OT: Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism

[Victor Steinbok]

  Fair correction. There is an additional meaning, in Russian, of
course, based on the derivation--it is the same expression that is
occasionally used when someone confuses the right and the left, giving
direct credence to the story.

I exaggerated the "bales", of course, but "wisps" sounds like a lot less
than the version I heard. Perhaps "handful" or "bunch"--informal
measures are so hard with long thin objects.

     VS-)

On 7/26/2010 4:27 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> This supposedly also happened during the American Civil War, though wisps of
> hay and straw were allegedly used rather than hard-to-manage "bales."
>
> JL
>
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society<ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: OT:  Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>   Russian lore has it that, when Peter I (the Great, if you wish) wanted
>> to modernize the Russian military training, essentially following the
>> "Prussian method", his drill sergeants tied bales of hay to one leg and
>> straw to the other, thereby commanding the raw recruits to turn toward
>> hay or straw. This anecdote (likely apocryphal) is often used as folk
>> etymology for the Russian proverbial "hay-straw" ([seno-soloma]) that is
>> used in the same sense as "six of one, half a dozen of the other".
>>
>>      VS-)
>>
>> On 7/26/2010 8:43 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>> At 7/26/2010 05:52 AM, Victor Steinbok wrote [Quoting the WSJ]:
>>>>> Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than
>>>>> left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
>>> The "wild Irish," when recruited into the British army, rather than
>>> left or right would be commanded to turn toward bread or
>>> cheese.  Having been given those two staples of the contemporary diet
>>> for their respective pockets.  According to John Dunton, circa 1696,
>>> while temporarily resident in Massachusetts..  Who would probably
>>> have agreed that they had lesser spatial orientation than the
>>> indigenous tribes.
>>>
>>> Joel
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>
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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