Almost every aspect of war spawns new words, and, over time, many of them slip into everyday use. Sometimes, they even become downright peaceful in the process. For instance, triumph used to mean a victory ceremony for Roman conquerors, and skedaddle signified retreat during the Civil War. And if you're ever had a snafu ("Situation Normal: All F'd Up"), then you owe a debt to the WWI soldiers who invented the acronym to describe the trenches. With each passing conflict, the list of pacified war words gets longer and longer. Undermine: If your colleagues constantly undermine you, just be glad they aren't doing so in the traditional sense. Undermine, a word that dates back to the 14th century, was once a military term for digging a clandestine passage under a building to sneak up on the enemy. The term quickly turned metaphorical, but in Shakespeare's day, its literal meaning was still commonly known. He even played with it in All's Well That Ends Well, when the maiden Helena asks a soldier if there's a way to safeguard her virginity. He replies, "There is none: man, sitting down before you, will undermine you, and blow you up." Fleabag: Starting in the 1830s, a fleabag was a soldier's bed. Although the word fleabag now seems wedded to hotel, it can be applied more broadly, as in the 1958 example from the Oxford English Dictionary, "God, how I hated Paris! Paris was one big flea-bag." Basket case: Today, a basket case is simply a neurotic person, but during WWI, it meant a living soldier who had lost all his limbs and was brought home in a basket. The United States military denies that real baskets were ever used to carry soldiers. Regardless, the original meaning of the word is still gruesome. Flak: Celebrities catch a lot of flak for idiotic behavior, but contemporary flak isn't what it used to be. When the term originated in the 1930s, it was short for fliegerabwehrkanome, the German word for anti-aircraft guns. After a generation, the meaning shifted so that catching flak now means absorbing criticism instead of cannon fire. Gung ho: You may be gung ho about collecting stamps, playing solitaire, or other individual pursuits, but originally, the term was more applicable to teams. The U.S. Marine first used it as a slogan during World War II, after General Evans Carlson adapted the Chinese kung ho, which means "work in harmony." While the teamwork element of the definition has faded, the enthusiasm bit has certainly remained. Fobbit, hillbilly armor, and IED: The war in Iraq is contributing its own new expressions. A popular word on the rise is fobbit, a term that combines FOB (forward operating base) with hobbit. The word is a derogatory term for soldiers who stay too close to base and help themselves to three square meals a day. Another expression gaining steam is hillbilly armor, a term for the scraps used to bulletproof vehicles. Some words have already entered civilian life. IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, refer to the homemade bombs created by terrorists and insurgents. A recent GQ article about inappropriate office-party behavior used it like this: "The workplace minefield is hard enough to negotiate without planting your own IEDs." So, what are the chances any of these new words will stick around? Who knows? The only thing that's certain is that as long as there are new wars, new words will crop up, too. |
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The article above, written by Mark Peters, appeared in the Scatterbrained section of the May - June 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today! |
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Alex Santoso's Blog Posts
Do you remember the insanely great Frozen Grand Central prank?
Well, Charlie Todd of Improv Everywhere, the guy that did it, replicated this stunt at a suburban Taco Bell Grand Opening. The facial expressions of the unsuspecting lunchtime crowd when 40 performers just froze mid-slurp and mid-bit are pure gold!
Check out the video clip:Eminence Orchestra wants to open up classical music to new listeners, especially younger people who think that a symphony is either a milk chocolate bar or music for old people. So they don't play Bach or Beethoven - rather, they composed and play music straight out of video games!
If young people won't come to the orchestra, then Eminence Orchestra will bring music to them ... through YouTube. I'll skip the oft-played Super Mario Bros. theme song (though it's good) - rather, let's listen to something from ...
Metal Gear Solid [YouTube Link]
... or from a year ago:
Final Fantasy VII (One Winged Angel) [YouTube Link]
Link: Eminence Orchestra website | YouTube Profile - Thanks Noel!
Previously on Neatorama: 10 Operas You Didn't Know You Already Like
Ah, South Korea: a major economic powerhouse of Asia, world leader in technology and a .... superstitious country?
Here's a particularly strange urban legend of "Fan death" where an electric fan, if left running overnight in a closed room, can cause death of those inside. The urband legend is so pervasive in South Korea that manufacturers had to equip fans with a timer switch that turns them off after a certain period of time!
Can an electric fan cause harm to its user? The Korean Consumer Protection Board once stated:
"If bodies are exposed to electric fans or air conditioners for too long, it causes bodies to lose water and [causes] hypothermia. If directly in contact with [air current from] a fan, this could lead to death from [the] increase of carbon dioxide saturation concentration and decrease of oxygen concentration. The risks are higher for the elderly and patients with respiratory problems. From 2003 [to] 2005, a total of 20 cases were reported through the CISS involving asphyxiations caused by leaving electric fans and air conditioners on while sleeping. To prevent asphyxiation, timers should be set, wind direction should be rotated and doors should be left open."
Link - Thanks Stephanie D!
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when Norfolk civil commissioner performed a wedding ceremony for the young couple ... except that later on they found out the bride actually wasn't a woman!
"Holy crap," Al Coward recalled thinking in Friday's paper. "They were very good, obviously. They fooled a lot of people."
Antonio Blount, 31, and Justin "Just Call Me Justine" McCain, 18, fooled Coward and the Newport News Circuit Court clerk who issued the marriage license March 24 for the same-day ceremony.
McCain (a.k.a.: the bride) looked every inch a lady, clerk Rex Davis said later, raising no suspicions he was "anything but a woman."
If McCain hadn't returned to the clerk's office two weeks ago to try to change his name legally, the bogus marriage might never have been outed.
