Mogul This and Mogul That

Powerful "Moguls" of days gone by

Vintage image of a Mogul tractor  from dok1 

In 2013, the word "mogul" has a vaguely negative feel to it. We might speak of "shipping moguls" or "manufacturing moguls", meaning the powerful people who control those industries. But a hundred years ago, "mogul" was a positive word, often used as a brand name for powerful machines and equipment.

 Mogul Motor Trucks were manufactured in St. Louis and in Chicago.  The Mogul  Street Sprinkling Truck was probably made by that company. And certain large locomotives were called moguls.

Mogul 1629 locomotive. Image by tkksummers. Gene
Autry purchased this Mogul 1629 after it was retired
 from a long life of of service on the rails. It  was used
in several Western movies and shows. You may
remember seeing it on "Gunsmoke" or "Wyatt Earp."

Mogul tractors with kerosene engines were manufactured by the International Harvester Company of Chicago, Illinois, through 1924. (If you enjoy mechanical curiosities, watch this YouTube video:  Harry Henderson starting his old Mogul tractor.)

I've written several times on this blog about the hard-working Mogul Wagons that were manufactured in Hopkinsville, KY from the 1870s through 1925. Production was halted by a fire that destroyed the factory, but the Forbes Brothers sold their remaining inventory of Mogul wagons, wheels, axels, and other parts for another 25 years.

Moguls didn't always live up to the promise of their name. The Mogul Steamship Company is mainly remembered for a court case in England that concerned it. The Mogul Mining Company was declared a poor investment by a financial adviser of 1920.

How to look and feel like a Mogul yourself? Just light up a Mogul cigarette! (Ugh. I have a feeling they were terribly strong.)

The following definitions are from a dictionary of the period, The Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary of 1913

Mogul \Mo*gul"\, n. [From the Mongolian.]
1. A person of the Mongolian race.
2. (Railroad) A heavy locomotive for freight traffic, having three
pairs of connected driving wheels and a two-wheeled truck.

Mogul \Mo*gul"\, n.
A great personage; magnate; autocrat.

Related:
Mogul Wagons from Hopkinsville sold in Mississippi, North Carolina

I Say "Ky-oht" and You Say "Ky-oh-tee"

Coyotes, wolves, and coy-dogs

After hearing the coyotes howl for the last few nights, I read a little about the animal. One bit of trivia I picked up is that the word "coyote" comes from the Aztec word "coyotl", which is often translated as "trickster."

I came across some interesting spellings of the animal's name in old books: "cayute," "cayota," "cayeute," and so on. Today we have standardized the spelling, but pronunciations still vary. According to Merriam Webster's entry for the word, the primary pronunciation is \kī-ˈō-tē\ but in the West, it's sometimes pronounced \ˈkī-ˌōt\.

Coyote in Yosemite National Park
Photo source: Wikipedia

Well, I grew up using the Western pronunciation \ˈkī-ˌōt\ . To me, "coyote" rhymed with "my oat." And I was equally comfortable with \ˈkī-ˌyüt\  (rhymes with "my boot".) These were the pronunciations of northern Nebraska.

On the rare occasion that I heard someone say \kī-ˈō-tē\ , it was obvious to me that they knew coyotes only from watching "Wile E. Coyote" on TV. To me, the three-syllable pronunciation was an overly-fancy version that only a dude would say.

Over the years, I've amended that preconceived notion because I've learned that many rural folks in other parts do say \kī-ˈō-tē\.  However, I haven't changed my own way of saying the word. The three-syllable pronunciation will never feel right in my mouth.

I've also heard lots of people call them "wolves." But in my internal dictionary, the word "wolf" is used only for the larger wild dogs. To me, calling them "wolves" would feel just as silly as calling them \kī-ˈō-tēs\.

I base my mental image of a coyote on the animal I knew during my Nebraska childhood. The average male coyote there weighed  maybe 30 lbs. But in the eastern U.S., the native coyote is a bigger animal -- at least a third bigger on average (10 to 15 lbs. heavier) -- than the Nebraska coyote. DNA testing has revealed that some eastern coyotes carry wolf genes as a result of coyotes and wolves mating with each other.

So my notion that no coyote should be called a wolf is probably wrong, too. I read that these crossbreed coyotes are called "coy-wolves." Now I wonder how they pronounce that first syllable, "coy."  Is it \ˈkī\ or is it  \ˈkȯi\?

Range map of the coyote
Image from Wikimedia

Related:
Website of Jonathan Way, Ph.D., a Coy-Wolf expert

Don't forget

Bad grammar, great message

I'm really not looking forward to the time change, but the extra hour of sleep will be nice.

