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Jottings On The LanguageBv ALLEN E. GREGORY JR.We begin today with a bit of doggeral left on our table by party or parties unknown, but thanks anyway. It goes as follows: “There comes a time in every man's life when he thinks-he's got. it made, until he learns his Christmas gift is charged and not prepaid!”From here we go to the comic strips, an ancient one. The Katzenjammer Kids of our childhood days tare they still up to their shennanigans?) for the origin of the expression. “on the fritz, since we seem to remember that the names of those two little devils were Hans and Fritz. (A readers assist here memory - wise would be helpful.)We have been waiting a long time to feed (or drag) this one into this column. It was supplied by a good friend of ours but slipped out in an unguarded moment of across-the-table conversation. “Open the window and let. the Lord clean your house,’ i.e. let the wind do your sweeping and cleaning. Staying within the four walls with some difficulty, we have just this one note only distantly related here, namely, the sticks, for the furniture, which comes out of memory lane of long ago.From our foreign correspondent's notes came the following: a budgeriger is an Australian parrot similar to a parakeet: dingle is another word for the sky in Ireland: a prawn is a shrimp Hhe edible kind) in England; and from tliis area comes the dialect word which we feel is very descriptive and effective — “fubsy.” for fat and squat and implying befuddled by sound association; from Ireland comes monkey puzzle tree with which we are not acquainted: from the dark continent comes Africian feet, for those toughened by lack of shoes, as the Barefoot Boy of yore; and finally at last from abroad comes “pin money.” for money saved by the thrifty housewife for the purchase of pins, which were quite dear in price because for years on end they were a Crown monopoly in England. According to the Oxford Dictionary this logjam was broken up in the year of 1637.DISCONNECTED notes department; an apothecary is from a Greek word meaning a warehouse and suggests the varied array of goods sold by the modern druggist; a shakeris a hooded garment first devised and used by the religious sect called the Shakers: “kel-tlmg” the roads is filling up the chuckholes; a muff pistol was a derringer - type of firearm carried by women in their muffs in times past: the book title of awhile back, “The Cruel Sea.” came from Dante’s “Inferno;” and an axehandle hound (of frontier folklore) had a diet of axehandles.OLD FACTS DEPARTMENT (three American universities give Ph.D. degrees in the subject of folklore, they being UCLA. Pennsylvania and Indiana.PARKINSON'S three laws of bureaucracy (previously touched on): 1. Work always expands to fill the time available. 2. Expenditures always rise to meet the income. 3. Facl finding is a very good substitute for thoughtUNDERSCORINGS: “Without failure then cannot be success.” — Fuchs “There is nothing new except what is for gotten. — attributed to Mile. Berlin, millinei to Marie Antoinette (circa 1785)fBut. Solomon apprently beat her to the drav with his alleged. “There is nothing new un der the sun.”
Newspaper Details
Salisbury Daily Times
Salisbury, Maryland, US
Tue, Dec 19, 1967
Page 25
Full Page
Clipped by
Kevin S.
CA 14 Oct 2021
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