PM and "Barnaby" (UNCLASSIFIED)

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Jul 14 04:03:36 UTC 2009


You're right, Bill. I have a feeling in the back of my thinking cap
that there was also a slang or jargon term for this, like "getting a
hop." But I could be dealing with a false memory. I never did this,
myself, having a phobia against getting lost. European trains still
went to a union station in the center of town, in my day. So, I always
went by train to, e.g. Amsterdam. In theory, since I was stationed in
Berlin, I could have flown from Tempelhof AFB to Soesterberg(sp?) AFB
in Holland, then gone by some means to A'dam. But my phobia made that
impossible. Berlin to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Amsterdam, cab to my GI
hotel (In the day, there were GI hotels as well as GI bars. Oddly,
there were no GI hotels in Germany, no GI bars in Holland.). No way to
get lost.

-Wilson

On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 10:27 AM, Mullins, Bill
AMRDEC<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: PM and "Barnaby" (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
>> As is now true for
>> members of the military using Air Force planes (there is / was a term
>> for this, but I can't bring it to mind, at the moment) and for airline
>> employees, he could go anywhere for free by hooking up with a series
>> of trains headed in the right direction till he reached his
>> destination.
>>
>> -Wilson
>>
>
>
> I believe that a person who travels that way is flying "space available"
> -- that is, he could deadhead on the plane, so long as there was an
> empty seat in the direction he was going, and there wasn't someone of
> superior rank/priority who could bump him.
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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