Don't Shoot the Cat!

Thought for the day: A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content, according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.  [Oliver Wendell Holmes]

Okay, so English may not be the gentlest, kindest kid on the block. It steals from other languages, and protects Arbitrary Rules by stabbing Logic right through the heart.

Difficult to learn, perhaps, but oh so easy to love.

So shoot me. I like words.

Language is the dress of thoughts.  [Samuel Johnson]









Which is why I'm so psyched about Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. 

Here's an original

No,  I wasn't looking for new ways to be vulgar. Granted, the preface DOES allow that the book can teach men to talk bawdy before their papas without fear of detection, and abuse their less spirited companions, but that certainly wasn't the reason I ordered it. No. Of course not. It was done purely in the name of intellectual research. How about you? Curious about some of the words in this dictionary?

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words, best of all. [Winston Churchill]

Well, Winnie, these words are definitely old:

• abbess:  mistress of a brothel
• ace of spades:  a widow
• all-a-mort:  to be struck dumb
• babes in the wood:  criminals in stocks or pillory (Interesting how the meaning of this expression has changed, isn't it?)
• blind cupid:  backside
• bob tail:  a lewd woman or impotent man
• bread and butter fashion:  one atop the other, as in John and his maid were found lying bread and butter fashion.
• cat: common prostitute 
• cold pig:  a punishment for sluggards who lie in bed too long. The bedclothes are pulled off, and cold water is thrown on them.
• dugs:  a woman's breasts
• elbow shaker:  a dice player
• flash the hash:  vomit
• glazier:  someone who breaks windows to steal goods for sale (Another one whose meaning has morphed.)
• gospel shop:  church
• hempen widow:  one whose husband was hanged
• oven:  great mouth
• rum doxy:  fine wench
• shoot the cat:  vomit from too much liquor
• snoozing ken:  brothel
• strip me naked:  gin
• twiddle diddles:  testicles
• twiddle poop:  effeminate-looking man

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.  [Quentin Crisp]

That's just a sampling of some of the euphemisms and cool expressions in this dictionary. What's really cool is this book, which was a big hit when written by Francis Grose in 1811, is once again available.  Whether you're like me, and just get a kick out of exploring the changes in our language, or if you're writing a book that takes place in that time period,  it's a terrific reference book. (And I got my e-version through Amazon for FREE!) 

I personally believe we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. [Jane Wagner]

                                                            Nah, no complaints here.

                                    Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Our Poor Sexless Language

Thought for the day:  Sign at the electric company -- We would be delighted if you send in your payment. However, if you don't, you will be.

I think we all agree by now that English is a weirdo language. But, by golly,  at least we don't have to worry about what gender our nouns are. A noun is a noun is a noun, and if we put the in front of it, we're pretty much good to go. One word fits all.

Let's face it. Ours is a sexless ... or unisex ... language.

Not so other languages. In Spanish, masculine nouns are preceded by el, and feminine nouns by la, but if any reasoning whatsoever went into the assignations of gender, it isn't readily apparent to me. I mean, in Spanish, dress is masculine ...  and necktie is feminine. Go figure.

Ditto French. They also use la to denote feminine, but do a switcheroo on the Spanish  el to use le for masculine. And as Cro, who actually lives in SW France, mentioned in his comments the other day,  the French word for beard is feminine, while the word for handbag is masculine. Again, go figure.

Know what's worse? The German language isn't satisfied to merely designate two genders. Oh no, they have to throw in a neuter as well. A precedent of der denotes masculine, die denotes feminine, and das means neuter. And to stir things up a bit, they sometimes have different words ...  of different genders ...  for the same object.

Other languages assign gender to words, too, but I believe I've already made my point. So, are you English speakers feeling linguistically sex-deprived now? Wouldn't it be fun if we could intuitively assign gender to our nouns, based on the characteristics of the objects they describe?

Reminds me of a joke I heard a few years ago. A high school Spanish teacher was teaching her class about noun gender, when one of her students asked about the gender of the word computer. So, just for fun, she split the class into two groups, one all male and the other female, and told them to decide the issue based upon the characteristics of computers. Their reasoning follows.

