Dedicated to:
     William of Ockham, born in the village of Ockham in Surrey, England about 1285, was a Franciscan monk but was also one of the most influential writers and philosophers of the 14th century and a controversial theologian.
       William of Ockham wrote extensively and at some point postulated a basic axiom of logic that simply said that given any possible explanation or solution to any question or problem the answer is usually the simplest and usually the most obvious. He was very popular among the people but the church was concerned that his rationalist philosophy was in conflict with keeping with the more irrational and emotion driven thinking of the Roman Catholic Church. His teachings had also aroused the attention of Pope John XXII, who summoned him to the papal court in Avignion (France) in 1324. Ockham and two other monks eventually had to flee and seek the protection of Emperor Louis IV, the Bavarian.
        They followed the emperor to Munich (Germany) in 1330, where Ockham wrote fervently against the papacy in a series of treatises on papal power and civil sovereignty. The medieval rule of parsimony, or principle of economy of thought, frequently used by Ockham, came to be known as Occam’s razor. Occam's razor helps us to "shave off" those concepts, variables or constructs that are not really needed. The rule, which said that a large number of possibilities should not be assumed without necessity.
       Ockham created this paradigm or model of the best way reach a conclusion as to what happened without getting bogged down with the infinite myriad possibilities of what could possibly have happened. 

       I endeavor always to remember Occam’s razor and the
 KISS Rule. Keep It Simple Stupid.

"Don't Kick the Bucket in My Neck of the Woods" is 
a mostly humorous but sometimes serious look at 
the way we use and misuse the common expressions, words, and idioms of the English language. It is one 
thing to use poetic or artistic license in expressing 
oneself but clearly some people are flagrant abusers 
that need to have their license revoked. After all, language's number one purpose whether spoken or written is to convey a clear message to others. So the communication is "the thing" and for me clear understanding is the "the ultimate thing".    
    We now know that almost all higher animals have
some form of auditory communications which even if
just an excited utterance to warn of an approaching predator is important to the protect the others in the group. Even the lowly insects, especially the "social insects", termites, ants and bees have a highly sophisticated form of communication using both body language and sound. When a bee returns returns to the hive and has been successful in locating a new source of flowers, pollen, and honey it enters the nest and begins to waggle it’s abdomen back and forth at the same angle that the other bees will use as a guide when exiting the entrance of the hive to forage for the same field of flowers. At the same time it is waggling it buzzes at a specific frequency to indicate the distance from the hive. There is surely even more to their vocabulary than entomologists have yet to discern.  
     Chickens have a vocabulary of at least 30 phrases. In the case of chickens, nationality seems to make no difference at all. "Ga-ga-GAAK, ga-ga-GAAK" means the same thing to a Russian Orloff rooster, an Italian Leghorn, a Cornish cock or a New Hampshire Red. At the sound of this particular cackling, prudent poultry the world over get the same message: "Watch out! Danger!". Other sounds tell their barnyard sisters and brothers to “get out of my space”, or “stay away from my eggs”, etc.  
      Every herd of cattle, bison, and deer, every pod of whale or dolphin, each pride of lions, flock of birds, pack of wolves, and band of horses possess this ability. But the real beauty of auditory communications is that they can go around corners and traverse long distances. Even when one animal is not in direct view of the other, it can get the message out. Man takes this even further by producing the “written word” which traverses not just distance but time. But I will get back to that in a moment.  
     Recently while flipping thru the many cable stations on the TV I found myself watching a documentary on the Animal Planet station. In this particular documentary zoologists set up cameras alongside a narrow river in a rain forest in New Guinea, and where they set up their cameras they were able to record three different species of monkeys that all co-existed in the same small area. But each group lived on a different level. One group of monkeys was better adapted to live on the ground level, while another group was better suited to live in the very tops of the very high rain forest and the last group was very happy and content in the middle level. The individuals were probably capable of interbreeding amongst the other groups but they didn’t because it would destroy the integrity of the years of adaptation to certain skill sets for each group.
      Since the cameras ran constantly the scientist were able, after awhile, to discern common vocalizations that all three groups universally understood. For instance in the narrow river below them there were crocodiles that occasionally would snap up one of the errant baby monkeys that had failed to paid attention to what it’s elders tried to teach them. All the monkeys knew of this danger so whenever any monkey spotted a “croc” in the area it would let out with this particular cry and all the monkeys would flee, usually upwards. This was obviously beneficial to all the monkeys. But it also raised a different kind of a problem.  
         One day one of the monkeys on the ground found some large edible fruit floating in the stream so before the others discovered what it found it let out with the “croc warning yelp” and all the monkeys ran for the treetops. All but one of them, of course, because he was busy with some large morsels of tasty fruit which he devoured, by himself.  
       Now how does that story relate to humans. I think you can figure it out. Whether deliberately contrived or subconsciously “accidental” or just sloppy, lazy, we sometimes distort original meanings and if left unnoticed the words we speak begin to lose their integrity and our ability to understand the truth suffers. 
       In one of many of the well preserved cave dwellings in France a Neanderthal man over 30,000 years ago drew upon the wall a picture of a man and a wooly “bison-like” creature. It would seem to be a narrative because as the bison appears to charges forward the hunter is leaning back as though he is falling, and his spear is not in his hands but on the ground. It appears as though the bison is about to trample the man to death. The artist was no Leonardo De Vinci but you can clearly see his spear lying on the ground and not in his hand.  
 
We don’t  know whether the picture was an event that occurred to one of his fellow tribesman or the artist, himself, (formerly known as Gorgo). Or he might have been thinking abstractly into the future about what could possibly be his own demise. Then again maybe it was just one of those warning signs that are often put up for as a warning sign like:  

                                                   NO
                                             SMOKING

                                                     or

                                            
                                                   NO  
                                         BULLSHITTING
                                               ALLOWED

                                                     or

                                          DON'T STAND 
                                          IN FRONT OF A 
                                       CHARGING BISON       
 

            Either way primitive man was slowly making the transition from verbalizing his thoughts to inscribing them.  
      This same cave artist no doubt might have showed a younger man how to create a spear and arrowheads by striking certain types of rocks together to form shards and in the process he might have pointed to the arrowhead they had just produced and said to his young protégé "sharp like tooth" as he pointed to his own incisor.  
     Thus the literary tool called the analogy was born and the metaphor soon followed. But alas, on the heels of these wonderful devices the cliché was born and not far behind, followed up by it's nearest cousin the “hackneyed cliché”.  
      Analogies and metaphors offer some relief from the hum drum kind of a soulless explanation that is usually reserved for a text book but if you keep misusing these  
expressions pretty soon nobody knows what in the hell you are talking about. Maybe not even youself, the speaker. Worse yet the error is now being repeated by others. 
         Well, that’s where this book comes in. I call it "literary  forensics" and like Sherlock Holmes I attempt to ferret out thru research, reading and reasoning the original meaning of what these expressions once were and should still be.  
        I hope that people who read this book will see it as a humorous look at the way we communicate and sometimes mis-communicate. The expressions themselves are rich with the colorful "back stories" of our cultural histories, our sometimes ancient and sometimes more recent past. They reflect our culture, our soul, our art and our collective intellect. I hope you will have as much fun learning about them as I did researching them.   

                    Lenny Marsh (Lenny Marsh)     

1) SON OF A GUN - While I was in Boston a few years I toured the world’s largest commissioned wooden battleship, the USS Constitution. The female Navy ensign that was giving the tour took us below to show us the lower gun deck. 

  At one point she explained how these canons we saw on the upper and lower deck could have been as easily been used in a fort or moved around on a battlefield but as soon as they were installed on ships they were called "guns". Thus they had what is called the upper and lower gun decks. At one point she explained that the U.S. Navy was a lot different during the War of 1812 against Great Britain. There were indentured servants, 12 year old boys, called powder monkeys, sold into more or less servitude by there parents and used to load the guns but women also were sometimes on board. The most romantic, or at least the most private place, on the ship apparently was the lower gun deck between the large canons (excuse me . . . guns}. If the women were to become pregnant and deliver a baby aboard ship either the father was not known or didn't want to be known. Either way an additional "soul" on board ship was one of those things that the captain would surely have been required by regulations to be recorded in the ship's log just as the cargo was recorded in the ship’s "manifest". If the child’s lineage was either not known or no one wanted to admit to it, it was recorded as a "son of a gun". So in effect a "son of a gun" is really a euphemism for calling someone a bastard.

2) DON'T LOOK A GIFT HORSE IN THE MOUTH - I recently watched the 1960 Stanley Kubrick movie about the Roman gladiator/slave revolt of 100 BC called "Spartacus" and was reminded of where this gem of a phrase came from. At the very beginning of the movie the owner of the gladiatorial training school forces the slave, Spartacus, to open his mouth to inspect his teeth. Literally thousands of years before Christ and up until the present time if you were buying a horse, a camel, or a slave opening the mouth and examining the teeth was a good way to determine the general health of the animal. This is where my Dad steps in to upgrade this explanation. My Dad is a retired mechanical engineer but before WW II and college he was a Kansas farm boy and he emailed to tell me that you can also tell the age of a horse by the length of their teeth. This would also explain the expression referring to someone's age by saying that they were:

3) A LITTLE LONG IN THE TOOTH.