Now, it seems like the two are in a whole bunch of trouble: http://www.dailypress.com/dp-local_tamara_0528may28,0,4213681.column
Jenna Wortham has compiled a pretty neat gallery of 13 best robot love stories, from Wall-E to Weird Science, for Wired Magazine. Who remembers this from Blade Runner:
Bounty hunter Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) falls hard for a genetically engineered clone called Rachel in Ridley Scott's 1982 cyberpunk thriller. Although Deckard's primary mission is to assassinate rogue "replicants," he finds the charms of an experimental model (Sean Young) difficult to resist.
RoboLove Meter Reading — 5/5: Since all signs indicate that replicant assassin Deckard was likely a clone, too, Blade Runner gets points for cyborg-on-cyborg romance.
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/multimedia/2008/06/robot_love_stories - Thanks JennaW!
Hello Neatoramans! I've just finished reading a novel and have got a question for you: what books would you recommend for summer reading?
I'm kind of a light reader, mind you - so no treatises for me. My favorite books have been easy-to-read thriller novels by Frederick Forsyth, the usual NY Times Best Sellers fare like those by Douglas Preston and Lincoln
Child, and so on.
I've got a book on order (from the library - yes, that way it's free!), the latest one by Lee Child called Nothing to Lose, but I'm always interested in learning about new authors.
What would you recommend and why? Thank you!
Woohoo! It's time for our top 5 video clip picks from VideoSift - today, we've got some great ones!
Girl Spins on Escalator | |
How to Distract Your Employees | |
Horde of Puppies Chase Boy | |
Why Women Hate Sports The ending will getcha (No, I won't give it away). Link | |
| Chinese Farmer Makes Home-made Airplane Do you remember those old magazine ads selling a kit to make a lawnmower helicopter? Well this is something like that: a farmer in rural China decided to make his own airplane ... and shot a video of himself flying the deathtrap: Link |
For more the web's most interesting videos, check out: VideoSift.
The notion of an arranged marriage seems so foreign to the Western world that it evokes an image of a time long, long ago - but the tradition is alive and well in certain parts of the world.
In India, arranged marriages take place alongside "love marriages" - and both seem to be acceptable to society there.
Swati Pandey of the LA Times recounts her experience attending one such arranged marriages, of her cousin Garima to a man she had just met:
LinkAll of it -- the years spent selecting a suitor, the final minutes of anticipation, the newness of the couple, a man and woman not shaped by former loves and heartbreaks -- was romantic in a way I hadn't expected. Growing up in America for all my 25 years, I'd long ago given up on the tradition, but by midnight, I had started to wonder.
What I never realized, as a googly-eyed adolescent who had imagined eloping with a George Clooney type, was that "love marriage," as many Indians call it, is the aberration.
Arranged marriages are common in countries and cultures that came belatedly to Romanticism and rock 'n' roll and whatever else gave rise to what we call youth. It's difficult to quantify them because the term is such a broad one -- encompassing a childhood betrothal and a parent's mere suggestion of a vetted match.
We've posted a video post on contact juggling before, but these performances by Okotanpe and Mister Om are pretty trippy!
See how Okotanpe makes the ball seem to float in place ...
[YouTube Link] - Thanks Justin!
... and Mister Om contact juggling a ball inside a giant inflatable ball ...
Mister Om contact juggling [YouTube Link]
We all know that the real estate market is really bad right now, but apparently it's also very difficult time for finding love.
So, single mom and real estate agent Devon Traboscia came upon a brilliant (or brilliantly crazy) idea of selling her house ... and herself on eBay and Craigslist:
In the ad, Traboscia writes:
"If you want to live the never ending dream and experience the real love, life and the romance you have always felt was a fairytale then this is the vibrant outstanding woman of your dreams! To sweep this European Loving Lady off her feet send in your application right now."
She goes on to say that her four bedroom, 2,000 square-foot home, that will be included in the deal, has "neutral colors, Berber carpet, and upgraded tile".
Now that is the way to travel in style! The guy must've really love his Volkswagen Beetle to create a custom trailer modeled after the car ...
Found at Daily Motorcycle News
Photo: rent-a-moose
Jowling (also known as slap n' flap) is a fun portrait photography where you get your subject to relax their facial muscle completely and then shake their head from side to side. Then you snap away (hopefully one of the pics will come out perfectly silly!)
Link | Why, there's a website specifically for jowlers ("where distortion is cause for celebration") - via Didn't You Hear?
After 200 years of debate, the Supreme Court has finally ruled that the Second Amendment means that individual Americans - as opposed to state militias - have a constitutional right to own guns (at least in their homes).
In a tight 5-4 decision, Justice Antonin Scalia stated:
"Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security and where gun violence is a serious problem," Scalia wrote. "That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct." [...]
"The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns," Scalia wrote. "But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home."
Link | Previously on Neatorama: US Supreme Court to Review Right to Bear Arms
Do you agree with the ruling?
Throughout most of medical history, doctors thought that itch was a mild form of pain - then in 1987, scientists found out that it's a completely separate form of sensation. Still, itching can be extremely aggravating, especially if the feeling won't quit.
Here's a fascinating though a bit long article at the New Yorker by Atul Gawande about itching. It talks about a woman called "M." who suffered a persistent scalp itch that, of course, led to constant scratching, and a man called "H." who suffered from itching and pain in his arm after a spinal cord surgery.
“Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any,” Montaigne wrote. “But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.” For M., certainly, it did: the itching was so torturous, and the area so numb, that her scratching began to go through the skin. At a later office visit, her doctor found a silver-dollar-size patch of scalp where skin had been replaced by scab. M. tried bandaging her head, wearing caps to bed. But her fingernails would always find a way to her flesh, especially while she slept.
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.’s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.
(Okay, that may be a stretch - but the rest of the article is very good)
Link (Photo: Gerald Slota) - via Ectoplasmosis