the Word for Friday

POPPYCOCK

Nonsense, rubbish.

It’s a fine-sounding expletive, but hardly heard on anybody’s lips these days, and with a dated feel. It feels very English: think of elderly ex-Indian-Army colonels in retirement in Tunbridge Wells exploding in wrath over some supposed mismanagement of the country’s affairs and writing disgusted letters to The Timesabout it. And most of the citations for it in the Oxford English Dictionary are from British sources.

But, as the OED reminds us, the word is actually American in origin, first turning up there about 1852. The OED is firm in dismissing one often-heard view of its origin, from the Dutch word pappekak for soft faeces. It says firmly “no such word appears to be attested in Dutch” but points to the very similar word poppekak, which appears only in the old set phrase zo fijn als gemalen poppekak, meaning to show excessive religious zeal, but which literally means “as fine as powdered doll shit”. The word was presumably taken to the USA by Dutch settlers; the scatological associations were lost when the word moved into the English-language community.

The first half of the word is the Dutch pop for a doll, which may be related to our term of endearment, poppet; the second half is essentially the same as the old English cack for excrement; the verb form of this word is older than the noun, and has been recorded as far back as the fifteenth century.

Despite some uninformed speculation, there’s no link with the vulgar meaning of cock. Nor is it linked to the sense of cock for rubbish (as in phrases like that’s a load of old cock), as that’s a shortened form of cock and bull story, which comes from a fable concerning a bull and a cockerel

When a street sign says, "Muff Road", someone is bound to snatch it

New Zealand

Council engineers have been asked to come up with ways to ensure South Canterbury's Muff Road sign stays put.

The sign, in rural Orari north of Timaru, has in the past been a tempting target for thieves, and a local resident has campaigned to have the road name changed altogether.

But the Temuka and Geraldine community boards recently voted to keep the name, and Timaru district councillors backed that decision at a meeting yesterday, the Timaru Herald reported.

Engineers have been asked to come up with alternative signpost options to ensure the sign stays where it should,

Muff Rd was named after an early settler in the district Englishman Sam Muff and descendants who have retained the name have campaigned to ensure it remains.

Muff Rd resident Roger Payne has complained about the sign going missing all the time and said it made navigating the area difficult for visitors.

Funny Goat Imitates Jerry Lewis

this is a funny video..if you've ever heard Jerry Lewis, the goat sounds as if he's imitating Jerry Lewisplease leave a comment and rating here in my new Youtube channel, thank you..


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwGwG5a7B2k

Handcuff Keys Worn On a Necklace..Worth 5 Years in the Slammer?

For wearing handcuff keys on a necklace draped around his neck, a homeless Miami Beach man could face years in prison.

Prosecutors on Tuesday formally charged Michael Gonzalez, 22, with disorderly intoxication, marijuana possession and two counts of possession of a concealed handcuff key -- a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

``It's an actual felony,'' prosecutor Barbara Teresa Govea explained to Miami-Dade Circuit Judge John Thornton, who questioned the charge.

``There's got to be some kind of constitutional violation in there somewhere,'' Assistant Public Defender Michelle Prescott grumbled to the court.

Actually, the Florida Legislature passed the law after the 1998 murders of two Tampa deputies and a state trooper. Hank Earl Carr shot and killed them after he escaped his cuffs using a universal handcuff key hidden on a necklace.

Gonzalez was arrested Aug. 16 after Miami Beach police said he was harassing women on the South Beach sand. In a report, Officer Errol Vidal wrote that he found a small amount of marijuana in the man's pocket and ``two handcuff keys concealed under his shirt on a necklace.''

Also under Gonzalez's shirt: a tattoo on his right shoulder, with the word ``anarchy'' and shooting flames.

