic depression, was eliminated
from the formula in the mid-1940s.