Posted on 05/05/2016 5:03:45 AM PDT by harpygoddess
"Hang up the phone." comes from one specific kind of land-line phone that had a kind of hook you'd hang the handset from when you were done. Doing so would pull down the hook that was connected to a switch inside the phone that would disconnect the line.
And lots of nautical stuff:
Groggy - In 1740, British Admiral Vernon (whose nickname was "Old Grogram" for the cloak of grogram which he wore) ordered that the sailors' daily ration of rum be diluted with water. The men called the mixture "grog". A sailor who drank too much grog was "groggy".
Leeway - The weather side of a ship is the side from which the wind is blowing. The Lee side is the side of the ship sheltered from the wind. A lee shore is a shore that is downwind of a ship. If a ship does not have enough "leeway" it is in danger of being driven onto the shore.
Pipe Down - Means stop talking and be quiet. The Pipe Down was the last signal from the Bosun's pipe each day which meant "lights out" and "silence".
Slush Fund - A slushy slurry of fat was obtained by boiling or scraping the empty salted meat storage barrels. This stuff called "slush" was often sold ashore by the ship's cook for the benefit of himself or the crew. The money so derived became known as a slush fund.
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professors who teach logic claim that mind your p’s and q’s comes from the their field. lol
????
the professor who taught logic when I was in school swore that the phrase came from the logic problems which always use p and q.
I’d love to know why.
me too, I asked and he gave a plausible answer, since I knew no better, I had no reason to doubt him.
Go get a BT punch.
Once the belts are linked together in the ammo boxes on the wings, you have 27 feet.
When something is recorded into either a video or audio file, I often hear it said that it is “on tape.”
President Obama claimed that the stimulus bill he was pushing would create “shovel-ready” jobs.
I did not even think of aircraft, silly me. Thanks.
Sounds like Opium Pipe dream. Just a guess.
Yep, just googled it and that’s it.
I take it the phrase "Can't catch me, 'cause the rabbit done died", would have left them rather clueless.
“Don’t go off half-cocked”
My favorite is “Folding the yargo and spinning polistricallicly.”
It comes from, when you are spinning up your faster-than-light drive and position yourself too close to a graviton wave, and this causes your timespace relational matrix to ‘yargo’, or spin futurewise, and you end up several thousand years in the past due to timespace folding.
Oh wait, this IS the year 3119, right? I’m in the right timeframe to reveal this technology?
I actually looked up this Aerosmith lyric, and it turns out it is a mistake. ALL rabbits used to die in the early pregnancy tests. You had to kill them to find out.
So the implication that the rabbit dies only on a positive, is incorrect.
Interesting, and makes sense.
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