“Be careful what you say as people may be eavesdropping.” The Louvre Palace in France was believed to have a network of listening tubes so that it would be possible to hear everything that was said in different rooms. People say that this is how the Queen Catherine de’Medici discovered political secrets and plots.
BIG WIG
Meaning an important person, especially in a particular sphere; in the 18th century, the most important political figures would wear the biggest wigs, hence today influential people are called big wigs.
CAUGHT RED-HANDED
It generally indicates that a person has been discovered in, or just after, the act of doing something wrong or illegal. However, there was an old law stating that if someone butchered an animal that didn’t belong to him, he would only be punished if he was caught with blood on his hands. If one was caught with the meat but his hands were clean, he would not be punished.
RAINING CATS AND DOGS
This idiom has two stories that try to explain its origin. The first explanation says that the origin of this phrase comes from Norse mythology, where cats would symbolise heavy rains and dogs were associated with the God of storms, Odin. The second version says that in 16th century England, houses had thatched roofs which were one of the few places where animals were able to get warm. Sometimes, when it would start to rain heavily, roofs would get slippery and cats and dogs would fall off, making it look like it’s raining cats and dogs!
BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER
Most people believe this means that family relationships and loyalties are the strongest and most important ones. Even though many might think this saying means that we should put family ahead of friends, it actually meant the complete opposite. The full phrase actually was “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” and it referred to warriors who shared the blood they shed in battles together. These ‘blood brothers’ were said to have stronger bonds than biological brothers.
DON’T LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH
While buying a horse, people would determine the horse’s age and condition based on its teeth, and then decide whether they want to buy it or not. This is the reason why people use this idiom to say it is rude to look for flaws in a thing that was given to you as a gift.
Mardi Gras Tokens
BY THE SAME TOKEN
Bus token? Game token? What kind of token is involved here? Token is a very old word, referring to something that’s a symbol or sign of something else. It could be a pat on the back as a token, or sign, of friendship, or a marked piece of lead that could be exchanged for money. It came to mean a fact or piece of evidence that could be used as proof. By the same token first meant, basically, “those things you used to prove that can also be used to prove this.” It was later weakened into the expression that just says “these two things are somehow associated.”
Irish Shebeen
THE WHOLE SHEBANG
The earliest uses of shebang were during the Civil War era, referring to a hut, shed, or cluster of bushes where you’re staying. Some officers wrote home about “running the shebang,” meaning the encampment. The origin of the word is obscure, but because it also applied to a tavern or drinking place, it may go back to the Irish word shebeen for a ramshackle drinking establishment.
CALLED ON THE CARPET
Carpet used to mean a thick cloth that could be placed in a range of places: on the floor, on the bed, on a table. The floor carpet is the one we use most now, so the image most people associate with this phrase is one where a servant or employee is called from plainer, carpetless room to the fancier, carpeted part of the house. But it actually goes back to the tablecloth meaning. When there was an issue up for discussion by some kind of official council it was on the carpet.
EAT HUMBLE PIE
This has come to mean making an apology and suffering humilitation along with it. However, during the Middle Ages, the Lord of a major would hold a feast after hunting. He would receive the finest cut of meat at the feast, but those of a lower standing were served a pie filled with the entrails and innards, known as “umbles.” Therefore, receiving “umble pie” was considered humiliating because it informed others in attendance of the guest’s lower status.
GIVE THE COLD SHOULDER
It has become a rude way of telling someone they aren’t welcome or to ignore someone. Although it is considered rude today, it was actually regarded as a polite gesture in medieval England. After a feast, the host would let his guests know it was time to leave by giving them a cold piece of meat from the shoulder of beef, mutton or pork.
RUB THE WRONG WAY
In colonial America, servants were required to wet-rub and dry-rub the oak board floors every week. Doing it against the grain caused streaks to form, making the wood look awful and irritating the homeowner.
WAKING UP ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE BED
The left side of the body or anything having to do with the left was often associated with something sinister. To ward off evil, innkeepers made sure the left side of the bed was pushed against a wall so guests had no other option but to get up on the “right side of the bed.”
COME UP TRUMPS
This is a variant of “turn up trumps,” which has been used since the early 17th century. “Trump” is a corruption of Triumph, which was the name of a popular card game during that period.
The Columbia disaster, the breakup of the U.S. space shuttle orbiter Columbia on February 1, 2003, that claimed the lives of all seven astronauts on board just minutes before it was to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Columbia, which had made the shuttle program’s first flight into space in 1981, lifted off for its 28th mission, STS-107, on January 16, 2003. STS-107 was a flight dedicated to various experiments that required a microgravity environment. The crew was comprised of commander Rick Husband; pilot William McCool; mission specialists Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark; and payload specialist Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. As Columbia was reentering Earth’s atmosphere, it broke apart over Texas at approximately 9:00 am Eastern Standard Time at an altitude of 40 miles, showering debris across southeastern Texas and southern Louisiana. The disintegration of the craft was recorded by television cameras and U.S. Air Force radar. Its major components and the remains of the crew were recovered over the following month.
The destruction of Columbia followed by almost exactly 17 years the loss of Challenger in a launch accident on January 28, 1986. Ironically, the cause of the Columbia catastrophe soon was determined to be launch-related as well. Films showed that a piece of insulating foam broke loose from the external propellant tank and struck the leading edge of the left wing approximately 81 seconds after liftoff. Bits of foam had detached in past missions without serious mishap, and, at the time of the Columbia launch, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) engineers did not think that the foam carried enough momentum to cause significant damage. In fact, as demonstrated in post-accident tests, the foam was capable of punching a large hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon insulation tiles that protected the shuttle’s nose and wing leading edges from the extreme heat of atmospheric reentry. Although some engineers had wanted ground-based cameras to take photos of the orbiting shuttle to look for damage, the request did not get to the right officials.
During Columbia’s atmospheric reentry, hot gases penetrated the damaged tile section and melted major structural elements of the wing, which eventually collapsed. Data from the vehicle showed rising temperatures within sections of the left wing as early as 8:52 am, although the crew knew of their situation for perhaps only a minute or so before vehicle breakup. Subsequent investigation by NASA and the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board uncovered a number of managerial shortcomings, in addition to the immediate technical reason (poor manufacturing control of tank insulation and other defects), that allowed the accident to happen.
The most palpable result of the accident was a grounding of the remaining three shuttles—Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour (the last built to replace Challenger)—until NASA and its contractors could develop means to prevent similar accidents, which included kits for repairs in orbit.
Assembly of the International Space Station (ISS) in Earth orbit was suspended after the Columbia accident until shuttle flights could resume. Limited research on the ISS was conducted by rotating two-person crews launched in Russian Soyuz spacecraft. The shuttle did not return to space until the STS-114 mission, which launched on July 26, 2005.
The team on the ground knew Columbia’s astronauts would not make it home and faced an agonizing decision – should they tell the crew that they would die upon re-entry or face suffocating due to depleted oxygen stores while still in orbit?
In the end, it was decided it was best for them not to know. On his blog, former shuttle project manager Wayne Hale revealed that Jon Harpold, Director of Mission Operations, told him:
You know, there is nothing we can do about damage to the TPS. If it has been damaged, it’s probably better not to know. I think the crew would rather not know. Don’t you think it would be better for them to have a happy, successful flight and die unexpectedly during entry than to stay on orbit, knowing that there was nothing to be done until the air ran out?
This was not the first time foam had broken off in space flights. In fact, it had happened several times before (and without incident), so much so that it was referred to as “foam shedding.” NASA engineers dismissed the problem of foam shedding as being of no great urgency.