Onomatopoeic Words

Words that imitate sounds

This evening, I was sorting through some old papers, and I came across some notes dated October 23. I left out the year when I wrote the date, but I think it was 1984. About that time, I took a class called "History of the English Language", and I must have saved only this little stack of pages from my notebook for that class.

On the long-ago October 23 when I made those notes, Dr. Eschlimann was wearing plaid pants. I know this to be a fact because Dr. E. always wore plaid pants. His lecture was about the ways that words enter the English language. My notes cover 17 different sources of words, with a list of examples for each one.

The list of onomatopoeic words (words that echo or imitate sounds) is kind of fun. Glancing through the list is like reading the "sound effects" of a comic strip. And it is dated October 23, so I decided to post it.

hiss
clatter
pop
sizzle
buzz
hum
bump
squeak
crash
snort
sob
howl
throb
jerk
knock
blab
flick
flip
gush
whistle
bleat
snicker
snore
snort
roar
purr
plunk
boom
bark
twitter
jabber
flash
blip
fuss
dump
crack
pat
squelch
blurt
lull
gag
gulp
and one of my all-time favorite words...
murmur (I just like the sound of that word.)

Such vivid words! I hope you enjoyed them!

Thursday Thirteen: Old-time Riddles

Conundrums from the early 1900s

1. If a chicken said anything, why would it be likely to swear?
Because it could only use fowl language.

2.What is the best thing to do if you split your sides with laughter?
Run until you get a stitch in them.

3. Why is a dirty boy like a piece of cheap flannel?
Because they both shrink from washing.

4. Why is the number 9 like a peacock?
Because it would be nothing without its tail.

5. Which is quicker, heat or cold?
Heat is, because you can catch cold.

6. Why were the Middle Ages called dark ages?
Because there were so many (k)nights.

7. Why did the fly fly?
Because the spider spied her.

8. Why do you always find a lost object in the very last place where you look?
Because when you find it, you stop looking for it.

9. Why is a straw hat like a kiss over the telephone?
Because it is not felt.

10. Why is a watch like a river?
Because it will not run long without winding.

11. Why is the letter D like a squalling baby?
Because it makes Ma mad ("ma"-d).

12. Why is there no such thing as a perfect day?
Because every day begins by breaking.

13. Why is a fishmonger ungenerous?
Because his job makes him sell fish (selfish).

From Party Games For All Occasions by Bernard Stanley. Published in Philadelphia by J. B. Lippincott Company, copyright date unknown.

Find more Thursday Thirteen posts here.

"Peacock and Peahen" by Maruyama Ōkyo (1747 - 1821)
Image from Wikimedia Commons

Overheard

Time flies.

At the store, I overheard this confused conversation between a 50-ish woman and her 30-ish daughter.

Mom: It's been at least a century since I bought new towels.

Daughter: No, it has not been a century, Mom! You got new towels when you redid the bathroom. That was seven years ago.

Mom: Well, I guess you're right. It seems like it's been over a century, though.

I have noticed that entire months slip by very quickly. Does that relate? I'm not sure.

Over a century ago
(Flickr image by peagreengirl)

Thursday 13: Needlework Idioms

Figures of speech, related to sewing and needlework

"Lise Sewing" by Renoir, Dallas Museum of Art

1. Revolution is part of the fabric of South American history.

2. The room was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop.

3. The peace accords are unraveling.

4. The contract is all sewed up.

5. The partnership is coming apart at the seams.

6. He needled his wife about her driving.

7. I'm tired, and my nerves are frayed.

8. He looks a bit frayed around the edges.

9. Her jokes had me in stitches.

10. That story's made out of whole cloth.

11. The two boys are cut from the same cloth.

12. This deal is hanging by a thread.

13. Finding his homework in his room was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

If you have a sewing or needlework idiom, please add it in the comments!

Buggy or Carriage?

Seen at the Mennonite store

Most of the "English" around Christian County, KY, would say there is a "horse and buggy" in this photo. However, the Mennonites would say that this is a "horse and carriage."

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary says that a buggy is a "light vehicle with two or four wheels, with or without a top, generally with one seat, and usually drawn by one horse".

A carriage, according to Webster's, is "a four-wheeled passenger vehicle, usually horse-drawn and often private." Dictionary.com adds that a carriage is "designed for comfort and elegance."

I think that vehicles like the one pictured above have two seats. I believe that some vehicles of this design also have a small cargo space behind the back seat. That second seat must be what makes this vehicle a carriage instead of a buggy -- to the discerning.

