[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to
erase it.

Glaser and Way

 

Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.

Rudyard Kipling

 

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you
really make them think, they'll hate you.

Don Marquis

 

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good
library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Mark Twain

 

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known,
then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.

Fred Allen 

 

Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning.

Marlo Thomas

 

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In a pig's eye

 

An expression of emphatic disbelief.

 

When compared the human's eyes, pig's eyes are relatively small and the
expression 'a pig's eye' has been used to denote small eyes since the 17th
century. The British poet Richard Flecknoe put that usage into print in
1658, in Enigmaticall Characters:

 

She have the spirit in her of twenty school-mistresses, looking with her
Pigs-eyes so narrowly to her charge.

 

The phrase 'in a pig's eye' emerged in the USA in the 19th century and,
while it is used in Australia, it hasn't travelled to the UK and its meaning
is generally unknown there. The expression's use to indicate incredulity
could be related to the earlier 'pig's eye' meaning but, if so, it isn't
clear how. It is in the same linguistic area as 'pigs might fly' - so it
might also be related to that.

 

We do know that 'in a pig's ear' was a variant of 'in a pig's eye' and that
the first known example of the phrase in print is in Jacob Oswandel's Notes
on the Mexican War 1846-1848. Oswandel was a volunteer in Pennsylvania's
First Regiment. He seems fond of the 'in a pig's eye' expression and used it
five times in his account of the war, for example:

 

The Publicanos de Mexicanos were all anxious to see the new arrivals, they
having been informed that our regiment was a whole division of about eight
thousand men (in a pig's eye).

 

Confusingly, the pig's ear phrase also has more than one meaning:

 

As 'pig's ear' - Cockney rhyming slang for beer.

As 'in a pig's ear' - an expression of disbelief.

As 'make a pig's ear of ' - make a mess or muddle.

 

The Cockney rhyming slang version of 'pig's ear' is one of the earliest
examples of the form and appears in D. W. Barrett's Life & Work among
Navvies, 1880:

 

"Now, Jack, I'm goin' to get a tiddley wink of pig's ear."

 

That's easy enough to decipher as "I'm going to get a drink of beer",
although you would need a Cockney for an explanation of why 'tiddley wink of
pig's ear' was thought to be an improvement on 'drink of beer'. 'Pig's ear'
rhymes with 'beer' and that's usually enough for rhyming slang. Franklin's
Dictionary of Rhyming Slang lists several alternatives for 'beer' - 'Charlie
Freer', 'far and near', 'never fear', 'oh my dear', 'red steer', 'Crimea',
and 'fusilier' but 'pig's ear' has always been the most popular.

 

The version 'in a pig's ear' is also perplexing. It originated in the USA in
the 1850s as a variant of 'in a pig's eye'. Both phrases were used as
expressions of incredulous disbelief and have the same meaning as 'tell it
to the marines'. They may possibly be related to 'pigs might fly'. 

 

'Make a pig's ear' is a mid-20th century phrase and means 'completely botch
something up; make a complete mess of it'. This is first found in print in a
1950 edition of the Reader's Digest:

 

"If you make a pig's ear of the first one, you can try the other one."

 

The expression derives from the old proverb 'you can't make a silk purse out
of a sow's ear', which dates from the 16th century. The English clergyman
Stephen Gosson published the romantic story Ephemerides in 1579 and in it
referred to people who were engaged in a hopeless task:

 

"Seekinge too make a silke purse of a Sowes eare."

 

'Make a pig's ear of' alludes to what might be the result if someone did try
to make something from a sow's ear - not a silk purse but a complete mess.

 

'Pigs might fly' is a humorous/ironic remark, used to indicate the
unlikeliness of some event or to mock the credulity of others. For example:

 

"I might make a start on papering the back bedroom tomorrow".

"Yes, and pigs might fly".

 

'Pigs might fly', or as some would have it 'pigs may fly', is an example of
an adynaton, that is, a figure of speech that uses inflated comparison to
such an extent as to suggest complete impossibility. Other examples are 'It
is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle...' and 'Make a
mountain out of a molehill'. The version of the phrase more often used in
America is 'when pigs fly'.

 

A book by John Winthrop has been speculated as the possible origin of the
expression 'pigs might fly'. Winthrop was an English Puritan explorer who
settled in Massachusetts in 1630 and recounted his story in The History of
New England, 1630-1649, which was transcribed from Winthrop's 17th century
notes and published in 1908:

 

In this year one James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others, saw a
great light in the night at Muddy River. When it stood still, it flamed up,
and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the
figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton, and so up
and down about two or three hours.

 

Whether Everett and his pals had been at the fermented cranberry juice or
whether they were the first to record an attempted alien abduction we don't
know, but we can be sure that their visions weren't the source of the
popular saying.

 

The original version of the succinct 'pigs might fly' was 'pigs fly with
their tails forward', which is first found in a list of proverbs in the 1616
edition of John Withals's English-Latin dictionary - A Shorte Dictionarie
for Yonge Begynners:

 

Pigs fly in the ayre with their tayles forward.

 

This form of the expression was in use for two hundred years as a sarcastic
rejoinder to any overly optimistic prediction made by the gullible, much as
we now use "...and pigs might fly".

 

Why pigs? Other creatures were previously cited in similar phrases - 'snails
may fly', 'cows might fly' etc., but it is pigs have stood the test of time
as the favoured image of an animal that is particularly unsuited to flight.
It is probably the bulkiness of the creatures and their habit of rooting in
earth that suggests an intensely ramping nature [...and it's nice to have an
opportunity to sneak in the little-used 'ramping', which means no more nor
less than 'unable to fly'].

 

Thomas Fuller, in Gnomologia: A Collection of the Proverbs, Maxims and
Adages That Inspired Benjamin Franklin and Poor Richard's Almanack, 1732,
was the first to explicitly single out the pig as a ham-fisted aeronaut:

 

That is as likely as to see an Hog fly.

 

The first example found of the currently used 'pigs may fly/pigs might fly'
form is from The Autobiography of Jack Ketch By Charles Whitehead, 1835:

 

Yes, pigs may fly, but they're very unlikely birds.

 

Having an autobiography that is written by someone else is commonplace in
the celebrity-obsessed 21st century, but wasn't in Ketch's day. Ketch was
the executioner employed by Charles II and his days were lived out in the
17th century, so, unless our eponymous hangman really was a ghost writer, we
have to assume the words of an 'autobiography' written 150 years after his
death were Whitehead's rather than his.

 

Flying pigs appeared in print in the UK quite often throughout the rest of
the 19th century. The Illustrated Times referred to them in an issue in
August 1855:

 

...pigs might fly. An elephant, too, might dance on the tight-rope,

 

Lewis Carroll also conjured one up in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
1865:

 

"I've a right to think," said Alice sharply... "Just about as much right,"
said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly."

 

In 1909, in a jokey attempt to prove that pigs can take flight, the pioneer
aviator Baron Brabazon of Tara, better known to his friends as John Theodore
Cuthbert Moore Brabazon, took a piglet aloft in his private biplane,
strapped into a wastepaper basket.

 

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What nation invented the concentration camp ?

A: Britain during the Boer war

 

What weapon was invented by Robert Whitehead  in 1866?

A: The Torpedo

 

What emergency aircraft safety device was first used in 1945?

A:  Ejector Seat

 

On Jan 14, 1878, what new invention was shown to Queen Victoria?

A:  The telephone

 

What type of device did William Addis invent while in prison?

A:  Toothbrush

 

What were Kleenex tissues originally intended for in 1915 WWI?

A: Gas mask filters

 

What group of people invented popcorn?

A: The American Indians