What do you think? Male or female? 

Why Computers are Male (according to the girls)

1. They have a lot of data, but are still clueless.
2. They're supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time, they are the problem.
3. They look attractive until you take them home.
4. Big power surges knock them out for the night.
5. In order to get their attention, you have to turn them on.

Why Computers are Female (according to the boys)

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic.
2. Even the smallest mistakes are committed to memory.
3. The native language used to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to anyone else.
4. The message "bad command or file name" is about as informative as, "If you don't know what's wrong, I'm not going to tell you."
5. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

So, whatcha think? Are computers male or female?

Before we go on to this week's weirdest news stories, one final word on our strange language. Good friend Bill sent me the link to a great clip, and I think you'll enjoy it, too. It shows Gallagher talking about the English language, in a piece called "Messing With Your Mind."

OK, here we go. It's time for (ta DA!) the

Weirdest News Stories of the Week

***  It isn't unusual for couples to adopt, and it isn't unusual for parents to let their offspring share their marital bed, either. But the "baby" French couple Pierre and Elianne Thivillon adopted thirteen years ago, who still shares their bed each night ... is a gorilla. Both parents are zookeepers with experience working with gorillas, so when baby Digit's mother wouldn't care for him, it was only natural that they'd consider taking him home. But their adopted baby now weighs 265 pounds. (I hope they have a king-sized bed!)

***  It's terribly annoying when a neighbor repeatedly allows his pooch to use your yard as as its own personal potty, isn't it? It's annoying to a New Hampshire apartment complex owner, too. The plentiful piles of poo were ruining the aesthetics of her lovely complex, doggone it, so she decided to do something about it. Residents have until today to submit pet (ahem) samples, so she can use them to set up a doggie DNA file. That's right. From now on, when an unpleasant mound of manure is found, she's gonna test the dog doo DNA to reveal the inconsiderate culprit. She doesn't yet know what she's gonna do once the doo is identified. Perhaps a fine, she says. (How about lighting a paper bag of "evidence" outside the offender's door?)

No! Not THAT kind of hot dog!

THIS kind of hot dog!

***  For the first time ever, there will be a separate ladies only competition at this year's July 4 Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest in Coney Island, New York. While women have competed against men in the past, and 105-pound Sonya Thomas even managed to out-eat 230-pound Joey Chestnut, women will undoubtedly have a better shot at winning their own separate $10,000 prize by going stomach to stomach with other gluttons of the fairer sex. Another female competitor, Juliet Lee, who has also occasionally bested male eaters in the past, hopes to beat her personal best of thirty-four dogs in this year's competition.



***  A 24-year-old man was arrested in Florida for smoking a marijuana bong. No big deal, you say? He was caught in the act while driving a van filled with precious cargo. With him were five children, ranging in age from one to six years old. Yeah, I know driving a bunch of kids around can be stressful out the wazoo, but did this dude even give aromatherapy a chance?

***  No, that horse in the picture isn't using the ground to scratch himself. I'm pretty sure he's laughing himself silly. And that's because he heard about what's going down in Wellington, New Zealand. Green Man Pub is offering a new drink to its clients, and word has it, men and women alike have been throwing 'em back and living to tell the tale. The drink? Horse semen shots. I kid you not. Each chilled shot contains approximately 300 million sperm, (I trust no one's actually counted the little boogers) and is tinged with a slight apple flavoring. The owner says the sticky drink isn't much of a sipper, so it's best to gulp it down in one big swallow. As for what these people hope to gain from drinking this, I haven't a clue, but it does give a whole new meaning when you hear someone in that bar say they're gonna "see a man about a horse."


Sorry to leave y'all with a bad taste in your mouth. (Think ice cream.) Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other. And have a real bang up fourth of July.

The Tale of an Ungrateful Kitty

Thought for the day:  An invisible man married an invisible woman. Their kids were nothing to look at, either.

I've been poking fun at the English language lately, so I thought about writing a short Ogden Nash-type poem using words ending in ough to make fun of the fact that those words have so many different pronunciations.

Well, as they say, the best-laid plans of mice and men ...