I guess common sense would tell you that it would be in poor taste to open the mouth to check the health and value of a horse that had just been given to you for free. What's wrong with somebody like that? Are they afraid they will get a:

4) A PIG IN A POKE - my cousin Joanie gave this one to me. She said to me that: "Most of the expressions I use come from my Mom's side of the family, very southern. Did you ever hear this one . . . Never buy a "pig in a poke"! Years ago, farmers brought their young pigs to market in burlap bags. They could easily tie up the big Mama or Daddy pig in their truck but the younger ones were a problem so they put them in bags. Buyers had sticks that they used to poke at the pig in the bag to determine its size. If they were smart they would also demand to see the pig, but an unwise buyer might buy "sight unseen" and never know until arriving home exactly what they had. Southerners seldom used the term "burlap bag", all of these bags were called croker sacks. But the ones used for pigs going to market were called "poke sacks". Now you know why just poking pigs with a stick before making a purchase is a bad idea. Caveat emptor.

5) PORT AND STARBOARD - These terms were originally nautical but even as late as WWII Navy airplane pilots also referred to left and right of their aircraft as port and starboard. The terms date back to the Vikings (Circa 600-1200 A.D). The Viking ships had their rudder secured not in the 

center but on the right side of the ship and so of necessity when they pulled up to a dock or shoreline it was always safer to dock to the left side of the ship so as not to damage the all important rudder. So the left side became the port side of the ship and the right side was the stear board or the starboard side.

6) EIGHTY SIX IT - This term refers to throwing something in the ocean to get rid of it and it goes back to the roaring 20's and prohibition. In New York City many speakeasies sprang up and one such club called the ??? that was just south of the famous Cotton Club was located at 86 S. Delaware Avenue. The bartender of this establishment had all his liquor bottles lined up behind the bar against the mirror and whenever the federal agents knocked on the front door all the bartender had to do was pull a lever and all the bottles dropped from their perch, behind the wall and crashed below in a concrete basin. He just turned on a water faucet and all the real evidence, the liquor, was quickly washed from the broken bottles into the city's drainage system, which went to the East River, and out to the ocean. As the word speakeasy implies everything was understood with a nod and a wink and the term "86 it", the clubs address, entered the American lexicon.

7) WINDFALL - In modern times, the term has come to be associated with finances, referring to an unexpected increase or surplus (e.g., a "windfall profit") and it has become disassociated from its original agricultural meaning.
     Quite literally a windfall was an agricultural term and refers to fruit and nuts that are removed from the tree by nature - a strong wind that blows them to the ground, where they can be easily harvested if discovered before they become overripe or insect-infested. Thus the dictionary says a windfall is; (1) fruit blown down, (2) an unexpected legacy or advantage.

8) HYSTERIA - or hysterical both derive their original meaning from the Greek word hystera which means uterus. I remember from studying Respiratory Therapy in college in my medical terminology class that a hysterectomy was the removal of the uterus. But the full explanation for this word goes back to my high
school days. At that time I was reading some esoterica "The Original Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud."

Sigmund Freud is recognized as the founding father of modern psychiatry and we still use a lot of his terms today, "Oedipus Complex," the id, the ego, super ego, "anal retentive" (we usually refer to someone as just being "anal,") Freudian slip, "hysteria" and more. Freud did most of his work at age 50 at the turn of the century in Vienna Austria at what was then the end of a very "prudish," sexually and socially repressive point in time called the Victorian era. Named after the Queen Victoria,
the reigning monarch of England. Since money is often the matter Freud found a lot of it in treating upper-class society women who suffered from a frenzied neurotic condition that doctors at the time named "hysteria." The reason the term "hysteria" came to be was because many of the women who suffered from this condition become miraculously better after having a hysterectomy or passing thru menopause. "Hysteria" was a medical psychological term at the time but eventually fell out of usage as psychology and became the word with the definition we use today. A little trivia. Most hysterectomies are usually a combination of the removal of fallopian tubes - a salpingectomy, and the removal of the ovaries, an oophorectomy, and a hysterectomy. So in fact most hysterectomies are actually hysterosalpingoophorectomies. Try saying that 10 times real fast.

9) A DOUBTING THOMAS - The New Testament of the Bible tells us that Thomas was the last of Christ's 12 disciples that would believe that Christ had actually risen from the grave. Thomas wanted to touch the wounds before he would believe.

10) What is BAITED BREATH - and would you kiss anybody whose breath smelled like it was baited with let’s say sardines. Actually I don't think that is what baited breath is or even the spelling of baited. If you find out please let me know.

GEEK - Bill Gates is proof positive that what the Bible said is true that "the geek shall inherit the earth".

11) THE JOHN – This is one of those words where the euphemism is not a literary tool that will make you sound more erudite but is a more a discrete way for you to say that "nature is calling" or "I need to pinch a loaf" or "I’ll be in the office doing some paperwork" since "no job is finished until the paperwork is done". Sir John Harrington, an English nobleman, godson to Queen Elizabeth was an accomplished inventor and in 1596 he designed the first toilet for his godmother. Unfortunately his peers ridiculed him for this "absurd device" and you might say his career "went down the toilet". Apparently his peers were quite content with their chamber pots and ditches. He never built another one but him and his godmother would never be without their "necessary" as they liked to call it. Another 200 years passed before Alexander Cummings would reinvent the "water closet (toilet) and others soon followed. The device eventually became known by the original inventers name as the "john".

12) THE CRAPPER - Yes, this is no joke, the man, Thomas Crapper, was born in September 1836 and had a successful career in the plumbing industry in England from 1861 (Civil War era) to 1904.
No, Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet but as the owner of a plumbing business he held nine patents, four for improvements to drains, three for water closets (toilets), one for manhole covers and the last for pipe joints.

 Every patent application for plumbing related products filed by Crapper made it through the process, and actual patents were granted. He operated two of the three Crapper plumbing shops in his lifetime, but left the business three years before the final and most famous facility on Kings Road in London. When Crapper retired from active business in 1904, he sold his shop to two partners who, with help from others, operated the company under the Crapper name until its closing in 1966.
Crapper did serve as the royal sanitary engineer for many members England's royalty. In World War I the doughboys passing through England brought together Crapper's name and the toilet. They saw the words T. Crapper-Chelsea printed on the tanks and coined the slang "crapper" meaning toilet.
While Crapper may not be the inventor of the product he is most often associated with, his contribution to England's plumbing history is significant. And the man's legendary name lives on.

13) SOUTHPAW - A friend told me that a left-handed pitcher was called a southpaw because ballparks always face the same direction and the pitcher's arm would be toward the south. It sounded right to me but I needed more proof to put it in the book. My website for my auto repair shop (www.lennysvw.com) drew a long distance call from a customer in San Francisco that day on a different matter so I asked him if he knew which way the pitcher threw in San Francisco's Candlestick Park. He told me toward the west. Later I asked a parts vendor who had been to our local team’s park, the Florida Marlins, and he confirmed the same set up but he said the word southpaw referred to boxers only. "But" I contested "the boxer is never necessarily facing any compass direction like the ballpark." Foul words of disagreement quickly followed . . . but I still buy parts from him.
     I got a picture on the internet of Fenway Park (below) and sure enough I could see the afternoon shadow was coming from the left.

(The Diagram below is where I saw my first Major League game in my boyhood, (Circa 1960) at Wrigley Field in Chicago, home of the Cubs)
     

     I thought to myself how outfielders have those special flip-down sunglasses because the sun gets in their eyes but I never heard of a batter "whiffing" because the sun got in his eyes. I would make sense that the sun never got in their eyes because were facing toward the east. Eventually I found the official Major League Rules and they actually require this approximate compass layout of the fields for all Major League ballparks and I later learned that a sports announcer in Chicago gets credit for coining the term in 1912.

SNAFU – WW II acronym - Situation Normal, All F**ked Up.
FUBAR – WW II acronym - F**ked Up Beyond All Recognition.
OUT IN THE BOONDOCKS

14) A JACK OF ALL TRADES A MASTER OF NONE -
     The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th Edition) tells us that a jack is a "NOUN: 2a. One who does odd or heavy jobs; a laborer. One who works in a specified manual trade. Often used in combination: a lumberjack; a steeplejack. c. A Jack is a sailor; a tar. A deck of cards shows the figure of a servant or soldier and is ranked below a queen. Also called a knave." The guild system that started in the middle ages required anyone in the trades, carpentry, metal smith, shoemaker, etc would start as a helper, or a jack and then graduate to journeyman status and eventually become a "master craftsmen" of that particular trade. So today’s "handyman" might be called "A Jack of all trades but a master of none".

15) BELLA DONNA - Literally means beautiful lady in Italian. Bella Donna is an extract from a plant that grows wild in Europe and the United States called deadly nightshade and is poisonous and fatal in large enough quantities and is the same poison used in Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet". So why is it called "beautiful lady"? In smaller quantities it has medicinal purposes and before modern medicine it was used for many other purposes .A liquid extract from the plant dropped into the eyes will cause the pupils to dilate or enlarge.
     Beyond medical uses why would someone want to dilate their eyes. Here's why. Some forty years ago scientists conducted studies of human behavior by showing pictures to male and female subjects and asking the subjects which picture of a person of the opposite sex looked more appealing, attractive or "turned on". Half of the photos of the faces were touched up so that the pupils of the people pictured appeared dilated. Even though the subjects were not consciously aware of it they consistently picked the pictures of subjects whose eyes appeared dilated over the same pictures when the eyes were not dilated. This is the same reason professional poker players wear sunglasses because you can actually see the pupils of your opponents eyes enlarge at the same moment they have realized that they have just been dealt is a winning hand. Back to the beautiful lady.

