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

Doesn't 'strait' mean narrow? So straitlaced people would have a narrower view of morality than we laissez-faire types?

>> Doesn't 'strait' mean narrow? <<

After a fashion.
According to plaguesville's dick.dot link it is an obsolete word for 'tightly'. Which sorta makes sense when you say 'strait-laced' with a Scottish accent and a straight face.

So yes perhaps in the sense that squeezing thru a narrow opening would be a 'tight' fit. Although, the dimension of length also seems at play in describing nautical areas called straights. They are narrow but are usually also significantly longer (miles) than just a single narrow opening into a sheltered bay or the tight passage between two rocks.

I'm getting wet just thinking about it.

~jwf~

Was the "street called straight" more properly "the street called strait"? Said street still exists and most of it is certainly not straight. Connections with eyes of needles perhaps? (for non-Anglicans, these are King James biblical references)
Would keeping to the 'straight and narrow' be better expressed as 'the straight and strait'?
Why does 'straight' mean heterosexual? (perhaps I don't really want to know that one )
btw Dunx, I don't believe you

It's all true - plus a resident collection of swans (as opposed to wild) is a "Fleet". Probably goes with a squadron of ducks?

>Do you look up and to the left when you are trying to remember something<
When on a listening skills course we were split into twos and were told to tell our partner "Think of your mother."
We then had to look at their eyes.
Generally speaking, we look up when we are retrieving information. So people who looked up were generally trying to remember something recent about the last conversation or whatever.
We look down when we are having emotional thoughts, particularly sad ones. People who looked down when asked to think about them often had mothers who had died.

I have the impression that swans, being large, highly visible and relatively slow to react, would have met the same fate as the dodo if these precious beauties had not been gathered into resident collections or fleets to grace palacial or public gardens.

In spite of their reputation for aggressive biting when their nests are threatened they are pretty much sitting ducks. It had never occurred to me that there might be any left in the wild. One certainly never hears of swans wandering away or escaping their 'captivity' as tigers and monkeys are wont to do.

That said, it seems obvious that swans would generally want to stay put in the relative safety of an established garden and not go "swanning off".

My question then is, if the reality is contrary to the meaning suggested, what is the logic behind this peculiarly British expression?


~jwf~

Swanning off is an allusion to the way swans glide serenely away in an unruffled manner, and is usually used in reference to people who probably shouldn't be quite so care-free (e.g. "Dubya's just swanned off to the ranch again").

There are (or were, anyway) wild swans in Ireland. Yeats wrote a poem about them

A great man, that Yeats. He even wrote a poem inspired by our very own jwf, 'Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?' - and why not indeed?

The wild swans are still there (in Coole, that is), and it's still pretty hard to avoid them in much of Galway.

And, because I know someone was just about to ask, what with it being so topical and all, here's a brief explanation of swan upping.

Swan upping is the yearly census of swans on parts of the Thames taken on behalf of the Queen who nominally owns unmarked swans along with the Vintners' and Dyers' Companies, who nominally own all the ones which have been marked on their beaks. This year's swan upping starts on Monday. It's called swan upping because the swans are inverted to check whether they have a mark on them. Yes, I know you don't have to up-end a swan to check if its beak is marked, but if it made any sense it wouldn't be called a tradition, would it?

We have swans on our university campus and I don't think thay are non-wild, as in they aren't kept we just don't chuck them off. Same with the ones on the resevoir which my friend had to count once as part of her holiday work, she said you just kind of guessed how many there were in groups of about 500!

Mel

*as usual agog with admiration for Mycroft*

Here's my bit about swans. (Not very relevant)

Paul McCartney's "This One" always fascinated me, because you can't tell when he's singing "This swan" and "This one".

http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/paul_mccartney/this_one.html

That reminds me of that Police song, 'Sue Lawley'.

Who said reading the news wasn't rock 'n' roll?

Had she not heard of the camera or was it one of those deals (e.g. MI6 work experience) where a premium is placed on inaccuracy?

I was told by an old english teacher that "straight laced" refered to posture given by tightly laced corsets and that during the 1920's it came to refer to anyone who still wore corsets and was seen asbeing some what behind the newer more liberal times.

This is a bit like "call my bluff"

Apparently (according to a boffin who spoke at a BDA lecture I once attended) right handed (left-brained) people generally look up and to the left, left handed (right-brained) people look up and to the right and the 2% of the British population who are "crossed laterals" do the opposite . (Those of us who are ambidextrous synaesthetes supposedly sort of look inwards in an unfocused sort of way).

>> ..I don't think thay are non-wild, as in they aren't kept we just don't chuck them off. Same with the ones on the resevoir..<<

Ah, so there are more than a precious few still around then.
Your description suggests they are not inclined to flight - either literally or figuratively. Is this because they have their flight feathers clipped as pups?

It also suggests (confirmed by Mycroft) that they are not entirely the rare preserve of royalty as someone on Coronation Street once said. But the picture of thousands of swans doing their business in the resevoir has put me right off water.

I can't imagine that many of them! We have two (count 'em -2) in our 'world famous Public Gardens' recently donated by the adjacent Lord Nelson Hotel since the old pair apparently got eaten last winter (or otherwise swanned off).

I thank Mycroft for his description of serene and unruffled gliding. It makes sense and fits with my experience of swans who tend to be a bit stand-offish, especially when children are throwing food at them.

The context in which I recently heard the expression (Corrie St again, sorry) was anything but serene and unruffled and care-free. Rather it gave the impression of much flapping and squawking and running amok with the plot emphasis suggesting wild abandonment. I now suspect this misappropriation must have been the scriptwriters' way of revealing yet more subtext about the characters which eluded me.

I am happy to report that Ben Kingsley's wonderful malapropism - 'insinuendo' - did not escape me in 'Sexy Beast'.


Glide on my sweet angels,
~jwf~

Once again, ~jwf~, you have put your finger on a dichotomy.
I cannot recall who said it but "On the surface the swan is stately and serene but underneath there is frantic activity."

I'm afraid that 'gamut' doesn't come from 'gemot', the Old English word for an assembly. It comes from the musical world. The Gamma Ut was the lowest note in the musical scale. Recumbentman has written a wonderful entry on the history of musical scales and you can read all about it there. Somehow Gamma Ut for the lowest note came to mean the whole range of the musical scale and then got changed to 'gamut'.

Mycroft - You could take a photo of over 2 thousand swans and try to count them accurately if you like, but would you count heads or tails, the numbers would probably not match up!

IIRC They were only trying to work out whether there had been a major decline or increase in the ones coming back to the resevoir, it was not an exact science and the time taken to count them accurately was better spent doing other conservation work.

~jwf~ - Again this is going from memory but the swans are only there at certain times of the year, as I have never seen or been told about a keeper I am assuming they fly somewhere else. Though to assume is a very dangerous thing to do, so I shall ask when I go back in september! I wonder if the ducks and geese are wild too?

Mel

Did you know that "playing ducks and drakes" was that game where you skim flat stones across water? How did it come to mean creating mayhem, then - as in "He played ducks and drakes with the English bowling"?