What exactly is a "Benchmark"?

Penny for a spool of thread,
Penny for a needle,
That's the way my money goes...

Pop, goes the weasel.

Noddy, I never understood that odd rhyme, so I did a little search and found this:

POP GOES THE WEASEL
[Q] From Nigel Neve in the UK: "Having a little rug rat, I am now at that stage where I find myself revising my knowledge of nursery rhymes. The one at the top of my mind currently is Pop Goes the Weasel. Most people remember the first two verses but there are three more. Can you help explain them?"
[A] This is one version of the rhyme:
Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Up and down the City road,
In and out the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Every night when I go out
the monkey's on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop goes the weasel.

A penny for a ball of thread
Another for a needle,
That's the way the money goes,
pop goes the weasel.

All around the cobblers bench
the monkey chased the people;
The donkey thought 'twas all in fun,
pop goes the weasel. Before anybody rushes to put fingers to keyboard, let me say that this is by no means the only version of the lyric. There are several others, especially from the United States. But this is the usual British version, a famous catchy rhyme (or at least, as you say, the first two verses are).
The earliest reference I can find to music with this name actually comes from the United States, from sheet music entitled "Pop goes the Weasel for Fun and Frolic", published in 1850 by Messrs Miller and Beacham of Baltimore. Another from three years later refers to "the latest English dance" and also "an old English Dance lately revived", so it seems to have been imported from Britain. None of these early versions had any lyrics apart from a repeated "Pop goes the weasel", the catch line of the dance, which was sung or shouted by the dancers as one pair of them darted under the arms of the others. Several references in books and magazines suggest that the tune soon became extremely well known, and that pop goes the weasel became a catchphrase, as it later did in Britain. There have been suggestions that the phrase was intended to be ribald or erotic, though the explanations I've seen are somewhat fanciful.
Following first publication of this article, David Joyce wrote that: "The tune is a version of that used for the country dance, The Haymakers, which has the same form as Strip the Willow, and Bab at the Bowster (a couple hold hands, forming a bridge, which the other couples have to pass under). The tune was published in Gow's Repository, issued in four volumes between 1799 and 1820. Thus the tune was around at least half a century before the American publication of Pop Goes The Weasel, but is certainly very much older. (It is similar to the tune used for Humpty Dumpty, and not far removed from Lilliebulero and Rock A-bye Baby, all jigs traceable back to the seventeenth century.)"
The first British mention of the phrase pop goes the weasel dates from an advertisement by Boosey and Sons of 1854 which described "the new country dance ?'Pop goes the weasel', introduced by her Majesty Queen Victoria" (a puff to be taken with a large pinch of salt, we may assume). It would seem from the dates that the title was taken from the American publication of 1850.
Talking of Queen Victoria, I found these words attached to the tune in the March 1860 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond, Virginia:
Queen Victoria's very sick,
Prince Albert's got the measles.
The children have the whooping cough,
And pop! Goes the weasel. Her Majesty would not have been amused.
Your version was a British music-hall song of the latter part of the Victorian period (quite when I haven't been able to discover); it is highly probable that the words were composed to the tune of the earlier dance because everyone on both sides of the Atlantic seems to have the same one, even if the words are different.
Some of the references are now quite opaque, but we can take a fair shot at a few. In the second verse, the City Road was?-still is?-a well-known street in London, more than a mile long. The Eagle was a famous public house and music hall, which lay near the east end of the road on the corner of Shepherdess Walk; this had started its life as a tea-garden, but was turned into a music hall in 1825 (one of the very first); it ended its days as a Salvation Army centre and was pulled down in 1901. However, it was replaced by another pub, which still exists under the same name.
The City Road had a pawnbroker's shop near its west end and to pop was a well-known phrase at the time for pawning something. So the second verse says that visiting the Eagle causes one's money to vanish, necessitating a trip up the City Road to Uncle to raise some cash. But what was the weasel that was being pawned? Nobody is sure. Some suggest it was a domestic or tailor's flat-iron, a small item easy to carry. My own guess is that it's rhyming slang: weasel and stoat = coat. Either way, it seems to have been a punning reinterpretation of the catch line from the older dance.
The first verse just refers to a couple of domestic food items; the fourth to sewing or tailors' requisites. The third introduces the monkey, one sense of that word being a nineteenth-century term for a drinking vessel in a public house, which makes sense in context. (It may derive from an older phrase, to suck the monkey, to drink from a bottle, which was also used by dock workers in London for illicitly drinking brandy from a cask by inserting a straw through the bung.) A stick was a shot of spirits, such as rum or brandy; to knock it off was to knock it back, or drink it. (There have been many other slang meanings of monkey, some extremely rude, of which the most famous is perhaps that for £500 or $500; from context, this is unlikely to be the meaning meant!)
The reference to the monkey in the fifth verse stumps me; in this case it seems to be a real beast. It could be one belonging to an organ-grinder, an itinerant musician who played a small portable organ, of whom there were many at this period. But I suspect there are topical or slang references in there that are now lost.

