Martha and Grant, et al,

Your show is endlessly fascinating to me, and I want to share my experience with two of today’s topics.

RE: flounder/founder

I kept listening throughout this segment expecting to hear a mention of what I had always thought was the principal use of founder. I grew up on a farm in Indiana, and my dad and most of his crew came from horsey backgrounds. Founder was always something that happened as a result of overeating, usually to a horse. It’s the only way I ever heard it used. If you gave a horse too much grain, too rich a diet, he might be likely to overeat and founder, or go lame. Dictionary.com has that usage as a secondary, referring to laminitis, or inflammation of cartilage connecting the horse’s hoof to its ankle bones, and also mentions “to become ill from overeating” and go lame. It also can be used to refer to inflammation caused by stress, trauma, infection, or parturition, the process of pregnancy and childbirth. An older person might say to a younger person who was stuffing himself, “Careful you don’t founder.” Their first definitions had to do with “to sink, fail utterly, fall.” I had never heard it used that way. And I thought I knew just about everything.

I think Grant was correct in saying that the cited use of flounder was correct, to struggle or stumble clumsily, perhaps heading toward actually foundering, to fail utterly but for now only floundering. It is interesting, however, that a horse which has foundered has a floundering gait. Unfortunately, the condition frequently resulted in the horse going completely down and failing utterly.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says, “1592, perhaps and alteration if founder….” Perhaps the words are very closely related, and may not always have been distinct from each other. I learned that the etymology of the stumbling and of the fish are not related, and I had always trained myself to think of the flounder’s movement as clumsy, just flopping in the sand. Do I need to differentiate them?

RE: Rule of Thumb

I, too, had heard the story many times of the wife beating derivation, and was always skeptical. I was glad to hear Grant say it most likely came from our propensity to use body parts as standards of measure. My earliest memory of it was when I saw a friend’s mother estimating how much fabric she had by pulling a length from the tip of her nose with her head turned to her left shoulder to the tip of her right thumb. When I asked her what she was doing she told me it was the “rule of thumb,” that from the tip of your nose to the tip of your thumb was a yard. I’ll be darned! It works with me. I had also heard that an inch was originally determined by the length of some English king’s distal thumb joint, the one with the nail. I wonder about that. I have relatively small hands, but that joint on me measures 1 and 3/8 inches. I wonder if it was the same king whose foot was 12 inches. Mine is only 9 1/2 inches. He must have had big feet and little hands. Darned inbreeding!

Thanks for your show.

C. James Walker DeleteReplyForwardMove…

In this episode, you discussed the term “simul”, referring to a match where a chess master plays many opponents at the same time. But you pronounced it “SIM-yool”, as if it derived from “simulation”. In fact, it is pronounced “SIME-ull”, as it derives from “simultaneous”.

shallit said:

In this episode, you discussed the term “simul”, referring to a match where a chess master plays many opponents at the same time. But you pronounced it “SIM-yool”, as if it derived from “simulation”. In fact, it is pronounced “SIME-ull”, as it derives from “simultaneous”.

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I agree with your observation up to a point. In England we pronounce ’simultaneous’ as ‘Sim-ul-tay-knee-us’, so your SIME pronunciation isn’t universally applicable.

regards, Geoff

And C. James: Yes, having grown up in Kentucky myself, my first thought about “founder” also had to do with that terribly sad condition involving horses.

As for “rule of thumb,” what I didn’t have time to say on the show, is that this penchant for measuring things by body parts also gives us, by way of Ancient Greek, the word “pygmy.”

On the opening discussion:

am a full-on son of the computerized generation, but I have recently fell in love with a 196? Smith Corona Classic-12 manual typewriter that I found in a second-hand store (great find: perfect working order, brand-new ribbon, marked down from $12 to $6). At first it was mostly an antique, a historical curiosity. But I started using it more and more for my writing, and now I use it for all of my first drafts.

This is for two reasons. First, like you said, there is a forced contemplation that comes with such a linear method. But beyond that, it forces honest revision. When you have a file on your computer, it’s just too easy to edit on-screen as you go. I’ve found that if I completely retype a work it comes out much stronger, and if I write my first drafts on paper I have no choice.

Plus, it starts so many interesting conversations. I was sitting in a cafe at midday writing on it, when a woman came in, looked at me for a while, and then came over to tell me that she had owned exactly the same typewriter when she went to college in the 1960s. She even pointed out a problem she remembered with the carriage return that, sure enough, has been a minor annoyance with mine. It was a lovely moment of inter-generational coming together.

About your listener who wonders about giving things away like they are “going out of style,” I think I have a perfect example for it. Every couple of years, my parents take our “out of style” clothes and whatever pieces of clothes they can collect here in the U.S. to Vietnam and give them to the people in our old town. Everyone in town would come and surround my parents and pick out their clothes. Just in a couple of minutes, all clothes would be gone. Everyone would run around trying on their new clothes and show off to others.

So I think “going out of style” is just a concept of the givers, not of receivers/recipients. Sometimes the receivers have no concept of styles due to their economic or social situations or environment. So your listener is right, giving like “going out of style” would not work if the givers and receivers are in the same social and economic status or environment.

Like Martha and the previous poster, I thought of laminitis immediately upon hearing the topic of flounder vs founder. I am a veterinarian, and while I work with small animals now I did of course study horses in school and more recently I followed quite closely the work done by my former teacher Dean Richardson during the hospitalization of Barbaro, who foundered and died at New Bolton Center near my home.

Would I be correct in understanding that you (Martha and Grant) do not believe that there is any association between the colloquial use of the word “founder” and the terrible illness that destroys the foot of a horse, resulting in disability and ultimately death for the affected animal?

Thanks for a great show as always!
-Hillary

They did indeed. I’ll be sure to let the editors know.

I am sometimes quite anxious to buy things that are going out of style, because very soon they won’t be available to buy anymore, no matter how much I like them.

Those blue jeans fit well, but they’re going out of style, so I better get several pairs.

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas…”

A few years back, the local NOAA office offered a “contest” to name the strong foehn or katabatic wind that we get in Oregon, coming from the east through the Columbia River Gorge. I’ve heard “Chinook” used to describe this wind, but the ggweather site indicates that is a wind in the Rocky Mountains. It would make sense for Oregon since Chinook used to be spoken in these parts. Anyway, the NOAA contest seems to have gone nowhere. We still refer to these, unapologetically if somewhat unimaginatively, as “east winds”. So much for making up new terms to replace the local organic word.

martha said:

(Btw, may I just say how much I love reading posts with words like “foehn” and “katabatic”?)

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Yes, I learned those on the ggweather site that Grant linked us to, and couldn’t resist using them right away.

TootsNYC said:
I am sometimes quite anxious to buy things that are going out of style, because very soon they won’t be available to buy anymore, no matter how much I like them.

Those blue jeans fit well, but they’re going out of style, so I better get several pairs.

When I heard the “going out of style” topic on the show I immediately thought, “It makes sense to me.” And it still does, because, just as TootsNYC mentioned, you might not be able to get something once it’s out of style because it might not be available.

In the screenplay to Pulp Fiction, the character Pumpkin (played by Tim Roth) is described as someone who “smokes like it’s going out of style”. Which, at first blush, might not make sense if you have never heard the phrase before—as I hadn’t—since, this character smokes an awful lot! I asked my mother (an English major) what it meant and she explained to me that doing something like it’s going out of style is like saying, as she put it (to the best of my memory) “If it’s going out of style, I’d better use it before it’s gone.”

Thoughts?