Number 102
I've been getting more variety in my spam diet lately, from the "Do you love your country?" returned-mail ploy to a variation on the Nigerian scam spam series that wants me to help someone give his millions to charity. One "Montaigne S. Libidinous" sent me an unusual bit of mail. Mr. Libidinous isn't selling erection enhancers, just freely sharing a list of borrowed ideas. The message is full of pithy, cynical ideas about life, love, and religion, some of which are contradictory. For example:
"If you think you're free, there's no escape possible."
"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world ~ and never will."
The former bon mot suggests that freedom is an illusion. The latter says humans are freed by escaping fixed opinions. But these are circular statements ~ if you think you're free, you can't escape, but if you don't think you're free, then you can escape, at which point you might think you're free, which you might be if you've relieved yourself of your loyalty to opinions (only the petrified ones), at which point you think you're free, but . . . . It's a hall of mirrors. There are plenty of old maxims that contradict each other, such as: "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and "Many hands make light work" but the ones that pose seeming paradoxes within themselves don't always hold up as well, although Erich Fromm's book Escape from Freedom is worth reading.
"A bird is not free of the skyway."
Bob Dylan wrote that.
And how can you know when your opinions are "petrified"? When someone calls opinions "petrified" that usually means they disagree with someone else's firmly held opinions, or with ideas that have been around for a long time. Belief in the value of freedom might be a petrified idea.
But who hangs on to every early opinion? As Jane Austen wrote so elegantly in Persuasion, "There was nothing less for Lady Russell to do, than to admit that she had been pretty completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions and of hopes."
I expect the anonymous Mr. Libidinous probably just got drunk one night and took himself to the keyboard with Barlett's Quotations to sprinkle bitterness with traditional sentiments about friendship and hard work.
From Dea (who used to drive trucks):
. . . a bob-tail with one axle reduces their over-all weight by the engine driving only one axle instead of two. And where there are two axles, the truck is also called a bob-tail when it is not pulling its semi-trailer or other type of load, such as propane. The adjective is probably descriptive because the cat's design like the truck is naturally short. Unlike a puma, the bob cat is quicker in close quarters, where it is more agile. The bob-tail truck is also quicker and more agile.[Also, a bobcat has no tail. "Bobbed" means cut short.]
As for the "sign," it probably refers to an area where bob-tail truckers are not permitted to park. This exception is because the "Big Dogs" find it hard to avoid stepping on them. Or because space is very limited, it is reserved for the Big Dogs, who are trying to get some rest while working the long haul.
From Doug:
A trucker friend of mine said that a bobtail is simply the tractor (the front part the with the engine and driver's cab built by somebody like Peterbilt, Freightliner, or Kenworth) without the freight trailer attached. "Bobtailing" is driving a tractor without a trailer hanging off the back.[Did you know ~ old truckers never die, they just get a new Peterbilt?]
From Bob:
I believe I've also heard "bobtail" referring to just a truck tractor without its trailer. Also, bobtail is used in poker to represent 4 cards to a straight. I don't remember if that means 4 sequential cards or the infamous inside straight or both.
Seems like lots of people know what a bobtail is. So how come I never saw that "No Bobtail Parking" sign before?
From Mike:
Well now, New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, January 1997 gives the original meaning as:n. 1 Hist. A game in which a challenger laid claim to an article belonging to another person, offering something in exchange for it, the difference in the value of the two items being determined by an umpire who stood to gain the forfeit-money deposited by all three contestants if the other two parties both signified (by drawing out full or empty hands from a cap, pocket, etc.) their acceptance or rejection of his award (otherwise the one who accepted it won the forfeit-money).
If you see what I mean!
[Uh, no.]
Sofa comes from Turkish/Arabic/Aramaic, meaning carpet. I'm guessing that carpets were piled up in tents to make seats and beds.
Funny, my dictionary says:
sofa n.E17. [Fr., ult. f. Arab. suffa long (stone) bench.] 1 Esp. in Arab countries, a raised part of a floor, covered with rich carpets and cushions, and used for sitting.
I don't suggest my dictionary is any more authoritative than yours; only that you might be interested in looking more widely.
[Thanks for doing it for me.]
From Dave:
Road sign typesetting is indeed an art because there's authentic value to bigger letters ~ they can be read from farther away. But it seems to me that a lot of people have misconstrued the micro-redactions as meaning "This is how you speak authoritatively." But sometimes the result is distinctly unclear, and when I mention that to people, I tend to get a true deer-in-headlights look.
Also from Dave:
Regarding ducks, there's a well-known Internet legend that a duck's quack doesn't echo. Some years ago (when semi-employed) I put way too much time into exploring that question. NOBODY anywhere has published anything scientific on the question, but I eventually found discussions of people who were determined to figure it out by observation. Now, you just think about that: how do you set up an experiment where a duck quacks near a configuration of surfaces that would produce an echo? They don't live in canyons. But, somebody figured out how to do it, and the mental image of the event was pretty funny.[I'm dying to know how that was done. I guess you could confine a duck to a room.]
A news reporter said a man "swarmed the stage." Can you do that alone? A swarm is a group or a cloud or a cluster. Bees swarm, and there are swarms of bees. In this case, someone heard the phrase (maybe "the audience swarmed the stage") and assumed it referred to the action.
But I discovered another meaning of the verb swarm: "to climb a tree, pole, or the like, by embracing it with the arms and legs alternately."
When I told Fred the City of Akron had planted a young tree in front of my mother's house, and some of her neighbors', in the devil's strip, he said he'd never heard that term. I've heard it all my life. It's the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, and presumably refers to property that's not one thing or another, that belongs to the devil. I'm not sure who legally owns that bit, but maybe the city, since they planted the tree at no cost. I was surprised when I did an Internet search to find that someone else said he'd only heard it in Akron. This architecture site lists other terms for that spot, such as easement and curb strip. Another site shows a city sign, "No Parking on Devil Strip", and a newer sign that prohibits parking on the "lawn area". How lame.
Other sites also say this is an Anakronism. Who knew? I thought I'd heard it elsewhere, but maybe it was just my folks using it elsewhere.
What do you call it where you live?
In the 1945 movie, Those Endearing Young Charms, a soldier refers to the local girls as the "local scallions." Why young onions? Because they're slender and hot?
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