Muckraking

The term muckraker was once used to describe American journalists who attacked established institutions and leaders as corrupt. The modern day, and much nicer, term would be investigative journalist.

But the term had a pejorative connotation in British English, and the term's origin is a lot earthier.

A muck rake is an actual tool still used to clean out "muck,"(manure) from stables and create a dung (another term for animal excrement) heap or pile.

This quite unpleasant job was used in 1684 by John Bunyan in his book Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan used it to represent man's preoccupation with earthly things. His character, The Man with the Muckrake, "could look no way but downward."

Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels has Gulliver encounter a group of people who do useless "research." One of their projects is to examine the excrement of suspicious persons to find evidence to confirm their suspicions. This muckraking also sounds like some of the most base of the journalistic type.

In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt used Bunyan's words to criticize journalists who focused too much on exposing corruption. These "men with the muck-rakes" were like Bunyan's character and he said they needed to know "when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward."

After that speech, the reporters willingly took up the the term "muckraker" as a badge of honor.

In contemporary American use, the term usually describes journalists who are adversarial and write to advocate reform and change.

In Britain, it still has a less lofty meaning and probably would refer to a  journalist (often on a tabloid newspaper) who focuses on scandal about celebrities and well-known personalities.

State Names in the United States part 1

The names of the 50 states in the United States of America come from different origins.  As you can see below, some come from the explorers, discoverers and the conquerors and those who ruled over an area. Likewise, British kings, queens and noblemen had their names used for areas that are now states. These are largely the sources for much of the east coast that was first explored. As expansion moved west, Anglicized versions of Indian words and the names used by the native people of an area became a common source of state names.

CALIFORNIA is an invented name for an imaginary island, but the explorer Cortes is said to have transferred the name to the area we know as the state.

COLORADO comes from Spanish, meaning reddish, and was applied by Spanish explorers to the area surrounding what is now the Colorado River for its reddish color.

CONNECTICUT is an Algonquian word meaning "long river." The second "c" has never really been used in pronunciation.

DELAWARE is named for Thomas West, Lord de la Warr, an English politician, for whom the bay, the river, later, a Native American people and the U.S. state all got their names.

FLORIDA is from Spanish, meaning the land of flowers.

All of these state names have more complicated origins. For example, the first European contact with Florida was made in 1513 by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León.He named it La Florida but his landing was during the Easter season of  Pascua Florida. Pascua Florida is a Spanish term that means flowery festival or feast of flowers and it is connected to the Easter season and the Passion of the Christ. Pascua can, depending on context, refer to Easter, Christmas, Epiphany, Pentecost, or the week after holy week. Pascua Florida Day is usually celebrated on April 2, the day on which Ponce de León first spotted Florida.

GEORGIA was named to honor King George II.

HAWAII is the name of the state's largest island, Hawaiʻi. One Hawaiian explanation of the name Hawaiʻi is that it comes from Hawaiʻiloa, a legendary figure from Hawaiian myth who was said to have discovered the islands when they were first settled, and it is sometimes translated as "place of the gods."

IDAHO is often said to be an Indian word, but its origin is more complicated. When the United States Congress was considering designating a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, a lobbyist George M. Willing suggested the name "Idaho", which he claimed was derived from the Shoshone "ee-da-how" meaning "the sun comes from the mountains" or "gem of the mountains."  Willing later claimed that he had simply invented the name.  Congress in 1861 decided to name the area "Colorado Territory" but the Idaho name lingered. A community in Colorado was named "Idaho Springs" and in 1861 an Idaho County was created in eastern Washington Territory after a steamship named Idaho, which was launched on the Columbia River in 1860. A portion of Washington Territory, including Idaho County, was used to create Idaho Territory in 1863.

Besides the Shoshone term, there is some evidence that it may be derived from the Plains Apache word "ídaahę́", which means "enemy" and that the Comanches used this word to refer to the area that became the Idaho Territory.

ILLINOIS - Though some sources say this is an Algonquian word meaning "men and warriors," the most recent explanation is that "Illinois" is the modern spelling for the early French Catholic missionaries and explorers' name for the Illinois Native Americans, though the name was spelled in many different ways in the early records.

INDIANA was meant as a way of designating the "Land of the Indians" when Congress passed legislation to divide the Northwest Territory into two areas. The western section was the Indiana Territory.

IOWA derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the Native American tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration

KANSAS is another state named for the natives who inhabited the area originally. In this case, it was the Kansa tribe. The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind", although this was probably not the term's original meaning.

KENTUCKY is probably based on an Iroquoian name meaning "(on) the meadow" or "(on) the prairie" (cf. Mohawk kenhtà:ke, Seneca gëdá’geh. Prior to 1776 when the counties of Virginia beyond the Appalachian Mountains became known as Kentucky County, the Kentucky River already carried the name.

