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

Making a Hames was unknown to me (Northwest England) but at school we had an expression "Making a cart of ..." when something went wrong. This was not any direct connection with equines or transport, it was an abbreviation of Cartwright - being the middle name of a classmate who had the reputation (possibly unfairly) for getting things spectacularly wrong.
Hi, John, if you're there.
I still use the expression, forty years later.


ltp,
One thing we should definitely NOT say is "hone in on" as in "When we have collated the information we shall hone in on the cause."
Why do people get these things wrong? Is it just to annoy me?
It's "home in" chaps, "home in".

* wanders off to release all his now worthless honing pigeons *


~jwf~

actualy Pold chap bit of a guf faw hit the n instead of m "out of hames" way old chap which is what I'd do if there a lot of hone'ing going on heard somewhere to do with sharp knives .

Sharp nives and annoyed P better toodle off toodle pip ld chap toodle pip.,

jwf,
"The state of confusion that can arise from the improper harnessing of horses is now lost on most of us."

Ain't that the trhoof.
Some years ago, before my daughter developed an allergy to horses (and before she was thrown by one) we went to the Halifax (Yorks) Horse Museum where a guy demonstrated how to harness a nag to a cart. He mentioned, particularly, how easy it was to get it wrong. Unfortunately I spent most of the time looking around to make sure that none of the huge beasts was likely to step on my infant. I don't recall the names of the equipment but I fancy that the horse collar has to be put over the horse's head upside down and then turned over.
He went on to say that the horses pull barges on canal trips. These craft weigh several tons and to get them moving, the horses move to take up the slack on the rope then then stop walking and just lean forward to "unstick" the boat. Once it's budged, it's easy to pull.

We went back a couple of years ago but were disappointed to find the place was deserted. Nearby Hebden Bridge was advertising horsedrawn canal rides, and Bradford, not too far away, now has something similar on its website. I hope that the coaches and carriages were rescued, they were old and interesting.

>> Why do people get these things wrong? Is it just to annoy me? <<

I suspect there may be a double jeopardy there.
First forget about any posssibilty that enough people have it in for you to actually create a conspiracy. Now clear your mind and recall observing inexperienced grave-diggers, whittlers-of-wood or honers of knives and axes. Their lack of skill causes them to take away much more material than is necessary.

Oh yes, there's many a fillet knife round here that's thin as pencil and sharp as attack.

Now the logic behind 'honing something down' until there's little left but its essential core, wasteful as it might be, is probably similar to the American notion of 'whittling something down' to its nub or core meaning. The due process of elimination is indiscriminate but effective.

(Nub was a very lovely word discussed here approximately three years ago, which I am happy now to use freely at anyvery occassion.)



~jwf~

ltp,

Anyone with a sharp knife is a friend as far as I am concerned.

What's an ltp?
Is it El Tee Pee or Eye Tee Pee?
There seems to have been a honing, a whittling, a shovellings out of more meaning than the remaining three letters - ltp - can in any way convey. It is dangerously close to txspk.

jwf

I'm too idle to type "logicus tracticus philosophicus" and to say "Mr. philosophicus" seems too formal.

Sorry for the confusion, I'm getting good at it.

~jwf~ deserves the prize for obfuscation for this dissertation on over-honers:

"Their lack of skill causes them to take away much more material than is necessary.[snip] Now the logic behind 'honing something down' until there's little left but its essential core, wasteful as it might be, is probably similar to the American notion of 'whittling something down' to its nub or core meaning. The due process of elimination is indiscriminate but effective."

This is logic worthy of George Bush. To summarise: to get to the essential, remove more than necessary. Aaaaaghhhhh! Desire to screaming. No, come back and talk sensibly. OK.

Honing is sharpening. One doesn't hone "in" to the desired shape, one hones the edge, wherever it currently happens to extend to.

One does on the other hand "home in" on an elusive detail or radio signal. No material is removed in this operation.

In reply to TrCh (easier to expand that?) there are other words from gaelic floating aroung the English soup; famous place names like Baltimore (bailte móra = big houses) and Avon (abhainn = river). Americans (I believe) use a phrase "rinky-dinky" from the gaelic rince = dance.

I haven't a handy source other than racking my brains for these examples. So to gratify TriChi as much as I can (which is my dearest wish) I will waffle on for a while about Irish phrases . . .

"Lillibulero", the song by Purcell beloved of Army bands, is not a piece of nonsense: "Lile ba léir ó, ba linn an lá" (generally given as "Lilliblero, bullen a law" which is a good transliteration) means "The lily (meaning the orange lily) prevailed, and the day was ours" referring to the defeat of James II by William of Orange in 1690. Why, you ask, are the victors singing in Irish? There you go.

"How are things in Gloccamaura?" -- this place-name seemed highly improbable to me when I heard it first, but it is taken from James Stephens's book "The Crock of Gold" (1912) where the action takes place in "Páirc na gcloca móra", the field of big stones.

Enough? I think I've aired my spleen on "May the road rise to meet you" before. Back to Making a Hones of it . . .

To be strictly accurate, the name Avon, for the river in England, would have come from Ancient British rather than Gaelic. This is still a Celtic language, but of the Brythonic variety rather than the Goidelic.

What is it about the Britons? I used to assume they were Celts, but have lately read that they weren't.

ltp

Some people may posibly have heard of Mr Wittgenstein's work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?

Noggin

Wittgenstein would probably be delighted to see his book title mangled. It was George Moore's idea, seized on by Bertrand Russell who was instrumental in having the TLP published in English. It was a play on the title of Spinoza's 17th century "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus"; but although Russell greatly admired Spinoza, Wittgenstein didn't.

Wittgenstein didn't care what the book was called, though he was happy to have it published in English. The German original was published the previous year (1921) with the name "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" -- something like "Logical Treatment of Philosophy".

A1024156

I'm still working on the assumption that the Britons were Celts, since the language they spoke was Celtic.

In Answer to Recumbentman's original question, and plaguesville's
"Making a Hames was unknown to me (Northwest England) but at school we had an expression "Making a cart of ..." when something went wrong."

I haven't heard 'hames' used in Recumbentman's way either, but I am familiar with my mother's Lancashire phrase (apparently unkown to Google)
'to make a [right] hand-cart of',
which essentially means making a mess of doing a job, generally through incompetence with possibly a bit of overcomplication.

I'm not sure how wide the usage might be - humour in Northern English (at least in Lancashire) does contain a significant slice of off-the-cuff analogies of sometimes apparently contradictory and/or surreal natures, and it is possible that it may be a phrase of very limited usage that simply stuck in my mother's mind.

*wonders*... We also have "making a hash of..." - was there some rude word starting with 'ha' that some/all of the above were polite replacements for?

Potholer,

I had always assumed that "making a hash of ..." related to the "tater 'ash" dish which, delicious though it may be, looks very untidy and mixed up.

I wonder whether your mother and I share an acquaintance.

<< And who now says "the data are...">>

I do....

Singular datum; plural data. The data are....

However "data" is also now used in the same grammatical fashion as words like butter. So "the data is..." is also acceptable.

Noggin