Bits and Pieces
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Mercury's Mess
Lies, boasts, weird tidbits, curiously fascinating facts, calls to action, and other odd-sods find their way to this page this month. And we know that your own brain is just bursting with this stuff. Unburden yourselves on us. We begin with a pre-urban legend concerning the origins of that most famous of all road rage gestures--bird flipping (and we ain't talkin' turkey), forwarded by a reader named Angela. We don't believe her for a second, but it's a lovely linguistics lesson nonetheless: THE BATTLE AT AGINCOURT (c. 1369 A.D.), involved armies of the French and the English. The French, who were overwhelmingly favored to win the battle, threatened to cut off a certain body part of all captured English soldiers so that they could never fight again. Fortunately for Anglophiles, the English won the battle. It was a major defeat for the French. When the battle was over, the English marched in front of those French soldiers who remained alive and waved the body part in question at the French in defiance. Which body part was it, you ask? The body part which the French proposed to cut off of the English after defeating them was, of course, the middle finger, without which it would have been impossible for the English soldiers to draw back the strings of their renowned English longbows. This famous weapon was made of the native English yew tree, and so the act of drawing the longbow, using the forefinger and middle finger, was known among all the soldiers as "plucking yew". When the victorious English waved their middle fingers at the defeated French, they said, "See here, we are still able to pluck the yew!" Their defiant cry was soon shortened to a haughty shout of "PLUCK YEW!" Over the years this gesture has become customary, with certain local variations, throughout the world as a symbolic act of defiance and insult. Of course, "pluck yew" is rather difficult to say; sort of like "peasant mother pheasant plucker," which described the women who supplied the English soldiers with the feathers used on their longbow arrows. As a result, over time the difficult consonant cluster at the beginning of the chant has gradually changed to a less fricative "F" sound. Thus the words typically used in conjunction with the middle-finger salute, often mistakenly thought to have something to do with an intimate sexual encounter, are actually derivative of the battle at Agincourt! It is also interesting to note that it is because of the pheasant feathers on the arrows that the symbolic gesture is known as "giving the bird."
--Angela
Isn't It Rich? From our only-in-Arkansas file, unsealed with a flourish for the first time: It seems that a gentleman in that fair state has been awarded $250,000 in a lawsuit after claiming that injuries sustained by being rear-ended in a car accident resulted in his becoming homosexual. The man, who was not named in the article that we read, had evidently been a happily married hetero until his rear-ending caused him to hunger after the joys of the sodomite. Claiming that he had left his wife, moved back in with his mother, and had taken to frequenting gay bars and perusing gay literature since the accident, the plaintiff testified that he could no longer bear the idea of having marital relations with his wife. His ex-wife, it should be noted, received $25,000 of his award for the misfortunes her life had taken as a result of her husband's bum deal.
Missy the Wonder Dog An anonymous couple has given $2.3 million dollars to Texas A & M University to have their dog Missy cloned. Missy, an 11-year-old Collie mix, is at the center of this university's Missyplicity Project, and is claimed by her owners to be the perfect pet. With the Bio Arts and Research Corp (acronym BARC, appropriately enough) acting as go-between for the anonymous Mr. and Mrs. Rich, this project should do more than just provide a new pet for its owners, but also yield an enormous amount of material on the genetic reproduction of other animals. Found as a four-month-old puppy in a adoption kennel, Missy proved her worth to her prospective human mother and father (the couple prefer these terms to "master") because she smelled so good and because, as Mrs. Rich relates, "I offered a howl to her and she raised her nose and howled at the roof. I barked at her and she barked right back, a low rich-toned, businesslike bark. I whined, she whined." Whine, dine, and live a long time. Lucky dog.
Life's A Beach If you live in California and have ever been to the beach, save Saturday, Sept. 19 on your calendar, because it's payback time. Formally known as California Coastal Cleanup Day, this is a time to join your fellow Golden Staters in combing the beaches for trash, bagging the stuff out of our lives, and just generally doing good. Last year's haul netted such wonders as a complete bathroom--complete as in: a toilet, sink, shower stall, and the tiles to line it all--three vacuum cleaners, a Russian newspaper, a toilet bowl cleaner that had floated idly over from Japan, three parking meters, an entire white Cadillac, some dollar bills, a bowling ball, and much more. Cleanup is from 9 a.m. to noon. For information, call 1-800-COAST4U.
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