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

>There's an almost 'evolution-based' insidiousness survival rate for good ideas and well turned phrases, they survive long after their original sources are forgotten. And the same will hold true for music and imagery. Pop culture is probably the only culture that counts in the long run.

You could leave out the word 'almost' there, ~jwf~. These are what Dawkins has christened 'memes'.

Strange; there is another scanned version of Heywood's Proverbs, this time along with his Epigrammes, here http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:HQxWeoDukF4J:www.archive.org/stream/proverbsandepig00heywgoog/proverbsandepig00heywgoog_djvu.txt+little+titte+all+%2Btayle&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ie

--this one dated 1562 (reprinted in 1867). I went looking for a footnote to 'Little tit all tail' but this scan seems to have few footnotes.

Off to OED: Hm, no results for the whole phrase, but certainly the 16th century meaning of 'tit' is a small horse (there is an earlier meaning, chiefly Scottish, 'A sharp or sudden pull; a tug, jerk, twitch' with citations from the fourteenth, sixteenth and nineteenth c.)

OED provides this list of John Heywood's works -- clearly someone we ought to know about:

Dramatic writings 15.. (J. S. Farmer 1905–08)
Woorkes. A dialogue conteynyng prouerbes and epigrammes 1562 (Spenser Soc. 1867)
A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue 1546 (1874)
A dialogue on wit and folly 15.. (Percy Soc. 1846)
Epigrammes 1555–60
A mery play betwene Iohan Iohan the husbande, Tyb his wyfe, and syr Jhan the preest 1533 (Brandl 1898)
A mery play betwene the pardoner and the frere, the curate and neybour Pratte 1533 (in Pollard, Eng. miracle plays 1890)
Of gentylnes & nobylyte See Rastell, John
The playe called the foure PP. A newe and a very mery enterlude of a palmer, a pardoner, a potycary, a pedler ?1545 (in Manly, Specim. pre-Shaks. drama I, 1897)
A play of love 1534 (Brandl 1898)
The play of the wether 1533 (Brandl 1898)
The spider and the flie, a parable 1556 (Spenser Soc. 1894)

Well I never. John Donne was a grandson of John Heywood.

Some of H's famous epigrams:

What you have, hold.
Haste maketh waste. (1546)
Out of sight out of minde. (1542)
When the sun shineth, make hay. (1546)
Look ere ye leap. (1546)
Two heads are better than one. (1546)
Love me, love my dog. (1546)
Beggars should be no choosers. (1546)
All is well that ends well. (1546)
The fat is in the fire. (1546)
I know on which side my bread is buttered. (1546)
One good turn asketh another. (1546)
A penny for your thought. (1546)
Rome was not built in one day. (1546)
Better late than never. (1546)
An ill wind that bloweth no man to good. (1546)
The more the merrier. (1546)
You cannot see the wood for the trees. (1546)
This hitteth the nail on the head. (1546)
No man ought to look a given horse in the mouth. (1546)
Tread a woorme on the tayle and it must turne agayne. (1546)
Many hands make light work. (1546)

Thanks to w*k*p*****

Funny that hootoo should have both a AND a smiley!!

Indeed. Mmm, nice ponies.

The phrase 'tit for tat' is according to OED first found in Heywood (1546). It is apparently a variation on 'tip for tap' which is found a century earlier.

>an equivalent given in return (usually in the way of injury, rarely of benefit); retaliation. Also used as rhyming slang for ‘hat’.

>first found in Heywood (1546)

should read 1556 (Spider & Flie)

Going back to my question - I am surprised to learn that people have problems with the uses of either/or and neither/nor.

I think we could accept a re-writing of those rules, though. Surely there is no reason why things can't have more than two alternatives?

Dualism and polarisation have invaded a lot of human thinking. In part because having only two choices is attractive to some, especially those in power.

Good and evil. Night and day. Man and woman. Life and death. The list is long for very real and primal examples of contrasted pairs. Many are the basic stuff of nature. Yingy yangy.

