You learn something new every day

@chai2,

chai2 wrote:

Gala wrote:

I didn't know that. A doosy, that's a good one, if you'd asked me what a Duesenberg was I wouldn't have been able to tell you...

I think I would have recognized that was the name of a car from a bygone era, but couldn't have described it.

It was brought up on NPR in the context of all the classic cars Jay Leno owns.
I figured if he owned a duesenberg, it would have to be a doosy.

Thay were very luxurious, custom made cars; coud be pricey.

David

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Alice B. Toklas was the companion of Gertrude Stein, a well respected writer and expatriate. I believe that they knew F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, and many of the others who roamed Europe after WW I. I love reading about the personalities from this time (anything from 1890 thru 1940) fascinating people, very non-conforming. Alice baked weed in the brownies to avoid detection by the authorities. They were well known, but not immune from the danger of arrest or deportation.

If anybody gets a chance, check out You tube and look up "The Lawrence Welk Show" and his singers version of "One Toke over the Line", apparently Lawrence thought it was a spiritual.

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Quote:

Trouble is, that word was used to describe something excellent or powerful (a doozy of a storm, for example) well before the brothers Duesenberg created their company in 1913 and began manufacturing passenger cars in the '20s.

Etymologists, including Michael Quinion at World Wide Words, believe the word derived from daisy, which, beginning in 18th-century England, meant something particularly appealing.

Quinion believes its use was influenced by Eleonora Duse, a famous Italian actress who hit New York in 1893, and, of course, the renowned car.

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Stranger than fiction.

I love that sort of thing, in which people just "know" where a word or a term comes from--until somebody comes along with something that shoots them to Hell. Every other year or so, the NY Times letters section has a mild argument about when the first baseball game was played, and they usually refer to the 1820s or -30s. A few times i wrote to them to point out that Jane Austen refers to one of her heroines playing baseball (and writing it as one word, which was not how it was originally done here), in a novel published in 1817 after her death--and that it was based on a story she originally wrote in the 1790s.

The Times has never published any of my letters, nor even acknowledged receipt of them. Some subjects are sacrosanct.

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@chai2,

Visually, the Duesenberg looks like a car for the weallthy from a bygone era, but that's about it. The name is not familiar, at all. Doosy, I know, and sometimes use the phrase.

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@glitterbag,

Thanks for adding this, I completely forgot aboout the Gertrude Stein part. Here's some added trivia-- Gertrude Stein was the person who came up with the phrase-- "there is no there there" about Oakland, California.

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I can be very slow about obvious things - when I first joined A2k, I kept seeing all this people writing lol at others' reponses. I thought thats odd everyone keeps saying lol (now go ahead and say it sounding each letter out). Yes I thought people were actually responding lol as a word and each time I thought it in my head I'd think it in this high-pitched sing songy voice. It seemed fitting.

One day several months later - I saw a commercial on TV and in it the "word" lol appeared and some one said laugh out loud. I then months later learned something new.

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@Linkat,

precious

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@Linkat,

Linkat wrote:

I can be very slow about obvious things - when I first joined A2k, I kept seeing all this people writing lol at others' reponses. I thought thats odd everyone keeps saying lol (now go ahead and say it sounding each letter out). Yes I thought people were actually responding lol as a word and each time I thought it in my head I'd think it in this high-pitched sing songy voice. It seemed fitting.

One day several months later - I saw a commercial on TV and in it the "word" lol appeared and some one said laugh out loud. I then months later learned something new.

don't know why this reminds me of this teenage memory, but it does...

When I was 16 I was working at a pizza place on the boardwalk on the Jersey Shore.
One day, a friend of the wife part of the husband and wife owners came by, and they were having a friendly chat.

The visitor was telling a story about a mutual friend who was in the hospital.

"oh....she was telling me it was awful. she said she had a purple vagina, and the pain was so bad she couldn't even talk"

I'm thinking "A PURPLE VAGINA!!! HOLY ****!!!"

