Momma's Word of the Day (check first post every day!)

[wardog]

why is it that dimes are worth more, but they are smaller than nickels?

 

Material content used.

 

As per the Thread; "I'm gonna drop a dime on ya for asking that question."

[General Septem]

"Russian captains sometime turn suddenly to see if anyone's behind them. We call it "Crazy Ivan." The only thing you can do is go dead. Shut everything down and make like a hole in the water. The catch is, a boat this big doesn't exactly stop on a dime... and if we're too close, we'll drift right into the back of him."

[momma]

185.April 22nd, 2007Geronimo, n.-Apache chieftain who raided the white settlers in the Southwest as resistance to being confined to a reservation (1829-1909)

 

-This word originated in Mexico

 

Leaping from airplanes to land on the battlefields of World War II, paratroopers of the U.S. Army shouted the Spanish name given by Mexican soldiers to an Indian chief who had terrorized white settlers in northern Mexico and the south-western United States eighty years earlier. How did it happen that "Geronimo!" sometimes followed by an Indian war whoop became the battle cry of American paratroopers?

 

Apparently the immediate cause was a movie of that name that paratroopers had watched as they were beginning their training in 1940. The 1939 movie depicts Geronimo, chief of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, as a bloodthirsty villain. Portrayed by the wild-eyed actor Chief Thundercloud, the movie Geronimo is an Apache whose sole delight is slaughtering whites, preferably defenseless women and children. According to Cinebooks' Motion Picture Guide, "Chief Thundercloud has only one expression--murderous."

 

Needless to say, that movie version of Geronimo is not entirely the truth. The real Geronimo, born in 1829 in what is now Arizona, lived peaceably until Mexicans killed his wife, mother, and children in 1858. In retaliation, he led raids against both Mexican and American white settlers, then settled on a reservation. In 1876, when the U.S. government tried to move the Chiricahua to New Mexico, he took up arms again and continued his occasional raids until 1887, when he was finally captured and relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He took up farming, converted to Christianity, and became such a public figure that he was in the inaugural parade for President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. Geronimo's Story of His Life, published in 1906, three years before his death, was a best seller.

 

Back in 1940, however, it was the ferocious warrior of the earlier film who commanded the attention of the paratroopers. It is said that Aubrey Eberhardt, a member of the first platoon testing methods of air drops in 1940, was inspired by the movie to announce that he would shout "Geronimo" as he jumped the next day. He did; his shout was beard on the ground; and the rest of the paratroopers adopted it as their call. Since then, of course, any kind of attack can be heralded in English with Geronimo!

 

In his Apache language, the warrior was known as Goyathlay or "one who yawns." It was the Mexicans who called him Geronimo, the Spanish version of the name Jerome. Numerous other words have crossed the border into English via Mexican Spanish, including Nahuatl words like chocolate, and more recently chihuahua (1858), a breed of dog named after the Mexican city, and maquiladora (1976), a south-of-the-border factory that uses cheap labor to make products for export to the north.

 

-In 1918, certain remains of Geronimo were apparently stolen in a grave robbery. Three members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones – including Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush respectively – served as Army volunteers at Fort Sill during World War I. They reportedly stole Geronimo's skull, some bones, and other items, including Geronimo's prized silver bridle, from the Apache Indian Prisoner of War Cemetery. The stolen items were alleged to have been taken to the society's tomb-like headquarters on the Yale University campus, and are supposedly used in rituals practiced by the group, one of which is said to be kissing the skull of Geronimo as an initiation. The story was known for many years but widely considered unlikely or apocryphal, and while the society itself remained silent, former members have said that they believed the bones were fake or non-human.

[shatteredsteel]

Geronimo! ... *SPLAT!*

[red930]

Back in the 60's when I was just a kid, Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida, had tours including the cell where Geronimo was held.

 

There's a more detailed telling of the story here...

http://americanhistory.about.com/od/native.../a/geronimo.htm

 

and a link to Geronimo's own words here...

http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/B/geronimo/geronixx.htm

[momma]

186.April 23rd, 2007high·brow, adj. or n.- Of, relating to, or being highly cultured or intellectual: They only attend highbrow events such as the ballet or the opera.

n.

