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

[momma]

190.April 27th, 2007looney tunes, adj. or n.-absurd, crazy; foolish

 

n.

 

The Warner Brother's cartoon

 

-Origin 1977

 

This slang expression derives from the Warner Brothers' cartoon series Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, a trademark of Warner Brothers, Inc. Thanks to those Loony Tunes, since at least 1975 (for the noun) and 1977 (for the adjective) it has been possible to write about "today's looney-tunes salary structure" in baseball (Seattle Times, 1990), or to say "My husband is loony tunes" (USA Today, 1991). A book reviewer for Newsday in 1991 considers a Paul Theroux character "a dislikable looney-toon of a man who crunches down health food, arranges kinky dates with his own wife...and places personal ads in dubious publications."

 

The inspiration for the first word of loony tunes comes ultimately from the moon and a bird. As far back as the thirteenth century in England, the moon was said to influence the mind, and a sufficiently influenced person was called a lunatic. Then, centuries later, in the new colonies of New England a bird with a weird haunting call was named the loon (1634). The sound made by this bird seemed lunatic enough to suggest the epithets drunk as a loon (1830), crazy as a loon (1845), wild as a loon (1858), and mad as a loon (1877). Moon and bird came together in loony, another Americanism first attested in Bret Hart's 1872 Heiress of Red Dog: "You're that looney sort of chap that lives over yonder, ain't ye?"

 

The tunes of loony tunes are simply cartoons abbreviated and respelled to match the Merrie Melodies, because Warner Brothers cartoons always used sound and music. Their first was "Sinkin' In the Bath," released in 1930, and gradually the zany characters we know today joined the cast.

[momma]

191.April 29th, 2007mon·goose, n.-Any of various Old World carnivorous mammals of the genus Herpestes and related genera, having a slender agile body and a long tail and noted for the ability to seize and kill venomous snakes.

 

-The name for about 39 species of carnivorous mammals which are members of the family Viverridae. This family also includes the civets and genets. Mongooses are restricted in their distribution to the warmer regions of the Old World, ranging from the Mediterranean into Africa and Southeast Asia. These are plantigrade animals about the size of a cat and have a long slender body, short legs, nonretractile claws, and scent glands. Some species are fair climbers even though the claws are nonretractile. Mongooses are predators, feeding on snakes, frogs, fishes, and crabs, and they are especially fond of bird and crocodile eggs.

 

-This word originated in India

 

It's not a goose but a small meat-eating mammal, something like a weasel or ferret, about a foot long with a tail of equal length. Since it's not a goose, its plural is not mongeese but mongooses. It's native to southern Asia and Africa.

 

You won't have any mice if you have a pet mongoose. But then you might not have any kittens or puppies either. Mongooses are so effective in getting rid of small mammals that they are household pets in India. They are banned from import into the United States because they would destroy too many of our native creatures.

 

From a mongoose you can learn how to catch a snake. First, get its attention and dare it to strike. Second, jump out of the way. Third, repeat steps one and two till the snake is worn out. Then grab the snake's head in your mouth, crush it, and enjoy your meal at leisure. During steps one, two, and three you do have to watch out, because if a poisonous snake bites you while you're taunting it, you're dead. But if you're a mongoose, once the snake is dead you can eat it, venom and all, without the slightest indigestion.

 

In number of speakers, Marathi is one of the world's major languages, spoken by about sixty-five million people in western India. It belongs to the Indo-Iranian branch of our Indo-European language family. Mongoose, a word Marathi obtained from a non-Indo-European Dravidian source, showed up in English, in a book about India, as early as 1698. From Marathi we also have carambola (1598), an evergreen tree and its star-shaped fruit, and bummalo (1673), also known as Bombay duck (1860), not a duck but a kind of fish.

[General Septem]

*screaming*

 

Rosie Carver: There's a- there's a-

 

James Bond: Oh, a snake! Yes, I should have told you, you should never go in there without a mongoose.

