Filth (For Grown-Ups Only!)

Consider filth. This is with reference to neither the police nor Newcastle United.

No, no. This is about real filth. The sort of filth that makes you sick and drives your Mum, or wife, to wash your clothes whether you think it is needed or not.

Girlfriends don’t wash your clothes as a general rule. They will let you be yourself until the knot is firmly tied and then the change sweeps over you.

The other day there was an episode of ‘Mythbusters’ that brought all this bubbling, like a thick froth of suds, to the surface.

Within this episode, the part that I saw, they were examining the difference between how people wash their hands post toilet event.

They carried out an experiment wherein they took hand samples with swabs following three different ‘techniques’:

The first one was where people pretended to wash their hands but walked out still ‘dry’.

The second was where people just rinsed their hands under running water, and,

The third was where people actually washed their hands properly with soap and water.

The samples were then placed on soy agar and incubated overnight.

There was a marked difference between the samples in that the people who failed completely to wash their hands had an agar covered in microbial activity. Whether the microbes were harmless or not was not investigated. The people who only used water showed spotty agar and those who washed properly had clean agar. Clearly (and obviously) the ‘soapy’ people came out the purist in terms of microbes.

But.

What wasn’t made clear was if the microbes were already on the hands prior to using the toilet. Might it not be that the hands were less than pure prior to carrying out one’s personal issues?

Consider this.

Money.

Money is filthy. The last person to hold that coin or note might have been infected with some dire disease known only to the ‘Centre for Disease Control’. Or it might have been held by someone who has just been to the toilet and failed to wash their hands. Or it might easily have been a pork salesman or purveyor of some equally filthy material.

Perhaps the coin was filthy because it had been dropped in doggy poos on the pavement/sidewalk/five-foot way. Who knows where that money has been.

Speaking of doggy poos—what about doggy? They like, do they not, to roll around on sundry surfaces like grass. Grass that could easily contain other doggy poos.

Or pavements. They might like to lie down on the pavement while you chat with your friends/neighbours/family. Pavements are well known to be a hard surface covered in a thin patina of dog/bird/cat poo, piss, vomit, spit and sundry other germ breeding bodily secretions from a variety of germ laden sources.

Then you stroke doggy. Doggies, I am reliably informed by those who know such things, like to be stroked. They do not, it appears, like to be cuddled but will tolerate it for short periods.

So you handle money and doggies. Never mind cats. We shall not mention cats who are an abundant source of filth.

Dogs and cats like to lick themselves clean. This licking includes their defecation areas; then they lick your face. Cute, eh?

What else do you handle during the course of the average day? Door handles. Door handles are gripped by everyone. Supermarket trolley handles. These are known to be one of the filthiest items in creation. Small children are known to be carried in supermarket trolleys; they will, on occasion, lean forward and suck at the handle—especially if they are teething, and swap one set of germs for another.

Then you go to the toilet. Men, generally speaking, tend to stand up, unzip, reach in and fumble around until they find ‘it’ then stretch it out past the zip and to make it look longer for the benefit of the person in the next stall. This requires quite a firm grip using both finger and thumb.

The fingers and thumbs are the primary gripping tool for holding money and supermarket trolley handles. Possibly, even, for stroking dogs and cats.

Shake off the drops and put the unclean object back in the trousers, zip up and head for the taps where we might, or might not, cleanse our fingers before reuniting with wife or girlfriend.

Allowing for a reasonable microbial incubation time we may now enquire of our wives or girlfriends if they should care to involve themselves in some sort of intimacy involving oral manipulation.

After all, our hands are clean.

Aren’t they?

'Alice in Wonderland'

“If you drink much from a bottle marked 'poison' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.”

Alice.

“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English). “Now I’m opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!” (for when she looked down at her feet they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). “Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I’m sure I shan’t be able! I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself about you: you must manage the best way you can—but I must be kind to them,” thought Alice, “or perhaps they won’t walk the way I want to go! Let me see. I’ll give them a new pair of boots every Christmas.”

And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it. “They must go by the carrier,” she thought; and how funny it’ll seem, sending presents to one’s own feet! And how odd the directions will look!

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), published on 4 July 1865.

Generally referred to as a classic of literature, Lewis Carroll has been held up as giant among authors for his brilliant stories.

Quite rightly so, too, of course. His tales entertain as much now as ever they did when they were originally published. There is no doubt that you will have enjoyed reading these quotes from his ‘Alice in Wonderland’ story as much as I did. There is, equally, little doubt that your children and grandchildren will enjoy them.