I did write a poem, but it isn't Ogden Nash short. (or Ogden Nash clever) Has some ough words in it, but I ended up having more fun telling the tale than fulfilling the original premise. So, here it is, a silly little poem. It's based on a true story, and although I got away with batting my eyes back then, I was young, lithe, and lovely at the time. I'm afraid if I tried to pull that stunt now, my hubby would haul me off to the eye doctor.


A Silly Little Poem

'Twas one in the morning, I vow,
When I heard a cat meow from a bough.
High up in a tree,
He seemed helpless to me.
Begged I, "Please get him down now."

With a frown, my man gave a cough,
Said, "No need to get the cat off.
He made his way up;
He can make his way down."
And I batted my eyes, sure enough.

'Twas sleeting and icy, so rough,
But my sweetie, so tender, so tough,
Climbed up on our ladder,
But that didn't matter;
To the cat, it wasn't enough.

The cat pulled back out of reach;
My man yelled, "Son of a beech!"
He stretched a bit more
To the kitty so poor,
And the cat gave a God-awful screech.



'Twas dark, so I couldn't quite see,
But the cat came tearing past me.
He'd run down my sweetie
And clawed off some meatie,
So I figured in trouble I'd be.

"No more!" my man roared to me.
"Next time, we leave the cats be.
We don't need no damned ladder;
It just doesn't matter.
Have you ever
Seen bones
In a tree?"


Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

Me? I think I'll do some editing, and just ...

hang around

A Duplicity of Plurals

 Thought for the day:  If you clean out your odds and ends drawer and only have one thing left in there, is it an odd or an end?

Now, is it I before E except ... 

As promised, we're gonna take another look at the head-scratching complexities of the English language today. Specifically, we're going to talk about plurals. As luck would have it, a friend recently sent me a poem about that very topic, so hey! I'm going with it. This poem does a bang-up job of saying what I wanted to say, so why fight it? And a great big THANK YOU to Cliff in Tennessee for essentially giving me a post-writing day day off.

This poem has been passed around via the Internet, and has appeared on several websites, usually without attribution, but investigation reveals that it may have originally been written as early as the mid 1800s, and the following version, which includes the non-poem parts, is commonly attributed to Eugenie A. Nidia, but as for the date? I haven't a clue.

Enjoy!




                                                       An Ode to the English Plural

                                           We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
                                            But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
                                            One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
                                            Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
                                            You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
                                            Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

                                            If the plural of man is always called men,
                                            Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
                                            If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
                                            And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
                                            If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
                                            Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?

                                             Then one may be that, and there would be those,
                                             Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
                                             And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
                                             We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
                                              But though we say mother, we never say methren.
                                             Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
                                             But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!

 Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England .We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither
from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

 Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship... We have noses that run and feet that smell. We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

And in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop.??????

Well, I think I'll go see what my cats are up to ...

Until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.

As Plane as the Knows on Your Phase

Thought for the day:  If ministers get defrocked, do electricians get delighted? And musicians, denoted?

One of the things amateur radio operators do is relay messages. Although the nature of those messages has changed since the early 1900s, one thing that hasn't changed is the importance, particularly during times of emergency, of efficiently and accurately delivering the information contained in those messages. In recent years, emergency communicators have also recognized the importance of using  plain English. No radio lingo, no acronyms ... just plain easy-to-understand language. Hams aren't alone in adopting this policy, either. The use of plain English is now mandated for governmental departments and agencies, as well as for emergency response professionals.

So, let's take a closer look at plain English, shall we? I've been a word nerd all my life, but if you think about it, the English language  is a mess. Must be extremely difficult to learn as a second language, and what may be plain to you and me could very well be Greek to someone else.

Consider these:

• Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?
• Howcum the third hand on your watch is called a second hand? 
• Hmmm, avoidable. Is that what a bullfighter tries to do?
• And is relief what trees do in the springtime?
• How about an eyedropper? Surely, that must mean a clumsy ophthalmologist.
• And eclipse. Sounds like something a cockney barber does for a living, doesn't it?
• Oh, and selfish. I'm pretty sure that's what the guy at the seafood market does.
• And, of course, the classic: Why do we park on the driveway and drive on the parkway?

