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Meaning Intense,often brutal questioning,especially by police.

Origin: Dating to the 1800s in America,it has no connection with criminal law. The third degree is the highest degree in Freemasonry.Any Mason must undergo very difficult tests of proficiency before he qualifies for the third degree and it is from these "test" that the exhaustive questioning of criminals came to be called the third degree."

This also has nothing to do with the degree of crininal offenses, which is governed by CULPABILITY. For example, third-degree murder in many states is a wrongful death caused by an irresponsible or reckless act, or an act committed in complete disregard for the safety of others, such as racing a vehicle through a school zone as school is letting out, or discharging a firearm in a crowd. Second-degree murder is wrongfully killing someone in anger, or committing an act which the offender should know is likely to kill someone. First-degree murder is the planned unlawful deliberate killing of another for any reason, a killing committed during commission of another crime, the wrongful killing of a police officer, or a political assassination.

Hangnail

Meaning: A small piece of torn skin at the base or side of a fingernail.

Origin: had nothing to do with a hanging nail--the original word was angnail.The ang referred to the pain it caused--as in ang/uish.

THUG

A term for a petty criminal who often assaults his vics.

This term came from the thuggees, an Indian cult of criminals which operated in that nation for several centuries. They were called thugs by the British while they ruled India & the term passed into American English sometime during the 19th century.

ROCK & ROLL

We all know it's music and what it sounds like. But how about the TERM?

There are many stories about this term came about. Some bigoted Southerners said it was a term used by local blacks to refer to having sex in a car or van, but while some people, black or white, used the term thusly, it appeared they used it due to the bigots' apocryphal stories, and not from some ingrained long-term use.

Southern Gospel choirs often swayed side-to-side in rhythm with their music, and were said to be "rockin' ".

However, there's no dispute when the term's universal use began. In 1951, Cleveland DJ Alan "Moondog" Freed began using the term for the "bebop" music he was playing, especially covers of black artists' R&B songs by white performers, and the term immediately caught on nationwide. As we know, this youth-oriented music became wildly successful. I have been alive during mosta the evolution of rock, and have always been a big fan.

But where did Freed get the term? He said it came from a 1922 Trixie Smith recording, "My Man Rocks me With a Steady Roll". In 1947, a performer named Paul Bascomb had a song titled "Rock And Roll and a year later a performer called Wild Bill Moore had an entirely-different song with the same title. As a researcher into the R&B recordings by black artists, Freed had doubtlessly heard those songs, but credited the term to Trixie Smith's song.(Smith[1895-1943] was generally a lead singer for several jazz bands & an early black film actress.)

However, a determined search by some dedicated discographers has found that the first known use of the term "rock & roll" on a recording was in 1916 on the Little Wonder record label, in a song called "The Camp Meeting Jubilee", where the singers say "We've been rocking and rolling in your arms, in the arms of Moses."

But there's no dispute that Freed popularized the term worldwide.

BLUES(music)The blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the full twelve note chromatic scale plus the microtonal intervals and a characteristic twelve-bar chord progression.

BLUE NOTESare notes sung or played at a lower pitch than those of the major scale for expressive purposes.

The term came from the other use of "the blues", a depressed mood, as the early songs of the genre were often sad songs of depression. This usage came from an older(1600s-1700s) phrase, "having a fit of blue devils" used to indicate depression. The music form evolved from the US slave days, when the slaves often sang work songs and sad songs over their state of servitude.Thus, it was associated with sadness for a long time. The term was tacked onto the music genre by W.C. Handy's 1912 song "Memphis Blues". Today, blues remains a separate genre.


"Jazz" evolved from the blues.

JAZZ

Can best be described as blues with sophistication, a combination of the various genres of dance music of the late 19th century into one form, much-more complicated than any of the separate genres. It is purely, originally an American music form.

The term 'jazz' was an old vulgar term for semen or, as a verb, to fornicate. It was often spelled/pronounced 'jass'. Just as people often use the 4-letter "S" word for a collection of unspecified things, or describe a pack of lies as "a buncha S", the Americans of 120 years ago, especially southern blacks, used 'jass' or 'jazz' similarly. Upon first hearing the new music form, many a person asked, "What's that jazz we're hearing?" Soon, the term was used almost universally to name the music genre, and its earlier definition fell into disuse & the word became 'proper' English.

COMPUTER

Everyone here knows what a computer is, right? Ya hafta use one to read this, right? Well, just where did the term come from?

Originally, 'computer' was a term for a PERSON who performed numerical calculations with a machine, or for a person with the gift of performing such calculations in his/her head almost instantaneously. It is an old term, used for centuries in English, from the Latin infinitive computare, "to count".It was NOT a term for the machine used to make calculations; that was called a CALCULATOR, just as purely-numerical calculating devices are called today. It was applied to machines beginning in the early 20th century when electric calculators were first made.

