[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Comcast]


He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
Mark Twain
 
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
Alan Dundes
 
I wish to thank my parents for making it all possible, and I wish to thank my children for making it necessary.
Victor Borge
 
Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can't be ignored.
From the writings of Robert A Heinlein
 
You had to stand in line to hate him.
Hedda Hopper
 
A politician is a person with whose politics you don’t agree. If you agree with him, he is a statesman.
David Lloyd George
 
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Bankrupt
 
There’s little difficulty in defining this common word — a person declared in law to be unable to pay his or her debts. What’s odd about it is its etymology. You might connect the first part with a financial institution, and the second part with rupture. So could it refer to a person forcibly torn from the embrace of his bank? It has a weird kind of sense about it, and actually it’s not so far from the truth.
 
The word actually comes from Italian banca rotta, a broken bench (not a rotten one, as the false friend of Italian rotta might suggest — it’s from Latin rumpere, to break). The bench was a literal one, however: it was the usual Italian word for a money dealer’s table (and indeed is the origin of our bank for a financial institution and also for the sense of break in phrases like “He’s gone broke”). In his dictionary, the great Dr Johnson retold the legend that when an Italian money trader became insolvent, his table was broken. But the Italian word was being used figuratively — it could also mean “shipwrecked” or “defeated”, for example.
 
Bankrupt arrived in English around the middle of the sixteenth century via the equivalent French form of banqueroute. It was changed into our modern form because people linked the second half with medieval Latin ruptus, broken, from the verb rumpere. That root also turns up in abrupt, corrupt, interrupt ... and rupture.
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Through the grapevine
 
To hear something through the grapevine is to learn of something informally and unofficially by means of gossip and rumour. The usual implication is that the information was passed person to person by word of mouth, perhaps in a confidential manner among friends or colleagues.
 
There are several expressions of this type, of which a well-known couple are bush telegraph and jungle telegraph. These are historically rather odd, because both were created well after the era of the telegraph. But that’s because both are imitations of the first such expression, grapevine telegraph, which is where our term comes from.
 
The phrase was invented in the USA sometime in the late 1840s or early 1850s. It provided a wry comparison between the twisted stems of the grapevine and the straight lines of the then new electric telegraph marching across America. The telegraph was the marvel of the 1840s (Samuel Morse’s first line was opened between Washington and Baltimore on 24 May 1844 and rapidly expanded in the following decade), vastly improving the speed of communication between communities. In comparison, the grapevine telegraph was by individual to individual, often garbling the facts or reporting untruths (so reflecting the gnarled and contorted stems of the grapevine), but likewise capable of transmitting vital messages quickly over distances.
 
The first recorded usage, according to Jonathan Lighter in The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, was in a political dictionary of 1852, which included the sentence “By the Grape Vine Telegraph Line ... we have received the following”. Various early references suggest that it was associated with clandestine communication among Southern blacks, especially slaves. For example, a writer named Samuel Bowles wrote a book in 1865 called Across the Continent in which he remarked that Colorado ladies seemed to have some secret method of learning about the latest fashions from the East: “How it is done I do not understand — there must be a subtle telegraph by crinoline wires; as the southern negroes have what they call a grape-vine telegraph”.
 
The term became widely known during the American Civil War period, so much so that the phrase permanently entered the standard language. Soldiers used it in the sense of gossip or unreliable rumour, as was made very clear in a diary note of 1862 reproduced in Major James Connolly’s Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland: “We get such ‘news’ in the army by what we call ‘grape vine,’ that is, ‘grape vine telegraph.’ It is not at all reliable”. However, it was widely acknowledged that the blacks’ communications network was extremely useful to the Union cause, as John G. Nicolay and John Hay reported in Abraham Lincoln: A History in 1888, calling it “one of the most important and reliable sources of knowledge to the Union commanders in the various fields, which later in the war came to be jocosely designated as the ‘grape-vine telegraph’ ”.
 
The telegraph is long defunct, but the grapevine seems never to have been more active ...
 
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Who originally coined the phrase that has been appropriated as the slogan for Maxwell House coffee; "Good to the last drop"?
A: President Theodore Roosevelt.
 
Who first developed frozen foods?
A: Clarence Birdseye, in 1930.
 
What was the first commercially-manufactured breakfast cereal?
A: Shredded Wheat, made by Henry Perky in 1882.
 
How many lemons does the average lemon tree yield per year?
A: 1,500. The trees usually bloom throughout the year, with the fruit picked 6 to 10 times a year.
 
What is the official state beverage of Massachusetts?
A: Cranberry juice. The state's cranberry crop is the nation's largest.
 
What food product overtook ketchup as the top-selling condiment in the United States in 1991?
A: Salsa.
 
What fruit was originally named the Chinese gooseberry?
A: The kiwi.