They are still making films of those stories using special effects that are, at this time superlative. Perhaps in the light of future developments they will look less entrancing but they will satisfy us for now.

So why did I open this ‘Blog’ with these illustrious words?

Because his English is dire. Read through them and see how many grammatical errors you can find. I count nine and those without the deliberate error of the ‘made-up’ words at the start.

A short while ago I listed some things that, we are told, writers should never do. Kurt Vonnegut said that semi-colons are dreadful things and it is generally accepted that you should never start a sentence with ‘and’.

Lewis Carroll gets away with it. Why?

Because, for all his failings as a writer of English, he was a magnificent storyteller. He uses words as tools to paint verbal pictures in our heads. More importantly, he describes things so that children will ‘see’ them in their mind’s eyes.

Naturally, language develops. The way things were written down in 1865 are not the way things are written now. I might refer you to the indomitable, but racist, Rudyard Kipling in this respect; magnificent stories written in the style of his period.

This brings you to my second point.

This is the ‘curiouser and curiouser’ part. It is a little fragment of what goes on in a writer’s head

Some years ago—possibly around ten of them, I had a story in my head that refused to go away. It was a stupid story involving the insular and xenophobic relations that the average British citizen has with their Continental neighbours.

Ultimately the only way that I could exorcise this string of words from my head was to write them down.

A few days at the computer feverishly pounding at the keys saw the story completed.

It was, in my view, rubbish. It was, in my view, just a ‘phantasmagorical’ plethora of gibber that was now, with any luck, removed from my head.

Wife saw it. Because I am computer illiterate my wife is required to come and extricate me from any problems that I get myself into with this electronic enemy.

Wife read the story and laughed.

“This is wonderful,” quoth she.

“Is ******g ***t,” I quoth back.

She sent it off. It is now on ‘Amazon’ in an unedited, unproofed state and is one of the more popular stories in the collection.

This is how ‘The Hags of Teeb’ came about.

There is nothing stranger than people.

“Curiouser and curiouser.”

From Whence Cometh the Foot?

Nobody is quite sure where the term ‘The whole nine yards’ comes from.

I have said that it is a Naval term based on the idea that a sailing ship with three masts has three ‘yards’ (spars) per mast. Ships could change direction as the new sails were unfurled; it is only when the last sail is unfurled that the enemy might know what direction the ship will finally be taking. The ship will now be sailing under the ‘whole nine yards’.

Some people have said that it refers to the shipyards rather than the sails.

There is little recorded use of this phrase before the 1950’s so there could be some truth in the idea that it is from the cutting table of a tailor’s shop. A suit is said to made from nine yards of material and so a tailor making a suit could be said to be using the ‘whole nine yards’. People who like this theory will point out that there is a similar saying, ‘dressed to the nines’, that is used to describe people who are well dressed—perhaps ‘overdressed’?

Another theory is that Ralph Boston was the first long –jumper to leap twenty-seven feet (twenty-seven feet and half an inch). You would think that headline writers might have equally jumped at the opportunity to write, “Boston Goes the Whole Nine Yards”. But they did not. That was in May, 1969.

Ralph Boston

I’m going to stick with my theory until proven otherwise! (How arrogant is that?)

But what is a ‘yard’?

This breaks into two different ideas. One of which is the idea of a ‘yard’ as being an enclosed area of land. This comes from the verb ‘to gird’; this is from the same root as ‘garden’ (note the German word ‘garten’ is similar). In Russian the word ‘gorod’ (town) originally meant an enclosed, or fortified, town. Similarly, the Latin or Greek ‘hortus’ and ‘hortos’ (farm-yard, feeding place, fodder – hay was always grown in an enclosed area) give us the same root.

Nowadays the area may be enclosed or open.

We should have a quick look at some other words used as measurement and see where they came from.

An ‘inch’ is the width of your thumb. Or it was. It is now, legally, 2.54 cms. That makes the inch based on metric measurements. How sad.

The Romans had a ‘pes’ which was made up of twelve ‘unciae’. ‘Pes’ is ‘foot’ (‘pedes’ is ‘feet’). England has used the ‘foot’ as a unit of measurement for over a thousand years but it was always, like so many other units, variable. This was until 1876 when it was decreed that the yard, foot and inch would be standardised. There is a plaque in Trafalgar Square, London that tells you this and shows the, new, standard measurements at 62°F.

Plaque in Trafalgar Square

(A 'Chain' is also marked out)

A ‘light-foot’ as part of a ‘light-year’ is about one light-nanosecond or billionth of a second, or 1/1,000,000,000 secs.

