[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Cheap cigars come in handy; they stifle the odor of cheap politicians.

Ulysses S. Grant

 

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

George Washington

 

Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is
good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.

John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.

Groucho Marx

 

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.

Dr. Thomas Fuller

 

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

Henny Youngman

 

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Jinx

 

The word jinx, in the sense of a thing or person that brings bad luck, is
first recorded as sports slang from the US in the early years of the
twentieth century. Most of the early American citations relate to baseball
and are spelled jinks:

 

Anyone who can furnish reliable information leading to the conviction of the
miscreant who put a "jinks" on the Los Angeles baseball club's batting eyes
last spring will likely receive a free pass for the rest of the season by
advising Manager Morley. - Los Angeles Times, 12 July 1904.

 

By the end of the decade the spelling had moved to the modern one. In this
form it appeared in The Jinx: Stories of the Diamond by Allen Sangree of
1910 and Christy Mathewson's Pitching at a Pinch of 1912, in which he
writes, "A jinx is something which brings bad luck to a ball player". From
sports it spread out into standard American English and later to other
varieties of the language.

 

Most dictionaries say with varying degrees of conviction that the word
derives from the classical Greek word iunx for the bird the English call the
wryneck. It's a member of the woodpecker family, a species that breeds
across Europe and Asia. It has a strange habit of twisting its neck right
round when it's alarmed or when it's watchfully at rest, hence its English
name; it has an odd courtship ritual, in which the male and female perch
opposite one another, shaking their heads about, and gaping their mouths to
show the pink inside. Such curious behavior made people think that the
wryneck was uncanny, and from the time of the Greeks there were
superstitions attached to it, with links to witchcraft, divination, and
magic. Its Greek name passed into Latin and then English, either as yunx or
jynx.

 

So it's not surprising that dictionary writers often suggest that jinx comes
from this bird of superstition. But there are two big holes in the idea: the
wryneck is not a North American bird and the word jynx for it was scholarly
and uncommon. Appropriate though it was, it would be surprising to learn
American sportsmen seized upon it.

 

A more plausible suggestion was put forward by Barry Popik, who linked it
with a once well-known American vaudeville song, Captain Jinks of the Horse
Marines. Captain Jinks was an incompetent buffoon and unsuccessful soldier,
who eventually was drummed out of the Army:

 

The first day I went out to drill

The bugle sound made me quite ill,

At the Balance step my hat it fell,

And that wouldn't do for the Army.

The officers they all did shout,

They all cried out, they all did shout,

The officers they all did shout,

"Oh, that's the curse of the Army".

 

Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines, by William Lingard, 1868. Note that the
horse marines were a mythical body of men, not least because horses on board
ship were spectacularly useless. In fact, it was a deeply deprecatory term
on board ship for a landlubber or bungler. Herman Melville wrote in his book
White-jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War of 1850, "To call a man a
'horse-marine' is, among seamen, one of the greatest terms of contempt."

 

This song became all the rage, almost at once spawning another song by Will
Hays about the captain's supposed wife: Mistress Jinks of Madison Square. It
grew to be a well-liked square dance tune, and a popular song in the
American Army in the decades after 1870. In 1901, the young Ethel Barrymore
starred at the Garrick Theatre in New York in Clyde Fitch's melodrama of the
1870s which he called Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines; in 1902 Ernest
Crosby, a friend of Mark Twain, wrote a satirical anti-imperialist novel
about the Spanish-American War with the title Captain Jinks, Hero. So,
thirty years after the song originally appeared, it was still sufficiently
well known that a playwright and author of the early 1900s could separately
refer to it in titles in the expectation that their audiences would
understand them. However, it isn't the direct origin of jinx.

 

The most probable source was uncovered by Douglas Wilson. In 1887, Archibald
Clavering Gunter, Fred Maeder, Robert Fraser and Howard P Taylor wrote a
fantastic musical comedy, Little Puck, based in part on Vice Versa by the
British novelist F Anstey (pen name of Thomas Anstey Guthrie), which had
been published five years earlier. The book involves the magical swapping of
bodies between a prosperous businessman and his schoolboy son (if this
sounds familiar, it's probably because of the 1948 Peter Ustinov film based
on the book and with the same title that starred Roger Livesy and the young
Anthony Newley or its 1988 remake starring Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage).
In writing Little Puck, the authors took many liberties with the book,
amalgamating its plot with that of a later Anstey work, A Fallen Idol, and
introducing additional characters, in particular one to whom they gave the
name Jinks Hoodoo, described as "a curse to everybody, including himself".
Hoodoo, a variation of voodoo, is recorded from the early 1880s in the sense
of a person or thing that's supposed to bring bad luck. At this time, Jinks
- not an uncommon first name, nickname or family name - didn't have such
associations. Little Puck was first seen in Buffalo in September 1887 and
later transferred to Brooklyn in 1888 and Broadway in 1890.

 

The character's name was picked up surprisingly early (even if spelled
wrongly) as a way to describe a person who brings bad luck:

 

If Halstead was the Jinks Hoodo, and if he was at the disposal of the
republicans, we can't see why they should send him to the most important
political ground in the Union. - Decatur Morning Review (Illinois), 1 May
1890. Murat Halstead was a famous journalist of the time.

 

and it became fairly common from the middle of that decade on:

 

But a whole page of Herald and Tribune notices combined could not have
rescued the affair from the failure to which it was foredoomed when its
management was entrusted to the hands of a "manager" who combined in so
eminent a degree the qualities of a Jonah and a Jinks Hoodoo. - Salt Lake
Herald (Utah), 24 Dec. 1895.

 

By early in the following decade, it had become a baseball term:

 

His accident was the climax of a string of hard luck, outpitching his
opponents and then losing games by one run day after day and other "Mr.
Jinks Hoodoo" stunts. - Sporting Life, 29 Aug. 1903.

 

It seems very likely that these two fictional characters came together in
the public mind - Captain Jinks, the well-known buffoon, and Jinks Hoodoo,
who really was a jinx. The influence of the former probably helped the
elision of the latter's name to just Jinks. The respelling came later, for
no very obvious reason.

 

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

 

What is a military contractor referring to when talking about a "manually
powered fastener-driving impact device"?

A: A Hammer.

 

In a military contract, what item is referred to as a "portable, hand-held
communications inscriber "?

A:  A Pencil.

 

What great military leader was an accomplished yo-yo player?

A: Napoleon's nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. At the time, the yo-yo was
known as a Bangalore.

 

At the Battle of the Marne in 1914, how were French reinforcements rushed
from Paris to the front in order to help fend off the advancing Germans?

A: In commandeered Renault taxis. Each cabbie was paid a 27-percent tip on
top of his metered fare.

 

Who signed Major Clark Gable's army discharge papers in 1944?

A: President-to-be Ronald Reagan, then a captain.

 

Following the British defeat at Dunkirk in June 1940, who made the stirring
broadcast vowing that "we shall fight in the fields and in the streets...we
shall never surrender"?

A: British actor Norman Shelley. He sounded just like Winston Churchill and
read the address so that the prime minister could deal with pressing matters
of state.

 

What was the inspiration for the name Rough Riders--the name of the elite
fighting unit Theodore Roosevelt organized for the Spanish-American War?

A: The Rough Riders Hotel in Medora, North Dakota, where Roosevelt had tried
ranching.