 

[momma]

192.April 30th, 2007New England, n.-A region of the northeast United States comprising the modern-day states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

 

-Origin: 1616

 

In the year Shakespeare died, New England was born. This was in fact four years before any English speakers permanently settled in that northern location. But in 1616 it was already the subject of the bock A Description of New England, by that busy explorer and promoter Captain John Smith, who had visited the land two years before.

 

According to Smith, New England owes its name to Sir Francis Drake. Not that Drake ever saw or talked about New England, but in sailing around the world he stopped in 1579 at a place on the Pacific coast of North America and claimed it as Nova Albion, the Latin for "New England." Following Drake's lead, Smith designated the region at a similar latitude on the Atlantic coast by the same name, translated into plain English.

 

The very words New England show the direction of Smith's thinking. This was to be an extension of Old England, not a new kind of community. The map in his book gives only English names for the places of New England, and he provides an accompanying list showing thirty American Indian names replaced by English ones: Accomack by Plimouth, Massachusets River by Charles River, Kinebeck by Edenborough, to list a few. Some of those changes succeeded. But what eventually happened after the Plymouth colonists landed four years later has turned out differently than Smith had imagined, for Indian names as well as English ones still cover the New England landscape.

 

-New England's weather was much colder, particularly in winter, than the English were accustomed to in the Gulf Stream–moderated British Isles. The colonial period and early nineteenth century were, as well, affected by what weather historians have characterized as a mini ice age. Still summers were shorter, hotter, and more humid than English growing seasons, conditions that adversely affected wheat and pea growing in particular. A recurring mildew attacked wheat, gradually impelling a switch from wheat flour bread to one made with rye and the Native American's cornmeal, which settlers named "Indian" to produce a loaf called "rye and Indian." New England's climate favored the native beans that ultimately fared better than peas as a field crop and helped urge the shift to the beans pottage that would evolve into baked beans.

 

-Political history

Chartering as Plymouth Council for New England: 1620

Formation as United Colonies of New England: 1643

Formation as Dominion of New England: 1686

Admission to U.S.:

- Connecticut-1788

- Maine-separated from Mass. March 15, 1820 (23rd)

- Massachusetts-1788

- New Hampshire-1788

- Rhode Island-1790

- Vermont-1791

[momma]

*screaming*

 

Rosie Carver: There's a- there's a-

 

James Bond: Oh, a snake! Yes, I should have told you, you should never go in there without a mongoose.

 

 

Who knew mongooses were banned from the United States cause they are so deadly to small animals?

[momma]

193.May 1st, 2007the·sau·rus, n.- 1. A book of synonyms, often including related and contrasting words and antonyms.

 

2. A book of selected words or concepts, such as a specialized vocabulary of a particular field, as of medicine or music.

 

-The word thesaurus is derived from 16th century New Latin, in turn from Latin thesaurus, from ancient Greek θησαυρός thesauros, "store-house", "treasury".

 

-Roget's Thesaurus, was published in 1852, having been compiled earlier, in 1805, by Peter Roget. Entries in Roget's Thesaurus are not listed alphabetically but conceptually and are a great resource for writers.

 

Although including synonyms and antonyms, entries in a thesaurus should not be taken as a list of them. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between similar words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Nor does a thesaurus entry define words. That work is left to the dictionary.

 

-In Information Technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology.

 

-Thesaurus databases, created by international standards, are generally arranged hierarchically by themes and topics. Such a thesaurus places each term in context, allowing a user to distinguish between "bureau" the office and "bureau" the furniture. A thesaurus of this type is often used as the basis of an index for online material. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, for example, is used to index the national databases of museums, Artefacts Canada, held by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN).

[momma]

194.May 2nd, 2007nun·cha·ku (nən-chä'kū) or nun·chuck (nŭn'chŭk') or num·chuck (nŭm'-), n.-A pair of hardwood sticks joined by a chain or cord and used as a weapon. Often used in the plural.