        In "days of yore" (which means  I don't know exactly when) if rouge or lipstick were not available for women to make themselves attractive to the opposite sex it could always be done the old fashioned way by pinching the lips and cheeks to make them red. In the 1960's 2 scientists Masters and Johnson did their famous study called "Human Sexual Response" and one of the things they discovered, because they filmed people doing it, was that during sexual arousal and intercourse certain parts of the body, the face, the lips, the cheeks, the nipples and genitalia became flush and red with blood. Today we have a drug that causes these same areas to become flush with blood flow and it is called Viagra. Back to the "beautiful lady". OK, she has the pink lips and cheeks so now add a couple of drops of the extract of deadly nightshade to dilate the eyes and you have a women who has the appearance that she is aroused and thus more attractive to men. She is a "bella donna" or beautiful lady. So this is what the people of the 15th century Italian royal court called this plant bella donna and the moniker stuck.

Chantilly lace and a perty face,
And a pony tail hangin' down,
A wiggle in the walk and giggle in the talk,
Lord makes the world go round round round,
There ain't nothin' in the world like a big eyed girl,
To make me act so funny, make me spend my money,
Make me feel real loose like a long necked goose,
Oh baby that’s what I like.

                                                 "the Big Bopper"

16) LOCK STOCK AND BARREL – These are the three main parts of a standard rifle thus the sum of the parts equaling the whole thing or in other words:

THE WHOLE KIT AND CABOODLE. What in the hell is The Whole Kit and Caboodle. Email me if you know the answer ‘cause I sure don't. Just last week I found out that caboodle is spelled with a C and not a K. It actually is some kind of slang word or colloquialism.

 17) LIMELIGHT – It seems everyone wants to be in the limelight. Given the ubiquitous nature of the TV, radio and print media and the ability to turn even temporary fame into cash this is not too surprising. It gets worse than that though. Even infamy can be turned into a meal ticket if you were a part of something very bad. There seems to be no loss of tabloids and media panderers that will supply money to people with salacious notoriety and underhanded exposure of other peoples lives.
Now what was I talking about? . . . Oh, that’s right . . . limelight. Some of the first lights ever used on theatre stages and music halls were what was called "limelight" because they were fueled partially by calcium carbonate which is the chemical name for lime. The light itself was devised by a Scottish engineer named Robert Hare in 1825 and enjoyed widespread use in theatres around the world in the 1860s and 1870s. Lime lights were used to highlight solo performers in the same manner as modern "follow spots". To this day, theatre "follow spots" are referred to by stage managers as "limes". No doubt when Lincoln showed up late at around 8:30 in the evening at Ford’s Theatre to see 

the play "Our American Cousin" the stage was lit with limelight.
As you look at this contraption (pictured above) and the volatile combination of compounds used to drive it, it is pretty obvious how dangerous a fire hazard it must have been when stages, just as today, were largely composed of wood and surrounded by highly flammable cloth curtains. Many a theatre was razed to the ground before Thomas Edison gave us the incandescent bulb in the late 1800’s.
      So, I think it is fair to say that when Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, an actor himself, jumped from the balcony to the staged he landed clearly in the limelight of history. He must have felt it was his finest role.

18) MANNA FROM HEAVEN - Always understood to be a gift from God in some ways it was. In Exodus we are told that when Moses first escaped from Egypt into the desert that his people were running out of food and faith but the heavens or the sky opened up and began to drop white flakes that were edible and saved the people. "Mana from heaven" they called it. We know today that millions, maybe billions, of locusts in that region would periodically shed there outer shell that was very high in protein and is edible and they would do this en masse and on the fly so it would literally rain down from the heavens.

19) ONCE IN A BLUE MOON - The definition varied over the years. A blue moon once meant something virtually impossible, as in the expression "When pigs fly!" This was apparently the usage as early as the 16th century. Then, in 1883, the explosion of Mt Krakatau, the volcano in Indonesia, released enough dust to turn sunsets green worldwide and the moon blue for over 4 years. Forest fires, severe drought and volcanic eruptions can still do this. So a blue moon became synonymous with something rare---hence the phrase "once in a blue moon."
     The more recent connection of a blue moon with the calendar apparently comes from the 1937 Maine Farmers Almanac.
     Most years have 12 full moons, but occasionally there are 13, so one of the seasons will have four. The almanac called that fourth full moon in a season a blue moon. A writer in 1946 misinterpreted the almanac to mean the second full moon in a given month. That version was repeated in a 1980 broadcast of National Public Radio's Star Date, and the definition stuck. So when someone today talks about a blue moon, he is referring to the second full moon in a month.

20) CROSSING THE RUBICON – is a literary term referring to making an irreversible move or decision from which there can be no return or escape. In 49 B.C. Roman law was clear that except for the small but elite Centurions no generals shall ever enter Rome with there armies. Julius Gaius Caesar had just defeated Gaul (France) and Germania (Germany) and nearly doubled the size of the Roman Empire. His popularity with the Roman people was huge and this was politically threatening to the Roman Senate who thought the people might want to declare him king and thus destroy the Republic. As a preemptive strike the Senate brought him up on phony arrest charges and he was ordered to relinquish control of the armies. This was hardly the way to thank Rome’s most successful general. Caesar intended on defying the Senate and to cross the Rubicon River which separated Gaul from Italy. For him it was an agonizing decision and today the expression Crossing the Rubicon means to pass a point of no return.

21) THE DIE HAS BEEN CAST - I used to think that this was like molten jewelry that is cast into a die and once it hardened solid could never be changed. In fact while I was reading about Julius Caesar, the first dictator of Rome that destroyed the republic and ruled as emperor I learned otherwise. The conquering armies of Rome fought only in the provinces. Left with no good choices Julius Caesar and his armies marched toward Rome and as they crossed the Rubicon River, the last major obstacle to Rome he realized there was no turning back and he was to have said before crossing the river "the die is cast".
    The game of throwing dice was popular with the Romans. It is said that Roman soldiers even threw dice at the base of Jesus’s crucifixion to see who would get his robes. We know that throwing of the dice was a favorite game of chance and the singular form of the word dice is die so to "cast the die" meant only one of the dice was thrown. Once the troops crossed the Rubicon the gamble had been set into motion and there was no turning back. Julius Caesar was to have said at that moment "The die has been cast."

22) THE BULLY PULPIT - By listening to the political journalists and "pundits" in context I would have to say this is probably one of the most misunderstood and mis-interpreted expressions by supposedly literate people. I have to confess I used to believe that this phrase meant the power and prestige of the presidency would give the president a dominating influence, like a bully, over any and all that listened to him speak but in fact there is a much more innocent explanation.

 The quote comes from Teddy Roosevelt who many times sounded more like an Englishman than an American. To him the word "bully" meant wonderful and it would not be surprising to hear him use the expression "bully good show". In fact he once said "the presidency was a bully pulpit" and the phrase has been used and eventually misused every since.

23) KNOTS - It is no coincidence that a measure of speed is spelled like the word for a knot in a rope because the first measure of the speed of a ship would be to throw a rope overboard with knots tied at specific lengths. At the end of the rope was a kind of pie shaped wooden triangle of specific size and after about 50 feet of rope was let out someone would turn over an hourglass shaped timer (not an hour) and someone else would let out the rope out and count the number of knots to determine the speed of the ship. Of course this was not land speed because if the water currents were with the ship or against it they would be moving faster or slower relative to the land. Even still relative to the water you could determine the performance of the craft compared to another ships speed. It took so long for better methods to arise that the term knots and its usage still remains today.

24) WORTH YOUR SALT - The next time someone tells you salt is bad for you ask them to try living without it. Why do you think they give you salt tablets when you experience dehydration from heat. Salt is essential and is constantly lost when we pee or perspire. Modern pre-prepared food of the last 20 years has too much salt in it but if your food had no salt at all we would be have to live like cattle grazing around looking for a salt lick. The body fluids are .09 percent salt and some biologists believe that when animals life first crawled out of the ocean they carried with them in their circulatory system the same level of salt that was in the ocean at that time millions of years ago. This was the secret of the ability to surviving out of the water because the organism carried the same chemical balance of the ocean with them. Whereas even the smallest organisms obtained there food nutrients and oxygen from the sea just as most do today from the "salt water" running thru their veins.
     I digressed. Anyways the Latin word for salt is sal and Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in salt because it was portable, had a standardized consistency and thus could be exchanged like money. At a time long before refrigeration salt was indispensable and life saving as a preservative for meat and other foodstuffs and from that we get the modern word 24) SALARY and the expression "worth one's salt".

26) TRIUMPH - Even in Webster’s dictionary the #1, first definition of the noun triumph says that a triumph was the parade of a Roman general returning to Rome after victory in battle. The procession thru the gates of Rome lasted 3 days and was composed of the booty of wealth and slaves captured from the vanquished territories. On the final day the conquering general rode in on a chariot with the laurel wreath on his head and by tradition riding with him in the chariot was a slave whose job it was to continually whisper in his ear "you are only a man, you are just a man".