[Beware something called a metric foot often used by DIY stores. It is 30 centimetres long, which is less than a foot, and you don't get a whole number of them to a metre. This makes it useless for both imperial and metric measurement.]

A yard is a single stride. The word yard comes from the Old English ‘gyrd’, meaning a rod or measure. Henry I (1100-1135) decreed that the lawful yard be the distance between the tip of his nose and the end of his thumb. It was within a tenth of an inch of the modern yard. A yard is nearly a metre.

A mile is derived from ‘mille’, Latin for thousand, since a Roman mile was ‘mille passuum’, a thousand Roman paces or double strides, from left foot to left foot. A ‘passus’ was 5 ‘pedes’, which would make 5000 feet to the mile.

The modern mile is 5280 feet or 1760 yards. In the past every part of England had its own mile, up to 2880 yards. In Ireland, the mile was 2240 yards well into the 20^th century.

A furlong is a 'furrow long' or length of a medieval field. This varied widely because the horses were entitled to pause for rest at the end of each furrow. Heavy soils meant a shorter rest or a shorter furrow. The railways insisted on a standard length for a furlong so it came to be one eighth of a mile.

"The whole of the United States was measured and mapped using the Gunter’s Chain and his chain still applies to all title plans in use today. For this reason all city blocks, roads and avenues are multiples of the chain. Towns were laid out at 6 miles square or 36 sq miles. Early farms were sold to would-be farmers as lots of 640 acres or 1 sq mile. Interestingly enough the geodetic coastal survey and ordnance surveys of the entire US are metric."

A chain is the length of a cricket pitch. It has been in use since 1620. The correct name is a Gunter’s Chain after the Reverend Edmund Gunter who was a Professor of Astronomy.

[The Ramsden's chain or engineer's chain is 100 feet long, where each link is one foot long.]

100 links make one chain. A link is 7.92 inches (7.92”).

Rods, poles and perches are different names for the same unit. Medieval ploughing was done with oxen, up to 4 pairs at a time. The ploughman handled the plough. His boy controlled the oxen using a stick, which had to be long enough to reach all the oxen. This was the rod, pole or perch.

     A BBC web-page about allotments says, "an allotment plot is 10 poles" and claims that "A pole is measured as the length from the back of the plough to the nose of the ox". If you wanted to control the front ox, you needed a pole long enough to reach!

The perch was used in the reign of Henry II (1154-1189), the pole since the 16C, and the rod since 1450.

A span, sometimes known as an ‘octave’ for the keys on a piano, was originally the length from your little finger to your thumb if you stretch your fingers out. It later became 9 inches or a quarter of a yard.

The cubit is the earliest unit of length, used in Egypt in the 3rd Dynasty (2800-2300 BC). It is the length of the arm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. The English cubit is 18 inches long, but the Romans, Egyptians and Hebrews all had different lengths. Cubits are used in the Bible. Noah’s Ark is said to have been 300 cubits long.

A cloth-yard was used to measure cloth. It is an inch longer than an ordinary yard. A natural way to measure cloth is to hold one end in one hand, and measure along the edge to the nose, then repeat, and these would be cloth-yards. A cloth-yard shaft was an arrow a cloth-yard long because that is how far you can draw a bow.

An ell is derived from 'elbow'. It started off similar to the cubit, but the English ell was 45 inches or a yard and a quarter. It could have been measured from elbow to elbow. There was an old saying "Give him an inch and he'll take an ell". As the ell fell out of common use, the saying got changed to "Give him an inch and he'll take a mile" (which makes less sense).

Another cloth measure. Cloth is stored in rolls, which are still called ‘bolts’.

Cloth Bolts

A league is another measure that varies by country. In England, it is taken to be 3 miles. It was originally the distance that you could walk in an hour.

In fairy tales, there were seven league boots, which would carry you seven leagues (21 miles) in one stride. Jules Verne wrote a book about a submarine, called "20,000 Leagues under the Sea". This refers to how far they travelled, not how deep they were. 

3 barleycorns = 1 inch. This was used in Tudor times. Thus 4 poppy seeds = 1 barleycorn and 12 poppy seeds = 1 inch.

In Asia, by the way, there is a Saga Tree. Also known as a ‘Shade Tree’. The seeds from this tree are always exactly the same size and weight. They were used, many years ago, as a standard to weigh valuable items—like jewels and gold.

 Saga Tree Seeds

As a last thought: if you have finished reading this and the sun is now over the yardarm, you may take a drink.

(Royal Navy, early 19^th Century.)

Just Pulling Your Leg - Or Not

Let’s move away from the Navy for a while and look at a couple of other phrases in relatively common usage.

