Professor Muffit's Word Births!!!

[Muffit]

Thanks Flamingo! These are even better than mine!!! And I really need the break anyway, I have been working my fingers to the bone (hey, there's another one to research), getting ready for our move. Yikes, all this work to make the place look pretty -- so many things I should've done before for us to enjoy. Oh well, no use crying over spilled milk (another one!!!).


Oh, btw, Jefferson "coined the the word 'dime'"?? Coined!! Great pun FG!!!

[Flamingo Girl]

The crying over spilled milk one is easy, its from an Aesop Fable. The same one that also gave us "don't count your chickens before they're hatched".

It was about a milk-maid who was carrying pails of milk to the market, thinking about what she was going to do with the money she was going to get, which was buying eggs and incubating them and raising the chickens, and selling them and making all kinds of money, and she wasn't paying attention to where she was going and tripped, and ended up spilling the milk all over the street, and then just sat there and cried about the loss of the milk, and the eggs, and the chickens, and whatever it was that she was going to use the chicken money with.

[shiningstar]

Thanks Muffit and Flamingo Girl I appreciate it

[Muffit]

Hello again! Got some free time today, so herer goes some more word births!!


"Coffee" - both the word and the liquid come from Turkey. It was called "qahwah" (funny!!! That exact same word in Mesquite is what you call your spouse when you're mad at them!! LOL!). The word means, "to have no appetite", which certainly is true!


"Coca Cola" - I'm sure you know this one, but just in case... comes from it's two main ingredients, coca leaves (i.e. cocaine) and cola nuts. And yes, Virginia, it did used to have cocaine in it. Yikes.


"Electricity" - this one is pretty odd. It actually comes from the latin word for amber, "electricus". Gilbert named it this cuz he used to rub chunks of amber to induce static and attract stuff.


"Eureka" - Archimedes is said to have popularized this term, which meant in Greek, "I have found it!", when he discovered the property of bouyancy in his bathtub. He ran naked thru the streets shouting it. Wonder what bouyant thing in his tub he was talking about?


"Ham" - an overactor is commonly called a ham, because actors protraying blacks in early plays used ham to remove their makeup.


"In God We Trust" - believe it or not, this was not the first slogan on our money. Originally coins were stamped "Mind your business". LOL!!


Happy Sunday!!!
Professor Muffit

[shiningstar]

Originally Posted by Muffit

Hello again! Got some free time today, so herer goes some more word births!!


"Coffee" - both the word and the liquid come from Turkey. It was called "qahwah" (funny!!! That exact same word in Mesquite is what you call your spouse when you're mad at them!! LOL!). The word means, "to have no appetite", which certainly is true!


"Coca Cola" - I'm sure you know this one, but just in case... comes from it's two main ingredients, coca leaves (i.e. cocaine) and cola nuts. And yes, Virginia, it did used to have cocaine in it. Yikes.


"Electricity" - this one is pretty odd. It actually comes from the latin word for amber, "electricus". Gilbert named it this cuz he used to rub chunks of amber to induce static and attract stuff.


"Eureka" - Archimedes is said to have popularized this term, which meant in Greek, "I have found it!", when he discovered the property of bouyancy in his bathtub. He ran naked thru the streets shouting it. Wonder what bouyant thing in his tub he was talking about?


"Ham" - an overactor is commonly called a ham, because actors protraying blacks in early plays used ham to remove their makeup.


"In God We Trust" - believe it or not, this was not the first slogan on our money. Originally coins were stamped "Mind your business". LOL!!


Happy Sunday!!!
Professor Muffit

Thanks sweet Muffit! I can't believe the one about cocoa cola actually
one having cocaine in it .......I mean I'm sure it's true it's just surprising
is all

[Flamingo Girl]

Well, in case you were still vacationing, I did this...

Allegory
From Greek allos meaning "other" and agora meaning gathering place (especially the marketplace). In times past, it was common to do one's chatting at the marketplace. Some of the topics discussed were clandestine in nature and when people spoke about them, for fear of being punished, they would speak indirectly. That is to say, they would speak about one thing in such a way as to intimate the actual information to the listener. Thus, the persons discussing clandestine matters were said to be speaking of "other things" in the marketplace. Eventually the words joined and became associated with the act of speaking about one thing while meaning another.


Noon
Derived from the Latin word for ninth. The word "noon" originally meant the ninth hour after sunrise, or 3:00 p.m.--generally the hottest part of the day and the time when most people in the Roman Empire would break for lunch.


Robot
Robot comes from the Czech word "robot," which means "worker." In 1923, Karl Capek, a well-known, Czech, science-fiction writer at the time, wrote a futuristic thriller about a nightmarish scenario in which the machines have taken over (a la, the "Terminator") and implanted circuitry in humans to make them into mindless zombies willing to serve them as workers or "robots."

