Assorted comments

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated >  Fri, 26 Nov 2004 13:43:27 -0500,  "Douglas G. Wilson" <
> douglas at NB.NET> quotes:
>
> From N'archive:
> _Colorado Springs Gazette_, 2 March 1902: p. 17:>
>
> [A humorous poem about the legislature, with interpolated commentary]
>
> <<.... / For below the people's elect were spread. / Some were statesmen,
> in wisdom born and bred, / While some were muggled goofs with necks of red.
> /

and in a later message suggests "muggled" is a (deliberate?) misrendering of
"muddled".

That suggestion makes sense, as the phrase would then read "muddled doofs"
which could be a shortening of "muddled doofuses".  I vaguely recall a
discussion on the word "doofus" in ADS-L, but I don't recall how far back that word was
citated.

On to other short comments:

Douglas Wilson also writes
> The supposed etymon of
> "honky" sometimes given as "honq" = "pink" appears as "xonxa" = "red". Of
> course it may be that Wolof was a little different a few hundred years ago

"honq" and "xonxa" look to be the same word, as trascribed by two observers
with different transliteration conventions, particularly if the final "a" on
"xonxa" is a grammatical inflection or agglutination.  Compare the
transliterations "Peiping" (or was it "Peking") and "Beijing".  Alternatively "honq" and
"xonxa" are variations on the same root which means "of a reddish color" as
reported by observers with different transliteration conventions and different
opinions as to the importance of including a variant meaning "pink".

--------------------------------------------------------
Two neologisms I found this past week:

In a negative review of "Alexander", the reviewer said the movie was a
"shleppic".
This I suspect is a nonce coinage.


Sally Friedman "The Plague of the Sexless Marriage" _Inside_ (ISSN 0199-7602,
published by Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia) Winter 2004, no
Volume/number given, page 61 bottom of column 1:

<begin quote>
In a culture saturated with the sexual---in a world in which sexual
liberation is presumably universal---m illions of American couples are living like
celibate monks.  There's even a name for these couples: "DINS."  Double Income, No
Sex
<end quote>

"DINS" may be a derivative of "DINK"- "Dual Income No Kids" which I ran
across a few years ago.

Gordon Welchman _The Hut Six Story_ (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982, ISBN
-0-07-069180-0) page 78 discusses the word "crib" and in a footnote gives the
following unattributed quote:
"And they found in his palms...what is common in palms, namely dates"

Anyone familiar with this proverb(?)? It certainly appears to be a parody of
a line in Bret Harte's poem "Plain Language from Truthful James"

        - Jim Landau