[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Don't judge me. I was born to be awesome, not perfect.

Anonymous

 

If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. 

Groucho Marx

 

For myself I am an optimist-it does not seem to be much use to be anything
else.

Winston Churchill

 

Now, for my younger viewers out there, a book is something we used to have
before the internet. It's sort of a blog for people with attention spans. 

Stephen Colbert

 

Long ago when men cursed and beat the ground with sticks, it was called
witchcraft. Today it's called golf.

Will Rogers

 

You can observe a lot just by watching.

Yogi Berra

 

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Chosen Words (from 1997)

 

Britain recently emerged from the longest and most tedious election campaign
in Britain this century, and yet the one that has had the most spectacular
result. These events have provoked looking into the history of some relevant
words.

 

In recent British parlance among parliamentarians and the public, the word
politician has been pretty much a term of abuse, often a near synonym for
"underhanded; dishonest". This view is not new: from e e cummings' "A
politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man" back to
Shakespeare's "Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to
see the things thou dost not", the breed has had a bad press. Indeed, one of
the word's first senses when it came into English - just at the right moment
for Shakespeare to grab and use it - was "a shrewd schemer; a crafty plotter
or intriguer"; the OED marks this as obsolete. But the word comes from the
Greek polis, meaning the state and its citizens; in those times the meaning
of politikos was nearer our modern sense of statesman, someone who puts the
good of his country above all other considerations, rather than, as Harry
Truman put it, "a politician who has been dead 10 or 15 years". Whether the
new Labour government will succeed in modifying or even removing this
penumbra of meaning is too early to say.

 

The poll in which one casts one's vote derives from an old Germanic word
meaning "head" (a meaning which survives in some dialects). So a poll was
just the process of numbering off heads in the days when people literally
stood up to be counted at election time. Actually, in many English elections
right down to the Reform Act of 1832 election was by acclamation, meaning
that the candidate whose supporters shouted loudest got in; this practice
was so unreliable in the crowded confusion of polling day that from the late
sixteenth century onwards candidates began to demand a head count of those
voting, and this is the true origin of the poll. The old sense of "head"
survives in phrases such as poll tax, one paid by each person individually.
This is a term with special historical resonances both in Britain and the
USA (a proposed poll tax was the prime cause of the peasants' revolt of
1381) which became so again in Britain in the late eighties. A local tax on
individuals which was intended to replace an ancient and unfair property tax
and officially called the Community Charge was renamed the poll tax by canny
objectors who eventually forced its withdrawal.

 

The word election just comes from the Latin meaning "to choose; to pick out
(from among a number of possibilities)". At one time this could be used in
phrases like "I elect Smith", meaning that the speaker is casting his vote
for, or choosing, Smith from among the candidates. A group term for those
eligible to vote, the electorate, is extremely recent, being first recorded
only in 1879; before then the usage was to refer to the electors. The right
to vote is now called the franchise, but that word's first sense in English
in the thirteenth century meant "freedom, as opposed to servitude or
subjection"; it gradually evolved through the senses of a legal immunity to
prosecution, the granting of a right or privilege (hence another reduced
modern meaning, of a right granted by an organization to someone to sell its
products within a given area), through the phrase elective franchise, a
right granted by the sovereign to vote, to its main modern sense.

 

The process of voting is, etymologically speaking, one of taking a vow,
since it is based on the Latin votum, "vow, wish", which was its first
meaning in English in the sixteenth century (the modern meaning spread south
from Scotland about 1600). A ballot comes to us from the Italian word
balotta for a little ball, since such balls were used for secret voting by
placing them in the appropriate urn or box. The older, literal sense
survives in English in black ball, since it was once the custom to place a
black ball in the voting container to indicate an adverse vote; this became
an effective veto in some places, especially gentlemen's clubs in London.
One successful candidate in the 1997 election, the former BBC war
correspondent Martin Bell, standing as an anti-corruption independent, wore
his trademark lucky white suits throughout the campaign; this fitted the
origins of the word candidate splendidly, as it derives from the Latin
candidatus, meaning "clothed in white", because it was the custom in Rome
for those putting themselves up for election to the Senate to wear a white
toga.

 

The names for the assemblies to which one elects such candidates are
various. Parliament comes from the old French parlement, which at first
meant only a "talk, consultation, conference" (it derives from the same
French word parler, "to speak" as parlance, parley and parlour, the last of
which, etymologically, is a "room set aside for conversation"). Later
parlement evolved to the sense "formal consultative body" and so to
"legislative body". A council is a body which has been called together for
some purpose (from the Latin concilium, "call together"), though there has
been much confusion down the years with consilium, "an advisory body", which
gives us counsel. A legislature is a body which makes laws; it derives from
legislator, itself created from two Latin words meaning "a proposer of a
law".

