assorted comments

Wed Apr 13 23:23:37 UTC 2011

On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 19:49:43 -0400
victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM> wrote

<q>In fact, "brown-bag lunch" has acquired a fairly recent association with lunch-time seminars. One interesting aspect is that conference "brown-bag lunches" often have a distinction with school brown-bag lunches in that the former is supplied to the participants by the organizers (sometimes free, sometimes buy-in).
</q>

At the place I worked 1984-85 we had "brown-bag lunches" meaning lunch-time seminars as often as once a week.  However, we had to bring our own lunches to the seminars.  I still have the slides for a seminar I gave:
"Lunchtime talk scheduled for 1/24/85"; unfortunately the slides do not contain the phrase "brown-bag".

I can cite an example a decade and a half earlier, but unfortunately I have no documentation and cannot give the date as more precisely than 1969-1972.  It was at the Pentagon, during those years of constant protests directed at the Pentagon about Vietnam (directed at the Pentagon for publicity, as the decision to stay in Vietnam was made by the President and seconded by Congress when it passed the necessary appropriations; for some reason nobody ever protested against Vietnam in front of the Capitol.  But I digress).  The cafeterias or maybe the snack bars at the Pentagon raised their prices and somehow word spread throughout the Pentagon that on a certain day everybody was to boycott the cafeterias/snack bars.  And on that day most everyone did, prompting a we-are-not-amused response from building management.

Unfortunately I have no recollection of whether the term "brown-bag" was used and I did not keep any written souvenirs.

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re: the j/gig is up:  I'm sure it is totally irrelevant, but circa 1800 in the Royal Navy (and probably the US Navy) the boat used by the captain when he left the ship was known as the "gig".  Hence when the captain returned the gig was hoisted up, i.e. "the gig was up".

Which reminds me:  when did the word "down" first come to mean "out of order, not operational"?  I met this term when I started working in computers in 1965, so it must have been around earlier.  To the best of my knowledge it started among computer people.  (The late George Flynn of the New England Science Fiction Association reported that where he worked the elevator was frequently out of service, reported by the ambiguous phrase "the elevator is down".)

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On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:53:59 +0000  (apparently he is writing from Greenwich England) Tom Zurinskas <truespel at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

<q>In the Atlantic City area long ago folks who brought their lunch to the shore were called shoobies ~shuebeez because it was often in a shoe box.
Basically meaning cheap customers.  The term may still be around for that.
Building of another casino has recommenced.  The economy is back.
</q>

I believe the term "shoobie" for visitors to the "Shore" (South Jersey term for the Atlantic seashore area) is still around, although I haven't encountered it in a while.  But then I don't have much contact with tourists.  As far as I know, one can be a shoobie without bringing one's lunch from home or while staying for several days.

I do not know if the shoe-box etymology be correct---it sounds like a guess to me.

I've long been of the opinion that too many casinos have been built in Atlantic City (look at the number that have gone through bankruptcy) and the fact that a new casino is being built merely means that one was born every minute.

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On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 21:32:06 -0400
Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>  wrote:

<q>According to Simon van Booy, ed, _Why Do We Fight?_ (N.Y.: Harper Perennial,2010), <snip> the same work improbably attributes the following to George Bernard Shaw (as
do thousands of websites): "I learned long ago, never wrestle with a pig; you get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it."</q>

This reminds me of a story attributed to Katherine Parr who told it to her husband.  It seems that a man got money from a king on the promise to teach a horse to sing within a year.  When asked about what would happen at the end of the year, "I might die, or the king might die, or the horse might die, or who knows?  Maybe the horse will learn to sing."

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On Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:20:30 -0400 victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

<q>
"lynching" has a long and diverse history, starting with Judge Lynch locking up Royalists during the Revolutionary War. If there were any "lynchings" of blacks between 1775 and 1860, they would have been isolated and would not qualify as a social phenomenon. "Lynching" became associated with black victims
only during or shortly after the Civil War.</q>

Perhaps.  But J. C. Furnas _Goodbye to Uncle Tom_ New York: William Sloane Associates, 1956, no ISBN page 134
"Theoretically all whites did rotating service in the patrol, which was often tied into the militia system.  Actually the well-to-do usually shirked and paid nominal fines.  In many places this left the overseers as backbone of patrolling.  Elsewhere, the country hired a regular patrol from among poor whites or small farmers, thus giving young men from those strata a special taste for abusing [N-word plural] which until recently remianed lively in Southern lynch mobs.  These ill-disciplined parties of young fellows organized under community sanction, often pasing the bottle freely while on their rounds, may well have been the nucleus suggestion for the Ku Klux Klan of post bellum renown.  Well before the Civil War th paddy rollers bulked large in slave folklore.  Fractious children were threatened with them.  Ole Massa was mad at Sluefoot Tom so he gin him a pass and tole him he could go to town, but Tom he couldn't read and the paddy rollers cotch him and they lookat his pa!
 ss, and it say, 'Give this [N-word] hell,' so they gin him hell right there on the big road.</q>

    - James A. Landau

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