When a NASA engineering manager, Don L. McCormack Jr., told Mission Management Team member Linda Ham of his concerns about the issue, he was told by her that it was “no issue for this mission.”
After the horrific crash, Columbia’s debris field stretched from Central Texas to Western Louisiana. A team of more than 25,000 professionals and volunteers searched an area of 2.3 million acres to recover everything possible that remained from Columbia. Due to the large area and extensive number of fragments, pieces are still being found to this day.
More than 14 years later, only about 84,000 pieces – or 40% – of Columbia have been recovered and are still being studied.
I’ll bet you didn’t know what ‘barding’ meant either!!! I saw something on Antiques Roadshow about a headpiece for a horse and it caught my interest. In some ways, this also parallels my etymology series, after a fashion. So, without further ado…..
Barding (also spelled bard) is body armour for war horses. The practice of armoring horses was first extensively developed in antiquity in the eastern kingdoms of Parthia and Pahlava. After the conquests of Alexander the Great, it likely made its way into European military practices via the Seleucid Empire and later Byzantine Empire. Though its historical roots lie in antiquity in the regions of what was once the Persian Empire, barded horses have become a symbol of the late European Middle Ages chivalry and the era of knights.
A museum display of a 16th century knight with an armoured horse
During the Late Middle Ages, as armour protection for knights became more effective, their mounts became targets. This vulnerability was exploited by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn in the 14th century, when horses were killed by the infantry, and by the English at the Battle of Crécy in the same century where long-bowmen shot horses and the then-dismounted French knights were killed by heavy infantry. Barding developed as a response to such events.
Examples of armour for horses could be found as far back as classical antiquity. Cataphracts, with scale armour for both rider and horse, are believed by many historians to have influenced the later European knights, via contact with the Byzantine Empire.
Example of Cataphract
There are a number of bits and pieces that make up the barding. The chanfron (also spelled chaffron, chamfron, champion, chamfron, chamfrein, champron, and shaffron) was designed to protect the horse’s face. Sometimes this included hinged cheek plates. A decorative feature common to many chanfrons is a rondel with a small spike.
A chanfron made in Italy in the early 16th century
The chanfron was known as early as ancient Greece, but vanished from use in Europe until the twelfth century when metal plates replaced boiled leather as protection for war horses. The basic design of the chanfron remained stable until it became obsolete in the seventeenth century, although late examples are often notable for engraved decoration. A chanfron extended from the horse’s ears to its muzzle. Flanges often covered the eyes. In an open chanfron, the eyes received no protection. Hinged extensions to cover the jowls were commonly used for jousting tournaments.
Torrs Pony-cap, as displayed in 2011 The enigmatic Torrs pony-cap from Scotland appears to be a bronze chanfron from about the 2nd century BC, perhaps later fitted with the bronze horns found with it.”
The criniere (also known as manefaire or crinet) was a set of segmented plates that protected the horse’s neck. In full barding this consisted of two combinations of articulated lames that pivoted on loose rivets. One set of lames covered the mane and the other covered the neck. These connected to the peytral and the chanfron.
Light barding used only the upper lames. Three straps held the crinet in place around the neck. It is thought that thin metal was used for these plates, perhaps 0.8 mm. Mail armour was often affixed to the crinet and wrapped about the horse’s neck for additional protection.
Fragments of a set of armour with a criniere (protecting neck), peytral (protecting chest), and the croupiere (protecting hind quarters). This set was created by Lorenz Helmschmied and Konrad Ssusenhoffer for Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor and later also used by his son Maximilian I.
The croupiere (also crupiere bacul or crupper) protected the horse’s hind quarters. It could be made from any combination of leather, mail, or plate armour.
The flanchards, used to protect the flank, attached to the side of the saddle, then around the front or rear of the horse and back to the saddle again. These appear to have been metal plates riveted to leather or in some cases cuir bouilli armour (which is boiled or treated leather sealed with beeswax or the like).
(Boiled leather, often referred to by its French translation, cuir bouilli, was a historical material common in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period and used for various purposes. It was leather that had been treated so that it became tough and rigid, as well as able to hold a mold.)
They sometimes had openings designed to allow the rider to use spurs.
Barding was often used in conjunction with cloth covers known as caparisons. These coverings sometimes covered the entire horse from nose to tail and extended to the ground. It is unclear from period illustrations how much metal defensive covering was used in conjunction. Textile covers may also be called barding.
(This 15th-century depiction of a tournament shows fully caparisoned horses, from Le Livre des tournois by Barthelemy d’Eyck.)
Another commonly included feature of barding was protection for the reins, so they could not be cut. This could be metal plates riveted to them or chainmail linked around them.
The full bard is a “complete ensemble of horse armour,” created for Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, by master armourers from Augsburg and Innsbruck like Lorenz Helmschmied and Konrad Seusenhofer. The development of the full bard was also connected with the development of Maximilian armour and the Landsknecht (all three arose from the time Maximilian was in Burgundian Netherlands), as both human and equine combatants required more and more protection. But the full bard was expensive and only the richest knights could afford it.
(Albrecht May, Master-of-Arms, entering Namur, riding a horse wearing his master Maximilian I’s bard in 1480. The bard is crafted by Lorenz Helmschmied. The female figure is likely Mary of Burgundy, the contemporary ruler of the Burgundian State and wife of Maximilian, holding the combined heraldry of Austria and Burgundy.)
(Maximilian I on an armored horse, ca. 1575)
A cataphract was a cavalryman in full armour riding an (partially or fully) armoured horse. This type of cavalry originated from central Asia and was adopted by the eastern satrapies of the ancient Persian Empire. The Seleucid cataphract used scale armour for its flexibility and effective protection against archers and also because unlike regular metal types, it was not too heavy for the horses.
(Taq-e Bostan: equestrian statue of Khosrow II as a cataphract)
Today is the 37th anniversary of the Challenger explosion that killed all 7 astronauts aboard. I found the following information on the Britannica website:
The primary goal of shuttle mission 51-L was to launch the second Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS-B). It also carried the Spartan Halley spacecraft, a small satellite that was to be released by Challenger and picked up two days later after observing Halley’s Comet during its closest approach to the Sun.
The Crew
Greatest visibility among the crew went to teacher-in-space Christa McAuliffe of Concord, New Hampshire, the winner of a national screening begun in 1984. McAuliffe was to conduct at least two lessons from orbit and then spend the following nine months lecturing students across the United States. The goal was to highlight the importance of teachers and to interest students in high-tech careers. Other members of the crew were commander Francis (Dick) Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair, and Hughes Aircraft engineer Gregory Jarvis.
Challenger disaster: icy conditions on day of launch
The mission experienced trouble at the outset, as the launch was postponed for several days, partly because of delays in getting the previous shuttle mission, 61-C (Columbia), back on the ground. On the night before the launch, central Florida was swept by a severe cold wave that deposited thick ice on the launch pad. On launch day, January 28, liftoff was delayed until 11:38 am. All appeared to be normal until after the vehicle emerged from “Max-Q,” the period of greatest aerodynamic pressure. Mission Control told Scobee, “Challenger, go with throttle up,” and seconds later the vehicle disappeared in an explosion just 73 seconds after liftoff, at an altitude of 46,000 feet. Tapes salvaged from the wreckage showed that the instant before breakup Smith said “Uh-oh,” but nothing else was heard. Debris rained into the Atlantic Ocean for more than an hour after the explosion; searches revealed no sign of the crew.
