Some Dictionary History For Tuesday...!

Some of us may still use the dictionary from time to time, but that number is probably shrinking from day to day.

When you stop and think about it, the making of the dictionary is no easy task. I can only imagine the research that would be involved in such an undertaking. The following article from KnowledgeNuts offers a small glimpse into just what a strange and tedious job this must have been.

The Killer Lunatic Who Helped Write Your Dictionary

By Debra Kelly on Thursday, October 2, 2014

Compiling the dictionary is no easy task—especially when it’s the Oxford English Dictionary. It wasn’t just definitions that were needed, but sentences as well. A massive project ultimately passed down to editor James Murray, the project was ultimately assembled by an impressive display of 19th-century crowdsourcing. One of the most prolific contributors with tens of thousands of submissions was a man named Dr. William C. Minor. Murray struck up a friendship with the man, and eventually found he was less of a professional, practicing doctor and more of a patient at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he’d been living for decades.

The Oxford English Dictionary is notable in that it’s not just a handy book that’ll tell you the meanings of words, it’ll also tell you how to use them. Compiling it meant that its editor, James Murray, didn’t need to just define words, but he needed sentences that showed their proper use. (Murray actually inherited the project from others, and it took an awesome 70 years to complete.)

Proving that you don’t need the Internet to launch a successful crowdsourcing campaign, Murray took out some newspaper ads and asked for contributions to his dictionary. They started coming in by the truckload, with one name popping up continuously throughout 20 years of Murray’s involvement with the project: Dr. William C. Minor, Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire. Over the course of two decades, Minor contributed tens of thousands of quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Murray struck up a friendship with this regular contributor, originally assuming that the man was, as his title suggested, a doctor at the manor house he’d given an address for. A chance meeting with a visitor in the late 1880s made him a little suspicious that it wasn’t the case at all, when he was thanked for his kindness toward “poor Dr. Minor.” It was only then that he did some research and found that he had been conversing with a patient, not a doctor.

Or, more accurately described, a lunatic.

To those who knew him as a young man, William Minor was quiet and sensitive—not one you’d expect to see on the battlefield. Yet Minor joined the Union Army as a surgeon after leaving Yale’s medical school, and was a firsthand witness to the horrors of 1864′s Battle of the Wilderness. Dealing with battlefield casualties is bad enough, but there was also a massive fire that swept through the field. Afterward, the doctor with the delicate disposition was ordered to brand a “D” on the face of an Irish deserter. It’s that event that was long thought to have been the one that pushed him over the edge, and certainly led to not only his irrational, paranoid fear of the Irish, but also caused his delusions that eventually led to murder.

He moved to England after the war. Walking home one night, he heard someone behind him. Convinced that it was the Irishman stalking him for revenge, he shot and killed George Merritt, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was ultimately found not guilty for reason of insanity and committed to Broadmoor until he was deemed safe for release back into the populace.

(Oddly, one of his constant contacts outside the asylum was Merritt’s widow, who not only accepted his apology but frequently visited him with gifts—usually books, a passion of his even while he was confined at Broadmoor.)

It was ultimately James Murray who championed Minor’s cause, and the doctor was released in 1910—on order from Winston Churchill. He spent 28 years locked away at Broadmoor, and still made significant, staggering contributions to one of the English language’s premier reference books. After his release, he moved back to the United States and died in 1921, at his home in Connecticut.

I reckon it just goes to show that even though you may be a lunatic, you might still be of some service. In other words, crazy doesn't always mean stupid!

Coffee out on the patio this morning. We can watch the hummingbirds.

Bones For Monday Mystery...!

Probably very few things are as spooky or disturbing as finding some human bones.

That being the case, just imagine finding thousands of human remains all together in a hidden room. Now that would be more than a little spooky to me! Straight from the pages of Listverse, here is a story of just such a find!

The Rothwell Bone Crypt

 Built during the 13th century, Holy Trinity Church is a medieval landmark in the town of Rothwell, England. However, beneath the church is a charnel chapel containing one of the creepiest sights ever found inside a place of worship: an entire room stacked with human bones.

