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On the Tonight Show tonight, they had a pretty funny guy on who googlewhacks and goes to visit the site owners he finds. Googlewhacking is putting two words into google and coming up with 1 and only 1 site found. Of *course* I had to try it ;-) and eventually succeeded with "batie supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", which took me to what appears to be a bibliography buried in The American Dialect Society. I was debating whether or not to send mail to the adminstrator telling them they'd been googlewhacked but on their contacts page, they have a number of reference links, including Word Origins. I find etymology fascinating, so zoomed off on that tangent. Unfortunately, there was a word just the other day I wanted to know the origin of, but now can't remember what it was. Oh well. Poking around at wordorigins, I ran across the most famous four-letter word, and of course had to check it out, where they debunk the most common explanation circulating the internet, but at the end had this interesting paragraph about a related gesture which is far older than I ever imagined:
There is also an elaborate explanation that has been circulating on the internet for some years regarding English archers, the Battle of Agincourt, and the phrase Pluck Yew! This explanation is a modern jest--a play on words. However, there may be a bit of truth to it. The British (it is virtually unknown in America) gesture of displaying the index and middle fingers with the back of the hand outwards (a reverse peace sign)--meaning the same as displaying the middle finger alone--may derive from the French practice of cutting the fingers off captured English archers. Archers would taunt the French on the battlefield with this gesture, showing they were intact and still dangerous. The pluck yew part is fancifully absurd. This is not the origin of the middle finger gesture, which is truly ancient, being referred to in classical Greek and Roman texts.
...followed by a link to an entire *book* on the one word. I do vaguely remember a rather humorous posting descibing the versatility of it, but an entire book?
And with that bit of highbrow insightfulness, it's way past my bedtime...
Posted by abatie at April 1, 2005 02:12 AM