The incident immediately grounded the shuttle program. An intensive investigation by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and a commission appointed by U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan and chaired by former secretary of state William Rogers followed. Other members of the commission included astronauts Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride, test pilot Chuck Yeager, and physicist Richard Feynman. What emerged was an appalling pattern of assumptions that the vehicle could survive minor mishaps and be pushed even further. The ill-fated launch brought to the fore the difficulties that NASA had been experiencing for many years in trying to accomplish too much with too little money.
The immediate cause of the accident was suspected within days and was fully established within a few weeks. The severe cold reduced the resiliency of two rubber O-rings that sealed the joint between the two lower segments of the right-hand solid rocket booster. (At a commission hearing, Feynman convincingly demonstrated the loss of O-ring resiliency by submerging an O-ring in a glass of ice water.) Under normal circumstances, when the shuttle’s three main engines ignited, they pressed the whole vehicle forward, and the boosters were ignited when the vehicle swung back to center. On the morning of the accident, an effect called “joint rotation” occurred, which prevented the rings from resealing and opened a path for hot exhaust gas to escape from inside the booster. Puffs of black smoke appeared on the far side of the booster in a spot not visible to most cameras.
As the vehicle ascended, the leak expanded, and after 59 seconds an 8-foot stream of flame emerged from the hole. This grew to 40 feet and gradually eroded one of three struts that secured the booster’s base to the large external tank carrying liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the orbiter engines. At the same time, thrust in the booster lagged slightly, although within limits, and the nozzle steering systems tried to compensate. When the strut broke, the booster’s base swiveled outward, forcing its nose through the top of the external fuel tank and causing the whole tank to collapse and explode. Through ground tracking cameras this was seen as a brief flame licking from a concealed spot on the right side of the vehicle a few seconds before everything disappeared in the fireball. Even if the plume had been seen at liftoff, there would have been no hope for crew escape, because the shuttle orbiter could not survive high-speed separation from the tank until the last seconds of the boosters’ two-minute burn.
Challenger disaster: remains of the crew
Challenger broke up in the explosion, but the forward section with the crew cabin was severed in one piece; it continued to coast upward with other debris, including wings and still-flaming engines, and then plummeted to the ocean. It was believed that the crew survived the initial breakup but that loss of cabin pressure rendered them unconscious within seconds, since they did not wear pressure suits. Death probably resulted from oxygen deficiency minutes before impact.
The boosters also survived the fireball and righted themselves to continue flying, something totally unexpected. Range safety officers finally detonated their charges 30 seconds later to prevent them from overflying land. After the accident, NASA immediately began work on a redesigned solid booster for future launches.
Challenger disaster: recovered main engines
An intensive salvage operation was organized to retrieve as much of the wreckage as possible and the bodies of the crew. The task was complicated by the force of the explosion and the altitude at which it occurred, as well as the separate paths taken by the boosters.
The Rogers Commission report, delivered on June 6 to the president, faulted NASA as a whole, and its Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and contractor Morton Thiokol, Inc., in Ogden, Utah, in particular, for poor engineering and management. Marshall was responsible for the shuttle boosters, engines, and tank, while Morton Thiokol manufactured the booster motors and assembled them at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The Rogers Commission heard disturbing testimony from a number of engineers who had been expressing concern about the reliability of the seals for at least two years and who had warned superiors about a possible failure the night before 51-L was launched. One of the Rogers Commission’s strongest recommendations was to tighten the communication gap between shuttle managers and working engineers. In response to this implied criticism that its quality-control measures had become slack, NASA added several more checkpoints in the shuttle bureaucracy, including a new NASA safety office and a shuttle safety advisory panel, in order to prevent such a “flawed” decision to launch from being made again.
Aside from these internal fixes at NASA, however, the Rogers Commission addressed a more fundamental problem. In NASA’s efforts to streamline shuttle operations in pursuit of its declared goal of flying 24 missions a year, the commission said, the agency had simply been pushing too hard. The shuttle program had neither the personnel nor the spare parts to maintain such an ambitious flight rate without straining its physical resources or overworking its technicians.
This judgment cut to the core of the way in which the national space program had been conducted in the shuttle era. Indeed, the Challenger accident merely focused attention on more deeply seated problems that had existed for as long as 15 years. From the time it was approved by Pres. Richard Nixon in 1972, the shuttle had been conceived as a “do-everything” vehicle for carrying every kind of space payload, from commercial and scientific satellites to military spacecraft to probes bound for the outer planets. NASA’s fleet of conventional “expendable” rockets such as the Delta and Atlas had been phased out in the shuttle era as a result and were being used primarily to reach polar orbits that the shuttle could not reach from Cape Canaveral.
Although this reliance on the shuttle was the officially stated national space policy, the Department of Defense had begun to retreat from relying exclusively on the shuttle even before the Challenger accident. Concerned that shuttle launch delays would jeopardize the assured access to space of high-priority national security satellites, the Air Force in 1985 began a program of buying advanced Titan rockets as “complementary expendable launch vehicles” for its own use.
Other, less powerful groups came forward after the Challenger accident to express their long-standing unhappiness with exclusive reliance on the shuttle for their access to space. Among those calling for a “mixed fleet” of shuttles and expendable launchers were scientists whose missions now faced long delays because the shuttle had become the only existing means of carrying their spacecraft.
By July, when NASA announced that the shuttle would not be ready to fly again until 1988, there was still no decision from Congress or the White House as to whether another orbiter would be built to replace Challenger. Proponents argued that another vehicle—perhaps two more—would be needed to meet the launch needs of the 1990s, which would include construction of NASA’s international space station, a permanent facility in Earth orbit.
In mid-August Pres. Ronald Reagan announced that construction of a replacement shuttle orbiter (later named Endeavour) would begin immediately. When the shuttle resumed service, however, it would no longer be in the business of launching satellites for paying customers but would be devoted almost exclusively to defense and scientific payloads. The Reagan administration had long had the goal of stimulating a private space launch industry, and now, with the removal of a heavily subsidized competitor from the market, three different companies stepped forward within a week’s time to announce plans for operating commercial versions of the Delta, Titan, and Atlas/Centaur launchers.
The word avocado comes from Spanish aguacate, which in turn comes from the Nahuatl ahuacatl, meaning testicle. Surprised? Perhaps, but the more one thinks about it, the less surprising it gets — they do rather resemble a man’s soft spot, and this resemblance becomes even more pronounced when you see avocado duos dangling clumsily from trees.
Nahuatl is the language of the Aztecs and is still spoken by approximately 1.5 million people native to Mexico and other parts of Central America. Avocado isn’t the only Nahuatl word that has been borrowed by the English language; chili, chocolate, tomato and guacamole were also coined by speakers of Nahuatl. Indeed, the mole of guacamole is derived from the Nahuatl molli, which means sauce. It’s a good thing the origin of this word has been obfuscated on its way into the English language. Otherwise, guacamole (Nahuatl: ahuacamolli) probably wouldn’t be as popular as it is.
2. Cappuccino (Origin: Italian/German)
Next time you’re trying to flirt with someone at your local coffee shop, impress them with this whimsical anecdote about the origin of the word cappuccino:
it’s the diminutive form of the word cappuccio, which means “hood” in Italian. Wondering what the link is between a (little) hood and a cappuccino? One must look no further than the Capuchin Monks, whose hooded habits were a dark, oak brown similar to the color of a good cappuccino.
The first recorded use of the word was in 1790 in Vienna, Austria. Wilhelm Tissot jotted down a recipe for an exquisite Kapuzinerkaffee (lit. “Capuchin coffee”), which was rather different in constitution to its modern-day successor, containing sugar, cream and egg yolks. The current, somewhat simplified recipe now consists of espresso and foamed milk, but there are still parts of Austria where you can order a good ol’ Kapuziner.