Known as the “Bone Crypt,” the room is filled with the unidentified skeletal remains of approximately 1,500 individuals. At one point, the room was sealed up, but legend has it that in 1700, a gravedigger working inside the church accidentally fell through the floor. The discovery of the hidden room allegedly drove him insane. The bones were eventually separated and organized onto shelves, and the Bone Crypt has since become a popular tourist attraction in the area.

Intriguingly, no one knows the origin of these bones. One prevalent theory is that the remains belong to victims of a plague. Another claims that they were soldiers who were killed during the nearby Battle of Naseby in 1645. It’s also possible that many of the individuals were originally buried in the church graveyard but had to be moved to a new location. Sometime during the 16th century, the adjacent Jesus Hospital was built over a burial ground, so the remains might have been dug up and stored in the chapel.

Scientists hope to use carbon dating to eventually determine the possible identities of these deceased individuals. Until then, the Bone Crypt remains one of England’s most bizarre unsolved mysteries. Now I don't know about you, but I am glad I wasn't the one that found this place. I really wonder what kind of tourist would pay good money just to go and visit this site, although I sure that some folks just have a much different view of what a good tourist attraction might be. As far as me going...no thank you!

Coffee out on the patio this morning. How about some donut holes?

Sunday Morning 'Toons Again...!

Seems like we just did this last week, don't it? Know what? We'll probably do it again next week as well!



A little different than those we normally have, isn't it?



Another one we haven't seen before!



One more should be good to get us off and running, I reckon.



OK, time to start the day. I know we all have things to do!

Coffee out on the patio this morning. How about some fried country ham with toast?

Let's Get Biblical This Saturday...!

Now this isn't as hard as it sounds, but I'll bet that no one expected a lesson about biblical expressions today.

Chickenmom (Phyllis) received this article from her friend Terry in Florida. Phyllis thought I would like it and might share it, so I'm doing just that! It's actually way too good NOT to share, know what I mean? So, thanks to Terry and Phyllis...we have a great piece of trivia to add to our ever expanding library!

Ya know, I've heard this phrase all my life, although not too often, but had no idea what it really meant! Well, as they say...now I know! Thank you ladies! BTW, if you would like to visit the site this came from, you can find it right here.

Better have our coffee out on the patio while the cool weather is here.

A Fish Story For Freaky Friday...!

Now I bet that all of you are wondering what kind of freaky fish story can qualify for today. Well, here it is...and I think you'll find it is kinda freaky!

I reckon that most of us just take it for granted that fish have to have water to live in, right? It seems that isn't always the case. Another case where Mother Nature has thrown us all a curve.

Killifish Overcome Their Watery Limitations

No matter how many abilities fish have, there’s still one universal rule: They’re stuck in the water. The mangrove killifish has found a way around even this immutable requirement, though. It can live inside of rotting trees and branches on land for months—it’s called “logpacking.” This is a fish that lives in trees. When pools dry up or the water recedes, mangrove killifish will jam into old trees, hollow coconuts, discarded coffee cans, or just under the leaf litter. As long as it’s kept moist, the killifish can survive like this for 66 days.

While other fish, like the lungfish, can survive without water for longer, they have to go into a dormant state, a kind of fish hibernation. Killifish maintain a normal metabolic state, so that as soon as the water hits, they jump up and take off. The secret is that their skin acts like an extra set of lungs to take in air and maintain salt levels. They are some of the most amphibious of all the amphibious fish . . . and they’re hermaphrodites. So while they’re living in a log waiting for the tide to come back, they can self-fertilize to pass the time.

Sounds to me like Mother Nature has kinda outdone herself this time. Of course, I say that every time I find an article like this one!

Coffee out on the patio today. It's supposed to cool off a bit, but we'll see!

Hanging Around For How Long...?

Did you ever notice that some plans by the people in charge don't work out as they thought they would?

I found this little article over at KnowledgeNuts that shows just what I'm talking about!

The Corpse That Hung By An English Road For 36 Years

By Debra Kelly on Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Thieves and highwaymen were rampant in 18th-century England, and when they were caught they often faced the hangman’s noose. That was the case with Spence Broughton, sentenced to hang for robbing a mail carriage. That wasn’t the end of him, though, and his body was put on display for the next 36 years. His body was finally removed and buried at the request of landlords sick of tourists coming to look at him.

In February 1791, Spence Broughton and John Oxley had a not-so-bright idea that Broughton wouldn’t see through to the end of the story . . . but his corpse would.