 

-This word originated in Japan

 

How do you arm yourself when you're disarmed? How do you defend yourself when you cant even have a knife around the house? For several hundred years, the people of Okinawa needed to find answers to those questions. It is said that under the Ryukyu Kingdom, which began in the fifteenth century, only soldiers and nobles were allowed to carry weapons. Under Japanese rule, which began in 1609, even iron household tools were supposedly prohibited. Each village was allowed only one knife, which was kept at the town square and lent for short periods to individual households. How could citizens defend against robbers and worse?

 

Their response, we are told, was to fight barehanded (a skill that developed into today's karate) or make weapons out of household implements. They learned to fight with a staff (bo), a sickle (kama), even the handle of a millstone (tonfa). And then there was the lowly nunchaku, two curved sticks tied together as the bit for a horse. The descendant of the original nunchaku, now made of straight rather than curved wood, has become one of the major martial arts weapons. In the 1970s Chinese-American actor Bruce Lee spread its popularity far beyond Japan and east Asia, demonstrating in his action movies the awesome efficacy of nunchaku in the hands of a skilled fighter. The word was used in English as early as 1970.

 

The nunchaku has advantages over the traditional police baton, not the least that it's folded over and thus easier to carry. In the United States, more than two hundred police departments now use the Orcutt Police Nunchaku system, developed by police sergeant Kevin Orcutt in the 1980s.

 

Okinawan is spoken by about 900,000 people on Okinawa and the other Ryukyu Islands to the south of Japan. Though Okinawa, now a Japanese possession, has early historical ties to China, its language is closely related to Japanese, not Chinese, and belongs to the Japanese-Okinawan branch of the Korean-Japanese-Okinawan language family. No other Okinawan words are widely used in English.

 

-Possession of nunchaku is illegal in a number of countries, including Canada, Germany, Norway, Spain, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom (anti-nunchaku laws in the UK were loosened somewhat in 1991, although media scenes with nunchaku were still edited out by censors until 2002). Legality in the United States varies at state level, e.g., personal possession of nunchaku is illegal in New York, Arizona, California and Massachusetts, but in other states possession is not criminalized. Legality in Australia is also determined by individual state laws. In New South Wales, the weapon is on the restricted weapons list, and thus can only be owned with a permit. In New York (USA), attorney Jim Maloney has brought a federal constitutional challenge to the statutes that criminalize simple in-home possession of nunchaku for peaceful use in martial-arts practice and/or legal home defense.

[momma]

195.May 3rd, 2007ba·tra·chi·an, [buh TREY kee uhn] adj. or n.- Of or relating to vertebrate amphibians without tails, such as frogs and toads.

 

n.

 

A vertebrate amphibian.

 

-From the Greek word batrakhos that means frog.

 

-Columnist Maureen Dowd teaches us a zoological term or two about bears and frogs while bluntly insulting World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, who is accused of getting his girlfriend a cushy job:

 

"Usually, spring in Washington finds us caught up in the cherry blossoms and the ursine courtship rituals of the pandas.

"But this chilly April, we are forced to contemplate the batrachian grapplings of Paul Wolfowitz, the man who cherry-picked intelligence to sell us a war with Iraq."

 

Link: More Con Than Neo - New York Times

 

Posted April 15, 2007.

 

-Synonyms: frog, toad, toadfrog, anuran, salientian

[General Septem]

The new amphibious robot rolled out of the factory. "It looks vaguely batrachian," the Lieutenant remarked.

 

You taught Firefox a new word too.

[boywander]

The folks have been talking about the batrachian presence of our local mayor at AGMs, especially with council elections upon us.

