Passing clouds of inconsequential observations
A piece by Greg Morris the other day and now an article from The i Paper talking about checks:
What is going on? That obnoxious American fellow said he was making English the official language so we might be able to persuade them to start using the correct spelling – he seems like a reasonable chap.
An article from the New Statesman today included the passage:
I stopped reading after “she had another thing coming”. What was coming? A promotion? A cup of coffee? Surely what was meant was that her rumination would require further thought – she had another think coming. The Ngram view (for what that is worth) shows the ‘thing’ form taking off from around 2000 and becoming the more usual form today.
It is a curious phrasing. The folksy etymology is often attributed to American usage but one suspects that anyone who thinks that has another think coming.
Watching the David Byrne dance routine in today’s Open Culture post reminded me that what he describes as Puppet Leg, where an imagined puppet string is pulled to raise the leg,
was part of a ‘dance‘ (I use the word in its loosest interpretation) routine known as the Spotty Dog that we did in the 1960s resulting in much merriment.
Upon a search for a Spotty Dog clip I discovered that it is, bizarrely, an actual exercise these days. But as Miss Cox confesses she, and I suspect many others, has no idea why it is called the Spotty Dog.
Well let me enlighten you.
After the towrag nonsense, in a piece about the Jacobite uprising of 1745, the BBC spews forth this:
We can give you Flash in the pan and Half cocked but Sideburns did not appear until almost 100 years later when they arrived from America; derived from General Ambrose Burnside who sported a fine pair of side whiskers – as they were previously known.