      The actual gates of Rome were huge arches that were an architectural design created by the Romans that was a much stronger structure that had ever been designed before. Roman architecture has been copied by many cultures including our own. In Paris France after WW I the conquering French armies returned to Paris and imitating the great Roman tradition they passed thru the Arc de Triomphe" (The Arch of Triumph) and down the street called the Champs Elysses. But much later after they were defeated by the Germans in WW II Hitler did his best to humiliate the French by marching his soldiers into Paris and down this same boulevard and thru this same arch.

27) BARBARIANS - The Greeks first used this term to describe anybody who didn’t speak Greek. Later the Romans used the term to describe the language of outsiders, those people that lived outside the Empire because to the Greeks and the Romans their languages were considered so crude that it sounded like the "ba ba" of sheep so they called these people barbarians.

By 1200 B.C. when the iron age began and up to around 1100 A.D., when the Vikings were terrorizing Europe, these barbarian tribes were spread all throughout Europe. They were the Celts (pronounced Kelts), Franks, Vandals, Goths, and Saxons. The Huns and the Mongols invaded from the plains of Asia and China since China built their Great Wall to keep them out. Many of the Barbarians like the Vikings had no written language so their is lot we don’t know about their history and culture but I think it would be fair to say that if your tribe, the Vandals, is the inspiration for the word:
28) Vandalize then they probably were not the best behaved people in the world. Today being referred to as a Visigoth or a Mongoloid is also not a complimentary term either.

29) SLAVES - The Romans captured so many of the slavic people during their wars of conquest in Europe and made them captives that the word for slav (Yugoslavians, Czechoslovakians and Russians who are all Slavic) eventually became synonymous with the word slave.

30) 3 SHEETS TO THE WIND - A confused individual either drunk or just plain dizzy. Old nautical term meaning the ships sails are not into the wind and they are "lofting" and so the ship might as well be rudderless because without the forward movement of the ship the direction of the ship cannot be controlled.

31) FLYING BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS - Means flying without the benefit of instruments. Almost all small aircraft built in the last 50 years contains a 6 pack of instruments which include one gauge that tells the pilot if he is in a coordinated turn (lower left in picture below). An uncoordinated turn would be one where the plane was "yawing" or skidding slightly sideways and both passenger and pilot would be pushed to one side or the other by centrifugal force. A coordinated turn, even a steep one, performed without the use of instruments would be one where the G forces would be pushing the pilot, just like gravity, down into his seat and the pilot could feel this pressure in the "seat of his pants"

 So what happened to young John Kennedy Jr.? Couldn’t he fly by the seat of his pants?( I’ll get to that.) About 10 years ago I got this urge to fly airplanes. After struggling  to get my pilots Private Pilot’s License (and I really struggled) I went on to get instruction in aerobatics (flying airplanes upside down and such) and eventually moved on to acquiring my Instrument Rating. This is the rating that would have saved young John’s life if he had acquired it.
     Believe it or not even the highest rated and most experienced ATP (Airline Transport Pilot) in the world would have done the same thing if he looked outside the cockpit and saw no visible horizon and he had no instruments. Like anyone else he would have ended up in what pilots call a "graveyard spiral" and in Chuck Yeager’s words would have "augered in", like a drill bit, into the ground. Yes, that’s right, even those guys that fly the 747s with 300 souls onboard are not immune to this effect of vertigo or "spatial disorientation.
    The only way an individual can tell what position their body is in is because of the vestibular system or inner ear in our head. The actual appearance is like this image here. These 3 canals you see in the diagram represent and measure the heads position in a three dimensional world but for purposes of

 simplicity I will give you a more schematized explanation of what occurs. Imagine if you will, a little sphere shaped room or vestibule inside your head with little hairs called cilia on all the walls and in this vestibule is a ball or a calcium carbonate stone that rolls around freely. So if you tilted your head to one side or if you were in an airplane that was tilted to one side that stone or lith, as it is called, would roll to the bottom of this room and the cilia on the sides of this room would sense that the ball had moved and the head was now in a different position or orientation. This is how the inner ear tells the brain that we are upright or upside down.
     I’ll never forget the day I woke up and found out I couldn’t balance myself on my feet and just walking across the room was impossible. I managed to teeter out to my car where with much trepidation and drive to my doctors office. Driving was actually easier than walking since the car didn’t have any trouble staying upright but I did. Dr. Bratt informed me I had an inner ear infection called otitus media. Two days of antibiotics and I was steady on my feet again. Actually I couldn’t have stood at all if it weren’t for my eyes giving my brain the visual cues of what was straight and level.
     What happens to a pilot is a little bit different. The pilot has to deal with his inner ear being "tricked" by centrifugal force. If a pilot makes a slightly uncoordinated turn because he isn’t using his rudder and wing ailerons at the same time then the plane will "yaw" or slip sideways and the centrifugal force will force him to one side just like a fast turn in a car. As long as he can look outside the plane and get oriented to the horizon then he will have no problems. But imagine what happens on a moonless night or while in the clouds. If he turns to the left or right in an uncoordinated turn that little stone in his inner ear will roll uphill to the opposite side of the inner ear. If you are turning left the stone will roll to the right which is where it would be if you head or body were tilted to the right. So now even though you are turning left you "feel" like you are turning right if you have no outside horizon to tell you otherwise. When this happens you can find yourself trusting the instinct that has guided you life since you were a toddler attempting your first toddle. It is imprinted, burnt and hard wired into your brain. It is what your inner ear is telling you.You are now actually turning harder left and the "g forces" are getting stronger and that means the stone is rolling even further to the right which is telling you you are banking even further right so you turn the yoke even more to the left in an effort to pull out of the right turn you think you are in and the downward spiral is increasing. At this point the nose is dropping because the "g forces" and the drag are pulling it down and the engine is speeding up and getting much louder as it dives toward the earth. By now the adrenaline flow is so great that your heart is pounding out of your chest and you have become so irrational that if you were to look at the altimeter which says you are dropping like an aerodynamic rock you manage to ignore the obvious and continue to . . . I’ll stop there because I think you get the picture. This is what the horrific last moments of John Kennedy and his wife were like.
     The first days of training even with an instructor to become an instrument rated pilot can be almost that scary. The "6 pack" of instruments on all modern aircraft are redundant and rarely do all of them fail but the ability to ignore your gut feelings and to defer to the instruments can only be learned over time.
     The men like Charles Lindberg and even the pilots of WW II had few dependable radios and no GPS. They had to be trained to ignore their inner fears and instincts and learn to trust the instruments that were not near as dependable and predictable as today’s avionics. And when called on they sometimes had to truly "FLY BY THE SEAT OF THEIR PANTS".

32) DOT THE I s AND CROSS THE T s - In the Bible it says "not a jot or a tittle would be changed" which were comparable marks used in the Hebrew alphabet. A jot was a dot and a tittle was a slash. This is certainly not the exact words but is certainly the exact meaning to a modern translation to the ancient writings. A jot and a tittle were marks used in the Hebrew alphabet that are separate from the character and are comparable to a dot or crossing line.

33) POLITICAL PUNDITS - Leave it to the media mouths that give their often unsolicited opinion about of all things political and many things not to label themselves "pundits". A pundit is a far eastern Indian word that means a wise man. So the joke is on us because every time some one refers to these media folk as pundits they don't realize they are calling these clowns wise men. Go figure.

34) AN EYE FOR AN EYE - Many people think that this was originally written in the Bible but in fact it was first written as one of the many laws from the Code of Hammurabi, the 18th Century B.C. King that unified Mesopotamia, what is now present day Iraq . This dates it easily 500 to 1500 years before it was put to paper by the Hebrews in the Old Testament. In fact the expression “it isn’t chiseled in stone” does not apply to the laws or the Code of Hammurabi at all. The laws were so solid, not to be broken, that all of the 260 laws are available today, 3,800 years later, in there original form on large tablets and stones. Their longevity far out paces the Bible’s.
      The same Abraham who we read about in Genesis is claimed by all 3 great religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam to be their father and patriarch. The Bible tells us that Abraham and his wife Sarah came to Palestine from the Mesopotamian city of Ur . No doubt he knew of this law.
 Eugen Weber, a professor at the USCLA tells us in his lecture series, The Western Tradition” that Hammurabi's Laws were valuable to his time because they were written as opposed to the decrees and edicts that were arbitrarily sent out piecemeal by the kings and pharaohs who often claimed that they ruled by “divine right”. This set of rules in effect was as close to an egalitarian code that said in effect this civilization was ruled by laws and not men. Many of the laws pertained to commerce and ownership of property and as a result helped to stabilize an otherwise unpredictable world. Many of these stone tablets still exists today.
    One of the laws says that if a nun enters a wine drinking establishment she would be punished and it said exactly what her punishment would be. Another says that if a man steals another man's goat he must repay with 2 goats and 4 goats if he steals from a noblemen. If a man causes another man to lose his hand he shall lose his hand and if he causes a man to lose an eye he shall lose an eye also.

35) MIND YOUR Ps AND Qs -In English pubs, ale is served in measurements of pints and quarts so in old England, when customers got unruly, the bartender would yell at them to stop bothering other people and mind your own business or "mind your P's and Q's" Pints and Quarts.

36) WHITE ELEPHANT - Is something that becomes a burden of no value or benefit to you that you have acquired and that you can't get rid of. You know that sweater somebody gave you for Xmas that you hate but you have to keep it and then wear it every year when the family gets together for Xmas. Actually this comes from the belief that the far eastern Indians have that white elephants are sacred so if someone gives you a white elephant you must feed and take care of it but you can't use it for work like you could other elephants. Thus the term a "white elephant" as something that looks good but is in fact a useless piece of merchandise that you are now forever burdened with.

