h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I remember a conversation between two of my American colleagues, one from Ma and one from Va. The Ma one was expounding some point about Ma having the oldest settlement in the US, or similar, when the Va one corrected him pointing out, quite correctly, that Va contains the site of a much older settlement. It felt distinctly like he was pulling rank!

Gonville and Caius is the subject of an edited entry A1126270, where it says that Caius was the latinsed form of Keys, so it isn't a corruption.

By MA i presume you mean Bee Gees ,MA ,not accademia.
In uk beeb or mayhave been open university, showing satellite imagery
photoes showing settlement (town planning)not huts/tents from before last ice age.

Either Ark or Atlantis debate.

>> The flappy bit is called the "fly". <<

Am I to assume there is an upper and lower fly as well?

~jwf~

Flappy lower flies (flys??) would probably be moderated

Who was it that said to a woman, who commented that his thing was sticking out of his trousers, "You flatter yourself, madam, it is merely hanging out."

What has three legs and flies?


























Manx trousers.

* or as the French so foppishly put it *



Whenever my mind is not deliberately focussed, it drifts again to the problem of why there are so many orphaned negatives like the classic 'uncouth'. So many of them seemed based on value judgements of social behaviour and good manners, indicating some class action is afoot.

Half asleep last night I hit upon 'disingenuous'. You can try looking up 'genuous' but I don't think you'll find it. This begs the question again then, how can something be the negative form - ie: ingenuous - of a word that doesn't exist - ie: genuous.

The qualities which ingenuous and disingenuous describe are essentially social in observation and likely class based - from genus and the idea of generational traits; blood will tell and all that.

Given then that 'ingenuous' is a house of straw on no foundation, how would one dare add onto it a 'dis' to become 'disengenuous' creating a kind of double negative orphan that has become synonomous with the thing it was supposed to contrast. Not unlike flammable/inflammable.

Dictionary dot com deals only with current usage and recent polar shifts in its meaning. They fail to explain the absence of any 'genuous' of which there could be an 'in-', or worse yet a 'disin-', there-by avoiding any participation in the class struggle while having a laugh at those who know no better. They simply acknowledge that:

"Sometimes disingenuous is used as a synonym for naive, as if the dis- prefix functioned as an intensive (as it does in certain words like disannul) rather than as a negative element."

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=1&q=disingenuous

They also Note that:

"Note: (Formerly) printers did not discriminate between ingenuous and ingenious, and these words were used or rather printed interchangeably almost to the beginning of the eighteenth century. --G. P. Marsh."


~jwf~

Oh, ~jwf~

You're confusing your gaelic trews with gallic trous.
Admittedly one needs "trous" to be able to put on "un pantalon". One at the top and one for each foot at the narrow end. (It would not be helpful in this context to say "bottom".)
**Trou = hole.**
The French look at trouser from the top - singular, whereas all the sensible people know that you need trousers - plural, or a pair of them.

The OED gives:
"Genuity" (obsolete) simplicity.

but I'm not sure if that moves you forward.

As for "couth", the OED has yards of it. Well perhaps not quite that much, but it is obsoletely there.

Starting with "known", it goes on to well known, acquainted, renowned, famed, agreeable, cosy ...

cOComeing from different angle'disingenuous''genuous'
being first what your tended subconcous fanticy was planning for you in short avi bytes one will never know.
since
A "Note: (Formerly) printers did not discriminate between ingenuous and ingenious, and these words were used or rather printed interchangeably almost to the beginning of the eighteenth century. --G. P. Marsh."
Also the lazy printer that could not be botherd to look for his speasly double ff or au and of p and q.

Possible greek or latin root was corupted ,rather like the buiscuit tin

In which you keep arrowroot biscuits?

Ane I love the idea of ~jwf~ confusing his trews (or getting his knockers in a twist)

Just butting in (as ever!) with something I found in my bike magazine, where it claimed that the game of golf is so named because it stands for 'Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden'. which made me laugh. They presented this as fact. whereas, to me, this looks like a classic back-formation a bit like the old 'Port Out, Starboard Home' for psoh. Just wondered if anyone else had seen it before or if this is a new one?

I had heard that one at least once some time ago in company I generally did and do not frequent. Golfers. One of whom insisted in what I took to be a sincere belief that it stood for "Get Off the Lawn Fellas!"

~jwf~

Well, more likely than 'Go On, Live Fast!' I suppose

Anyway, we all know it originated by spelling the word 'Flog' backwards

As in flogging a dead horse?

A good general rule in etymology is to disbelieve any derivation of a word from initial letters if it is before the 20th century.

Gnomon,interesting, I wonder if we can come up with any other general rules of etymology?

Here's one I've just made up:

1 syllable - most likely Anglo-Saxon
2 syllable - from Norman French
3 syllable - from Latin
4 syllable - from Greek