 

One who possesses or affects a high degree of culture or learning.

 

-Synonyms: cerebral, intellectual, sophisticated, thoughtful.

 

-Origin: 1903

 

Americans can claim credit for both highbrow and lowbrow, the upper and lower levels of culture and cultivation. Highbrow seems to have come first, most likely around 1903, but lowbrow is close on its heels. In 1906 we have examples of both. That year the writer O. Henry refers to "the $250 that I screwed out of the high-browed and esteemed B. Merwin during your absence." As for lowbrow, we find it in S. Ford's Shorty McCabe: "The spaghetti works was in full blast, with a lot of husky low-brows goin' in and out." In Collier's the next year is a reference to "the overwhelming majority of Low Brows, who never read 'Peer Gynt.'" And in the Saturday Evening Post for 1908, we see highbrows again: "It takes all sorts of men to make a party, and Mr. Hearst apparently led in a few prize-fighters with the other high-brows and reformers he accumulated."

 

From the start, both terms were applied with tongue in cheek. They referred to the discredited phrenological notion that a person of superior intellect and culture would have a high forehead while an ignorant boor would have a low one.

 

A 1916 reviewer in The Nation took the distinction more seriously. Highbrow and lowbrow, he said, "stand for more genuine differences than Democrat and Republican. The one class has ideals, but no experience; it has flowered in an unfruitful transcendentalism. The other class has experience, but no ideals; its finished product is the millionaire. Each class looks with contempt, or rather with indifference, upon the other." The reviewer lamented this split, but in fact the two extremes of American culture seem to have prevented either side from taking itself too seriously. In the rest of the twentieth century both highbrows and lowbrows have had such success that American science, scholarship, and art on the one hand and practical inventions and popular culture on the other have swept throughout the world.

[momma]

187.April 24th, 2007in·da·ba, n.-A council or meeting of indigenous peoples of southern Africa to discuss an important matter.

 

-This word originated in South Africa

 

When the rest of the world goes to meetings and conventions, South Africa proclaims its African heritage by holding indabas.

 

English-speaking South Africans learned the word from Zulu chiefs, who would call their people together to discuss important issues at meetings called indabas. In the nineteenth century, when the word was first used in English, it always referred to the African tribes. An 1894 article, for example, reports that "a message was therefore conveyed ... to the King, inviting Umtassa to come to an indaba at Umtali."

 

Not surprisingly, in the latter part of the twentieth century Nelson Mandela's African National Congress party used the word for its meetings. "More than three thousand delegates are expected at the African National Congress's fiftieth national conference to be held here next week," reported the Klerksdorp Record in December 1997. "This four-day ANC Indaba ... will be officially opened by the provincial chairperson of the ANC." But today's pro-African South Africa has indabas for everyone. In recent years there have been a Dance Indaba, a Tourism Trade Indaba, an International Design Indaba, a Structural Chemistry Indaba, a Small-Molecules Indaba, and a Welding Indaba. The 10th Biennial Congress of the Hypertension Society of Southern Africa in 1996, with the goal of improving health care for all South Africans, was billed as the "Hypertension Indaba."

 

Also contributing to the spirit of the new South Africa are Cape Indaba Wines. Their maker explains that "a portion of the profits generated from the sale of the Cape Indaba Wines will be donated to the underprivileged for the purposes of education. This contribution, coupled with the ethnically styled label emphasizes our commitment to the upliftment and furtherance of our new nation."

 

Zulu is spoken by about nine million people in South Africa, nearly a quarter of the population. It is a Bantu language of the Niger-Congo language family. Other English words from zulu include buchu (1731), a medicinal shrub; mamba (1862), a poisonous snake; impala (1875), the famous antelope; and nagana (1895), a disease of cattle also called tsetse disease.

[momma]

188.April 25th, 2007ja·lop·y, n.-An old, dilapidated motor vehicle, especially an automobile.

