[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Solutions are not the answer. 

Richard Nixon

 

The danger of the blogosphere is reading only those you agree with. While
there are right-wing blogs that are entertaining freak shows, it's hard to
find substantial journalism there.

Molly Ivins 

 

So I'm ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.

Yogi Berra

 

My best birth control now is just to leave the lights on. 

Joan Rivers

 

And where is the National Public Radio table? You guys are still here?
That's good. I couldn't remember where we landed on that. Now, I know you
were a little tense when the GOP tried to cut your funding, but personally I
was looking forward to new programming like 'No Things Considered' or 'Wait,
Wait...Don't Fund Me.'

President Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner

 

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

Winston Churchill

 

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

 

Sockdolager

 

This is one of the more famous of the set of extraordinary words that were
coined in America in the early years of the nineteenth century, along with
such gems as absquatulate, hornswoggle and skedaddle.

 

As well as its literal meaning of a heavy or knock-down blow, sockdolager
also came to mean something that was exceptional in any respect, especially,
the OED says, a particularly large fish. James Fenimore Cooper wrote in 1838
in Home as Found: "There is but one 'sogdollager' in the universe, and that
is in Lake Oswego". A related sense given in Bartlett's dictionary in 1848
was "a type of fish hook"

 

Lexicographers are reluctant to speculate about where it came from (as usual
there's little evidence), but we may hazard a guess that it's a combination
of sock, meaning to give somebody a blow, with doxology, the little hymn of
praise sung towards the end of a church service. Researcher Barry Popik
found this more detailed speculation in the issue of the Chicago Daily
Tribune of 19 March 1893:

 

A writer in the March Atlantic gives this as the origin of the slang word
"socdollager," current some time ago. "Socdollager" was the uneducated man's
transposition of "doxologer," which was the familiar New England rendering
of "doxology." This was the Puritan term for the verse ascription used at
the conclusion of every hymn, like the "Gloria," at the end of a chanted
psalm. On doctrinal grounds it was proper for the whole congregation to join
in the singing, so that it became a triumphant winding up of the whole act
of worship. Thus is happened that "socdollager" became the term for anything
which left nothing else to follow; a decisive, overwhelming finish, to which
no reply was possible.

 

The particular claim to fame of sockdolager is that a close relative of it
was supposedly almost the last word President Lincoln heard. In Tom Taylor's
play Our American Cousin, there occurs the line "Well, I guess I know enough
to turn you inside out, you sockdologising old man-trap", and as the
audience laughed, John Wilkes Booth fired the fatal shot.

------------

Shyster

 

In an online discussion about singing masters and hymn-book salesmen of the
19th century, the word shyster was used to describe certain members of that
fraternity. Some thought the term to be anti-Semitic. The supposed
anti-Semitic origin links the word to the name of the vengeful money lender
Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, with the occupational ending
-ster added. This is untrue. It is also often claimed to come from the name
of a New York lawyer named Scheuster; in the 1840s, his unscrupulous ways
are said to have so annoyed Barnabas Osborn, the judge who presided over the
Essex Market police court in that city, that he supposedly began to refer to
Sheuster practices. No such lawyer has been traced and it's clearly just a
folk tale. Unsuccessful attempts have also been made to link it to a Scots
Gaelic word and to bits of English slang.

 

Whatever its origin, we use shyster to mean a person who uses unscrupulous,
fraudulent, or deceptive methods in business. Historically, it has mainly
been applied to lawyers. There's good reason for that, as Gerald Cohen
discovered when he traced its true origin some 25 ago. Professor Cohen found
that shyster appeared first in the New York newspaper The Subterranean in
July 1843, at first in spellings such as shyseter and shiseter but almost
immediately settling down to the form we use now.

 

In the 1840s the notorious New York prison known as the Tombs was infested
by ignorant and unqualified charlatans, who pretended to be lawyers and
officers of the court. Before shyster came into being, pettifogger was the
usual term for them, a word of obscure origin for lawyers of little scruple
or conscience that dates from the sixteenth century. Mike Walsh, the editor
of The Subterranean and the first user of shyster, summed up these plaguers
of the Tombs in this passage:

 

Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted drunkards, driveling
simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks, vagabonds, swindlers and thieves make up,
with but few exceptions, the disgraceful gang of pettifoggers who swarm
about its halls.

 

Mike Walsh described shyster as both obscene and libelous. The circumstances
surrounding its first appearance suggest that in New York underworld slang
it was a term for somebody incompetent, so a potentially libelous
description, and that only later - largely through the publicity that Walsh
gave it in his newspaper in the years 1843-1846 - did it come to refer
specifically to a crooked lawyer.

 

Professor Cohen concluded the word derives from German Scheisser for an
incompetent person, a term known in New York through the many German
immigrants there. Mike Walsh considered it obscene because it derives from
Scheisse, shit, through the image of an incontinent old man. This is
plausible, because British slang at the same period included the same word,
meaning a worthless person; the usual spelling was shicer, though it
appeared also as sheisser, shiser and shycer. It's recorded first in print
in Britain in 1846, but must be significantly older in the spoken language.
(It was taken to Australia and from the 1850s was used there for an
unproductive gold mine.) It may have been exported to New York by London
low-lifers.

 

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

 

In 1953, what type of signal was first successfully transmitted in the
United States?

A:  Color TV

 

What company was it that invented the transistor radio in 1952?

A:  Sony

 

In Australia, John Flynn invented what service?

A:  Flying Doctors

 

Whitcome Judson in 1891 invented what for fastening shoes

A:  Zip Fastener

 

Reuben Tice died trying to invent a machine to do what?

A:  Dewrinkle prunes

 

Samuel Morse, the inventor of the famous "Morse code" was of what
nationality?

A:  American