SLEEP TIGHT - In Shakespeare's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes the mattress tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase goodnight, sleep tight" (don't let the bed bugs bite).

37) THE HONEYMOON - It was the accepted practice in Babylon 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink (especially if the daughter was real ugly).. Mead is a beer made from honey and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the honey month or what we know today as the honeymoon.

38) A WHITEWASH - Usually meant to mean a cover-up or a glossing over of the facts and often used in a political sense. The earliest known use of this phrase by this writer is actually from the New Testament and since the Bible is maybe one of the very few first books it isn’t so far out there to suggest that is the first reference to whitewash. As more books were added to what became the New Testament they seemed to become less Jewish and more Christian. Mark was actually written first about 60 A.D., 60 years after the death of Jesus and Mathew 80 A.D.. At one point Jesus is to have said in Mathew - 23:27 "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited (whitewashed) sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanliness". So today a whitewash is a painting over or cover-up of something unseemly.

39) SAVED by the BELL (or the tell tale heart) -When Edgar Allen Poe wrote the short story the "The Tell Tale Heart" in the late 1800's he was writing about a man suffering from guilt because he murdered and then buried a man under the floor boards in his bedroom and then began to believe he could hear the heart beat of the man he buried. Long before modern medicine had advanced to it's present level caskets were sometimes exhumed and opened only to find fingernail scratch marks of the occupant on the caskets lid. There are a lot of explanations for this including that the deceased was actually in a coma. Little could be done so a tradition began by some families where the family would gather around the open coffin, have a few drinks, talk about the deceased or better yet something else like the weather and wait and see if the dead would come back to life. This tradition was called a;

40) WAKE - and it was a good excuse to get together with family too.

In 1882 an inventor designed a device in which the occupant of a buried casket if he came back to life could pull on a rope and ring a bell that was outside above the grave site. If it did ring it he would have been Saved by the Bell. The family that could afford it might hire someone to stay at the grave site at night and this became known as the ...
41) GRAVEYARD SHIFT.

42) A METHOD TO HIS MADNESS - In Shakespeare's Hamlet the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, is possibly faking insanity so people will not take notice of his erratic behavior. Someone in the royal court suspects that and remarks "Methinks there is a method to his madness".

43) BREAKFAST - This is too easy. It is the first meal of the day. The longest period of the 24 hour day in which you don't have a meal is when you sleep so naturally the first meal of the day would break your fast. That is breakfast.

44) A GOOD SAMARITAN – Usually understood to be a person that helps a stranger in need unselfishly and with no real expectations of reward or reimbursement for their efforts.. In Luke 10:25-37 - "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a certain priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Levite also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii’s, and gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.' Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbor to him who fell among the robbers?"
     To really understand the parable you have to know who all the players were. Like much of Jesus' philosophic teachings he is, once again, talking about hypocrisy. The man who was attacked was an ordinary man but the first person to pass him on the road was a priest. The second man to avoid helping the man was a Levite. Of the 12 tribes of Israel the tribe of Levi and its male members held a special position in assisting the priests in the service of the Temple. The Levites were in fact the tribe that Moses, his brother Aaron, his sister and his mother were members. They performed such functions as treasurers, musicians, gatekeepers, custodians, etc. In the book of Exodus we are told that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments and found the people worshiping idols he was so angry he dashed the tablets to the ground,. He then went to his special surrounded and highly guarded tent for a meeting in which he instructed the Levites, the guards, to do Gods will with their swords. As ordered the Levites took out their swords and went out and slew 3,000 people that day. If memory serves I believe they left those events out of the movie version of "The Ten Commandments". Unfortunately if you are looking for the truth from the Bible and what it says you better read it yourself. If you are willing to accept the interpretations of others then "ye shall reap what you sow". If you have no stomach for the actual labor of reading it then don’t preach to me your rehashed, second hand info to me because I do my homework. That is what this book is about. That is part of why I wrote it.
     A Samaritan was someone who lived in Samaria, the region in Palestine between Judea and Galilee. Samaritan is also an ethnic and religious description. Many Jews of the time questioned whether Samaritans were true Jews as they claimed so there was some enmity between the groups. One thing is for sure this Samaritan was a good man and behaved like A Good Samaritan.

45) HALF DEAD – From the same parable about the good Samaritan the Bible says; "A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead." It is not likely that this would have been anything like an original Hebrew or Greek version which then was translated to the Latin vulgate and finally to the popular King James Version of the Holy Bible which was published in 1611. It was written in the style of the Shakespearean English of the time and would have contained the same idioms that the English people of the time would have used. If it will help you to get the picture, 1611 was about 50 years after the death of William Shakespeare. The expression "half dead" could only be a common idiom of the times since there is literally no such thing as half dead any more than it is possible to be "half pregnant". You are either dead or you are not. But even today the idiom has stuck in our contemporary English. The words to this song by Bob Dylan demonstrate that.

46) BITE THE BULLET – Forensic archeologists researching the area around George Washington’s makeshift hospitals near Valley Forge found many musket balls with teeth marks in them. Without any painkillers to help the soldiers during amputations, to save a man’s life, leather or musket balls were commonly given to the men to bite on while the procedure was done.

47) PAPARAZZI -- Coined from the name of the obnoxious photographer in the famous Italian movie "La Dolce Vita" (The Sweet Life), directed by the famous Federico Fellini and starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroiani. The photographer's name in the movie was Paparazzo and by no coincidence. Paparazzo is the Italian word for insect which is very appropriate.

48) PUSHING THE ENVELOPE - In context "pushing the envelope" usually means doing something daring. Verbatim though it sounds more like a bookkeeper who is pushing a letter across his desk.. That kind of takes away from the exciting danger element. In fact the phrase comes from what every airplane pilot knows is a very important part of making a flight plan to determine the "weights and balances" of his aircraft and whether he is flying near the edge of the performance for his aircraft. Near the edge of the envelope.
     In 1996 a huge cargo plane leaving Miami International Airport crashed on takeoff just a few hundred yards from the end of the runway. Why? Because of an error made by the loading crew before takeoff. Immediately after takeoff the airplane crashed because the craft was outside of the "Weights and Balances" envelope. They accidentally pushed beyond the edges of the envelope.
     If you ever made a paper airplane in school when you were a kid you already know the answer. You might have constructed this paper airplane and thrown it into the air but it fluttered to the ground like a maple leaf. You didn't want a helicopter, you wanted an airplane. It just wasn't aerodynamic enough. So maybe you added a paper clip or scotch taped a penny near the nose and all of a sudden when you threw it, it not only stayed in flight for awhile but it maintained straight and level flight for a good distance.
     Believe it or not that is exactly the kind of calculations and adjustments a pilot must make before takes off in flight with an plane and he can actually decide, figuratively, where to tape the pennies before he takes off and crashes. If he puts the baggage

in the wrong place or it takes on too much weight anywhere, especially if it is placed too far away from the CG (Center of Gravity) then when he does the pre-takeoff calculations he may discover he is outside both the legal and physical envelope that guarantees the aircraft will actually be controllable upon takeoff, landing and in flight.
     Above is a graphic of the trapezoidal shape often created by the weights, balances graph and the center of gravity created by a pilot before he files a flight plan. A set of limitations, as for a particular aircraft, system, etc., within the boundaries of which it can operate safely and efficiently.
     If too much weight from baggage or passengers was too far aft or too far forward in the plane it would leave it unbalanced and difficult to fly. Just as if you taped the penny to the back of your airplane making it impossible for the pilot to control because of the center of gravity would cause the plane to want to pitch upward. You in fact would be outside the allowable envelope for safe flight. That is exactly what happened in Miami that fateful day. The men that loaded the cargo neglected to fasten securely the cargo hold down clamps and as soon as the aircraft pitched up for takeoff in a steep 30 degree climb the heavy cargo slipped it moorings, slipped back towards the tail, the plane pitched upward even more to the point where the pilot couldn’t even keep the nose down enough to maintain flight.

49) A MOVIE TRAILER - Although it comes before you even see the movie it was originally recorded at the end of a the reel of film used in the older style cinemas which would normally have a blank portion used to attach the film to the take-up spool. Today it is a completely separate and smaller reel of film largely used for advertising and.

50) UPPER CASE AND LOWER CASE – Guttenberg’s first printing press used what was called movable type and that system remained the same far into the 20th century and is still used today. In affect all letters were individual but if the letter was capitalized the printer who laid the type kept his capital letters in the upper drawers or "upper case" and the standard letters were kept in the lower drawers or "lower case".

TOO MUCH RED INK OR IN THE BLACK?

 51) NITPICKING -Nitpicking is the act of removing nits (the eggs of lice, generally head lice) from the host's hair. As the nits are cemented to individual hairs with louse saliva, they cannot be removed with lice combs and before modern chemical methods were invented, the only options were to shave all the host's hair or to pick them free one by one.