On the internet:
Word list: Carriages, Carts and Chariots

Overheard at the Grocery Store

Preschooler humor

In the cereal aisle, I saw a little boy walking hand-in-hand with his mom. The little boy was having a giggle attack. "I'm going to call Daddy 'STUPID'!" he announced.

"That wouldn't be very nice," his mother said.

Another giggle attack. The little fellow could barely sputter out the rest of his joke. "I'm going to call Daddy 'Stupid' and I'm going to call you 'THE BUNNY RABBIT'!"

I didn't get to hear Mom's response to that.

No Shrinking Violets Here

Where did the idiom, "shrinking violet," originate?

These violets lift their pretty faces to the sun.

William Safire wrote that the earliest usage of the term "shrinking violet his researcher (Elizabeth Phillips) found was in the 1827 play, Sylvia, by George Darley. Fifteen pages into Darley's lyrical drama, Morgana, Queen of the Fairies, praises Floretta, Queen of the Flowers, for her kindness:

The shrinking violet thou dost cheer; and raise
The cowslip's drooping head: and once did'st cherish
In thy fond breast a snowdrop, dead with cold...

If Elizabeth Phillips could have searched Google Books, she would have found several earlier mentions of shrinking violets. In 1826, a poem by James Gates Percival, titled "The Perpetual Youth of Nature - A Soliloquy" was included in the book Miscellaneous Poems Selected from the United States Literary Gazette. Here is the relevant portion:

The wind is very low—
It hardly wags the shrinking violet,
Or sends a quiver to the aspen leaf,
Or curls the green wave on the pebbled shore...

A second reference to shrinking violets is found in "A Song Over the Grave of a Lover", in the same 1826 collection of poetry.

And I have sought
The lowly violet, that in shade appears,
Shrinking from view like young love's tender fears,
With sweetness fraught

And Dorothea Lynde Dix, in The Garland of Flora which was published in 1829, has a chapter about violets. From her collection of quotes about violets, I found an even earlier mention of the shy nature of violets (in Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore, published in 1817).

While she who sung so gently to the lute
Her dream of home steals timidly away,
Shrinking as violets do in summer's ray...

Safire thought the violets might be shrinking from the still-wintry winds of an early spring, based on a bit of poetry by John Byrne Leicester Warren from 1893. However the phrase by Moore, "shrinking as violets do in summer's ray," predates Warren's use of the idiom by 75 years and suggests that violets were said to shrink from the heat of the summer sun.

Saturday Night Scrabble

New and old words

Keely and Taurus came for pizza on Saturday night, and after supper, Keely, Isaac, and I played a game of Scrabble on Keely's extra-large board.

Isaac played "LEET" and said it was an alternative internet language. It wasn't in the dictionaries we were using, and I had never heard of it. With some indignation and a bit of scorn, Isaac produced an Urban Dictionary definition of leet on his laptop and educated me.

Today, I looked up leet at www.dict.org and learned that it has some traditional meanings as well. It's another name for a pollack (a type of fish), and it also has some legal meanings.  If you don't see LEET on the gameboard, that's because someone added an F and made it "FLEET."

"POO" was also one of Isaac's words. Isaac thought I was picking on him when I checked to see if poo was in the dictionary. He shouldn't have worried. According to the yellowed pages of a 1961 Funk & Wagnalls dictionary that we had on the table, poo is a verb of Scottish derivation that means "pull".

I played "PENT" and the kids questioned it because it's usually heard as "pent-up". Of course, it's in the dictionary. Pent is an old variant of "penned", meaning "confined or caged". Really, would I try to invent a word, children? (Don't answer that question, please. It's strictly rhetorical.)

We didn't reach many of the quadruple word squares at the edges of the board. I think it was because Keely was hoarding all the good letters. (Just kidding, Keely!). Below, her letters at one point in the game -- nary a vowel amongst them. If she had known about the Scrabble Solver, she would have been wanting to use it!

Bad Signs

Seen in a town that shall remain nameless

I've been looking at this sign for about a year now. I think the owners of the store speak English as a second language. Still, you'd think they'd have noticed by now. It might be my duty to tell them.

I wonder -- how do you meatloaf fry a chicken? I'm intrigued. I'm also glad there's much more on the buffet because that chicken could be really strange.

Scrabble to the Death

Marathon match

Keely brought her fancy Scrabble board yesterday when she and Taurus came out for Easter dinner. After the dishes were done, she challenged me to a Scrabble "duel to the death", and I accepted.

Each square on Keely's board has a ridge around its boundaries so the letters don't slide around.  It has twice as many letter pieces as Classic Scrabble does and twice as many squares on the board.  The squares on the corners are quadruple words, and there are also some quadruple letter squares.

