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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Again I find an excuse to hijack tsuwm's wwftd: "woodshedding". My excuse is that only someone my age would know what a woodshed was, or what pain in posterior was predicted by the command from paterfamilias "Come with me to the woodshed." In the days when the great majority of homes was heated by wood, there were two little houses behind the home. for two different kinds of comfort. The firewood had to be kept dry, , but in particular the kindling to light the fire had to be dry. And the kindlling was a convenient size with which to administer corporal punishment. And the woodshed was far enough away from the home that sympathetic mother did not have to suffer the vocalizations of the culprit.
The woodshed was never big enough for a barbershop quartet. That part of the quote makes no sense to me.
Subject:
today's wwftd is... woodshedding
Date:
Wed, 29 Aug 2001 11:07:34 -0500 (CDT)
From:
wwftd master <mikef3@cfsmo.honeywell.com>
To:
wwftd minions <tsuwm@aol.com>
the worthless word for the day is: woodshedding
[vbl. n.] a) the dispensing of punishment
b) the practice or rehearsal of music
c) spontaneous or improvised barber-shop singing
No head falsetto here but complete, out of the honest breast,
a baritone voice brought over years of woodshedding up to this range.
-Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_
-tsuwm http://members.aol.com/tsuwm/
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Here is a 44-year-old, Dr Bill, with familiarity with woodsheds and their implications.
Re "The woodshed was never big enough for a barbershop quartet. That part of the quote makes no sense to me.", I understood the connection to be that the sounds coming from spontaneous or improvised barber-shop singing would not be unlike the sounds emitting from a delinquent boy receiving a woodshedding.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Dear Sparteye: I never heard of a barbershop quartet made up of four sopranos.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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thanks, bill; I now have all three(c) meanings attested to by loyal correspondents. as to the sense of it all, Occam's razor often doesn't suffice -- cf. southpaw.
Judi writes: If you WERE a "Barbershopper" you wouldn't consider this a "worthless
word"........ Sing bass for the women's group myself.
Tom offers: Being a frequent trumpet-playing member of community theater
orchestra pits, I can verify that definition b is actually used, usually
in the context of a conductor suggesting to a player that he or she
do some woodshedding, said suggestion usually being made
because he or she sucks.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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sounds emitting from a delinquent boy receiving a woodshedding
The common musical use of the term is b) with the connotation of working on basics, often outside the context of a full group. I might suspect that the specialized barber-shop meaning is a derivation of this rather than a harkening back to the original meaning. I know some barber-shop singers whom I will see next week. I'll try to remember to ask them. Communal memory, E?
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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Does Judi have an ovarian tumor? Only way she could sing bass I know of.
Judi writes: If you WERE a "Barbershopper" you wouldn't consider this a "worthless
word"........ Sing bass for the women's group myself.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I also knew a woman bass. No health problems other than smoker's throat that I knew of. She wasn't very good, but she was a better bass than she was a tenor.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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...and, if you're going to have a women's b-s quartet, *someone's got to sing the bass parts.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
Carpal Tunnel
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I know what falsetto is. That's the way I talk to cats. But how can even a contralto sound like a bass?
No Boris Gudanov there.
P.S. Too late I realise I should have said:" She would not be Gudanov."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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how can even a contralto sound like a bass?
Falsone
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