3. Disaster (Origin: Italian/Greek)
The word disaster has been passed around Europe like a hot potato. The English version is most closely tied to the French désastre, which is derived from the Old Italian disastro, itself derived from Greek. The pejorative prefix dis- and aster- (star) can be interpreted as bad star, or an ill-starred event. The ancient Greeks were fascinated by astronomy and the cosmos, and believed wholly in the influence of celestial bodies on terrestrial life. For them, a disaster was a particular kind of calamity, the causes of which could be attributed to an unfavorable and uncontrollable alignment of planets. It’s therefore interesting to note that the strict, modern English definition of disaster explicitly stipulates that a disaster is human-made, or the consequence of human failure.
4. Handicap (Origin: English)
This word originates from the 17th-century English trading game “hand-in-cap.” The game involved two players and an arbitrator, or umpire. The players would present two possessions they would like to trade. The umpire would then decide whether the possessions were of equal value or not, and if they weren’t, would calculate the discrepancy. The owner of the lesser object would make up the difference with money, and then all three participants would place forfeit money into a hat. If the two players agreed with the umpire’s valuation, they would remove their hands from the hat with their palm open. If they disagreed, they would pull out their hands clenched in a fist. If both agreed or disagreed, the umpire would get the forfeit money, while if one agreed and the other didn’t, the player who approved the transaction would receive the forfeit money.
Over time, hand-in-cap came to be known as “handicap” and started to be used to refer to any kind of equalization or balancing of a contest or game. The word handicap is still used in many sports today, such as golf and horse racing. Indeed, horse racing was probably the first sport to introduce the term in order to define an umpire’s decision to add more weight to a horse so that it runs equally to its competitors. This notion of being burdened or put at a disadvantage was carried over to describe people with a disability in the early 20th century. By the mid-20th century, it was widely used, but it has since fallen out of the popular lexicon.
5. Jeans (Origin: Italian)
Although jeans are quintessentially American, and their invention is commonly attributed to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss, the etymology of the popular garment is actually of European origin. The fabric Strauss used for his patented, mass-produced trousers was first produced in Genoa, Italy and Nimes, France. Why’s that significant?
Well, the French word for Genoa is Gênes, and the name “jeans” is likely an anglicization of the material’s city of origin. Similarly, the word “denim” most likely comes from de Nimes, meaning “from Nimes” in French. Although we often talk about denim jeans nowadays, the two materials actually differed. Denim was coarser, more durable and of higher quality than the toughened cotton corduroy manufactured in Genoa. Workers in Northern Italy were sporting jeans as early as the 17th century, long before post-war American subcultures picked up on them as a fashion accessory.
6. Salary (Origin: Latin)
The word “salary” comes from the Latin salarium, meaning “salt money.” In ancient times, salt was used for many important things and was often referred to as “white gold.” It could be used as an antiseptic to treat wounds — (in Romance languages one can recognize a connection between sal/sale, meaning “salt,” and salud/saude/salute, meaning “health”) — and to preserve food; also as a method of payment in Greece and Rome.
As far back as the Egyptian Empire, laborers were paid with salt that they could use to preserve their food. The Roman Empire continued using this form of payment and it took on the name “salary” for “that which was given to workers at the end of the working month,” which adds a new dimension to the notion of a company’s solvency.
7. Trivial (Origin: Latin)
“Trivial” originates from the Latin word trivium, which was used to mean “a place where three roads meet” (tri- meaning “three,” and -vium from via, meaning “road”). A trivium gained the connotation of being an open, public place — a mini agora— where people from across society’s technicolor spectrum could relax, chat and simply coexist. The adjective trivialis was a derivative of trivium and came to mean “vulgar, ordinary, of little importance, common and contemporary,” and the English adjective trivial carries much of this definition to this day: tired, ordinary, commonplace; of little use, import, consequence or significance.
8. Whiskey (Origin: Gaelic)
Medieval monks called it aqua vitae, meaning “life water.” The expression was transformed into uisce beatha when it was transferred to Gaelic. As time passed and the word was anglicized, uisce evolved into uige, usque, and then uisky, which bears an obvious and close resemblance to “whiskey.”
You may have noticed that you can spell the drink two different ways — “whiskey” and “whisky.” Some people believe the extra “e” was added by Irish and American distilleries to differentiate their higher quality whiskeys during a period when Scottish whisky had a bad reputation.
Scotch was also introduced to denominate a Scottish whisky, and the word “whiskey” has been adopted in other countries for quite different reasons. In some South American countries, it’s used as an alternative to “cheese” to encourage people to smile when being photographed. How and why we chose “cheese,” and why the South Americans chose “whiskey” is a story for another time.
The Great Brinks Robbery was the biggest armed robbery in U.S. history at the time. Thieves vanished after stealing $2.7 million, leaving few clues. It was almost the perfect crime. Almost.
It happened on Jan. 17, 1950 at the Brinks Armored Car depot in Boston’s North End. The gang of 11 that stole the money after two years of meticulous planning almost got away with it. They failed because they fell out over the division of the spoils. Police arrested all of them five days before the statute of limitations ended.
The Brinks Robbery
The idea for the heist came from Joseph ‘Big Joe’ McGinniss, but career criminal Anthony ‘Fats’ Pino. McGinness masterminded the crime. Pino also recruited a gang to watch the depot for 18 months to figure out when it held the most money.
The gang stole plans for the depot’s alarm system, and then returned them undetected. They also removed the cylinders from locks, one by one, and had a locksmith duplicate the keys. Planning for the Brinks robbery took two years and included six failed attempts.
The gang wore outfits similar to Brinks uniforms – Navy pea coats and chauffeur’s caps – and rubber Halloween masks. At 6:55 p.m. on Jan. 17, 1950, seven of the gang members entered the counting room. They surprised the five employees and bound and gagged them face down on the floor.
The thieves cleaned out everything except the General Electric payroll. It took them only 35 minutes to load 14 canvas bags with a half ton of cash, coins, checks, securities and money orders. Two of the gang members waited outside in the getaway truck.
3 Clues
They left but three clues: a chauffeur’s cap, the adhesive tape used to gag the Brinks employees and the rope used to tie them up. No one was hurt. The thieves divided up some of the loot and promised each other they wouldn’t touch the money for six years so the statute of limitations would run out. Then they split up to establish alibis.
They almost made it. Investigators had few leads and little solid evidence. Law enforcement officers interviewed hundreds of people who lived and worked near the Brinks depot and questioned known criminals. According to the FBI, “in the hours immediately following the robbery, the underworld began to feel the heat of the investigation.”
Police picked up and questioned well-known Boston hoodlums. From Boston, the FBI quickly spread the pressure to other cities.
“Veteran criminals throughout the United States found their activities during mid-January the subject of official inquiry,” the FBI reported.
The robbers’ truck was found cut to pieces in Stoughton, Mass., but it didn’t offer many clues. The FBI was flooded with unhelpful tips.
The Rat
One gang member blew it for all of them. Joseph ‘Specs’ O’Keefe left his loot with another member when he served a prison sentence for a different crime. While behind bars, he wrote angry letters to his cohorts demanding money and suggesting he might talk.
When O’Keefe got out of prison, Fats Pino sent a hit man to kill him. The hit man shot at O’Keefe with a machine gun in the Dorchester section of Boston. O’Keefe escaped with minor wounds and made a deal with the FBI to testify against the gang. All eight were caught and convicted. Two died before they were tried.
Police recovered only $58,000 of the $2.7 million stolen. The crime inspired at least four movies and two books, including The Story of the Great Brink’s Robbery, as Told by the FBI.