I chimed in saying "Oh my Gwad, how did THAT happen? Is she all right? Oh Gwad, I feel so bad for her. I can't imagine how painful that would be that she couldn't even talk...Gwad."

At first they just thought I was a nice young lady for being concerned, but as I went on about how horribe that was, they started looking at me weird.

It wasn't until years later that I realized she must have been saying "turrible angina"

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@chai2,

that's nuts Very Happy

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@chai2,

Nice very nice.

Probably because whether you know it or not, I could visualized me thinking and saying the same thing.

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@Linkat,

Linkat wrote:

Nice very nice.

Probably because whether you know it or not, I could visualized me thinking and saying the same thing.

let's go circle Uranus together linkie.

or mine, whatever.

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@chai2,

Its odd, I look at myself as a reasonable intelligent person - I mean I have to have some smarts (at least a little) - I did obtain a Masters Degree and it wasn't at Mickey Mouse college (granted it wasn't at Harvard either). And I do have a job that does require some level of thinking and decision making.

Then why can I be so blond sometimes? It seems simple things baffle me and I appear ditzy...at least it can be helpful some times like getting out of a speeding ticket and getting men to do things for you.

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@Linkat,

Linkat wrote:

. . . and getting men to do things for you.

I do that sometimes . . . but then they always look at me funny afterwards . . .

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@Linkat,

Linkat wrote:

Its odd, I look at myself as a reasonable intelligent person - I mean I have to have some smarts (at least a little) - I did obtain a Masters Degree and it wasn't at Mickey Mouse college (granted it wasn't at Harvard either). And I do have a job that does require some level of thinking and decision making.

Then why can I be so blond sometimes? It seems simple things baffle me and I appear ditzy...at least it can be helpful some times like getting out of a speeding ticket and getting men to do things for you.

Oh!

That's the term I've been looking for. Being blonde.

I mostly get that way when it involves spatial activities. You could ask me to get a hammer out of a drawer, and if there a fair amount of other stuff in there, I have a really hard time seeing the hammer immediately. Then I'll quickly forget what it is I'm looking for, and just stare. Finally, I'll remember I'm looking for a hammer, and will start taking things out of the drawer one by one, looking at them to see if they fit the description of "hammer"

That's on a good day. Ususally it's some damn thing that I don't even have a clear image of what it even looks like.

Strangely enough, I'm really good at not getting lost when I'm walking in the woods. Well, not the woods with bears and everything, but like hiking trails.
If trails start slitting off again and again, I can always remember what the terrain looked like at certain junctures when I'm coming back.

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A being blond moment eh?
How about, year 10, top set for science, the teacher mentions the Sun is made primarily of hydrogen.
A person behind me sticks their hand up and says "is that why it stays up in the sky?"
Yeah...he didn't even bother to answer...
These were the people doing early entry GCSEs for crying out loud!

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@blueprince,

wow...that's a good one blueprince. I'd have loved to see the look on everyone's face.

not quite as good, but here goes...
today I was talking to a youngish gal in the office. I asked "you were raised, a Baptist, right? But I know you're not one of those who are all fanatical." She agreed saying she wasn't really religious, but she did believe God made the earth. So I then asked "Do you believe in evolution?" she said, "well, kinda. I don't know" I asked "So do you believe God just went Poof and the world appeared"
"well, no, not really, but, I mean how else could it have happened? I mean, the earth is really complicated"

I then said "Not to mention the rest of the universe"

She readily agreed. "Oh yeah! That too."

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When I was young, I always drove used cars. I must've been around 30 or so when I got my first new car and learned that all new cars are sold with a spare tire and a jack as standard equipment. I was appalled! It's like they're admitting they know it's gonna fail!

The salesman tried really hard not to laugh at me. Embarrassed

But I still think there's something not quite right about it.

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You know when you get into a new car or a friends car and you have to fill it up with gas... and just as you pull up to the pump, there is always that little moment of panic, which side is the gas tank on? If you look at the little gas indicator thingy on the dash there is a small arrow on one side or the other, this tells you where the tank is.

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@Ceili,

When the sun comes up, I'm going to go look.

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You learn something new every day

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