The small-time, London-based criminals decided to rob the Rotherham mail coach in the northern city of Sheffield. Months later, in October of that year, Oxley was arrested for another crime and not only admitted that he’d also been responsible for the Rotherham job but pointed the finger at his accomplice as well.

Broughton was arrested, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang. At the time, thieves and highwaymen were among the most likely of all criminals to be hanged, and with Broughton’s premeditation and the use of violence in his crime, the noose was a given.

His case had become weirdly, strangely famous. After he was dead, his body was transported back to the scene of his crime, Attercliffe Common. There, he was strung up in a gibbet, and left for 36 years.

On the day that he was put there, around 40,000 people were on hand to see it. Local pub owners said that it brought them a small fortune, and stringing up the dead body didn’t seem to really have the desired effect that the justice system was going for.

Leaving the corpses of criminals to rot away in public view from a gibbet wasn’t anything particularly out of the ordinary—there were at least 100 of them in London by 1800. It was meant to act as a warning to others, an attempt to keep people in line by showing them the gruesome end that waited for them if they crossed to the other side of the law.

But Broughton’s body became not just a local landmark, but a target for the public’s sympathy rather than fear or hate. Newspaper articles from the time describe him as going to the gallows resigned to his fate, not allowed to make restitution or do penance for his crimes. Far from being a deterrent to the future crimes of others, it cemented his place in the area’s folklore—and drew attention to the fact that the system wasn’t necessarily working as it was intended to.

Writers and reformers of the day pointed to the spectacle that went along with his hanging and the execution of others. An execution had become an event, with attendees able to buy souvenirs from figurines of the hanged criminals to copies of their last words or sketches of their bodies hanging from the gallows. What was supposed to be a somber reminder of the bloody, awful end that waited for those that didn’t obey the law had turned into a public spectacle—one that, in the case of Spence Broughton and others left on display in gibbets, lasted for decades.

Broughton’s corpse was eventually cut down, not because of some social revolution or public outrage, but because nearby landlords were sick and tired of gawkers coming to visit the town’s grisliest landmark. He was given a churchyard burial, and a nearby pub was (sort of) named in his honor, taking the name “The Noose and Gibbet.”

It was only six years after he was cut down that England had its last public execution. Theft was no longer a capital offense, and the gibbets were taken down, their last two criminals buried in 1832.

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but 36 years seems a bit long to leave a corpse hanging just to make a point. Seems as though a lot of folks felt the same way!

Coffee out on the patio one again. Don't worry...no spooky things are hanging around!

Transcontinental Telegraph On Western Wednesday...!

I don't think we have any idea what a job the Western Union company had when it began this enterprise. Probably they didn't either!

There must have been so many obstacles along the way that were unforeseen, the company must have felt like throwing in the towel more than once.

Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line

On this day in 1861, workers of the Western Union Telegraph Company link the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that for the first time allows instantaneous communication between Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Stephen J. Field, chief justice of California, sent the first transcontinental telegram to President Abraham Lincoln, predicting that the new communication link would help ensure the loyalty of the western states to the Union during the Civil War.

The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun only a little more than year before when Congress authorized a subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph line that would join the eastern and western networks. The Western Union Telegraph Company, as its name suggests, took up the challenge, and the company immediately began work on the critical link that would span the territory between the western edge of Missouri and Salt Lake City.

The obstacles to building the line over the sparsely populated and isolated western plains and mountains were huge. Wire and glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada. Supplying the thousands of telegraph poles needed was an equally daunting challenge in the largely treeless Plains country, and these too had to be shipped from the western mountains. Indians also proved a problem. In the summer of 1861, a party of Sioux warriors cut part of the line that had been completed and took a long section of wire for making bracelets. Later, however, some of the Sioux wearing the telegraph-wire bracelets became sick, and a Sioux medicine man convinced them that the great spirit of the "talking wire" had avenged its desecration. Thereafter, the Sioux left the line alone, and the Western Union was able to connect the East and West Coasts of the nation much earlier than anyone had expected and a full eight years before the transcontinental railroad would be completed.

Just imagine, the first time ever that coast-to-coast communications could be carried out almost in real time! Certainly did a lot to hasten the start of the information age, don't you think?

Coffee out on the patio once again today, my friends.