 

The first act of Prime Minister Blair was to form his new Cabinet, now the
standard term for the inner council of state in the British system; it
derives from the French word of the same spelling meaning "small room",
which, surprisingly, has no straightforward link in that language with the
word cabin, but comes either from an old French word for a gambling house,
or possibly from the Italian gabbinetto, which derives from the same Latin
root from which we also get cage. In English, cabinet took on the special
meaning of "private room" in the early seventeenth century, especially a
place where the monarch could meet his advisers, a group known as the
Cabinet Council from the accession of Charles I in 1625; the word was later
transferred to the body of advisers itself. (It also turns up in the set
phrase cabinet of curiosities, where the reference is to a small room, not a
storage container.) It was at first a term of abuse, because the body was
seen to be usurping the function of the much larger, older (but still
surviving) body, the Privy Council, whose name is closely related in sense
because privy here just means "private". It is only by a small accident of
language that the Cabinet is not called the Closet, which was a very similar
word in use at about the same time.

 

Committee comes from commit plus the suffix -ee and originally meant "a
person to whom some function or trust is committed". So it was considered
quite correct at one time to refer to the 24 Committees of the East India
Company; these were not a bureaucratic nightmare but the 24 individuals whom
we would now call its directors. It was only in the seventeenth century that
committee shifted sense to refer to the body rather than the individuals
comprising it, though the older meaning survived in a few archaic usages
such as at Guy's Hospital in London, which into this century had a Court of
Committees - 21 individuals who managed its financial affairs. Conclave, not
a common legislative term but one signifying an assembly brought together
for some special purpose, derives from the Latin word meaning "a place which
can be locked up" (the second syllable is from clavis, "key") - Popes are
elected in literally this way with the Cardinals locked away until they make
their decision.

 

One ancient deliberative body has come down in the world wordwise, since
hustings are now the whole proceedings of a parliamentary election campaign
with its attendant brio, emotion and argument; but in medieval times a
husting was a private council held by some leader in distinction to the
thing or general assembly of the people; its name means "house-assembly".
Later this word was given to a court of law in the Guildhall in London (the
Court of Husting); by the seventeenth century it was being applied to the
platform at the upper end of the building on which the Lord Mayor and
Aldermen sat during its sessions; later still it came to be the name for the
platform on which candidates stood to address the electors, and from which
the poll (the counting of heads, remember) took place before the secret
ballot was introduced in the 1870s. More recently still, its scope has
widened even further to embrace the whole electioneering process of
argument, promotion and canvassing.

 

Incidentally, alderman is an ancient title of rank, dating back beyond the
Norman Conquest, indicating someone ruling a province or district. Until
local government reorganization in 1974 aldermen were a senior rank of
elected members of local authorities in Britain but now only the City of
London retains them. And the process of canvassing for votes derives from
canvas in the sense of tossing someone in a sheet as a punishment or
practical joke. This led very early on (in medieval times) to the figurative
meanings "to criticize harshly" and "to discuss thoroughly" and presumably
so to the idea of attempting to persuade electors by argument of one's
qualifications for election (the thought of tossing recalcitrant electors in
a sheet to persuade them to your point of view would probably appeal to some
politicians).

 

One issue which is likely to feature during the regional devolution debates
in the new session of Parliament is the West Lothian Question, a term which
was invented by the Scottish Labour MP Tam Dalyell in the 1970s when he was
sitting for that constituency (Lothian is the area around Edinburgh). If
devolution came about and the Scots obtained their own parliament, he asked,
why should Scottish MPs at Westminster be allowed to discuss and vote on
English issues, when English MPs could not do the same for Scottish matters?
The name for the issue, a crucial one for a proposed political system which
is neither centralized government nor a federal association, was probably in
part a punning reference to the famous Midlothian speeches of Gladstone in
1879-80 which did so much to put the Liberals back into power at the 1880
general election, and which was the first example of the manifesto in
British politics. This word comes to us from Italian, and is closely related
to the older word manifest, etymologically something "grasped by the hand",
that is, "palpable, obvious". Originally manifesto just meant "evidence,
proof" (closely related to the modern word manifest for a list of cargo or
passengers) and only gradually evolved to its current sense of "a public
statement of political objectives or intentions, especially immediately
before an election".

 

As a result of the opposition by members of both main parties (but
particularly the Conservative right) to the idea of Britain conforming to
European Union agreements and laws, the word federal has taken on a
derogatory meaning in Britain in the nineties, one which is different to
that commonly understood elsewhere. It was possible, for example, for the
former British Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind to speak in February 1997
of a "monolithic, centralized, federal" Europe, to the total bemusement of
his German audience. The word derives from an older meaning based on the
Latin federus, "treaty; covenant", in phrases such as "federal union", from
which the modern term has evolved. This is a rare example in Britain of a
word whose sense and associations has been radically amended within little
more than a decade. The policies of the new Government suggest we may get it
back, though slightly tarnished, in its more usual meaning.

 

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Edward Hunter, a US Journalist, invented what war Korean term ?

A: Brainwashing

 

In 1951 disposable what were invented?

A:  diapers

 

Fire escapes, windshield wipers, and bullet proof vests were all invented by
what group?

A:  women

 

Denis Gabor of Hungary, in 1971, won the Nobel prize for what invention?

A:  Holograms

 

The Wright brothers made aircraft but what was their other job?

A:  Bicycle manufacturers

 

Who invented the Linux computer operating system?

A: Linus Torwalds

 

in 1662 what calculating aid was invented by William Oughtred?

A: Slide Rule