Eight of the Brink’s robbers were caught, convicted and given life sentences. Two more died before they could go to trial. Only a small part of the money was ever recovered; the rest is fabled to be hidden in the hills north of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. In 1978, the famous robbery was immortalized on film in The Brink’s Job, starring Peter Falk.
Lastly, Wikipedia had additional details which may or may not be true at this point.
Planning
The robbery was first conceived in 1947; however, in 1948, after months of planning, the group learned that Brink’s had moved to a new location. While the theft was originally intended to be a burglary, rather than an armed robbery, they could not find a way around the building’s burglar alarm. After observing the movements of the guards, they decided that the robbery should take place just after 7 pm, as the vault would be open and fewer guards would be on duty. Over a period of several months, the robbers removed each lock from the building and had a key made for it, before returning the lock. Two vehicles were stolen: a truck, to carry away the loot from the robbery; and a car, which would be used to block any pursuit. Vincent Costa was the group’s lookout, and signaled with a flashlight from a nearby rooftop when he saw the vault being opened. After five aborted runs, Costa finally gave the go-ahead on the night of January 17, 1950.
Robbery
Seven of the group went into the Brink’s building: O’Keefe, Gusciora, Baker, Maffie, Geagan, Faherty, and Richardson. They each wore a chauffeur cap, pea coat, rubber Halloween mask, and each had a .38 caliber revolver. At 7:10 pm, they entered the building and tied up the five employees working in the vault area. They spent about twenty minutes inside the vault, putting money into large canvas bags. Approximately a million dollars in silver and coins was left behind by the robbers, as they were not prepared to carry it. The total amount stolen was $1,218,211 in cash and $1,557,183 in checks and other securities. By 7:37, one of the Brink’s employees managed to free themselves and raise the alarm.
Investigation and falling out
Immediately following the robbery, Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan sent a mobilization order for all precinct captains and detectives. Thirteen people were detained in the hours following the robbery, including two former employees of Brink’s. Brink’s, Inc. offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those involved in the robbery, with an additional 5% of recovered cash offered by the insurance company. Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, took over supervision of the investigation.
The only physical evidence left at the crime scene was a cap and the tape and rope used to bind up the employees. Most of the cash stolen was in denominations of $1 to $20, which made it nearly impossible to trace the bills through serial numbers. Any information police could get from their informers initially proved useless. The truck that the robbers had used was found cut to pieces in Stoughton, Massachusetts, near O’Keefe’s home.
In June 1950, O’Keefe and Gusciora were arrested in Pennsylvania for a burglary. O’Keefe was sentenced to three years in Bradford County Jail and Gusciora to 5-to-20 years in the Western State Penitentiary at Pittsburgh. Police heard through their informers that O’Keefe and Gusciora demanded money from Pino and MacGinnis in Boston to fight their convictions. It was later claimed that most of O’Keefe’s share went to his legal defense.
FBI agents tried to talk to O’Keefe and Gusciora in prison but the two professed ignorance of the Brink’s robbery. Other members of the group came under suspicion but there was not enough evidence for an indictment, so law enforcement kept pressure on the suspects. Adolph Maffie was convicted and sentenced to nine months for income tax evasion.
After O’Keefe was released, he was taken to stand trial for another burglary and parole violations and was released on a bail of $17,000. O’Keefe later claimed that he had never seen his portion of the loot after he had given it to Maffie for safekeeping. Apparently in need of money he kidnapped Vincent Costa and demanded his part of the loot for ransom.
Pino paid a small ransom but then decided to try to kill O’Keefe. After a couple of attempts he hired underworld hitman Elmer “Trigger” Burke to kill O’Keefe. Burke traveled to Boston and shot O’Keefe, seriously wounding him but failed to kill him. The FBI approached O’Keefe in the hospital and on January 6, 1956, he decided to talk.
On January 12, 1956, just five days before the statute of limitations was to run out, the FBI arrested Baker, Costa, Geagan, Maffie, McGinnis, and Pino. They apprehended Faherty and Richardson on May 16 in Dorchester. O’Keefe pleaded guilty January 18. Gusciora died on July 9. Banfield was already dead. A trial began on August 6, 1956.
Eight of the gang’s members received maximum sentences of life imprisonment. All were paroled by 1971 except McGinnis, who died in prison. O’Keefe received four years and was released in 1960. Only $58,000 of the $2.7 million was recovered. O’Keefe cooperated with writer Bob Considine on The Men Who Robbed Brink’s, a 1961 “as told to” book about the robbery and its aftermath.
I believe the assertion—that Biden got 81 million votes—is the BIGGEST HOAX ever perpetrated on the American people. Sadly, it’s not the first, nor will it be the last hoax the public will fall for. Throughout history, we’ve had some doozies!
The War of the Worlds
Orson Welles didn’t mean to mastermind one of the greatest hoaxes in history. Mass hysteria was simply a byproduct of a high-quality radio play in an era where world war loomed, the space race was in its early stages, and most people got news and entertainment from their receivers. According to History.com, the October 30, 1938, broadcast began at 8 p.m. with an introduction presenting the Mercury Theater’s update of H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel The War of the Worlds, but unfortunately, many people were listening to a popular ventriloquist on another station until 8:12 and therefore missed the disclaimer. Welles take on Wells’ Martian invasion tale started with a weather report and a concert live from the Hotel Park Plaza before news alerts about explosions on Mars, a meteor crashing into a New Jersey farm, and eventually aliens with tentacles, heat rays, and poisonous gas broke in. Terrified announcers were then saying cylinders had landed in Chicago and St. Louis, 7,000 National Guardsmen had been wiped out, and that people were fleeing.
Only the panic part turned out to be real as potentially a million listeners thought Earth was under attack. People crowded the highways, armed themselves, begged police for gas masks, requested their power be shut off so the aliens wouldn’t see them, and were treated for shock at hospitals. A woman ran into an Indianapolis church during evening service to proclaim, “New York has been destroyed. It’s the end of the world. Prepare to die!” When CBS got wind of hysteria IRL, Welles went on the air as himself to remind listeners that it was fiction. The FCC investigation found no wrongdoing but networks agreed to be more cautious regarding programming going forward. The attention scored Welles a Hollywood contract, which enabled him to write, direct, and star in his 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane.
The Shed at Dulwich
For just six short months in 2017, The Shed at Dulwich, where patrons ordered entrees by mood, became the highest-ranked restaurant in London on TripAdvisor and the hardest reservation in town to get. Calls and emails poured in begging to be squeezed in for birthday dinners, romantic dates, and media coverage. All were ignored or told to call back as they were booked solid for more than half a year. Except that was a lie. The reason they couldn’t score a table was actually because the business was bogus. It was an experiment in algorithm manipulation and buzz creation by freelance writer Oobah Butler, who had been paid in the past by owners to review their restaurants positively without ever stepping foot inside on the site. To turn the South London garden shed he resides in into a fake fine dining experience, he bought a burner phone and a domain, created a website with soft-focus pictures of delicious-looking dishes made with ingredients you wouldn’t want to eat (paint, bleach tablets, shaving cream, the heel of his foot), and drummed up interest by providing minimum details, making it an appointment-only establishment, lying about it being full, and soliciting friends to write glowing reviews. According to The Washington Post, people contacted him looking for work and companies sent him free samples of their food products. He opened The Shed for one night and served canned soup—and some diners still asked to come again. Butler outed himself in an article and video for Vice a month after hitting the top spot and TripAdvisor removed the listing.