There was a time when the removal of somebody’s head was regarded as a method of execution for upper class people like Royalty or Knights.

A Royal head would be removed by the use of a sword and that was regarded as much more dignified than having your head lopped off by an axe.

Of course the French had different ideas and summoned Madame Guillotine to the task. We still have guillotines to this day but now they are more commonly used on paper or sheet metal. It would have been interesting to have someone who could lip read at these Gallic executions since the severed head would often try to speak to the assembled crowd after being excised from the body but, of course, with no air to drive the vocal chords...

The common person, criminal, would have his life separated from his body by rather more bizarre ways. These were invariably painful and long lasting as in being hung, drawn and quartered. Death was rarely instantaneous in this type of execution unless the fellows doing it got it wrong and then they were for the ‘high jump’.

The ‘High Jump’ does not refer to a form of athleticism but rather to dropping somebody through a hatch at the end of a rope. Once the neck was broken they would usually jump around for a while until the body recognised that it was no longer getting instructions from the brain as to what to do next—breathing springs to mind.

We still have an expression where we say that something has ‘gone to pot’. This has nothing to do with the culinary arts and more to do with the tradition in olden days of boiling somebody to death in a pot. This was a time when boiling to death was a legal punishment.

On an equally vicious note, "meeting a deadline" refers to the line drawn in the American Civil War to stop inmates escaping - and would be shot in the head if they crossed it.

It began as a real line, drawn in the dirt or marked by a fence or rail, restricting prisoners in Civil War camps. They were warned, "If you cross this line, you're dead." To make ‘dead’ sure this important boundary was not overlooked, guards and prisoners soon were calling it by its own bluntly descriptive name, the dead line. An 1864 congressional report explains the usage in one camp: "A railing around the inside of the stockade, and about twenty feet from it, constitutes the 'dead line,' beyond which the prisoners are not allowed to pass."

Today, applying a "rule of thumb" suggests a practical approach to problem solving, but it was actually a violent way to settle marital disputes.

A judge, Sir Francis Buller, ruled that "a man was entitled to beat his wife with a stick provided it was no thicker than his thumb".  This is from the Glasgow Herald dated 1886.

Experts discovered that "paying through the nose" was originally a Viking punishment of slitting the nose from tip to eyebrow of anyone who refused to pay tax. You would be immediately identifiable as a tax evader by the heavy scar eventually and, no doubt, the terrified screams initially.

Meanwhile "pulling someone's leg" originates from a time when London was rife with "grab and run" thieves who attacked their victims by pulling them to the ground by their leg.

Not much changes there, then!

Perhaps you have some interesting snippets that you could add to this.

Finding out about these words, phrases and sayings is, to me, fascinating stuff.

Know the Ropes

While we are on a nautical theme with the jolly Jack Tars there is a question that comes up from time to time about the number of ropes on a sailing ship.

If we look up at a typical three master we could reasonably ask our land-locked colleagues that same question. They would, in all probability, respond with an answer akin to, “Bloody thousands!”

They would be in error.

There are five ropes on a sailing ship.

They are:

The “Man-Rope”

This is what would be the ‘hand-rail’ of the accommodation ladder. This is the ladder that comes down the side of a ship so that access can be made to board the ship. It is often known as a ‘gangway’.

The “Foot-Rope”

Which is stirruped below the yard from mast to yardarm.

The ‘yardarm’ is the wooden pole attached to the mast from which the sails are deployed or reefed (furled). Underneath each yardarm there is a rope that is looped at short intervals (stirruped) so that sailors may stand on it to see to the sails. That is the ‘foot-rope’.

The “Bolt-Rope”

Is at the edge of the sail. It is a reinforcing rope that is the equivalent of a hem on a shirt.

The “Bucket-Rope”

The handle of the bucket.

The “Bell-Rope”

The ‘handle’ that is used to ring the ship’s bell.

Some sailors refer to the “Tow-Rope” but that is actually a hawser, it is not a ‘rope’.

Apart from these five there is nothing on board a ship that is referred to as a rope.

Lifts, bunt-lines, clew-lines, braces, hawsers, warps, bends, sheets, ratlines and fenders are just some of the names that are given to ‘ropes’ on board a sailing ship but there are, in reality, only those five.

 That will give you a clew.

Just Saying...

In the last ‘Blog’ there was mention, I believe, of the ‘bitter end’. You will not be surprised to hear that this is an expression derived from the Royal Navy in yesteryear. The end of the anchor line secured to a sturdy post on the deck called a bitt. The line was paid out in order to set the anchor. However, if the water was deeper than anticipated the rope would pay out to the bitter end; if it was improperly secured... And so the "bitter end" of any line is the loose, unsecured end.