Our duel lasted three hours.  Lengthy dictionary searches were conducted (mostly by me, because I wasn't feeling very sharp), and there was an extended "7th inning stretch" while I found the popcorn and the air popper.

We managed to play all the letters, and the final score was 711-707 in my favor. My brain was dead afterwards so Keely did duel me to the death.

It wasn't a decisive victory. I wouldn't have won if Keely hadn't showed me a place to play where I got 19 points, instead of the 6 points I was getting ready to play. But on the other hand, she played a proper noun (Zend), and I didn't catch it until it was too late to call it. I predict a rematch in the future.

Old-time Brickwork

Interesting brick detailing

A corbel is defined as a shelf or ledge formed by projecting successive courses of masonry out from the face of the wall. Racking is defined as masonry in which successive courses are stepped back from the face of the wall. (Source)

Brick is added to a building from the bottom up, so the brick pattern at the top of this building was added by stepping the bricks out from the main wall. Thus, it must be a corbel, I think.

The pattern of the bricks is interesting and it also creates attractive shadows. There are bricklaying rules about how far each row of masonry can safely protrude beyond the previous row.

These are the second story windows and roof line of an old building in Hopkinsville, KY. It sits next to Metcalfe Flowers on East 7th Street.

I believe Mr. T. L. Metcalfe had a business here, about a century ago. He owned a laundry and a newspaper in addition to his flower business, and they were all located on East 7th Street. I don't know the building's recent history.

Ducks in a Row

Natural order

I saw these colorful ducks at Target last weekend. I like them, but I don't need them. I can't accumulate a big collection of spring decorations. The shed is already full of Christmas decorations. Besides, I already have the fireplace mantel ready for Easter with a cute little family of white ceramic rabbits.

The expression "get your ducks in a row" has a solid basis in duck behavior. Little ducks will follow their parent in a fairly orderly fashion, whether waddling through the grass or gliding through the water. It's a fascinating thing to see.

It's common to see even adult ducks swimming in a line or perched in a row. The same instinct for formation helps ducks fly with the flock in migration.

Herding ducks is another matter altogether, as any herd dog in competition would tell you.

In English, we mean "getting organized" when we speak of "getting our ducks in a row". Personally, I don't have a strong natural herding instinct. My ducks are usually all over the place, despite my barking at them. While I'm busy getting a couple of ducks in line, the rest of the flock wanders away.

Reigning Over the Reins

Faulty headline noted

Kennedy camp reigns in Bloomberg adviser Kevin Sheekey’s Senate seat lobbying efforts

(Headline on a New York Daily News article)

Oops. That should be "reins", not "reigns." Reins are the long straps on a horse's bridle that a rider uses to guide and control the horse. When a rider reins in a horse, he brings it to a stop, as the Kennedy camp would like to do with Kevin Sheekey.

A monarch reigns. After all the recent talk about the Kennedy dynasty and the entitlement to public office that the Kennedys supposedly feel, I wonder if the headline writer made a Freudian slip.

The NY Daily News article tells of efforts to "muzzle" Kevin Sheekey, who is described as New York City Mayor Bloomberg's "pitbull." Caroline Kennedy's advisers are afraid that Sheekey's high-pressure advocacy is hurting her bid for Hillary Clinton's soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat. The advisers are trying to rein in Sheekey's efforts.

Perhaps the headline writer didn't read Zane Grey westerns as a child. In Grey's fiction, cowboys reined in their horses nearly as often as they pulled out their guns. An example:

The cowboy reined in his horse, listened a moment, then swung down out of the saddle. He raised a cautioning hand to the others, then slipped into the gloom and disappeared.

(from page 54 of Desert Gold by Zane Grey)

On the frontiers of Zane Grey fiction, it didn't rain much. If anyone reigned, it was the cowboys. They had firm control of the reins.

Clichés Compiled

List of losers

If you are a person who enjoyed English class in school, or if you want to speak and write better English, take a look at Laura Hayden's list of clichés.

Clichés: Avoid them like the plague.

Often we speak and write with clichés because we are lazy. Rather than thinking of original ways to express our ideas, we repeat the familiar, overused phrases that come to mind so easily. Clichés make our writing and speaking dull -- and may suggest that we don't think much.

It takes vigilance to avoid them, but I'm inspired to try harder after browsing Hayden's list.

Cliché can be spelled with or without the accent. I like the look of cliché better, so that's how I've typed it.

Related:
20 of your most hated cliches

Marginally related:
Repeating a holiday cliche, a column by Martha Allen which contains an amusing anecdote about her child's reaction to an oft-told Santa Claus myth.