You ain't likely to be fellin' no trees with a bodkin, burnishd or otherwise . . .

My understanding <in a dim memory of an organizational behaviour course 20+ years ago> is that the original bench was a workbench, and that benchmarking was marking the bench when you were making measurements against it. i.e. you want 20 sticks 'this long'. once you've got the first one, you make a mark on the workbench - and measure the other sticks against it.

General (10 matching dictionaries)


bench mark : Encarta® World English Dictionary, North American Edition [home, info]

bench mark (benchmark) : The Wordsmyth English Dictionary-Thesaurus [home, info]

bench mark : Infoplease Dictionary [home, info]

bench mark : Dictionary.com [home, info]

bench mark : UltraLingua English Dictionary [home, info]

Bench mark : Online Plain Text English Dictionary [home, info]

bench mark : Rhymezone [home, info]

BENCH-MARK : 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica [home, info]

bench mark : WordNet 1.7 Vocabulary Helper [home, info]

bench mark : LookWAYup Translating Dictionary/Thesaurus [home, info]

Set--

If a Good Woman is standing behind the lumberjack with sweet words and brandishing a burnished bodkin....she's risking decaffination.

ehBeth--

I had a very hazy notion that a bench mark might be used for measuring cloth.

Letty--

Over the years I've seen a lot of speculation about the lyrics for "Pop goes the Weasel". Language has its own archaeology.

I thought decalfination was bovine abortion . . .

I yield!

the bench was a rock highpoint or a bridge onto which a permanent bench mark was assigned.

"pop goes the weasel" is a counting song to wind yarn using a skein winder. This tool looks like a windmill which, internally contains a series of interconnected cog wheels and a wooden splint called "the weasel" When the gears moved around 81 full turns , which caused the final gear to make one full turn(81 was the calculation of {Sigma" (n=81) ,piXD}= one skein of 64 english yards (+/-) 14. {Nobody had a correct measure, we have about 8 skein winders and they all have different dimensions) SO. Whenever the final cog made one revolution to the top of the counting post it plinked this splint with a large flattened peg which caused the splint to make a loud "Bang" or "pop". So , you could just wind a way making up all sorts of nonsense verses (but , for the time, some were quite newsworthy)It was the rhymes that would keep you singing till the pop came up and you hadda tear off another skein. Remember the song "ring around the rosey". It had a cute message of horror also
The swifts and niddy noddies did the same thing except swifts were gizmoed up with pile driving weights called "monkeys' and were set up to run by overshot water wheels.
I beleieve that the line that 'the monkey thought twas all infun , had to do with accidents that were caused by the weights dropping off and smashing hands in the old yarn mills)
Monkeys had all sorts of uses in preserving and distributing energy based on elevation and weight.

Withot looking up further in my wifes textile history books, Im now tapped out here.

Farmerman--

I'm impressed. Thank you.

When no one else can understand me....


Your always there to lend a hand in everything I do. xx :wink:

You really are a dear, my dear, and you are fun. We forgot about bench press.

Well they do assist in the development of various arm, shoulder, chest and back muscles.

The only problem with getting involved in this type of past time is if it becomes competetive. Then the fancy diets loom into view, followed by steroids and other drugs of ill repute, GHB comes to mind.

However, the end results could be to one's advantage, had one for instance decided he may wish to become Governor of California for example.

Personally, Luscious Lips Letty, I could show you how to have much more fun on a bench.xx

Laughing, Mathos. Arnie did admit to taking steroids. You're a good sport, Brit.

He's quite a guy, totally retarded, his films are a hoot ! He wants to cut gas emission in CA and drives around town in half a tank! He like to grope the women, quote " It was only a harmless bit of fun"

If I walked down Oxford Street groping women, I would be incarcerated very swiftly. Not made Mayor of London for instance.

He would make a great President I am sure.

Well, Mathos. I know that the man should have stayed in the movies where he could be bad and get by with it.

Sorry, Noddy. Didn't mean to turn this into a political thread.

Can't happen without amending the constitution . . . not too bloody likely . . .

Mathos, are you and spendius all right? check in at Steve's thread, ok?

Letty--

Once you put backs on benches and people get comfortable, then people start to settle in and feel at home.