     This is a slow and laborious process, as the root of each individual hair must be examined for infestation. It was largely abandoned as modern chemical methods became available; however, as lice populations can and do develop resistance, manual nitpicking is still often necessary.
     As nitpicking inherently requires fastidious, meticulous attention to detail, the term has become appropriated to describe the practice of meticulously searching for minor, even trivial errors in detail (often referred to as "nits" as well), and then criticizing them. A nitpicker is of course the noun version of someone who is "picky" about details.
Shaving the head bald by the ancient Egyptians wasn’t just a fashion statement but was sometimes the only way to be sure of getting rid of head lice.
      This information about how common head lice was also explains why the royals of Europe wore these woven wool wigs to cover their bald heads. Especially in the English courts this headwear eventually became so common it was established as the "official" coiffure of judges, lawyers and magistrates but the wigs were large and easily slipped forward over the wearer's face. Since the courts were meant to be the final and ultimate forum where the truth was to be established but was sometimes misrepresented by the defendants advocates. It was in the courts where the defendant’s lawyers were sometimes accused of trying to:
52) PULLING THE WOOL OVER HIS EYES – To pull the wool over someone’s eyes, meant that if ones wig slipped low enough it would cover their eyes and their ability to see. So to "pull the wool over someone’s eyes" and block their view meant to deceive them. This use of the term was so common it entered general usage for any trick or deceptive practice.

53) YANKEE – This could be one of the best examples of how a word can start off innocently as kind of light hearted reference to something or someone and then over time transform into something more pejorative (insulting) and finally change back again to a term of endearment.
     A customer walked into my shop the other day and while I wrote up his work order I recognized his Dutch name and we began to talk. Even though he didn't know I was working on a book I managed to coax him into telling me about his recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum of New York and attending a lecture about the Dutch Culture where he learned why some Americans and eventually all Americans became known as "yankees". He explained to me the American colonies were first settled by a large number of Dutch immigrants around New York, called "New Amsterdam" at the time. At that time a very common Dutch surname was Kees (pronounced like the word keys). Traditionally we know that the most common first name in the mostly Christian Western World (see The West #) is the Biblical name John. In German the same name is Johanne, in French it is Jean, in Spanish Juan, in Russian Ivan, in Irish Sean, Shaun or Shawn and in Dutch it is Jan (pronounced Yan). And so one of the most common names in the New England area would have been Jan Kees and is pronounced YAN-KEES. Thus the colloquialism, Yankees, became an American term for New Englanders but by the time of the Civil War in 1861 southerners changed the word to mean all northerners and I assume not in a nice way.
      By 1917, during WW I George M Cohan wrote a rallying song for the soldiers and the country that lasted thru WW II called "Over There" that brought back yankee as a good thing to be.

John-nie, get your gun, get your gun, get your gun,
John-nie show the Hun you're a son of a gun
Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yan-kee Doo-dle do or die
Pack your lit-tle kit, show your grit, do your bit
Yan-kees to the ranks from the towns and the tanks
Make your moth-er proud of you and the old Red White and Blue

CHORUS:
O-ver there, o-ver there, send the word, send the word, o-ver there,
That the Yanks are com-ing, the Yanks are com-ing,
And we won't come back 'til it's o-ver O-ver There!

       As more time passed it evolved again into a derogatory Ant-American term of derision by South Americans to mean all Americans. The phrase "Yankee go home" was everywhere on political banners at demonstration when Americans visited.
      Now add more time and geography and once again yanks is a term of collegial friendliness when it is adopted by our English cousins in Australia.

54) REDNECK – This one is too easy for me and it is kind of personal because members of my family were what I would guess were known as "rednecks" and I have nothing but fond memories of these important people in my formative years. I would like to assume that the original use of redneck didn’t have the negative connotation it has today but I could be wrong.
     When I was a kid of maybe 8 or 9 I had the kind of experience you have to pay big bucks for nowadays. It wasn’t a "dude ranch" but a farm and me and my sister, Suzy, got to live several weeks of our summer vacation on my Aunt Wilma and Uncle Joe’s farm.
My dad grew up on a farm in Kansas when he was a boy and after serving in the Pacific as a SBD dive bomber pilot in WW II he went on to college and got a degree in mechanical engineering and eventually went to work for the Firestone Tire Company in Akron, Ohio. Wilma was Dad’s sister who married and remained in Kansas. Me and my cousins Virgil and Leonard got up every morning at 5 A.M. with the hired hands and walked several hundred yards to the milking barn where the cows came in the morning. Cows are complete creatures of habit. Every morning at first daylight they would all lumber into the barn for the free food, oats and such, and they’d stay for the milking and the relief of pressure from their full udders. On the way back from the cow barn we would stop by the chicken coop located closer to the house and pick up the eggs for our breakfast and the rest they would sell. Outside the kitchen door we all stopped and used a blade that was staked to the ground so we could scrape off the mud and the other delightful stuff that generally resides on the floor of a cow barn. We did the whole farm thing. Baths occurred only on Saturday night in the basement shower. No hot water, just cold, but at least you were clean and didn’t smell when you showed up for church the next day.
       Wilma’s husband Joe was a tough wiry old bird. Not an ounce of fat on him. All day long he spent mostly outside. He would drive the big wheat harvesting machines, called "combines". The combines pulled the wheat, shaft and all, and stripped it of its kernels and left the stalks in the field later to be picked up in bales for cattle feed. Sometimes I got to ride in back of the "combine" in the huge bin that collected the wheat when it was being filled. It was like sitting in a huge sand box constantly being filled with earth’s bounties as it moved up and down each new row. One of my cousins teld me about the time he had to go to a doctor because of an ear ache and the doctor found 2 kernels of wheat that were starting to sprout in his ear canal.
     I remember one evening shortly before dusk when all of us kids were out in the front yard digging a hole for some purpose. All the kids wanted to participate and Lois the youngest of my cousins, an eight year old, wanted to be part of it. Everyone was excited and having fun but when one of the boys moved too fast with a shovel Lois’s finger was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was cut off. They rushed her to the hospital. They didn’t have the technology to re-attach in those days.
     Farm people are tough. They have to be, because the elements can be tougher and unforgiving and those forces can have their own unpredictable schedule that doesn’t always give advance notice to these stewards of the land about what they might have to endure and for how long.
     Joe always wore a long sleeved shirt because of the wind and the sun and bugs and the dust and dirt. He buttoned it clear to the top to keep out the harsh debris. He wore a wide brimmed hat and when he took it off there was a clear line burnt by the sun across his forehead where his hat set. I remember seeing him standing in the kitchen one day and taking off his shirt and seeing his leathery face and neck. His ruddy neck and face were clearly contrasted against his milky white chest and arms. I may have never heard the word at that time but no one had to tell my unckle Joe was clearly a redneck and I say that in the most endearing way possible.
Granpa and Grandma Marsh on the extreme right

       I don’t know if it was a mark of pride for him but it was certainly a mark of who he was and how he lived. Today a lot of young people tattoo and pierce their bodies for whatever reason I don’t know. Maybe for them it is some kind of way to say how tough they think they are. Servicemen especially sailors and marines will tattoo themselves to show pride in their choice and their sacrifice. Joe was tattooed by nature and it spoke volumes about the hard work and sacrifice he provided for his family.

(At this point in my writing I stopped and got out a dictionary to see what Webster had to say since I was writing this whole thing from my memory and my conjecture.) Webster’s gave me this: [from the characteristic sunburned neck acquired in the fields by farm laborers] [slang] a poor, white, rural Southerner, often, specif., one regarded as ignorant, bigoted, violent, etc.
     Once again like the word Yankee (See Above # 53)), what might of started out as a simple descriptive term for a certain group of people got changed to something pejorative. Joe and his family may have had their prejudices but I wouldn’t know because if they did they certainly never taught them to me. My dad left the farm life when he received a degree from Kansas State in Mechanical Engineering after WW II. His boyhood was spent on the farm but despite the misconceptions about farm people I never heard him use the word "nigger" or any other kind of racial slur for that matter. It wasn’t in his vocabulary because it wasn’t in his heart. In grade school I was always taught that "Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me", or you for that matter, so unless someone yells the words in your face they still are only words and are never an excuse for any kind violent retaliation.
        Why such an innocent term which only describes one’s appearance should become a derogatory term is beyond me. To use it in a defamatory way, to me, just shows the speakers ignorance and I take little notice of those who like to push emotional buttons.

58) NO PAIN, NO GAIN - It may sound like something that your aerobics instructor would say but Benjamin Franklin might have been one of the first to write it in his popular annual book, "Poor Richards Almanac". He wrote "there is no gain without some pain".

60) PRIVATE EYE – The Pinkertons founded in 1850 had as their motto "We never sleep" and what you see below is one of their newsletters. From this image came the expression Private Eye which means a detective for hire.

61) C NOTE – I stopped by an auto parts store that I regularly buy from yesterday to buy a carburetor part and when it came time to pay I placed a 100 dollar bill down on the counter. Jay, the manager, picked it up and said "A C-Note". That got me thinking. "Any idea why they call it a C note"? I asked. He replied "no" so I pointed out to him that "C is the Roman numeral for 100 (The C stands for centum, the Latin word for 100).

