(no subject)

My parents are in Minneapolis for the weekend. My youngest brother is off gaming with folks. The middle brother is probably at his girlfriends' house; he's only here sporadically. I have the whole house to myself this evening! And Tim and I will largely be alone for the whole weekend!

The most exciting thing I'm likely to do, though, is go grocery shopping. I'm out of pizza and diet soda, which are important for what I'll be doing the rest of the weekend, which is sitting at my desk and working on school projects. No Indian food with Lisa for me like we were talking about. *sighs*

On the plus side, getting all of this stuff done is feeling possible.

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I totally forgot about housemate A while writing that. He's so quiet, down in the basement all the time! He's here too; I just heard him on the stairs.

Fun with slang, or everything old is new again

I'm switching from working on my anthro theory paper to my history paper. This week in class, we're going to address the theoretical perspective I decided to use in my reanalysis, and I think talking about it more will really benefit me. So for the moment, I'm going to see about getting all my other projects moved along this weekend.

While going through microfilm, I scanned a number of pieces that I thought would be fun to share if I ever do start a Kenosha bike blog like I keep thinking about. Here's one of them, from the Kenosha Evening News of August 8th, 1895. There were a huge number of articles on bikes around this time; there was a real craze sweeping the city!

What a lot of slang has grown up out of the bicycle. The youth who talks boastfully and erratically is called down by the apt suggestion of the bicycle young woman with the remark, "Freddie, your lamp is out." The "road-hog" is borrowed from old New England nomenclature, but "scorching" is of the bicycle's own lingo, and means an undue haste in driving a wheel. The exhausted bicyclist on the road and needing refreshments suggests, "Let's stop here and pump up," referring to the fagged condition of the pneumatic. Bicycle girls are "bloomers," and "here comes my bloomer" is equivalent to here comes my girl. A policeman is "a header," and the cyclometer is "the ticker." "He has lost his tire" is equivalent to "having tacks in your head," or "being off your trolley," and no doubt there is plenty more of the same.