{"id":2974,"date":"2005-07-04T15:16:04","date_gmt":"2005-07-04T22:16:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2005\/07\/04\/2974.html"},"modified":"2005-07-04T15:16:04","modified_gmt":"2005-07-04T22:16:04","slug":"origins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2005\/07\/04\/origins\/","title":{"rendered":"Origins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Vardibidian has a brief <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/journal\/show-entry.php?Entry_ID=2973\">discussion of the Declaration of Independence<\/a>, with a promise of further discussion of the rhetoric at some future date.  I'm looking forward to that.<\/p>\n<p>He also mentions <cite>Star Wars<\/cite>.  For those inclined to celebrate the holiday by movie-watching, but not inclined to watch <cite>Star Wars<\/cite>, I wanted to make an uncharacteristically serious suggestion: <cite>National Treasure<\/cite> would make a good July 4th movie if you're not feeling entirely cynical about the holiday and about America.<\/p>\n<p>Mostly unrelated: Saturday night around 10:45 p.m., someone in the neighborhood started setting off firecrackers or fireworks or something.  They got more frequent, until by around 10:55 there was a steady thudding and thumping every few seconds.  By 11:05 I was sick of it, so I called the police non-emergency number&#8212;just as the noise stopped.  I reported it anyway, figuring they might keep an eye out in the neighborhood.  And the dispatcher said, \"Oh, yeah, Shoreline Amphitheatre is having a fireworks show tonight.\"  I opened my mouth to say something snarky about that, and then realized it was perfectly reasonable and shut my mouth.  And then thanked the dispatcher and got off the phone.  I mean, 11 p.m. may be a little late for a fireworks show, but not <em>too<\/em> bad, especially on a Saturday night.  It must have been <em>really<\/em> loud up close, though.<\/p>\n<p>Interesting that I'm a lot more tolerant of an official fireworks show than of neighborhood people setting off their own fireworks.  Maybe partly a question of how many people are benefiting?<\/p>\n<p>Anyway.  Entirely unrelated to any of that, I was tickled by a couple of place-name origins I learned just now:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vauxhall\">Vauxhall is an area of south London<\/a>, as well as the name of an Underground and train station.  Turns out (according to that Wikipedia article) that the land was once owned by a widow who married a mercenary named Fulk le Breant; they built a house named Fulk's Hall; the name gradually changed to \"Fox Hall, then Vaux Hall and finally Vauxhall.\"  Which is all cute enough, but the really entertaining bit is that (according to a story given at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.answers.com\/topic\/vauxhall-station\">answers.com<\/a>) \"Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, visiting London in 1844, was taken to see the trains at Vauxhall and mistakenly assumed that 'Vauxhall' (transliterated into Russian as 'vokzal') was the generic term for a railway station.\"  Hence, the Russian word <span class=\"foreign\">vokzal<\/span> (&#1042;&#1086;&#1082;&#1079;&#1072;&#1083;) apparently means \"train station.\"  I don't know whether to believe that etymology, but it's a great story.<\/li>\n<li>And Cecil Adams provides (and semi-debunks) similar stories about the origins of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.straightdope.com\/classics\/a2_236.html\">kangaroo, Yucatan, and Nome<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>(Thanks to Jillian, Aaron, JDMS, and Will.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vardibidian has a brief discussion of the Declaration of Independence, with a promise of further discussion of the rhetoric at&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2974\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}