Because It's Cute
posted by Louise at 6:06 pm
Thursday, November 24, 2011
About Me
- Name: Louise
- Location: Canada
A stubble jumper is a prairie farmer. I'm from Saskatchewan and my dad was a farmer, so the name is apt. "Redneck" needs no explanation. It's anyone who disagrees with a lunatic leftie. My blog is mostly about the Middle East but other issues also catch my eye and get me going. I monitor comments to keep out trolls and lunatic lefties. Anyone who is zealously anti-American and anti-democracy in the Middle East is NOT welcome.
Various Anglos Elsewhere (With Thanks to the British Empire)
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Who Needs the Canadian Broadcorping Castration (CBC) When You've Got This?
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AGW Scam Busters
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Good Stuff
2 Comments:
I've always found the etymology of English to be fascinating. It really brings history alive, to learn how our beautiful language developed and flowered.
Just one fascinating facet is how much of our daily language derived from the great fleets of Anglo naval and merchant sailing vessels that were once ubiquitous on the world's oceans.
"Learning the ropes", a metaphor for learning a new job, came from an apprentice seaman's early task of learning the purposes and interconnections of all a sailing ship's ropes and cables, which were a complex, dynamic interconnection. (The USS Constitution, when fully rigged, had about 3.5 MILES of ropes and cables. A typical merchantman would often have a mile or more of rope. This is why hemp growing became a major crop all over Britain's colonies. The Royal Navy and merchant marine fleets needed vast amounts of ropes and cables, which need periodic replacement as they wear out, losing their tensile strength. The pro-marijuana crowd would have us believe that everybody, even George Washington, who on his diversified plantation grew hemp, smoked pot. Not so, farm owners, especially near coasts, usually grew some hemp, as this was a very profitable plant in great demand for rope manufacture. Every port, large and small, had numerous rope works.)
"Three square meals a day" came from the Royal Navy and merchant vessels' use of easily stackable square wooden plates to provide meals that, at least in the Royal Navy's case, were heartier, more plentiful than most of the peasant crewmen were probably used to from relatively impoverished civilian life. A Royal Navy seaman actually was paid, comparatively, a pretty good wage, plus "three squares a day". Especially in peacetime, when there was no impressment, the Royal Navy had to compete with the vast numbers of merchant vessels for trained seaman. The Royal Navy pay scales for it's rated seamen was, by necessity, actually very good. But I digress...
"Son-of-a-gun" is really interesting. During the decades of the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy's mostly impressed crews were rarely allowed to go ashore, for fear of massive desertions. The crews were allowed, however, to have their wives aboard when the ships were in port. No privacy when they're all living in huge common areas, in hammocks but oh well. Anyway, when a pregnant woman went into labor, she'd be placed on the deck on a makeshift mattress, which would be between two of the cannons. It became a custom that if a woman was experiencing a difficult delivery, they'd fire the two cannons on either side of her (without cannon balls, just powder charges) on the theory that the periodic shock, loud blasts somehow aided her in actually expelling the baby. A baby so delivered was called a "son of a gun"!
There's many, many examples of neat stuff like this, from which we've gotten our wonderful, beautiful English language.
(OK, so I get interested in oddball stuff. Some sports fans are into sports trivia; others closely follow the doings of the vacuoous Hollywood airheads. I'm into language trivia. :-)
That is interesting.
I didn't know the one about three squares a day. I always thought it was due to the unimaginative English cuisine with meat in one corner, potatoes in another and a couple of vegies to square it out. Seems I was wrong.
And what happened if the baby that was scared out of its mother's womb with a couple of shots from the cannon was a girl? I've never heard of a "daughter of a gun". Did it fall into disuse? Or did girls just not count.
My mother used to like to tell the story of when my brother was born (only boy in the family). We had an old millionaire miser uncle from whom my Dad rented the farm. One day, shortly after my brother had been born, he came into the house and said to mom, in his best grumpy voice: "I hear you had a stroke of luck this time."
Having already had two daughters (myself being one), about whom he had said nothing, my mother was rather put out, to say the least.
But there's so many stories to tell about this old miser uncle. Maybe he deserves a blog entry.
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