The Cardiff Giant
This gentle giant remains one of 19th-century America’s most legendary hoaxes. Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols unearthed a ten-foot petrified “man” on October 16, 1869, while digging a well on the New York farm owned by William Newell. Word spread about the discovery and Newell put up a tent and started charging a quarter (and then 50¢ as business boomed) to take a peek at the ground Goliath. Hundreds of curious onlookers and amateur archaeologists made the pilgrimage, many believing it was an ancestor of the Onondaga people and some claiming it was proof of the giants mentioned in The Bible—even after most professionals like Yale paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh said it a fake. The “mummy” was eventually sold to a group of businessmen who sent him on tour. Greatest showman PT Barnum offered to buy it for $50,000, and when they declined to sell, he made a plaster knockoff and arranged for it to be shown in a New York City museum. By December, Binghamton cigar salesman George Hull admitted this was a stone-cold swindle. He’d commissioned a German stone cutter in Chicago to carve it out of a block of gypsum he’d bought in Iowa before he and his cousin Newell buried the 2,990-pound statue. While it was a get-rich-quick scheme, Hull, an atheist, was also trying to prove a point about what he considered silly religious stories and how science could disprove most of them. Even after the hoax was revealed, the Cardiff Giant still made appearances and money. According to Archaeology.org, he showed up at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and was sold in 1947 to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, where he’s on display today.
Michael Jordan is dead
In February 2015, an article published on the Cronica MX website said that former Chicago Bull Michael Jordan had gone to that big basketball court in the sky after suffering a heart attack while he slept. It even quoted his wife, Yvette Prieto. They also posted a video clip designed to resemble a breaking news segment on YouTube with footage of a tearful ESPN reporter Rich Eisen saying goodbye. According to Snopes.com, the footage was real but recycled from a NFL Game Day episode from a month earlier when Eisen had learned that his longtime co-worker and friend Stuart Scott had lost his battle with cancer. It recirculates every once in a while, always trying to lure fans to click through to a spammy site or to provide their personal information. The same story was used again in 2017, this time by a site called Viral Mugshot, according to Inquisitr.com. Despite it containing the same spelling and grammar errors, it went viral on social media until debunking sites and news agencies reported it as fake news. And Jordan isn’t the only celebrity targeted by pranksters and hackers. If you believed everything you read on stars’ sites, fake Twitter accounts, or items reported by newspapers erroneously, many of your favorites would have been gone long before their time, including: former President Barack Obama (assassinated while campaigning in an Iowa restaurant), Will Ferrell (died in a 2006 paragliding accident), Nick Jonas (heart attack after a lap dance in a Dallas strip club), Justin Bieber (suicide twice, nightclub shooting, and an overdose), and, of course, Mikey from the Life cereal commercials (a deadly combo of Pop Rocks and soda made his stomach explode).
Piltdown Man
Since Charles Darwin released his evolution theories in 1859, scientists have been on the lookout for proof of the missing link—a phase between full ape and full man—and in 1912, Englishman Charles Dawson announced he’d found it in a gravel pit in Piltdown. He used the fossils to build a skull model with a human-sized brain and an ape-like jaw and England declared itself the real birthplace of modern humanity. But other scientists immediately took issue, mostly because it didn’t match other fossils found around the world including the Australopithecines one dug up in South Africa. In 1915, Dawson doubled down and claimed he retrieved a second similar fossil, which was enough evidence for many average Joes. The hoax was not revealed until 1953 when British scientists used new technology to date the Piltdown pair. They deduced that the remains were only 500 years old, not the 1 million years old needed to be the link. They also took a bite out of his claim by discovering that the jaw was from an orangutan whose teeth had been filed to resemble human wear patterns and that the bones had been stained to match each other. Most people involved were dead by the 1950s so the prank plotter was never identified. One whodunit theory, according to the BBC: The doer was none other than Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He lived near the pit and was a member of Dawson’s archaeological society. The motive was revenge for being constantly mocked by scientists for his belief in spiritualism.
The Cock Lane Ghost
Even royals can fall prey to paranormal pranks, according to The Daily Mail. In 1762, Prince Edward, Duke of York and Albany, visited a home on Cock Lane in London that was said to be haunted by Scratching Fanny, a woman who had died of smallpox in the rented house after her loan shark lover William Kent had lent their landlord money with a high interest rate. Kent took the landlord Richard Parsons to court over the loan and won. Strange noises that sounded like a cat scratching a chair were reported at the property around this time, and Parsons and his daughter Elizabeth, who the noises actually emanated from, claimed the ghost was Fanny. To prove it, they held séances regularly, which were written up in the newspaper and drew religious leaders, the prince, the mayor, and so many other onlookers that the street became impassable. At the time, people widely believed that a person would return from the great beyond to warn the living or seek revenge, so they quickly accepted that it was Fanny communicating via a system of knocks that Parsons and a preacher developed. During one such communing, the “ghost” accused Kent of poisoning her and requested he be hanged. To clear his name, Kent and two doctors who had tended to Fanny on her deathbed attended a séance, and again Fanny declared he was her killer. But during a later gathering, Dr. Samuel Johnson witnessed Elizabeth creeping from the bed where she was during encounters to pick up a piece of wood that she used to knock. She’d usually hidden the branch in her clothes. Parsons was trying to frame Kent after losing the case, but it was he who ended up behind bars for two years. (His wife also got a year in prison.)
The Hurricane Harvey freeway shark
Between social media sites and the 24-hour news cycle, it is impossible not to be bombarded with insane photos of daring rescues and heartbreaking destruction following any natural disaster these days. Hurricane Harvey hitting Houston in 2017 was no exception, with one image in particular proving you can’t always believe what you see. Twitter user @Jeggit posted a startling shot of a shark swimming in the floodwater that filled a Houston highway. It appeared to have been taken from the driver’s seat of a stalled car. It was retweeted almost 84,000 times and liked by 141,733 users fairly quickly. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Fox News host Jesse Watters was also fooled by the photo, even mentioning it during his show The Five. He later apologized for the mix-up on his Twitter account once Politifact tracked the doctored photo back to 2011. It appears to have first been circulated after Hurricane Irene struck Puerto Rico and posted on imgur.com. In 2012, social media users posted it saying it was taken in New Jersey during Sandy. It is believed that whoever created this fishy photo took the shark from an image that ran in Africa Geographic in 2005.
Hitler’s fake diaries
In 1979, Der Stern Magazine reporter Gerd Heidemann met with Nazi memorabilia collector Fritz Stiefel, who claimed to have a diary penned by Adolf Hitler. Stiefel said it’d been recovered from a 1945 crash of a plane transporting Hitler’s personal effects. (Records indicated the crash was real and that a chest was also recovered likely containing other journals.) After a couple of handwriting experts authenticated the script, more volumes turned up through Konrad Fischer, who’d procured them from an East German General who was planning to smuggle them out of Germany in pianos, according to the UnMuseum.org. Heidemann convinced his outlet to pony up 9.9 million marks (almost $4 million) for 60 diaries. The magazine knew it could make their money back and then some from reprints. In April 1983, Stern broke the story and then Newsweek and London’s Sunday Times ran excerpts.
Historians immediately balked, as Hitler loathed writing and there had been no indication from those close to him that he’d kept notes. Also, the content sparked skepticism as they portrayed Hitler as having little knowledge of concentration camps and wanting to deport, not exterminate, Jews. After many experts questioned the handwriting, the West German Federal Archives ran more tests. They concluded that the paper, ink, and glue were manufactured after the war had ended and Hitler had died. Heidemann, who always maintained he wasn’t in on it but had inflated the asking price and skimmed money off the top, was fired. Fischer turned out to be Konrad Kujau, a criminal specializing in forgery. He faked memorabilia first and worked his way up to whole documents and paintings. (In fact, a quarter of the works that were featured in the 1983 book Adolf Hitler: The Unknown Artist were done by Kujau.) Both Kujau and Heidemann were sentenced to almost five years in prison. Most of the money was never retrieved. While Heidemann was a pariah after serving, The Guardian reports that Kujau made regular appearances on talk shows and became a minor celebrity.