62) 2 BITS – "Now maybe you can help me with one I don’t know" I said. "Why do they call a quarter 2 bits." Jay is around 15 years my junior and he didn’t seem to recall the expression so I tried to jog his memory with "You know, 2 bits 4 bits 6 bits a peso, all for my school stand up and say so, or 2 bits 4 bits 6 bits a dollar, all for my school, stand up and holler." Still I saw no signs of recognition. I looked to the left and then to the right to make sure I didn’t offend any of his customers. Quietly, I sad to him "Have you ever heard the expression a 2 bit whore?" I saw a light bulb go on above his head but I didn’t ask any more questions of him because I am sure he probably heard that one on TV or somewhere else. I am sure Jay wouldn’t know anyone that spoke with such a foul mouth.
     I went back to my shop and while talking to my head mechanic, Harry, I noticed he had a coin on a gold chain around his neck. He told me it was a "piece of eight" from Mel Fisher’s sunken treasure ship the Atocha. I couldn’t help but wander if there was a connection between "pieces of eight" and "2 bits". In fact it turns out that there is a direct connection.

     Because of the Spanish Conquistador’s conquests in Mexico and South America they had very quickly become very gold and silver rich and so naturally they could afford to mint a more "trustworthy" coin that soon became the standard throughout the world. I think that most people believe that inflation is some kind of 20^th century invention that U.S. president Jimmy Carter got started. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Even when barter was still common in ancient Mesopotamia around 2000 B.C. certain commodities like sheep had a general value that was understood and accepted almost like money. On one particular occasion after one city state had invaded and conquered another the victors walked away with all their possessions. They brought so much booty back, kind of an ancient booty call if you will, and so many camels that their was a huge glut on the local market. Everyone had camels. Rich people had camels, poor people had camels. Even slaves had camels. This of course caused deflation of the value of camels, that is, if the camel is what you wanted to purchase in the first place. But if you consider the camel to be your legal tender, like money, then it now would take more camels to buy an object of the same value as before and that would be considered inflation because the definition of inflation is "more money (camels) chasing fewer goods".
     In Rome’s formative years when they finally defeated the Carthaginians, around 400 B.C. in the last of the Punic Wars, as they were called, they lacked the funds to pay all the soldiers so they simply began minting coins that weighed less and contained less silver and then paid them that way. Of course the coins now really had less value so it took more coins to buy the same goods and of course, once again, we had inflation. In the long run this is never good in general because it undermines confidence in the coinage and thus destabilizes the economy. The stable value of money has always been important.
        Initially Spain’s imports of bullion from the new world helped the Chinese economy but eventually when the total output of China’s own silver mines was less than that carried in a single Spanish galleon sailing from Acapulco and imports of silver began to began to dry up after 1640 the Chinese economy, the worlds largest, was plunged into a terrible recession almost destroying the Ming dynasty. But all in all the Spanish were able to mint a coin without putting their thumb on the scale. Because they had so much of these precious metals the temptation was not there and this meant everyone could have confidence in there coinage. Through widespread use in Europe, the Americas and the Far East, it became the first ‘world currency" by the late 18th century.
       In 1794, the U.S. Mint used the Spanish silver dollar as a template for the U. S. silver dollar. Many numismatists believe that the Spanish eight real coin (el real de ocho) was the forerunner of the U.S. dollar. Spanish dollars were cut into pie-sliced pieces or bits of halves, quarters, and eighths and were known as "pieces of eight." Hence, two bits was a quarter dollar, four bits a half dollar and so on.
     The Spanish coin, the reale was so respected it was legal tender in the United States up until an act of Congress discontinued the practice just before the Civil War in 1857.
     Today Two bits remains an expression in the United States for two eighths of a dollar a quarter.

62) DECIMATE – Referring back to the C-note, since we are already talking about the influence of Latin numbers on language decimate is a perfect example of a word that is commonly misused by everyone including myself. Colloquially it is often used to mean the destruction of a large military or civilian population to near annihilation but its root "deci" tells us it means exactly a 1/10^th death rate. It was first practiced by the Romans around 80 B.C. as a form of military discipline. If a group of soldiers deserted or showed cowardice by running from the battle the commander would divide these troops into groups of tens and they would draw lots to see who would die. The other nine men would do the killing usually by stoning or clubbing to death the "winner". It was also practiced again by the soldiers who went up against Spartacus in the "Third Servile War" in 71 B.C..
     The first time I read of this occurring was at the WW II battle of Stalingrad. In this case the commander rounded up all the captured deserters and had them stand at attention facing forward. He then walked down the line and shot every tenth man in the face until his gun ran out of ammo.
     Decimate in Latin means literally "removal of a tenth". Eventually the practice was abandoned and fell out of use because it seemed to damage "esprit de corp" and fostered a distrust of the commandeers. Today there is seldom a reason to use the word so rather than retire a good word people decided to reassign it a new meaning that still reflected the horrors of war.

So why did the metric system arbitrarily pick ten as its standard rather than the more easily divisible 12? Unlike the number 10, 12 can be divided into halves, thirds and quarters. We have composed the day into easily divisible numbers. 24 hours in a day, 6o minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute. So why 10? The answer should be obvious. As plain as the nose on your face? No, but as clear as fingers on your hands.
     Unless a person is polydactylous (a hereditary condition of being born with extra fingers) then they will have 10 fingers (or digits) and toes. It is as though we were born with our own counting abacus with a backup abacus on our feet. Thus the metric system is based on the number 10.

63) DIGITAL – Digits (or fingers) surface again in the word digital, often referring to equipment that has a numeric readout like a clock or a volt-ohm meter. Vinyl records record music in what is caused an analog format. Digital music means the information is recorded numerically on a computer or a disc and has a similar source or beginning since the root word is digit as in fingers. Because digital information is number based it is always the same every time you copy it as opposed to analog which literally means that the sound is only similar to or analogous to the original but is never exactly the same. A word to the wise though, the next time you go to your doctor for a complete physical and he tells you he will be doing a digital exam don’t be looking anxiously around the room for a computer. There probably won’t be one.

64) TOUCHSTONE – Here we go with the money thing again. Writers like this metaphor. The word touchstone is more likely to be used in a sentence as a metaphor for anything that can be used to gauge the value of something, a test or criterion for determining the quality, genuineness or validity of a thing or even a concept. If you don’t immediately recognize the word you may be familiar with a subdivision of Disney Pictures called Touchstone Pictures. When Disney wanted to make movies with more adult themes they created Touchstone Pictures so as not to soil the Disney "for kids only" reputation. In other words they didn’t want you to know that it was actually Disney that was producing these movies.
     The actual Touchstone itself was one of the most important technological discoveries of the western world. It occurred in ancient Mesopotamia around 1500 B.C.. In these times most economies traded by barter which is not efficient or as practical because even a wealthy man's fortune was based on the number of sheep, goats, or barley he possessed and if attacked by an invading force he would lose it all if he had to flee. To be able to turn wealth into gold or silver would have been ideal but it was not possible to know the purity of these elements and thus there worth. It was not until someone discovered a black stone that if rubbed against gold or silver would indicate the purity of the metal by the marks it left on the stone. Now that traders could travel long distances to exchange their goods the world could begin to switch over to a money based economy.
     Since we no longer a use for the touchstones anymore the word is more likely to be used in the metaphorical sense as something used to determine a standard of value.

65) THE WEST or Western Civilization – l I am talking about this expression not because it is based on an erroneous assumption, which it is, but because few authors ever make the effort to explain it’s real meaning.

65) NIKE (the shoe?) – In 490 B.C. the Greeks fought the invading Persians at Marathon and won. Since more attacks from the Persians at different places could follow it was important that the Athenians needed to know right away of the victory. A man named Phidippides ran 26 miles to Athens where he announced with the Greek word for goddess of victory, "NIKE!" The Greeks had won the battle. He then died. Today we run a 26 mile foot race called:

56) THE MARATHON – Oh, by the way, the Roman name for this same goddess of victory is Victoria which is obviously how we get the word; 57) VICTORY

