dubious usages

[James A. Landau]

Already this morning I have encountered:

1.  at a construction area the highway people posted signs showing how to get to businesses whose normal access to the main roads had been blocked off by the construction.  One such sign read "DINER".  If you follow it, you will find yourself at a McDonald's.

2.  a porno spam message in my e-mailbox entitled "Napster of Porn !!!"

Also some notes to Barry Popik:  I'm not sure but I think the "Potlatch" was a custom of American Indians in the Columbia River/Puget Sound area, not Alaska.

As for "city Arab", that apparently was a well-known usage in England well before 1903---Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories was found of referring to "street Arabs"

in my experience, a pancake/hotcake/griddlecake is a "flapjack" ONLY if it gets turned by being tossed well up into the air

"Emperor Norton" was a well-documented San Francisco character.  I have never seen him described as "half-witted"; from most descriptions he was an intelligent and well-educated man who had what was then probably called "dementia", his idee fixe being that he was the Emperor of something.  "blackmail" is an unlikely term in this context, especially considering the word "amused" in the same line.  "Levying taxes" is a plausible emendation.

A "biled shirt" should be a starched shirt ("boiled shirt", as it is boiled in starch) rather than simply a white shirt.  I am told that "stuffed shirt" meaning a pompous man is a reference to the idea that men who went to the trouble of wearing "stuffed" or starched shirts were necessarily putting on airs.

       - Jim Landau