But it is all too easy to expand a few basic observations into a theory. And then turn the theory into a full blown philosophy. You end up with nonsense pairings like cats and dogs, cars and trucks and the classic 'horses and cows' as if each these pairs represented all there was to consider in their respective fields.

It is very difficult to dissuade a mind once it has been polarised into thinking only in terms of black and white. Us versus them, Protestants and Catholics, Brits versus Yanks.

One of the first things I noticed about the way many young people at h2g2 viewed the whirled was their overarching desire to fix things into opposite poles of right and wrong. That was the main reason I started the 1st,2nd,& 3rd person thread, to give them chance to stretch their minds to consider a third point of view.

As I am fond of saying, even Goldilocks had three choices.


~jwf~

>> >There's an almost 'evolution-based' insidiousness survival rate for good ideas and well turned phrases, they survive long after their original sources are forgotten. And the same will hold true for music and imagery. Pop culture is probably the only culture that counts in the long run.

> You could leave out the word 'almost' there, ~jwf~. These are what Dawkins has christened 'memes'.

Christened?!?!

O



M



G

G ?

G = Gosh when referring to Dawkins. The fact that gosh is a euphemism for the thing Dawkins believes doesn't exist is entirely irrelevant.

Thank bob for that.

One of the first things I looked for when I started writing on forums (fourteen-odd years ago) was a place where I could discuss the wilful impoverishment of language.

The fact that you don't believe in something doesn't (I suggest) stop you referring to it; for instance sunrise and sunset.

>> Well I never. John Donne was a grandson of John Heywood. <<

Well I never either.

That list of his famous epigrams is pretty impressive.
I've even heard a few of them attributed to someone else.
And of course I think we've established that 'Shakespeare'
(whoever 'they' were) borrowed heavily from Heywood. But
perhaps his sayings were just so much in common usage that
the Bard(s) simply incorporated the common speech of the day.
There is little doubt that the 16th century was an age of words
and wisdom.


~jwf~

>>...surprised to learn that people have problems with the uses of either/or and neither/nor. <<

It occurs to me that neither/nor may have, for some minds, a slightly scary echo of that other rule of grammar about double negatives.

'They teach us to no way do not use no double negatives no-how, no-time, never, on accounta two wrongs make a right. And then they want us to say neither and nor in the same sentence.'

Not me of course. I ain't never scared o' no rules.
But y'can see how the logic of neither/nor might seem at odds with the double negative rule.


~jwf~

I liked Wandrin 's construction above.
And it made me remember being taught that once you've used neither/nor you can continue with one more 'nor' but after that shift to 'or' if the list is longer.
eg:
'Neither one nor two nor three or four or five or six or any other.'

>Shee sounds like quite a spitfire! (~jwf~ post 15897)

Spitfire is a nice word. It is cited in OED dating from 1600:

ROWLANDS Lett. Humours Blood ix. 15 That with a spit-fier Serpent so durst fight.

-- but I had always presumed it was derived from King Lear's rant:

Rumble thy bellyfull! Spit, fire! Spout, hail!

Spitfire was a very appropriate name for a fighter plane. I'm not so sure that a car with that name was a good idea.
"Spit" is an interesting word. Do you say "Spit and image" or "Spitting Image"?

I've always said spitting image. According to one website (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spitting-image.html) 'spit and image' appears in print earlier than spitting image - but not by much.

OED says 'spit and image' is the earlier (1895), and cites:

1859 SALA Gas-light & D. xxix. 334 He would be the very spit and fetch of Queen Cleopatra.

Spit by itself came first:

1825 KNAPP & BALDWIN Newgate Cal. III. 497/2 A daughter,..the very spit of the old captain.

We used to say 'the dead spit of him'.

Also turned up this piece of lore in the search for spitting and images:

1831 J. JEKYLL Corr. (1894) 286 The cigar-smokers of Dublin use *spitting vases in the shape of mitres.

I should perhaps remind you all that one of Douglas' original site rules was 'No spitting'