[Muffit]

Cool!! Thanks FG!

[Muffit]

It's substitute teacher day!! My name is Gnawty Beaver and I'm filling in for Muffit this morning.


I thought we'd do a slightly different lesson today, trivia about food products!!!


McDonald's - ever wonder why they call their thick tasty shakes, "shakes", and not "milkshakes"?? Truth is, they're not /allowed/ to call them milk shakes, because milk is oddly enough not the main ingredient (if at all). McDonald's was one of the first fast food vendors to use "carageenan" as its primary ingredient. This is basically a thickening agent, which doubles as a very cheap base solution. What is it? Seaweed!!! Yep, that's what it is! It's also the most popular main ingredient for today's salad dressings, btw. More trivia, most westerners cannot digest seaweed products - only orientals with a long cultural history of consuming sea plants have actually developed enzymes that can digest the stuff.


"French Fries" - again with a McDonald's first, ever wonder why McDonald's fries always taste so incredibly better than everybody else's?? Why they taste only like fries, and not like fish or anything else fried in their store? That's because McDonald's pioneered the use of diatomaceous earth as a filtering agent, which they run their oil thru frequently throughout the day. This white powder has long been used by (lucky) swimming pool owners in their pool filters. It's cheap, abundant, and extremely effective as a filter. What is it? Dead bugs!!! Yep, diatomaceous earth gets its name from the microscopic animals whose billions of skeletons make a perfect filter (think snowflakes). The ocean bottom is a truly unending resource for them.

So next time you go to Mickey D, remember, it's really a seafood place!!!


Toodles!!

[Muffit]

Hello all!!! Today we will do something really different, the etymology of surnames, i.e. last names. It's really pretty amazing where they all come from


Ages ago, people had only one label, what we now call our first name. That was okay when the population was very low and people lived far apart, but as towns grew popular and the prolific found their calling in life, it got really, really hard to distinguish one person from another. Hence the need for some sort of additional label.

The most natural outbirth from this was to say who your father was, appended after your first name. In English we have "John-son", "Eric-son", etc, etc. In the British Isles, "Mc" was used instead of "son", so we have, "McDonald", "McCauley", and so on. In Europe they used "Van" and "Von", and sometimes "De", "Da", or "Di" ("De Laurentis", "Da Vinci", etc).

The other way of distinguishing people was to say where they were from, often using the same "de, da, di" etc. Then we have "De Gaul", "Robin of Locksley", etc.


In Catholic countries it became popular to use Biblical events or phrases, such as "Camposagrado" (sacred ground), "Transfiguracion" (take a guess ), et al.


Lastly and certainly very popular, was to associate people with their chosen profession. Most of these professions are obsolete now, and most of us have no idea what they used to be called. However, the surnames remain. From these we have "Smith" (worker of metal), "Cooper" (barrel maker), "Fletcher" (arrow maker), "Fisher" (pretty obvious that) and so on.


So next time someone tells you their name, pay particular attention to their surname, and see if you can guess where it came from. Folks like Shake-spear(e) suddenly take on a whole new meaning!!


Toodles!!

[Archangel]

Originally Posted by Flamingo Girl

Robot
Robot comes from the Czech word "robot," which means "worker." In 1923, Karl Capek, a well-known, Czech, science-fiction writer at the time, wrote a futuristic thriller about a nightmarish scenario in which the machines have taken over (a la, the "Terminator") and implanted circuitry in humans to make them into mindless zombies willing to serve them as workers or "robots."

Interesting Trek tidbit here, The android character Rayna Kapek in the TOS episode Requiem For Methuselah was named after this author, for the simple reason that he did us the term in this context.

Thanks for the reminder FG

[Muffit]

Hello again!!! Today we look at some sports terms...


"First string, second string" - although now predominantly associated with football, this originally had nothing to do with ball-based sports. In the Middle Ages, archery contests were held quite often, and the mettle of any archer rested firmly on the quality of the string on his bow. And if for some reason it should break, he carried a spare. Hence, first-string, second-string, where the second was less desirable.


"I wanna touch bases with you" - you probably already know this, but it comes from the requirement in baseball that a runner must touch all bases to score.


"The whole nine yards" - I always thought this came from football, but actually it comes from the construction industry. It refers to the maximum load capacity of a cement truck, nine cubic yards of cement.


"Par" - this golfing term comes from the same Latin word, meaning "equal"


"Bogey" - in golf, this means one stroke over par. It actually comes from a popular late 1800's song called "Colonel Bogey". In England, where the song was from, it came to mean a good player, whereas in America it came to mean just the opposite.


Toodles!!

[Archangel]

Cool. Oh, illuminator of obscure references.



*Gets down on his knees and does the Wayne's World "We're not Worthy" routine.

[shiningstar]

Thanks for posting everyone I just love the tidbits