Re: [ADS-L] Ath na Long Long Ford of the Ships

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 1/16/03 6:47:58 AM Eastern Standard Time, DanCas1 at AOL.COM
writes:

> Long = ship as in long siar (longshore, boat quay) or so/ long as in so
long.

I think Malay "salang" (cognate to Hebrew "shalom" and Arabic "salaam") is
more likely.  "So long" is a candidate for "term for which the most
etymythologies exist", easily beating out "OK".  A certain etymologist of my
acquaintance has a form letter to send to people who submit unsubstantiated
origions for "so long".

>  Don't believe the hype, or the buan cumadh, bunkum, perpetual invention,
> long  drawn out story.

According to MWCD10, "Buncombe County, NC; fr. a remark made by its
congressman, who defended an irrelevant speech by claiming that he was
speaking to Buncombe".  However, this leaves open the question of where the
name "Buncombe" comes from.  Perhaps the name of an early settler, whose
eponymous ancestor was run out of Ireland for being a boring storyteller.

While on the subject, I'd like to propose an etymology or perhaps etymytholgy
for "hard-bitten" (MWCD10 says 1784).  In the second half of the 18th Century
(and probably earlier), while civilians used powder horns for their muskets,
soldiers used "cartridges" (from French "cartouche", from Italian "carta",
leaf of paper, from Latin "charta" leaf of papyrus, from Greek "chartes")
which was a rolled-up sheet of paper containing both the bullet and the
gunpowder charge.  In order to load a musket, the soldier had to bite off the
end of the cartridge  to free the gunpowder which he then poured down the
barrel of the musket, after which he ramrodded the bullet (still in its
paper) down the barrel.  Eighteenth century battlefields were littered not
just with blood and gore but also with bits of cartridge paper.  A soldier
who could reliably perform the intricate, almost sleight-of-hand, process of
loading a muzzle-loading musket amidst the chaos, the blinding gunpowder
smoke, and the traumatic stress of the battlefield could easily have been
described as "hard-biting", which in some dialects would be rendered as
"hard-bitin' ", misrendered by non-combatants as "hard-bitten".

So long like a hot dog

     - Jim Landau