[momma]

196.May 4th, 2007char·la·tan, n.-A person who makes elaborate, fraudulent, and often voluble claims to skill or knowledge; a quack or fraud

 

-Synonyms: fake, faker, fraud, humbug, impostor, mountebank, phony, pretender, quack

 

-The word comes from French charlatan, a seller of medicines who might advertise his presence with music and an outdoor stage show. The greatest of the Parisian charlatans was Tabarin who set up a stage in the Place Dauphin, Paris from 1618, and whose commedia dell'arte-inspired skits and farces inspired Molière. Ultimately, etymologists trace "charlatan" from either the Italian ciarlare, to prattle; or from Cerretano, a resident of Cerreto, a town that was apparently notorious for producing quacks.

 

-Famous American charlatans include John R. Brinkley, the "goat-gland doctor" who implanted goat glands as a means of curing male impotence, helped pioneer both American and Mexican radio broadcasting, and twice ran unsuccessfully for governor of Kansas. Another famous charlatan was Albert Abrams, the advocate of radionics and other similar electrical quackery who was active in the early twentieth century. A less well known charlatan was the German mathematician and active Nazi Ludwig Bieberbach, who claimed to have discovered an "Aryan" version of mathematics and criticised normal math for being too "Jewish".

[momma]

197.May 5th, 2007o·pos·sum, n.- 1. Any of various nocturnal, usually arboreal marsupials of the family Didelphidae, especially Didelphis marsupialis of the Western Hemisphere, having a thick coat of hair, a long snout, and a long prehensile tail.

 

2. Any of several similar marsupials of Australia belonging to the family Phalangeridae.

 

-The word opossum takes us back to the earliest days of the American colonies. The settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607 (We are currently celebrating its founding 400 years ago this month) by the London Company, chartered for the planting of colonies. Even though the first years were difficult, promotional literature was glowing. In one such piece, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, published in 1610, we find this passage: “There are … Apossouns, in shape like to pigges.” This is the first recorded use of opossum, although in a spelling that differs from the one later settled on to reproduce the sound of the Virginia Algonquian word from which our word came. The word opossum and its shortened form possum, first recorded in 1613 in more promotional literature, remind us of a time when the New World was still very new, settlers were few, and the inhabitants for whom the New World was not new were plentiful.

 

-Highly adaptable and prolific, opossums have changed little in millions of years. The North American species, the stout-bodied common, or Virginia, opossum (Didelphis marsupialis), grows to 40 in. (100 cm) long. It is largely white and has an opposable clawless toe on each hind foot; with its long, hairless, prehensile tail, it resembles a large rat. Up to 25 grublike, 0.07-oz (2-g) newborns compete for the 13 nipples in the pouch, where the survivors spend four or five weeks; they spend the following eight to nine weeks clinging to the mother's back. The common opossum may feign death ("play possum") if surprised. It eats small animals, insects, and fruit, and sometimes domestic poultry and cultivated grain. See also possum.

 

-The opossum was a favorite game animal in the United States, and in particular the southern regions which have a large body of recipes and folklore relating to the opossum. Opossum was once widely consumed in the United States where available as evidenced by recipes in older editions of The Joy of Cooking. In Dominica and Trinidad opossum or "manicou" is popular and can only be hunted during certain times of the year due to over-hunting; the meat is traditionally prepared by smoking then stewing. The meat is light and fine grained and the musk glands must be removed as part of preparation. The meat can be used in place of rabbit and chicken in recipes. The cousin of the opossum, the possum, found in Australia and New Zealand is consumed in a similar manner. (Davidson, 1999)

 

Historically, hunters in the Caribbean would place a barrel with fresh or rotten fruit to attract opossums who would feed on the fruit or insects. Cubans growing up in the mid-twentieth century tell of brushing the maggots out of the mouths of "manicou" caught in this manner to prepare them for consumption. It is said also that the gaminess of the meat causes gas.

 

In Mexico, opossums are known as "tlacuache". Their tails are eaten as a folk remedy to improve fertility (most likely because they have many babies that they store in their pouch).

 

-Have you had your opossum today?