Punch cards were invented by a Frenchman, Joseph Marie Jacquard, in 1801, to record intricate patterns used by cloth looms. He invented a way to keep these patterns as a program on a series of cards to guide the loom. His work was used in principle to make modern digital computers that used punch cards.

The first computer machines bearing that name were pure number-crunchers, but eventually they evolved into the combination calculator/word & data processors we now have. The name stuck as word-processing features were added to calculators.

No use boring you with a detailed history of computers, as you can easily find it on the Net if you're interested, but I thought you might find the origin of the TERM interesting.

peter means rock.

CAR...


The word has many meanings, so we won't go into ALL of em. The word itself appears to have come from Celtic/Old Irish and meant "vehicle". In medieval times, it meant a heavy cart used by farmers to haul their crops to town, and that same word, pronunciation, and definition was used in several other languages besides English. It also was used for chariot and carriage in English, especially if it was a heavy vehicle. It was spelled "carr, carre, car". at various times in various places, and was still used in England for a heavy cart when the automobile was invented.

In the early 1900s, English speakers began to call autos and motorized trucks "autocars" & "horseless cars/carriages". Before long, people, especially in the USA, began calling all autos "cars", & the tag has stuck to this day.

NASTY

Many believe this word came from the name of the great cartoonist Thomas Nast(1840-1902) who developed a fanatical hatred for NYC political/crime kingpin William "Boss" Tweed, and caricatured him in scores of cartoons published in several newspapers and magazines.

However, the word came from Middle English, which got it from the Durch "nestig", 'dirty'. The word wasn't in very common use, however, until Nast became famous, and it then acquired its meanings of "very unpleasant, mean, obscene, hazardous", etc.

BTW, Nast was of GERMAN ancestry, and gave us the popular image of Santa Claus, and the political symbols of the GOP elephant and Dem donkey.

Gypsy

Meaning: A nomad,or a member of a nomadic tribe

Origin: In the early 16th century members of a wandering race who called themdelves Romany appeared in Britain.They were actually of Hindo origin,but the British believed that they came from Egypt,and called them Egipcyans.This became shortened to Gipcyan,and by the year 1600,to Gipsy or Gypsey.

BLOG

No deep etymology here...it's short for weblog!

NEWS

Most of us have been told that "news" stands for North, East, West, South, a report of things previously unknown to most, but actually, it usets be a plural of "new", an English word in use almost from the beginning of English, from Old irish 'nue', Welsh 'newydd'.

The first known use of 'news' for plural 'tidings' was in C. 1423, with 'newspaper' first known to have been used in English was C. 1670.

SMARMY

Many people believe that this word came from Left Coast surfer slang, but actually it's much older. In the 1840s, a alang term, 'smawm', to dab pomade on one's hair, came into being. By the 1910's-20's, it had been corrupted to 'smarm', and by 1924, its definition had become "behave in a flattering way", from one's flattering himself with an extra shot of hair goo.

SNIPER

This is not a modern term, either. British snipe hunters knew this bird was very difficult to hit unless one could sneak up on it. By the mid-1700s, they called anyone who was a good enough shot and/or sneaky enough to consistently hit snipes a 'sniper'. The term came into its current use in the 1770s when both British and Indians(in India) used marksmen shooting from concealment.

REDNECK

This term, now meaning a rural ignoramus, is much-older than Jeff Foxworthy. And for my generation, it was old when hippies adopted it to mean a man with short hair who was in some kind of authority. Its first known use was in the 1830s, in a novel, Southern Tour I, by Ann Royall. She gave it to some Presbytarian farmers who often worked with their necks exposed to the sun while protecting their faces & throats. At the time, it carried no negative connotations nor implications of ignorance. The term lay dormant until the days of the carpetbaggers after the Civil War, when it was first used in a disparaging way by Southern blacks. (Those same people also made "cracker' a racial slur for whites at the same time.)

JUKEBOX

This name for a commercial music player comes from Creole slang, "juke, joog", which meant wicked or disorderly. The early jukeboxes were associated with cheap, often disorderly bars, called 'jook joints'. The term was first used as strictly a play-for-pay music machine in 1937.

HOMOSEXUAL

This term was coined in 1892 by an Englishman, C.G. Chaddock, while translating a German work, Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Thus, older Bibles such as the KJV don't contain this word.

GRAND TETONS

Some people believe this term came from the first white people who saw the mountain range saying they resembled female breasts. Actually, 'Teton' is a Sioux name for a western subtribe of the Sioux. The mountain range is named after the Teton Sioux.