Still not convinced? Consider these sentences:

• The nurse wound the bandage around the wound.
• He could lead quite well if he ever got the lead out. (And, by the way, how did lead get in there in the first place?)
• Betsy Ross, a sewer, fell into the sewer.
• When I saw the tear in my expensive new dress, I shed a tear.
• Get close to the door so you can close it.
• The lawyer said, "I object to that object!"

And don't get me started on pluralization! Really. (I believe we'll take an amusing gander at that insanity on Monday ...)

CQ Field Day, CQ field day

Before taking a look at some of the wacko news stories of the week, one additional word about amateur radio. This weekend, amateur radio operators all over the United States will be participating in something we call Field Day. In many areas, set-up will begin this evening, but the actual 24-hour operation period begins tomorrow afternoon. Most, but not all, groups will be set up in  the great outdoors, and will be powering their stations with anything from generators to solar power. The idea is to practice emergency communications, to contact as many other stations as possible, and to have FUN. And ALL are welcome. The public is invited, and if interested, can even operate under the watchful eye of a licensed operator. You can see the unusual antennas used, the wide range of modes, and might even get to hear contacts made via satellite or with the international space station. We LOVE to show people ... especially youngsters ... around and "infect" them with the radio bug. Oh, and we hams really like to EAT, so you can probably find yourself some mighty fine grub there, as well. Sound interesting? To see if there's any Field Day activity going on near you, check here

Oh, yeah. One thing I wanted to mention before looking at the news. There was a very interesting obituary in our newspaper last week. The gentleman, one Harry Bernstein, died at the ripe old age of 101. The obit says he wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of forty books in his lifetime, but destroyed most of them after receiving rejection notices from publishers. And here's the thing: at the age of NINETY-SIX, his memoir "The Invisible Wall" was published. And at the age of NINETY-EIGHT, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his writing ... and wrote three more books!

So again, I tell you ... never, never, NEVER give up!

OK, so now the time has come to look at the (ta DA!)

Weirdest News Stories of the Week

***  Find a penny, pick it up, and all the day, you'll have good luck. Ever say that when you were a kid? I still do. (But if the penny is tails up when I find it, I always flip it over, and leave it for the next person to pocket. I know. Weird, huh?) Anyway, an unemployed jewelry setter has been picking up a lot more than pennies in his spare time. On 47th Street, in what is known as New York's Diamond District, this gentleman has been crawling on his hands and knees, plucking treasures from the pavement cracks with a pair of tweezers. He's found diamond chips, rubies, bits of platinum, and gold fragments, which have earned him more than one thousand dollars in the past two weeks. (Heck, and I'm happy when I find a penny ... )

*** Police suspected a 46-year-old Minnesota woman of shoplifting, and placed her under arrest on other charges. Three days later, while still in jail, she whipped out a $6500 mink coat, which she'd hidden in her underwear. Hmmm, softer than Charmin, but I hope the store dry-cleaned that puppy before putting it back on the rack ...

*** A woman attending a Colorado yoga and music festival, called the Hanuman Festival, got a little more than she bargained for when she went into one of those standard blue port-a-potties. She thought she saw something moving in the tank. So she alerted a security guard, and it turned out, that "something" was a 20-year-old, 6' 8" man. In the tank. With the, uh, stuff you'd expect to find in the tank. The man, shirtless, shoeless, and covered in sewage, fled before he could be arrested. Somehow, I don't think the police tried overly hard to apprehend this fellow, who's wanted on suspicion of making "unlawful sexual contact." I mean, would you have wanted to put him in YOUR back seat?

*** An unemployed North Carolina man entered a bank this week, and gave the teller a note reading, "This is a bank robbery. Please give me one dollar." Then, the polite man, who carried no weapon, sat and waited for the police. This 59-year-old, who has a multitude of serious medical problems, has no medical insurance. After considering his options, he decided jail was the best. He hopes to be sentenced to three years so he can get all the healthcare he needs. If his plan works, I fear we may have a rash of one-dollar robberies all over the country.

Enjoy your weekend, and until next time, take care of yourselves. And each other.