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ELIZABETH ELIZA'S PIANO

Yvonne P. identified the square piano story from last week: it was about Elizabeth Eliza in the Peterkin Papers. And amazingly we both had the same reaction to that story when we were kids: fascinated but annoyed. That kind of idiocy is funnier to adults than to kids, or at least to us.

CROSS CHILDREN AND GUSTY WINDS

Anne DaBee wrote about large yellow signs:

...all roads in the vicinity of a school zone have (or at least used to have) large yellow signs warning of children possibly being in a crosswalk. The signs said "CROSS CHILDREN WALK", with the longest word in the middle where the sign was broadest. Most of my 6 children were sufficiently brainwashed that they were each about 10 years old before they realized that the signs didn't mean that bad-tempered children would be put out of the car and forced to continue on foot... Amazingly, when their eyes were finally opened to the truth, they rarely passed it on to their younger sibs. Perhaps they each enjoyed that lovely (if fleeting) "I know something YOU don't" feeling of superiority...

Jan G. found a variation on our old favorite, "Gusty winds may exist" ~ "Gusty winds likely". She said she'd like to see one saying "Gusty winds unlikely!"

TESTY

Dave DaBee (yes, they're related, mom and son) sent what was supposed to be an 8th-grade test from 1895, and thought it seemed bogus, and indeed it had what appeared to be typos from transcription. I don't know whether it was a genuine test from 1895, but I did find it on the Snopes urban legends site. While Snopes says it doesn't prove what it's intended to prove ~ that modern high school students couldn't pass this test ~ it never says definitively that it is not a test from 1895. Snopes does, however, show "a certification examination for prospective teachers, prepared by the Examiners of Teachers for the Public Schools in Zanesville, Ohio, in the late 1870s," which most modern teachers probably couldn't pass. The Snopes commentary is vague, and seems to dismiss the idea that students today are not held to the same standards as students of a century ago. But students of less than half a century past know that things have changed.

USE "GRUEL" IN A SENTENCE

Mike S. said he used to be annoyed by a man who used "literally" all the time when he didn't mean it, and he was especially irritated by "literally half-dead". What's half-dead anyway? Is it like being a little bit pregnant? Mike also thinks the phrase "half as small again" doesn't make sense. I think this is a British expression, we don't use it over here, but it always sounded like it means 50 percent less.

He also sent this quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth (offered with all disclaimers about any religious or ethnic or drab offense). The three witches were stirring up a gruel in their bubbling cauldron:

Liver of blaspheming Jew, / Gall of goat, and slips of yew / Slivered in the moon's eclipse, / Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips, / Finger of birth-strangled babe / Ditch-delivered by a drab, / Make the gruel thick and slab.

BOOKCROSSING

More online book fun. You can sign up at BookCrossing - The World's Biggest Free Book Club - Catch and Release Used Books and try to track books that you release into the wild.

BRUNCH

Bob O. thought I was being too hard on the Church of Brunch ladies, because there's so much suffering in the world and anything that gets people together in a friendly way is good. He's right. I'd go to the Church of Brunch if I were invited. I only objected to them using the word "church" because it makes me want to sing "Come to the Brunch in the Wildwood" and "The Brunch's One Foundation" and even "Get Me to the Brunch on Time" and things like that. Church is not just about hanging out together. As I said last week, church is about non-ephemera.

LET'S BE CLEAR

Sue S. made a good point about the "ho" thing: Somehow changing it from whore to ho seems to take away the impact of the meaning and help them delude themselves.

STRONG GUN

Herb passed this on: Brown Bess could have been derived from the German words "brawn buss" or "braun buss", meaning "strong gun" or "brown gun"; King George I who commissioned its use was from Germany. This seems plausible. Words and phrases have often entered the language through translations and mistranslations. For instance, Cinderella's glass slipper was a fur slipper in the original French. And people think that "feed a cold and starve a fever" means you ought to fast if you have a fever, but "starve" comes from the German word sterben, "to die"; that is, if you eat when you have a cold, the fever will die.

A LEGAL POINT

Brad you-know-who say's he won't marry Angelina you-know-who until everyone can marry. They can. He means till everyone can marry anyone. If this is all that stops the couple from marrying, then they have no need to get married, therefore marriage means nothing anyway and serves no purpose, legally or socially. So what's his point?

HEARD HERE AND THERE

"America, God shed His grace for thee." The song goes "shed His grace on thee." The speaker was confusing the Christian concept of Christ shedding (falling or pouring) blood for humanity, and the song's idea of shedding (casting, throwing) grace on the country. A small but real difference.

"I don't have skin in the game." Since the reference was to the war, it has to mean the person does not have a personal stake by being there in the flesh.

Movie reviewer: "Iconoclastic things happen" and "Things evolve." She meant simply that things happen to people in the movie, and some of those things change their lives. Evolve has a more complex meaning; let's not lose it in the desire for a fancier synonym for happen. Iconoclastic also has a more complex meaning than dramatic or important.

ERRATA, MINE AND THEIRS

I know I wrote "thing gruel" instead of "thin gruel". And in "passersby", "passers" is a noun, not a verb. Anyway I ran across another example of incorrect pluralization of a similar construction: "appointed by highers up". For some reason, this should be "higher ups" but I can't tell you why.

9/11

This week was the fifth anniversary of the fall of the World Trade Center. What I remember most is that it looked unreal on TV ~ until the buildings actually collapsed into themselves, and I thought, "We are at war." That is, we were at war here, not just abroad. I lived in Boston then. I filled up my gas tank in case it became necessary to evacuate the city. The gas station nearby had full service, and the middle-aged man who pumped the gas looked like he might be from the Middle East, and he looked anxious. We didn't speak. I bought a crank radio in order to get news in case of power outages, which is still in my car. Air traffic was stopped, yet in the next couple of days I heard planes occasionally ~ had to be the Air Force. In November I had to go to New York one day on business, and I visited the site. After two months, they were still pumping water into the hole 24 hours a day, it was still burning underground.

It's still burning.

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The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is not composed of atoms, but stories.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg said the universe is not made of matter, but music.

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