"Pre-owned,""near miss," "s/he"

[Dennis R. Preston]

Of course, all these apparently good definitions miss the one most
commonly in use when I was young; when you wanted to tease a
mechanically-ignorant neophyte (especially in auto mechanics) or if
you just wanted to speculate out loud to knowing fellows when you
didn't know what the hell was going on, you very frequently expressed
doubt about the "Johnson bar." "Hey, sounds like the Johnson bar is
loose in your old lemon, Fred." If Fred knew the game (and especially
if there were neophytes around), he would 'low as how he'd have his
Johnson bar looked at. If Fred was one of those being teased, he
might express real concern about his Johnson bar, to the delight of
all us mechnincally sophisticated (although we were rapidly becoming
unsophisticated as overhead valve engines and automatic tramsissions
were passing us by).

dInIs

dInIs

>In a message dated 09/28/2001 6:59:42 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>preston at PILOT.MSU.EDU writes:
>
>>  Hope ya'll know what a Johnson Bar is; hate to use technical terms.
>
>A "Johnson bar" controls the amount and direction of the steam that enters
>the cylinders in a steam locomotive.  (As a steam locomotive speeds up, the
>amount of steam per stroke has to be changed.  As for direction, the Johnson
>bar also controls whether the locomotive moves forward or back).
>
>The Johnson bar works by rearranging the pivot points of the rods and levers
>that connect the cylinders with the wheels.  If you can conjure up even a
>vague image of a steam locomotive and realize how big those rods are, you can
>easily understand that the Johnson bar has to be a substantical piece of
>ironmongery.
>
>Earnest K. Gann in one of his books mentions an airplane which had a sizable
>lever in the cockpit that was referred to, for reasons Mr. Gann never
>understood, as a Johnson bar.  (As best as I can recall, it was "Band of
>Brothers", the Ford Tri-Motor, and the lever controlled the brakes when the
>plane was on the ground.)  Apparently somebody who was familiar with the
>inside of a steam locomotive found that that lever reminded him of a Johnson
>bar.
>
>The OED2 has Johnson bar as "US, origin unknown" with the first cite from
>1930 and an incomplete definition that describes it only as the reversing
>lever, not as the device that also controlled the amount of steam allowed per
>stroke.  There is a 1971 citation as the emergency brake handle on a truck
>(presumably, like the Gann cite above, from the size or shape of the thing.)
>
>A magazine article I once read said, or maybe admitted to theorizing, that
>the original term was "jouncing bar" ("jouncin' bar") because it jounced
>around.
>
>                            - Jim Landau
>
>P.S.  The OED2 has "near miss" (under near, adjective) with 2 naval citations
>from 1940, several citations in which the term appears to mean only "close
>but missed safely", one citation reading "...a lot of bomb damage to repair
>from a near miss..." implying that this near miss caused considerable damage,
>and oh yes a 1973 quote about airplanes having near misses.

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736