[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Politics, noun. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of
principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

Ambrose Bierce

 

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Albert Einstein

 

Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as
distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

Ambrose Bierce

 

I don't want to be invited to the family hunting party.

Barack Obama on Dick Cheney

 

I'm not a complete idiot. Some parts are missing.

Anonymous

 

My housekeeping style is best described as 'there appears to have been a
struggle.'

Anonymous

 

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Missing opposites

 

What has happened is that the root words have vanished, leaving the
negatives behind. There are quite a number of these orphaned negatives.
Comic writers have often exploited this fact to startle readers, as in P G
Wodehouse's "I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from
being gruntled" (from The Code of the Woosters).

 

For instance, gormless is now mainly an informal British English word that
describes somebody foolish, lacking sense or initiative. This comes from a
defunct term, usually spelt gaum, a dialect word meaning care or attention;
in turn this derives from an Old Norse word gaumr. Though rarely recorded,
at one time gaum-like was also around, for someone with an intelligent look
about them. Curiously, the verb to gorm also existed, which meant to stare
vacantly, implying almost the opposite; but this may be related to the Irish
gom for a stupid-looking person and so may be unconnected with the other
sense of gorm.

 

Ruthless is easier, since ruth was a well-attested Middle English word for a
feeling of pity or compassion. This was formed about the twelfth century
from the Anglo-Saxon noun and verb rue, with the same sense (we still have
the verb, of course, with the closely related idea of regret). The adjective
ruthless appeared in the fourteenth century. The noun is now archaic, but
the adjective survived.

 

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Jackpot

 

This word has always had associations with gambling, at first not the big
lotteries of today with their rollover jackpots, but with the game of poker.

 

In its early days in the US in the 1820s, poker was a gambling game for four
players using a deck of only 20 cards; its reputation was commonly as a
crooked game for cheats and hustlers. Its rules evolved very quickly through
the following decades. Players began to use the full deck of 52 cards so
more could take part in a game and, around the 1860s, some bright spark had
the idea of improving the game by introducing a rule that nobody could open
the betting unless his hand contained two jacks or better. If, after the
usual rounds of dealing extra cards, nobody else had a hand good enough to
bid, the player with the good hand took the accumulated stakes, which
obviously enough became known as the jack pot.

 

This version of the game took a while to catch on. Though the term is first
recorded in an issue of The National Police Gazette in 1865, it doesn't
appear with any frequency until the middle 1870s. A puzzled reference to it
is in a story with the title The Young Men at Narragansett Pier, which
appeared in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette of 21 August 1876:

 

One never sees these young men standing around barrooms holding one end of a
straw to their mouths and the other to a julep. They are never seen playing
billiards for wine and cigars, or passing out of the game in a Jack pot when
they hold a bob-tailed flush. Indeed, like the reader and myself, they do
not know what a Jack pot is, unless it is a pot to put jacks in, which is
sometimes the case. [bob-tailed flush: a useless one, missing one card of
the set, like a chopped-off rabbit's tail.]

 

The term began to be applied to lotteries only around the start of the
twentieth century.

 

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In the USA, there is a sports league for rock-paper-scissors competitions.

 

Although Christopher Columbus was the first to discover the American
continent, it was the Italian Amerigo Vespucci who came up with the idea
that this might be a new continent and not an Indian island, as Columbus had
initially thought. In memory of this insight, the continent was named
"America" after Amerigo Vespucci.

 

Alaska crosses the border with the eastern hemisphere and is thus the most
eastern and western state in the USA.

 

>From 1789 to 1790, New York was the capital of the USA.

 

To date, there have been a total of 2,055 atomic bomb tests worldwide. 1,039
were carried out by the USA alone, 718 by the Soviet Union and 198 by
France.

 

In September 1719, prisoners in Paris were released under the condition that
they marry a prostitute and emigrate to Louisiana, USA. The objective was to
advance French colonies along the Mississippi.

 

Adolf Hitler's nephew William Patrick Hitler emigrated to the USA in 1939
and even fought alongside the Americans against Nazi Germany during the
Second World War. He was even awarded the Purple Heart for his
accomplishments during the war. After the war, however, he changed his name
to William Patrick Stuart-Houston.