Balloon Boy
On October 15, 2009, the nation could not take its eyes off the non-stop news coverage of a homemade silver helium-filled balloon that looked like a UFO floating around the Colorado skies. After releasing it from Fort Collins, Richard and Mayumi Heene called 911 to report that their six-year-old son Falcon was trapped aboard. National Guard helicopters and local police followed the blimp, which topped out at 7,000 feet, for 90 minutes and 50 miles until it landed 15 miles from the Denver airport. Falcon was not inside, but as some had seen something fall from the balloon, a land search ensued. That too turned up nothing. Several hours later he came out from hiding in the attic at home. When interviewed on air by Wolf Blitzer, the kid slipped and said his father had told him they were doing it to get a reality show. The first responders didn’t like their time or money wasted and the Heenes were arrested for the hoax. According to CNN, the Larimer County Sheriff’s Department tallied the cost to be at least $47,000. In addition, the FAA imposed an $11,000 fine because airport traffic was delayed because the balloon had flown and landed close to it. The case’s judge decided it was “clearly a planned event done for the purpose of making money” and that it was “exploitation of the children, exploitation of the media, exploitation of the emotions of the people.” Both parents were sentenced to jail, four years probation, and more than 100 hours of community service and agreed to pay restitution of $36,016. On the five-year anniversary, USA Today found the family living in Florida and the sons had started a heavy metal band. One of their CDs has a song called “Balloon Boy No Hoax.”
Russian royal or insane Polish factory worker?
The 1918 grisly basement execution of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children aged 13 to 22 in the dead of night by bullet and bayonets by Bolshevik revolutionaries is hardly the stuff of fairy tales. Which is likely why so many people wanted to desperately believe the rumors that the youngest daughter, Anastasia Romanov, had escaped. The mystery and hope were fueled by the fact that no bodies had been found. Women popped up all over the world claiming to be her, the most believable of which was Anna Anderson, according to Refinery29. She had tried to kill herself by jumping off a Berlin bridge two years later and landed in an asylum for two years. She was the right age, had scars on her body, and a Russian accent. Some relatives and former Romanov friends and servants confirmed her identity while others denounced it. The murders had become common knowledge and Soviet counterintelligence did nothing to quell survival rumors. Her tale inspired multiple books, tabloid fodder, an Ingrid Bergman classic, an animated film, a stage musical, and an Amazon Prime TV series.
After leaving the hospital, Anderson bounced around Europe, staying with distant relatives and wealthy supporters, but she was usually uncooperative, even malicious, when people tried to prove or disprove her identity. She also knew things the late royal would have known, which is how the son of a doctor who was killed with the family became her most ardent defender. Together they hired an attorney to try to get legal recognition of her title and access to the Tsar’s estate. The case lasted 32 years, the longest in German history, and ended without any conclusions. During the investigation, her detractors posited that she was Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish worker who disappeared after being declared insane after being injured in a factory explosion shortly before the incident at the bridge. Anderson died in 1984. Seven years later, five skeletons were found in a forest near the town where the family was executed and DNA testing identified them as Romanovs. With two bodies still missing, people argued she had been telling the truth all along. But that did not last long, as they tested their DNA against an intestinal sample from a prior Anderson surgery. No match. In 2007, the final two bodies were found at a different gravesite.
Whenever we travel home, we pass through Williamsport, PA. It’s a larger city in PA with a lovely historic district, a vast commercial district and The Little League Museum. The crown jewel of Williamsport was West Fourth Street in the 1800s. The city was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the country. This was due to the lumber business and the lumber barons that contributed to the boom in home and church construction. Many of these homes can still be seen today!
The A.D. Hermance House
The Rowley-Hermance Company manufactured woodworking machinery. This 20-room building is an example of the Richardsonian-Romanesque style of architecture. The interior features beautiful cherry and oak hand-carved wood work by Giovanni Ferrari.
The Peter Herdic House
This home was built in 1854 and changed hands several times, but remained a single-family dwelling until 1957 when it was converted into apartments. A fire destroyed portions of it in 1977, but it was renovated and restored and turned into a restaurant. The home features ornate plaster moldings and arches, acanthus columns and a mahogany stairway that curves three floors to a cupola.
The Hiram Rhoads House
Designed by Eber Culver in the late 1880’s for Hiram Rhoads, the man responsible for bringing the telephone to Williamsport, this building is an example of the Queen Anne style. This house has many notable features such as an upstairs bathtub which is encased in mahogany, a solid pecan floor in the living room, and the most magnificent chandeliers in the city.
There are plenty more houses on Millionaire’s Row that have now been converted to apartment buildings and no detail is available about them.But I have included a bunch of the pictures I could find.
In 1847, a Maine ship captain invented the donut as we know it today – with a hole. On the day Lewis Hine took the photo of a waitress next to a plate of donuts (with holes), Capt. Hansen Gregory lived in the next town. He was telling his cronies how he’d gotten the great inspiration to cut a hole in a donut.
(Lewis Wickes Hine, by the way, took many photos of very young workers, which then influenced the passage of child labor laws. His caption read, “Exchange Luncheon. Delia Kane, 14 years old. 99 C Street, South Boston. A young waitress.” )
Captain Gregory, 85, lived at the Sailor’s Snug Harbor in Quincy, Mass. His fame as the inventor of the modern donut had spread, and theWashington Post interviewed him in a story published March 26, 1916
Sailor’s Snug Harbor
He told the reporter he discovered the donut hole when he worked as a 16-year-old crewman on a lime-trading schooner. “Now in them days we used to cut the doughnuts into diamond shapes, and also into long strips, bent in half, and then twisted,” he said.
“I don’t think we called them donuts then–they was just ‘fried cakes’ and ‘twisters.’ Well, sir, they used to fry all right around the edges, but when you had the edges done the insides was all raw dough. And the twisters used to sop up all the grease just where they bent, and they were tough on the digestion.”
Captain Hansen Gregory
First Donut
He asked himself if a space inside the dough would solve the difficulty – and then came the great inspiration. “I took the cover off the ship’s tin pepper box, and—I cut into the middle of that donut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!”
Gregory, born in 1832, would have had his insight around 1858. According to the New York Times, he rose to second mate at 19, mate at 21 and master mariner at 25. He sailed in all kinds of vessels from the lime coaster to a full-rigged ship. He modestly assessed the result. “Well, sir, them doughnuts was the finest I ever tasted. No more indigestion — no more greasy sinkers — but just well-done, fried-through doughnuts.”
But the donut made him famous. He had asked a tinsmith to fabricate a donut cutter for him, and soon, reported the Times, ‘cooks everywhere had adopted it.’ He returned to Camden, Maine, where he taught his mother the trick. She sent several plates to Rockland, Maine, where people gobbled them up. After that, the donut never looked back.
Primitive Soldered Doughnut Cutter
Antique Doughnut Cutter
A plaque in the town of Rockport, Maine, marks Captain Gregory’s birthplace, now the parsonage of the Nativity Lutheran Church. The National Baking Association nominated him for the Baking Hall of Fame, but it doesn’t appear he made the cut.
