Category: Life

Life

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Legal Life Oddities Political

Pork Barrel

You might expect that the original pork barrels were barrels for storing pork — and you’re right. In the early 19th century, that’s exactly what ‘pork barrel’ meant.

But, the term was also used figuratively to mean ‘a supply of money’ or ‘one’s livelihood’ (a farmer, after all, could readily turn pork into cash).

When 20th-century legislators doled out appropriations that benefited their home districts, someone apparently made an association between the profit a farmer got from a barrel of pork and the benefits derived from certain state and federal projects. By 1909, ‘pork barrel’ was being used as a noun naming such government appropriations, and today the term is often used attributively in constructions such as ‘pork barrel politics’ or ‘pork barrel project.’

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Everyday Life

Plaintiff

We won’t complain about the origins of ‘plaintiff,’ although ‘complain’ and ‘plaintiff’ are probably distantly related. ‘Complain’ is thought to derive ultimately from ‘plangere,’ a Latin word meaning ‘to strike, beat one’s breast, or lament.’ ‘Plangere’ is an ancestor of ‘plaintiff’ too.

‘Plaintiff’ comes most immediately from the Middle English ‘plaintif,’ itself a Middle French borrowing; in Middle French, ‘plaintif’ functioned both as a noun and as an adjective meaning ‘lamenting, complaining.’ That ‘plaintif’ in turn comes from the Middle French ‘plaint,’ meaning ‘a lamentation.’ (The English words ‘plaintive’ and ‘plaint’ are also descendents of these Middle French terms.) And ‘plaint’ comes from the Latin ‘planctus,’ past participle of “plangere.” Logically enough, ‘plaintiff’ applies to the one who does the complaining in a legal case.

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Life Literary

Oxymoron

2 Greek derivatives:
‘Oxy’ which means ‘sharp’ ‘Moros’ which means ‘dull’ which are opposites.

It referrs to terms like ‘act natural’ ‘false truth’ ‘athletic scholarship’ etc.

Categories
Everyday Life Literary

Out of the blue

Thomas Carlyle (1837).  The French Revolution.

‘Arrestment, sudden really as a bolt out of the blue, has hit strange victims.’

Categories
Everyday Life Literary

Out of Sight

It was used by Stephen Crane at least four times in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (New York: 1893).
Visiting a museum, our heroine utters, ‘Dis is outa sight.’ She could have been speaking 70 years later.