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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thus the word, "elektron." I know you'll get a charge out of knowing that.Negative, Geoff. (Wish I could say "positive", but I can't put that spin on it. 'tis an electra-complex subject.) 
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Carpal Tunnel
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teD, I was going to post about the baseball sense of battery myself, but I hesitated; not because of the sports connection, but because originally it referred to just one (oh no!) part of the pitcher/catcher pairing. The following purports to be from "The Dickson Baseball Dictionary":
"The explanation offered in the glossary in R.G. Knowles and Richard Morton's 1896 book 'Baseball': "The term has its origin in telegraphy, the pitcher being the transmitter and the catcher the receiver." In 1897 however, in a slim volume in the Spalding's Athletic Library entitled 'Technical Terms of Baseball', Henry Chadwick clearly implies a military borrowing when he gives this definition: "This is the term applied to the pitcher and catcher of a team. It is the main attacking force of the little army of nine players in the field in a contest." Most later attempts to pin a history on the term have alluded to this comparison to a military artillery unit. Metaphorically, it fits nicely with 'firing line' a now dated, but once popular term for the pitcher's mound, and 'powder' and 'smoke', two synonyms for fastball. Perhaps the most contrived attempt to explain the exact origin of the term appeared in a letter published in 'The Sporting News' on January 18, 1940. In response to an appeal for clues to the origin of the term, Frank J. Reiter of Kenmore, New York, wrote, "It may possibly have arisen as follows: General Abner Doubleday, the founder of baseball, being a military man, may have originated the phrase, or someone in the army so named it in honor of General Doubleday. As the word 'fire' is a miltary command, and as the pitcher literally 'fires' the ball to the plate much in the same manner as a field artillery battery fires a cannon, this may have prompted the name of a military unit to be applied to the pitcher and the catcher.
2. Before the 1880s the term was commonly used for the pitcher alone. "
[the catcher was called the 'battery mate']
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Carpal Tunnel
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Re: so, do you want to go back to Leyden jars then? (that was the first electrical battery, and that usage stems from the artillery battery, and that usage stems from...)
Why, as a matter of fact, i do!
i am guessing the next step back refers to a battering ram. but that begs the question why was it a battering ram....
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Joined: Oct 2000
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Don't worry TEd, if it shows any tendency to be come a sports thread, those of us who are inclined to food threads will have no trouble turning batter into a food thread..
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Carpal Tunnel
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Batter from the Latin battuare to beat, knock
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old hand
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OP
old hand
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Posts: 819 |
why was it a battering ram....Purely a matter of machismo, Troy. I mean, who wants to be clobbered by a battering ewe? Now, back to the amber rod and the sheep pelt... or was that a pelted sheep? 
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old hand
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old hand
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Posts: 819 |
ne of the russian czars had a whole room made of amber.. (the walls, the floor, all the furniture, were cover
in, or made directly of amber. (it was in the hermatige i think) Rather shocking i think, especially if you dressed
in fur!
So what do you um,- infer - from this shocking display by this sap?
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Carpal Tunnel
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a pelted sheep?
In our efforts to resolve this question of the ages, let us leave no tern unstoned.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Pelted sheep. Now I know that you're trying to pull the wool over our eyes ... 
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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member
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Oh no, Geoff, you're dead wrong. Take a cat plus chicken tikka masala and some white shag pile carpet, and you have the world's first monorail system based on antigravity ...
In a similar vien: in a humorous research paper I heard of, the author proposed an array cats with slices of buttered toast strapped to their backs as a mechanism to facilitate high-speed travel. As the toast always lands buttered side down and the cat must always land on its feet, the combination would remain spinning just above the ground in perpetuity.
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