Number 101
Hope your Thanksgiving was bountiful, and that you are thankful for it. I am, in spite of a slight case of tryptophan poisoning. But I ain't been slack, just slow.
Somewhere on the road Thanksgiving weekend I spotted a sign I'd never seen before: "Absolutely No Bobtail Parking". I thought "bobtail parking" must have something to do with how you park ~ nose in instead of parallel parking? diagonal parking? A bobtail is an animal with a short tail, so I tried visualizing parking like a bobtail nag, or its tail, but it didn't help. A bit of Web research explained that a bobtail is also a kind of truck, usually carrying propane in a shorter than average cylinder. However, one William Banks has a photo gallery of bobtail trucks that look quite different, like truck cabs with big sleeper boxes on the back. Maybe they could carry a propane tank, but they're not in these photos. In any case, if you have a bobtail of any kind, be careful where you park.
Also over Thanksgiving, someone said that "handicap" came from "cap in hand" when beggars were long ago licensed to hold out a hat for money based on their worthiness, i.e. their disabilities. But www.dict.org says it is "perhaps in reference to an old mode of setting a bargain by taking pieces of money from a cap". Now, "handicap" refers to either a disability, or an equalization of a competition by some artificial means. In any case, a hat used to be involved.
An article about step shows said they are supposed to have begun in the 1940s at "historically black fraternities and sororities". Why "historically"? Would just "black fraternities and sororities" mean something different? When does history begin and leave off?
Step shows are way cool, by the way. I was invited to one some years ago at Kansas State University. The kids compete in group routines that combine fancy stepping, clapping, etc., without musical accompaniment.
Do you have a sofa, divan, couch, davenport, or chaise longue in your living room? When I grew up, we had a couch. I don't know why. These words are more or less synonymous in the United States but I suppose their usage is regional.
When I grew up we had a hassock to go with our couch. Hassock is of Scottish derivation, and originally referred to a tuft of turf used as a seat. Some fancy people have ottomans, named for a Turkish sultan.
"To the untutored ear it might just sound like a load of quacking, but British researchers have discovered that the country's ducks, much like its people, have distinct regional accents. Ducks from London make a rougher sound which resembles shouting so that fellow birds can hear them above the hubbub of city life, whereas their country cousins make a softer sound, the study found. The differences were uncovered after academics at London's Middlesex University recorded the calls of ducks at a city farm in the capital and at a tranquil location in Cornwall, southwest England, the Guardian newspaper said. There was a clear difference in sound, English language lecturer Victoria de Rijke told the paper, with the London ducks 'much louder and (more) vocally excitable'."
And I just learned that when prairie dogs warn each other with their barks of approaching predators, they make different sounds not just for different species, but for different individuals.
Rupert Sheldrake, by the way, is coming up with a TV series based on his book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.
When I was a kid, those little individual boxes of cereal that came packaged like a cigarette carton were kind of cool. You could open them at the perforation and pour milk right into the wax paper liner and, as the instructions explained, "Eat from pac!" When I was in grade school, the idea of eating right out of a disposable cardboard box was novel and exciting, like a picnic or camping out. This was before the era of the disposable everything. But somehow that line creeped me out ~ "Eat from pac." It was a combination of the lack of an article ("the") before "pac" and the illicit abbreviation of pack or package or packet. I was a sensitive child, and words sometimes were live things in and of themselves, aside from their meaning.
Since then, I've become hardened to lite spellings. Once I even worked at a Nite Club. Did someone think the spelling "nite" was more fun than the traditional "night," weighed down by the heavy yet silent g? More modern and speedy? It's not as if anyone is confused by the meaning of "night club". Night life is perhaps more dangerous than nite life.
Outside of advertising, misspellings have been used to convey non-standard accents in speech, or illiteracy in writing, usually for humorous purposes, as when Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw, 1818-1885) wrote: From a wife who don’t luv us, from fluky mutton and tite butes, from folks who won’t laff, good Lord deliver us! "Tite butes" seem to hurt more than mere tight boots. It's tight spelling.
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