59) PISSY – This word is used as an adjective. In gay parlance, a fastidious, overly fussy gay male. This following explanation doesn’t exactly follow the pattern of the book but by now you must have figured I just don’t care. I actually became aware of this expression while doing some research for another book. While watching a video documentary about the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii I learned that Romans "washed" their clothes in urine. I had my doubts so I googled a search on the subject and it took me to a blog hosted by a young female history major in England who wrote a blog in which she remarked that the Romans in fact did this but their clothes must have had a very "pissy" odor.
     At this point I should tell you while I was studying Respiratory Therapy in college I learned that urine is completely bacteriostatic, which means that it is very unfriendly to bacteria. Not bactericidal like Lysol but close to it. In fact it is a mildly weaker form of ammonia which is bactericidal.
     The human body has many different types of proteins, some for muscle tissue, some for nervous tissue, some for connective tissue but all are composed of about 20 different building blocks called amino acids. Each amino acid is a relatively large molecule that has on one end of its structure a group of molecules called an amine group and on the other end an acid group. Thus the name amino acid. It is no coincidence that the word amine and ammonia have similar sounds because if you separate the amine group, NH3, from the amino acid that is exactly what you get, ammonia. So when proteins break down and the amino acids go to die they move into the bloodstream and to the liver where they are filtered out. The process is called de-amination. But at this point the liver can’t just dump ammonia into the bloodstream because it is too toxic a substance for the body to tolerate so the liver combines the ammonia with other compounds to form urea or uric acid which can be caustic in large concentrations but easily more tolerable to the system than pure ammonia. (An excessive buildup of this compound will cause the whites of the eyes and eventually the skin to turn yellow, a condition caused jaundice.) The urea is then filtered thru the kidneys and the final product is a diluted form of waek ammonia we call pee. Technically this compound wouldn’t wash clothes so much as "bleach" them.
     The Romans actually had professional launderers called "fullers" that organized and gathered the early morning urine, just for this purpose, or so I read. But was I buying it?
     Well, if it actually worked then it was plausible, but would it work. I smelled an opportunity for an experiment here. (That was a bad choice of words).
     First thing I did was find 4 pieces of light colored cloth, similar to a Roman toga. On each one I put 5 stains that I let dry for several days. The stains were 1) very dark coffee, 2) mustard, 3) barbecue sauce,4) spaghetti sauce, and 5) red wine. The last 2 seemed likely stains for the Romans. (It was only later that I found out that ancient Romans had no tomatoes. The tomato was native to western South America and Central America. It wasn’t until 1519 that Cortez discovered tomatoes growing in Montezuma's gardens and brought seeds back to Europe where they were planted as ornamental curiosities, but not eaten.)
      Meanwhile I began to save my "morning urine" which is more yellow and has higher concentrations of urea (the good stuff). I saved it in a gallon jug and kept it in the refrigerator. When I eventually had enough to fill half a bucket I set it in the tub and put a couple of the stained swatches in the bucket and the others I laundered in the washing machine. I stirred it now and then and even after 4 or 5 days there was no detectable odor at all. So much for the "pissy smell" theory. After rinsing the swatches with water there was absolutely no smell on the cloth. As for the stains it did the best job on the coffee, just so-so on the mustard and not so good on the barbecue sauce and just OK on the red wine. Admittedly I let the stains set as opposed to treating the swatches right away because I wanted a hard test so I don’t know how well it would have worked if I did but clearly it did work.
     I have since learned that urine has been used for all sorts of purposes throughout the ages like gargling it to whiten ones teeth. Some 35 years ago when I was very young I remember the prime minister of India being interviewed by a journalist and he explained how he drank his own urine every couple of months so as to purify and clean out his system. Ancient doctors discovered how to diagnose "diabetes melitis (honey)" by dipping their finger into the patients urine and tasting it. If it tasted sweet they had the disease. R Kelly might but I wouldn’t recommend this stuff. I am simply saying that they is no reason to have such a great fear of this stuff as some people do.
     The other waste product that humans excrete is quite another story. It is useful as fertilizer and an important ingredient in gunpowder as Timothy McVeigh proved by loading up a truckfull of fertilizer and diesel fuel and detonating it at the Moreau Federal Biulding in Oklahoma city but it is easily as deadly because the germ it contains called "e coli" (which is where the word cholera is derived from). has throughout many millenia caused outbreaks of cholera in deadly epidemic proportions. This is where that whole hand washing thing becomes important. Still, as they like to say, "it is better to be pissed off than pissed on".

SIRENS - Ironically the word siren to us is that high pitched wailing sound that we hear in traffic letting us know that a police car, fire truck, or ambulance is going somewhere in a hurry. It warns us of impending danger but the original sound of "sirens" was the danger itself. In the 50's and 60's the word "siren" was slang for a very sexy, attractive women sending out her own kind of "siren's song". In fact the first sirens were more analogous to this women than the signal of an emergency vehicle. In the ancient Greek epoch poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey said to be composed by the blind poet Homer somewhere between 1200 and 800 B.C. we read about the king of the Greek island of Ithaca, Odysseus (Greek) which is the same as Ulysses(Latin). In the Iliad we hear how Ulysses and his soldiers go to fight the Trojan War and after the big horse is brought inside the gates Troy loses the war. Anyway after the war Ulysses heads for his home, the island of Ithaca, Greece.

The second epic poem, "The Odyssey" is the story of his journey back home from the war. Today we refer to an odyssey as a adventurous journey. Ulysses’ "Odyssey" supposedly took 20 years to complete, and is pithy with dreamlike symbolism. To me it is, arguably, a story on 2 levels. Every challenge he and his men encountered could be symbolically paralleled to the challenges we all face in life. At the very beginning of the story the ship's first stop is the "land of the Lotus eaters" and once his men tasted the Lotus flower they didn't want leave that island (like drug addiction). Even at the very end of the story when the god of the sea, Poseidon, sends a violent storm to destroy Ulysses' ship and the ship brakes apart Ulysses survives only because he grasps hold of the floating statue that was on the bow of the ship who just happens to be Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love.

Back to the Sirens. Ulysses is warned in advance by Circe the witch who is a necromancer that his ship will pass close to an island which is inhabited by women called Sirens whose singing voices are so hauntingly beautiful and alluring that if the sailors hear their voices they will surely sail towards the island and crash their ship on it's rocky shoals. But because Ulysses wanted to experience everything there was to experience in life so he instructed his men to put wax in there ears so they couldn't hear the Sirens and tie him to mast so he could hear what no man had ever heard and lived to tell about.

So the next time you listen to the rock group Cream's song

"Tales of Brave Ulysses" you will understand these lyrics;

ACHILLES TENDON - Speaking of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Achilles was a soldier who fought against the Trojans at the gates of Troy. Fable has it that Achilles was invulnerable because as a baby his mother turned him upside down, held him by the heel and dipped him into the River Styx. The River Styx was the river that souls had to cross if they were to enter the after life. When Achilles circled Troy in his chariot in a fierce battle no one could hurt him until Hector speared him in the only part of his body that was not invulnerable, his heel where his mother had held him as she dipped him into the river. Thus that section of the heel is called the "Achilles tendon"

3 DOG NIGHT - When aboriginal Australians who are known for their sparse attire experience a cold night they sleep with their dingoes or dogs to stay warm. On a cold night they might sleep with 2 dogs but a really frigid night would be known as a "3 Dog Night".

THE DOGS OF WAR - Shakespeare Julius Caesar

THE EVIL THAT MEN DO - Shakespeare Julius Caesar

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY - Shakespeare Hamlet

WHAT DREAMS MAY COME - Shakespeare Hamlet

METHOD TO HIS MADNESS -Shakespeare Hamlet

I AM WORKING ON THESE SO IF YOU HAVE SOME NEW ONES TO CHALLENGE ME WITH OR YOU KNOW THE ANSWERS TO SOME OF THESE EMAIL ME

FELL OFF THE WAGON?
RAINING CATS AND DOGS? - Please, no poodle jokes.
I DON'T GIVE AN IOTA? - We know of course that an iota is the letter I in the Greek alphabet but what was the original meaning of this phrase? Help me if you know.
A COP or a COPPER is a police officer? Why?
SHOWING HIM THE ROPES

RAINING CATS AND DOGS - Please, no poodle jokes.

POSH - Port, Outboard, Starboard, Home..

F**K - Fully Unsanctified Carnal Knowledge?

RED HERRING - Until over-fishing depleted their ranks, herring were so numerous and so important as a staple foodstuff to both America and Europe that many writers referred to the Atlantic Ocean as "the herring pond." The downside of the little critters, however, is that they spoil very rapidly and become inedible. The only practical way to preserve herring is to cure them with a combination of salting and smoking, and those herring most heavily cured turn a deep crimson color from the process. Voila, red herring.
     Curing herring in this fashion not only preserves the fish and changes its color, but also gives it a distinctive smell, and thereby hangs the modern meaning of "red herring." In training hounds to hunt foxes, these red herrings, dragged on a string through the woods, were used to lay down a trail of scent for the dogs to follow. There is also some evidence that red herrings were, later in the training process, sometimes dragged across the scent trail of a real fox to test the ability of the hounds to ignore a false clue and stick to the scent of the fox. From this practice comes our use of "red herring" to mean a false clue or bogus issue designed to confuse one's opponent (or, in the case of our recent election, the voters). "Red herring" first appeared in the literal "smoked fish" sense around 1420, but the figurative "phony issue or false clue" sense didn't appear until around 1884.

HUNKY DORY
A SPITTING IMAGE?
AN ALBATROSS AROUND THE NECK

FAMILY PICTURES

   This is the scanned shot which really is quite good but cursor down and get a load of the enhanced version and the improved detail. This is the:

Original scanned version

                             Enhanced version

    Possible final edit for a widescreen presentation

Original Polaroid of Lenny Marsh & David Mangano (AKA "Rapper  D")

Enhanced Version

Original of Sandy Mangano Papp &
 David Mangano)

Enhanced version

Tighter shot

Sandy & Dave

Me and Ronny (Original)

Enhanced

Lt. Gerald L. Marsh WW II (my Dad)

Dad's Gunner

An SBD "Dauntless Douglas" over Wake Island

Original

Enhanced

Dad's Squadron Aboard the U.S.S. Lexington

Dad and Suzie (my sister)

Dad and Suzie (my sister)

Grandma Marsh

The Marsh Family

Grandpa Marsh

Grandpa and Grandma Marsh on the extreme right

Suzy, Grandpa & ?

Suzy and friend

Suzy and Lenny in Ohio?

Suzie and Mom

Suzie and Mom's last party

Gerry Marsh n friend

Gerald "Gerry" Marsh

Dad n me in Punta Gorda

Gerry Marsh

Squadron Insignia

Lenny in Boston and Cheers Bar

These are edited frames from 8mm film.

There is no sound on 8mm film so it is impossible to tell exactly what is going on . . . .

. . . but I would venture to say that in this frame it appears as though he is ducking to avoid getting slapped in the back of the head. Possibly the first documented shot of the classic "rope a dope" technique later made famous by Mohammed Ali.

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