 

-Origin: 1929

 

We find a definition in print in 1929: "Jaloppi--A cheap make of automobile; an automobile fit only for junking." The definition has stayed the same, but it took a while for the spelling to stop bouncing around. Among the variants have been jallopy, jaloppy, jollopy, jaloopy, jalupie, julappi, jalapa, and jaloppie.

 

John Steinbeck spelled it gillopy in In Dubious Battle (1936): "Sam trotted off toward the bunk houses, and London followed more slowly. Mac and Jim circled the building and went to the ancient Ford touring car. 'Get in, Jim. You drive the gillopy.' A roar of voices came from the other side of the bunk house. Jim turned the key and retarded the spark lever. The coils buzzed like little rattlesnakes."

 

Jalopy seems to have replaced flivver (1910), which in the early decades of the twentieth century also simply meant "a failure." Other early terms for a wreck of a car included heap, tin lizzie (1915), and crate (1927). But where jalopy came from, nobody knows.

 

-Synonyms: bus, heap

[General Septem]

If many new cars in a given area are an indication of a thriving job market, the job market here must be completely dead because everyone's driving jalopies. :tooth:

[momma]

189.April 26th, 2007kay·ak, n. or v.- 1. An Inuit or Eskimo boat consisting of a light wooden frame covered with watertight skins except for a single or double opening in the center, and propelled by a double-bladed paddle.

 

2. A lightweight canoe that is similar in design.

 

v.

 

To go, travel, or race in a kayak.

 

-This word originated in United States (Alaska), Canada, And Greenland

 

If you want to paddle a canoe on an arctic sea, learn from the Inuit: Cover the top so water won't get in. And use a two-bladed paddle so you don't have to change hands as you paddle first on one side, then another. Snug in the middle, your legs invisible under the cover, you become one with your boat.

 

There is, to be sure, a down side to the kayak. If your boat turns upside down, so do you. And then there is the phenomenon known as "kayak angst." Tom Carroll, who circum-kayaked Long Island in eleven days in 1993, describes it like this: "I began to feel as though my sense of balance had left me. The sky and the water were a dull silver in color. I had trouble finding the water with my paddle. I experienced the strange sensation of gliding through a silver tunnel, drifting suspended by an unseen force. A trusty low brace kept me upright and I soon realized that the ripples made by the brace in the gloss like water brought me a sense of orientation. This form of spatial disorientation or kayak angst, as it was known to the Greenlanders, would be an experience I would not soon forget."

 

Kayak, which appears in English as early as 1757, is not all we have learned from the Inuit Eskimo language. We have the igloo (1856) for a home, the anorak (1922) to keep us warm, and other more obscure terms such as muktuk (1835, whale skin as food) and qiviut (1958, wool of the musk ox). There is also another kind of boat, the umiak (1769), which holds a whole family, as opposed to the one-person kayak.

 

Inuit is not a single language but five closely related ones, forming a branch of the Eskimo-Aleut family. They are Northwest Alaska Inupiat Inukitut, North Alaskan Inukitut, Western Canadian Inukitut, Eastern Canadian Inukitut, and Greenlandic Inukitut. It is impossible to tell which of these is responsible for bringing the Inuit words to English. Altogether there are more than 60,000 speakers of these Inuit languages, the majority in Greenland.

 

-Modern kayaks have evolved into numerous specialized types, that may be broadly categorized according to their application as recreational kayaks, touring kayaks, fishing kayaks, sea kayaks, whitewater (or river) kayaks, surf kayaks, and racing kayaks, though many hybrid types exist as well.

[momma]

If many new cars in a given area are an indication of a thriving job market, the job market here must be completely dead because everyone's driving jalopies. :tooth:

 

Hey! I drive a jalopy and there is nothing wrong with being poor .

[General Septem]

Hey! I drive a jalopy and there is nothing wrong with being poor .

 

Nothing wrong with that at all. I was just saying there aren't many jobs around here. :tooth:

 

A man was kayaking down a river and decides he's cold. So he builds a campfire in the middle of it. The kayak catches on fire and he finds himself stranded. The moral of the story is, you can't have your kayak and heat it too.