(A plaque at Nativity Lutheran Church pays homage to an iconic food. Google Maps)
More Donut History
The truth is that there were mentions of doughnuts in recipe books and even in Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York in 1809. But Gregory’s mother’s doughnuts became famed in her neighbour hood in Maine, particularly using the cinnamon and lemons that would have been brought in on her son’s trading ships.
There were numerous legends that sprang up about how the captain invented the doughnut, including one that he skewered his mother’s cakes on his ship’s wheel. Which is why he came forward in 1916 to give his account. By then the Maine version of the doughnut was popular across America. During World War I, the Salvation Army cooked them to raise money for the war effort and also set up canteens in town away from the front lines serving coffee and doughnuts to soldiers. The women who operated these cafes were known as “Doughnut Dollies.”
A cover of the Salvation Army publication “War Cry” from 1918 showing a “Doughnut Dolly”
Captain Gregory died in 1921 but by then Adolph Levitt, a Russian refugee in the US, had invented the automatic doughnut-making machine. This led to the creation of doughnut chain stores, which spread across the US and by the 1930s had begun to appear in Australia. Australians now eat more than 100 million doughnuts a year.
Springfield, IL
The Food History Timeline posts donut recipes before 1858, and they all advise cutting the doughouts into diamonds, squares or twists. Then in 1877 a doughnut recipe calls for cutting them into rings. The Food History Timeline also notes that after the Civil War, ‘inexpensive tin doughnut cutters with holes were manufactured commercially and sold widely.’
1950’s Aluminum Doughnut Maker
You can visit Capt. Hanson Gregory’s grave at the National Sailors’ Home Cemetery in Quincy MA.
Continuing my etymology series, today I am focusing only on some common phrases. If you have any phrases you are curious about, hit me up and I’ll see what I can find for you. Enjoy!!!
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
This proverb, like many others, warns against taking risks. It suggests that you should keep what you have and not risk losing it by going after more. The allusion may be to falconry where a bird in the hand (the falcon) was a valuable asset and certainly worth more than two in the bush (the prey).
This proverbial saying is first found in English in John Capgrave’s “The Life of St Katharine of Alexandria, 1450”: “It is more sekyr [certain] a byrd in your fest, Than to haue three in the sky a‐boue.”
John Heywood’s 1546 glossary “A Dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the Prouerbes in the Englishe tongue” also includes a variant of the proverb: Better one byrde in hande than ten in the wood. The 7th century Aramaic “Story of Ahikar” has text that modern translations render as “Better is a sparrow held tight in the hand than a thousand birds flying about in the air.”
Cat got your tongue?
The origin of the phrase ‘has the cat got your tongue?’ isn’t known. What is certain is that it isn’t derived as a reference to the cat o’ nine tails or people’s tongues being fed to cats in ancient Egypt. Both of these have been suggested and there’s no shred of evidence to support either of them.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ is the shortened form of the query ‘Has the cat got your tongue?’ and it is the short form that is more often used. It is somewhat archaic now but was in common use until the 1960/70s. It was directed at anyone who was quiet when they were expected to speak, and often to children who were being suspiciously unobtrusive.
There’s no derivation that involves any actual cat or celebrated incident of feline theft. Like the blackbird that ‘pecked off his nose’, the phrase is just an example of the light-hearted imagery that is, or was, directed at children.
The expression sounds as though it might be old but isn’t especially so. There are no instances of it in print until the mid 19th century. The early examples of the expression in print all come from the USA, which reinforces the falsity of the Egyptian or Royal Navy origins.
Hell’s bells
The exclamation ‘Hell’s bells’ has been used in both the UK and the USA since at least the mid-19th century. The earliest example of it in print that can be found is from the weekly London sporting newspaper “The Era,” February 1840. The rather fanciful story concerned a character who had stolen his friend’s partridges and replaced them with pigeons, claiming them to be ptarmigan.
There’s no reason to look for any special meaning of Hell’s bells – it doesn’t refer to diabolical campanology – the ‘bells’ are added just for the rhyme. It is an uncommon phrase in that, as well as being an example of reduplication, it is also a minced oath. Adding ‘bells’ was simply a way of uttering the oath ‘Hell’ and making it sound acceptable in polite company.
The expression is often extended by other evocative but meaningless additions. In the UK this is often ‘Hell’s bells and buckets of blood’ and, in the USA, ‘Hells bells and little fishes’ or ‘Hells bells and a bunch of parsley’. There are many other variants, in fact almost anything can be added to ‘Hell’s bells…’ as there’s no requirement for the addition to make sense.
Hold a candle
The expression ‘can’t hold a candle to’ refers to someone who compares badly to an known authority – to be unfit even to hold a subordinate position. Apprentices used to be expected to hold the candle so that more experienced workmen were able to see what they were doing. Someone unable even to do that would be of low status indeed.
Sir Edward Dering used a similar phrase ‘to hold the candle’ in his “The fower cardinal-vertues of a Carmelite fryar,” 1641: “Though I be not worthy to hold the candle to Aristotle.”
‘To hold a candle’ is first recorded in 1883 in William Norris’s “No New Thing:” “Edith is pretty, very pretty; but she can’t hold a candle to Nellie.”
Raise Cain
Cain was the first murderer according to scriptural accounts in the Bible – Genesis 4 and in the Qur’an – 5:27-32.
The biblical account, from the King James’ Version, tells of how Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve, bring offerings to God, but only Abel’s is accepted. Cain kills Abel in anger and is cursed by God.
The transitive verb ‘to raise’ has been used since at least the 14th century to mean ‘to conjure up; to cause a spirit to appear by means of incantations’. Geoffrey Chaucer made use of that meaning in “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” circa 1395:
I haue yow told ynowe To reyse a feend al looke he neuere so rowe.
In Modern English – [I have told you enough already to raise a fiend, look he never so savage.]
If you make trouble you are raising, that is, conjuring up, the accursed spirit of Cain. This is similar to several phrases that allude to calling-up or ‘raising’ the Devil. There’s ‘raise the Devil’ of course and also ‘raise hob’ and ‘raise hell’.
The phrase is American and is first found there in the late 19th century; for example, this little pun on the word ‘raised’ from the St. Louis’ “Daily Pennant,” May 1840: “Why have we every reason to believe that Adam and Eve were both rowdies? Because they both raised Cain.”
A picture is worth a thousand words
This phrase emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. Its introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title “One look is worth a thousand words”, in “Printer’s Ink,” December 1921. Barnard claimed the phrase’s source to be oriental by adding “so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right.”
Printer’s Ink printed another form of the phrase in March 1927, this time suggesting a Chinese origin: “Chinese proverb. One picture is worth ten thousand words.”
The arbitrary escalation from ‘one thousand’ to ‘ten thousand’ and the switching from Japan to China as the source leads us to smell a rat with this derivation. In fact, Barnard didn’t introduce the phrase – his only contribution was the incorrect suggestion that the country of origin was Japan or China. This has led to another popular belief about the phrase that it was coined by Confucius. It might fit the Chinese-sounding ‘Confucius he say’ style, but the Chinese derivation was pure invention.
A similar idea was seen very widely in the USA from the early 20th century, in adverts for “Doan’s Backache Kidney Pills,” which included a picture of a man holding his back and the text “Every picture tells a story.”
Neither of the above led directly to ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. Who it was that married ‘worth ten thousand words’ with ‘picture’ isn’t known, but we do know that the phrase is American in origin. It began to be used quite frequently in the US press from around the 1920s onward. The earliest example found is from the text of an instructional talk given by the newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to the “Syracuse Advertising Men’s Club,” in March 1911:
Sew Colorful 