Rabbit Spat Resolved By Roosters..Calm Restored..Barnyard Safe Again

I LOVE PATCHES THE WONDER HORSE

patches is more dog than horse, I think..appreciate ratings and comments ty

the Joke for Thursday

Albert Einstein arrives at a party, introduces himself to the first person he sees, and asks, "What is your IQ?" to which the man answers, "Two hundred forty one."  "That is wonderful!" responds Einstein. "We will talk about the mysteries of the universe."  Next Einstein introduces himself to a woman and asks, "What is your IQ?" 

The lady answers, "One hundred forty four."  "Excellent. We can discuss politics and current events. We will have much to talk about."  Einstien goes to another person and asks, "What is your IQ?" The man answers, "Fifty one."  Einstein responds, "How about them Cowboys?" 

the Word for Thursday

Cockamamie



Something ridiculous, incredible or implausible.


Cockamamie is intrinsically funny, but it’s truly incredible that word historians believe it’s a close relative of decal, a design prepared on special paper for transfer to another surface. (It is instead sometimes said to be Yiddish, but this turns out not to be the case.)


The original of both cockamamie and decal is the French décalcomanie, which was created in the early 1860s to refer to the craze for decorating objects with transfers (it combines décalquer, to transport a tracing, with manie, a mania or craze). The craze, and the word, soon transferred to Britain — it’s recorded in the magazine The Queen on 27 February 1864: “There are few employments for leisure hours which for the past eighteen months have proved either so fashionable or fascinating as decalcomanie”. It reached the United States around 1869 and — to judge from the number of newspaper references in that year — became as wildly popular as it had earlier in France and Britain. The word was quickly Anglicised as decalcomania and in the 1950s it became abbreviated to decal.


The link between decalcomania and cockamamie isn’t proved, but the evidence suggests strongly that children in New York City in the 1930s (or perhaps a decade earlier) converted the one into the other. There was a fashion for self-decoration at that period, using coloured transfers given away with candy and chewing gum. Shelly Winters wrote of cockamamie in The New York Times in 1956 that “This word, translated from the Brooklynese, is the authorized pronunciation of decalcomania. Anyone there who calls a cockamamie a decalcomania is stared at.”


Quite how the word changed sense to mean something incredible is least clear of all. An early sense was of something inferior or second-rate, which presumably referred to the poor quality of the cheap transfers. It might have been influenced by words such as cock-and-bull or poppycock. Anyone who adopted the craze for sticking transfers on oneself may have been regarded by adults or more serious-minded youngsters as silly — certainly the first sense was of a person who was ridiculous or crazy; the current sense came along a few years later.

the Word for Wednesday

TWITTERPATED


Besotted


This lovely term appeared, slightly differently, in the article Sex in Space in Wired magazine on 18 May 2007: “How do you handle love, sex, romance, heart-break, jealousy, hurt, unrequited longing, crushes, loneliness and twitterpation when you’re 18 months away from Earth and perhaps unsure whether you’ll make it back?”


It refers to the feelings you get when you think about your current object of desire. A contributor to the Urban Dictionary defined it as “An enjoyable disorder characterized by feelings of excitement, anticipation, high hopes, recent memories of interludes, giddiness, and physical overstimulation which occur simultaneously when experiencing a new love.”


One stimulus for its current popularity is that it appears in the film Bambi II, following on its invention in the original Bambi of 1942, in which Friend Owl says, “Nearly everybody gets twitterpated in the springtime.” When the film first came out, the Oakland Tribune remarked that “‘Twitterpated’ is perhaps the best adjective coined by Hollywood since the pixilated sisters were invented for ‘Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.’”


It also shows signs of becoming accepted, at least in the short term, as a mildly derogatory term for those obsessive communicators who use the online medium Twitter to tell their friends every small thing they’re doing with their day.

WTF?!! I CAN'T GET INTO MY YOUTUBE NOW!! GEEZ

I CREATED A NEW ID AND HAVE BEEN DIGGING THRU ALL VIDEOS FROM MY ACCOUNT..GOTTA SHARE A FEW GOOD ONES WITH YOU
this dog is whacked!!