There are lots more. We have spoken about some of these in the past so we shall see if we cannot find a few new ones with which to entertain ourselves.

We have come to see the expression ‘bail out’ in common parlance these days. Originally it meant to remove the water from the bilges of a swamped ship to prevent it sinking but now it refers also to helping out anyone in difficulties.

In Naval terms, ‘stand aloof’ meant to keep your distance and maintain that distance (from another ship).

In the seventeenth century the Spanish would raise a false flag to deceive the enemy. This was to ‘bamboozle’ the enemy.

From the early fourteenth century the Admiralty collected all the maritime laws and conduct into a book that was known as the ‘Black Book of the Admiralty’. The punishments listed for contravening these laws and terms of conduct were ‘Draconian’. The more serious offences would be met with drowning, marooning, and starvation; these were meted out for serious offences like repeatedly sleeping on watch. Nowadays the punishments are less severe but could lead to social disgrace if you are someone’s ‘black book’.

During the Battle of Copenhagen in 1801, Admiral Nelson deliberately held his telescope to his blind eye so that he could not see the flag signal from the Commander to cease the bombardment. He won the battle. In modern terms, turning a blind eye to something means to intentionally ignore it.

In the time of the Spanish-American War, sailors wore leggings that were called ‘boots’. It came to mean a Navy (or Marine) recruit. The Military still go to ‘boot camp’.

‘Brought Up Short. When under way a ship can only make an emergency stop by dropping the anchors. This is an extremely unpleasant thing to do for both the ship and the personnel on board. Someone who is brought to an unfortunate standstill by a change in circumstances is now said to have been ‘brought up short’.

A ‘caboose’ is a kitchen on a ship’s deck. Now it is referred to as accommodation for a train’s crew.

On sailing ships the Officer of the Deck would keep a ‘weather eye open’ for any changes in the wind so that sail could be added or shortened (reefed) as necessary. If a good breeze appeared then he would order the crew to ‘carry on’ and that meant that every inch of canvas that the ‘yards’ would carry would be hoisted. Now it merely means, “Carry on with your work.”

‘Letting the cat out of the bag’ has two possibilities. The one I like best is the one that is not nautical but both are interesting.

The first one is that the cat-o-nine-tails, which is a nine-thonged whip, was stored in a felt bag. Sometimes the bag would be waved in front of a seaman to threaten him with what could happen if he did not reform immediately. It was only ever taken out of the bag just before punishment was inflicted. (It is from the cat-o-nine-tails that we undertand a cat as having nine lives.)

The other explanation is that it was possible to buy a piglet in a sack (a pig in a poke). If you failed to check the contents of the sack you may find, after purchase, that it only contained a cat—less than tasty, I am told! This deception was only realised after ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ and, hence, ‘never buy a pig in a poke’!

Nowadays the expression ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ means to reveal a secret. That’s why I like the second one more than the first.

The Latin for ‘canal’ is ‘channel’. In nautical terms it means the movement of water within a larger body of water that has sufficient depth for navigation. ‘Going through the proper channels’ these days does not, necessarily, assure one of a pleasant passage

‘Chewing the Fat’ was a literal saying. Before refrigeration the sailor’s meal would be tough, cured meat that was either pork or beef. These meats were durable but required an enormous amount of chewing to make then edible! If you ‘chew the fat’ now you are having a chat with a friend—or talking a lot!

If two blocks of rigging tackle were so hard together they couldn't be tightened further, it was said they were "Chock-a-Block". Meaning something is filled to capacity or over loaded.

The term ‘cranky’ is possibly from the Dutch krengd, a crank was an unstable sailing vessel. Due to a faulty design, the imbalance of her cargo, or a lack of ballast, a crank would heel too far to the wind. It has come to mean ‘irritable’.

I think that’s enough for the time being. The point is that there are lots of terms, ‘enough room to swing a cat’, ‘son of a gun’, ‘freeze the balls off a brass monkey’, ‘fly by night’, and ‘garbled’ are just a small sample, to show that the derivation of terms and words in the English language are more often from the Navy than you might think.

Now I don’t want to ‘gripe’ about this ‘hodgepodge’ so I’m off see a ‘mate’ about his ‘hooker’s’ ‘nipper’ in the ‘skyscraper’. I believe he is ‘under the weather’ or just ‘pooped’ perhaps.

Perhaps later we’ll do the ‘whole nine yards’!