On the same general topic (thanks, Fred):
Oxford Researchers List Top 10 Most Annoying Phrases

Seen in Smiths Grove, KY

Old Farmer's Bank building

Another chapter in what Keely calls "Mom's 'American Main Street' series":

What a surprise for the eyes to see this little limestone bank in Smiths Grove, KY.  (Smiths Grove is a small town in Warren County, about 20 miles east of Bowling Green.)

The Farmer's Bank building is currently unoccupied. I found the following information about its history:

Erected in 1894, Farmer's Bank is a pretentious limestone structure built for Dave and James R. Kirby by an itinerant stone mason. Closed in 1931, Farmer's Bank never reopened and was later used as a post office.

Source: Architecture of Warren County, KY 1790-1940, copyright 1984 by the Landmark Association of Bowling Green and Warren County, Inc., Bowling Green, KY.

A "pretentious limestone structure"? The adjective "pretentious" seems opinionated -- and thus, out-of-place.  This book is supposed to be reporting noteworthy facts about Warren County's best old architecture.

Were the writers insinuating that Smiths Grove was not a fancy enough town to deserve an attractive stone bank?  Or are they suggesting that a small building should not have so many details?  There's no way to know what they really meant, but I'm pretty sure they were expressing an opinion, not giving a fact.

According to WordNet (r) 2.0:

pretentious adj

1: making claim to or creating an appearance of (often undeserved) importance or distinction; "a pretentious country house"; "a pretentious fraud"; "a pretentious scholarly edition" [ant: unpretentious]

2: intended to attract notice and impress others; "an ostentatious sable coat" [syn: ostentatious] [ant: unostentatious]

3: of a display that is tawdry or vulgar [syn: ostentatious, kitsch]

Double Spaces Are Out

Typewriter rule bites the dust

I was searching for a punctuation rule about commas, when I came across an interesting paragraph.

Spacing at End of Sentence

Use a single space at the end of a sentence and after a colon. Double spaces date back to the days of typewriters, when all characters were allotted the same amount of space. Computerized typesetting adjusts the spacing for a good fit. Extra spaces create gaps and look unprofessional.

Source: Punctuation Primer

I had never read this rule in print before. I did read a discussion about single-spacing after a paragraph, on Sarabeth's blog a while back. It seemed to me that the younger commenters were single-spacing, and the older ones were still double-spacing. It was evidence of the difference between keyboarding (taught nowadays) and typing (taught before the Computer Age).

Miss Tibbitts, the stern typewriting teacher of my high school days, is surely feeling some un-rest, whether she is still in this world or has gone on to the next. A single space at sentence-end was always an error in her classroom of big, manual, office typewriters.

In Blogger Draft, I notice that a double space is converted into a single space plus a space-holder symbol that creates the second space. It assumes that, if you double-space, you really want two spaces. (I think previous Bloggers automatically converted double spaces to single spaces.) To be honest, the double space does look like an unprofessional gap, just as the Punctuation Primer says (quoted above).

I can't express how hard it is to abandon the double space habit. I type without much conscious thought about the process. Typed words flow from my fingers like spoken words from my mouth. My right thumb is extremely well-trained after 40 years of typing. It goes "thump thump" automatically after every period.

Even in this post about the rule of single-spacing, I double-spaced after most of the periods. I had to remove the Blogger-inserted extra space-holders manually. If I do that often enough, maybe that will teach me.

Measuring the Rain

Talking about rainfall

When my children were both in school, but still young, I worked for several years at a little country store in our neighborhood. It was a very short commute (less than 5 minutes), and the kids could get on or off the bus at the store as necessary, so it worked well.

One day, a customer asked me how much rain had fallen at my house. I said that we'd received about 30 hundredths (meaning .30 inch). He looked at me oddly for a long moment. Then he said, "Where are you from?"

He asked that question because, in Kentucky, people talk about tenths of rain. When I spoke of hundredths of rain, I was using the language of Nebraska. In the Nebraska Sandhills where I grew up, rain is precious enough most years that every hundredth of an inch is measured and appreciated. In Kentucky, where we get twice as much annual rainfall, we carelessly round off the measurement to the nearest tenth of an inch.

A slow, quiet rain is falling now. Its scent is drifting through the open window. I won't have to water my garden for another few days, and the crops in the neighborhood will welcome the moisture.

We live near a divide. On one side, the creeks run into the Pond River, and on the other side, they run into the Little River. This little area is often dryer than the rest of the county, because the rains either go north or south of us. We've been fortunate this year, though. We received several little showers in June that other parts of the county didn't get.

At work tonight, a lady who lives in the western part of the county told me that they had received three tenths of rain last night. She was thankful because their corn needed the moisture. I hope her corn got some more rain tonight.