READERS WRITE

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Thanks to all the readers who take the time to send me a response and contributions, same are appreciated.

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From David G:

Otto

Thought this would suit your sense of humor.

David

See yourself out, please, David.

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From Steve M in respect of the comments by the young defendant to the journalists after being charged with a machete holdup:

Morning Otto,

A point about that idiot who was arrested for the robbery at the QLD service station: how quick-witted was he with the journalists? Brilliant, though he is using the same script that comedian Jimmy Carr uses to put down hecklers at his live shows. Carr thrives upon audience reaction and participation, and is probably the best ad-libber and one line advocate around the comedy scene in the world at the moment.

Steve m

Agree Steve, there are lots of videos on Youtube of Jimmy Carr dealing with hecklers but be warned, he uses blue language.

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By the way . . .

The connection of swearing and lewdness with the word blue is uncertain. Etymologists have put forward a bunch of theories but haven’t found anything conclusive.

Some comments:

The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of this usage dates back to 1818, in John Mitford’s The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy, in which Mitford (under pseudonym Alfred Burton) compares blue with brimstone:

“Blush, Pluto! Blush as brimstone blue!

This bluer Town can boast like you

A ‘facilis descensus’ too.”

John Mactaggart’s Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, from 1824, lists “Thread o’Blue” to mean “any little smutty touch in song-singing, chatting, or piece of writing.” There is, however, no guide on the origin.

In Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present (1890), John Stephen Farmer and William Ernest Henley proposed that blue might refer to the blue gown worn by a convicted prostitute in a house of correction, although that usage dates from the 16th century and doesn’t seem to have endured into the early 1800s. A related source for the crass blue is the colour’s association in Britain with uniforms worn by servants and licensed beggars, who were not necessarily smutty but were certainly considered coarse and unrefined, paralleling the evolution of the term blue collar, which popped up in North America in the 20th century.

Slang authority John Camden Hotten, in his 1859 publication, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, suggested that the base or indecent connotation of blue had its origins in the French Bibliothèque bleue, popular literature published between the early 17th and mid-18th centuries on low-quality paper with a blue cover and read by the lower classes. The OED disputes this conjecture, “since such material appears in general to have been highly moral in tone”—unlike, say, the blue books that emerged in Storyville, New Orleans’ red-light district, which were directories of the area’s prostitution services.

Blue laws, which began in 1755 as puritanical restrictions on the activities of New England residents on Sundays, are unconnected with the obscene sense of blue. Contrary to popular belief, blue laws were never printed on blue paper and so the origin of their name also remains a mystery.

So why the blues when feeling down?

The adjective blue has long been used to signify, of a person, the heart, a feeling, etc., depressed, sorrowful, miserable. It was originally a metaphorical use of blue meaning, of the skin, bruised, as in the expression black and blue, discoloured by bruises. This is explicit in the first known instance of this usage, which is found in Merlin, a Middle-English metrical version of the French romance Estoire de Merlin, completed in the first half of the 15th century by Henry Lovelich, a London skinner; this romance tells that after Arthur’s time a great plague gave rise to the name of “Bloye breteyne” (= “Blue Britain”) because the British people’s “hertes bothe blw and blak they were” (= “hearts both blue and black they were”) with sorrow.

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From Wayne B in response to the street art murals:

Otto

Fabulous - more images please

Wayne b

More coming, Wayne

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From David C B:

Your native American proverb yesterday reminded me of what I was told when I bought a few acres of land: "You don't own land, you hold it in trust for the next generation"

The p
roverb was: “We don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

A similar thought . . .

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From Rob W, looking at how far we have progressed since 1922:

Love the Bytes Otto, thank you. Yes, we’ve come a long way in 100 years! A lot of which I didn’t know.

Someone once said that history can only be looked at from hindsight, which creates the risk of what has been termed “hindsight bias”, a phenomenon which influences not only how we think about the past, but also the present and the future.

Hindsight bias is the human tendency to believe that events that have already happened were more predictable than they actually were. Looking back, we think we could have predicted how history would unfold—it seems obvious in hindsight. But while today we can describe how history has unfolded so far, we can’t say why it’s turned out the way it has.

It's easy now to look back at Hitler’s rise to power, the growing might of Germany, the start of World War 2 and to offer ways and means it could have been avoided. It was a lot more difficult at the time, taking into account those times and circumstances and the unknown future.

Something to bear in mind as we go forward.

What is the future re COVID and how we deal with it?

The growing might of China?

Global warming?

The destruction of the rainforests?

Pollution?

Russia and the Ukraine?

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From Tim B when I used Donald Trump as one example of the Dunning Kreuger effect (summary: when stupid people think they are smarter than they are because they are too stupid to know that they are stupid):

Greetings Otto,

Good byte today. Notice you posted a picture of Trump as an example of the Dunning Kreuger effect. I sure wish we had his incompetence back. Biden is killing us with his expert knowledge and competent cabinet members.

Hope you are doing well my friend. 

Tim B

Tim and I have differed on the subject of Donald Trump over many years but remain friends and regularly exchange ideas and communications, I am pleased to say.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. 

But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, each of us will have two ideas.”

- Anonymous, misattributed to George Bernard Shaw

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From Ron T, in response to my advice in early August that the erratic and non-deliveries of Bytes had been due to the blogger provider decommissioning, and that my daughter (thanks, Acacia) was arranging swapover to another provider:

Looking forward to Bytes returning. They, and much coffee - of course, are the only way to start the day.

All the very best to you and yours.

Thanks, Ron, and to those others who expressed similar comments.

It is good to see delivery again and at regular times, as in the old days.

And that is said without hindsight bias.

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