LOUISIANA was named after Louis XIV, King of France from 1643 to 1715. When René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed the territory drained by the Mississippi River for France, he named it La Louisiane. The suffix -ana or -ane is a Latin suffix that can refer to "information relating to a particular individual, subject, or place." Thus, roughly, Louis + ana carries the idea of "related to Louis." The Louisiana Territory was very large and once part of the French Colonial Empire and stretched from present-day Mobile Bay all the way to just north of the present-day Canada–United States border including a small part of what is now southwestern Canada.  French: État de Louisiane and Louisiana Creole: Léta de la Lwizyàn.

MAINE or French État du Maine - The etymology is not definitively explained but the most common origin story is that it was the name given by early explorers after a province in France. The word refer to "mainland." By 1665, when the English King's Commissioners ordered that the "Province of Maine" be entered in official records. The state legislature in 2001 adopted a resolution establishing Franco-American Day, which stated that the state was named after the former French province of Maine.

MARYLAND which is nicknamed Old Line State, the Free State, and the Chesapeake Bay State is named after Henrietta Maria of France, the wife of Charles I of England.

MASSACHUSETTS prior to being a state was the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The name came from the indigenous people of that area, the Massachusett. The name can be segmented as mass/large, adchu/hill, s (diminutive suffix meaning "small") and -et a locative suffix that identifies it as a place. It has been variously translated as "near the great hill","by the blue hills", "at the little big hill", or "at the range of hills." The Great Blue Hill is located on the boundary of Milton and Canton. An alternative origin is from the spelling Moswetuset, from the name of the Moswetuset Hummock (meaning "hill shaped like an arrowhead") in Quincy where Plymouth Colony commander Miles Standish and Squanto, part of the now disappeared Patuxet band of the Wampanoag peoples, met Chief Chickatawbut in 1621.

The official name of the state is the "Commonwealth of Massachusetts" and it is sometimes referred to as "the Commonwealth" an, although this designation is part of the state's official name, Massachusetts has the same position and powers within the United States as all the other states.

MICHIGAN has a complicated history of French and Indian occupation. The closest translation for the state seems to be an Algonquian word translating to "big lake" or "forest clearing." The French had Fort Michilimackinac at the Straits of Mackinac to better control their lucrative fur-trading empire. Michigan is the only state to consist of two peninsulas. The Lower Peninsula, to which the name Michigan was originally applied, is separated from the Upper Peninsula by the Straits of Mackinac, a channel that joins Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. The two peninsulas are connected by the Mackinac Bridge.

MINNESOTA comes from the Dakota Sioux name for the Minnesota River. It comes from either 'Mnisota' which means "clear blue water", or 'Mnißota', which means cloudy water. Supposedly, the Native Americans demonstrated the name to early settlers by dropping milk into water and calling it mnisota. Many places in the state have similar names, such as Minnehaha Falls ("laughing water" (waterfall)), Minneiska ("white water"), Minneota ("much water"), Minnetonka ("big water"), Minnetrista ("crooked water"), and Minneapolis, a combination of mni and polis, the Greek word for "city."

MISSISSIPPI The name of the state is derived from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary. Settlers named it after the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi meaning "Great River."

MISSOURI is another state named for a river. The Missouri River was named after the indigenous Missouri Indians, a Siouan-language tribe. They were called the Ouemessourita meaning "those who have dugout canoes", by the Miami-Illinois language speakers. As the Illini were the first natives encountered by Europeans in the region, the latter adopted the Illini name for the Missouri people.

MONTANA comes from the Spanish word Montaña and the Latin word Montana, meaning "mountain", or more broadly, "mountainous country." Montaña del Norte was the name given by early Spanish explorers to the entire mountainous region of the west

NEBRASKA is derived from transliteration of the archaic Otoe Sioux words Ñí Brásge meaning "flat water" after the Platte River that flows through the state.

NEVADA is directly taken from the Spanish nevada  meaning "snow-covered" because of the Sierra Nevada ("snow-covered mountain range").

Indian Corn

I always knew it as Indian corn, but this year I wondered if that was politically correct or even accurate.

It would more accurately be called flint corn (Zea mays var. indurata) and sometimes as calico corn. It is a variant of maize, the same species as common corn. For this variety, each kernel has a hard outer layer that is compared to flint.

Flint corn has become a symbol of harvest season and these multicolored ears often adorn doors and centerpieces.

Did you know that corn does not grow wild anywhere in the world? It is a domesticated plant that evolved sometime in the last 10,000 years. Its original form was teosinte, a form of wild Mexican grass.

Good old troublemaker Christopher Columbus brought corn to Europe in the late 1400s. The American Indians used it as a dietary staple and the colonists learned how to cultivate it from them.

The most commonly grown kind of corn in America is dent or field corn which is used to feed livestock, for the manufacture of industrial products and processed foods. It is a yellow or white corn and it is called dent for the indentation that appears on the outside of its mature kernels.

We eat sweet corn (also yellow and white), which can be cooked and eaten right on the cob, and is also sold canned or frozen. Like dent corn, its kernels are usually yellow or white.

Flint corn, or Indian corn, is one of the oldest varieties of corn and is white, blue and red. It has  very low water content and so it is more resistant to freezing than other vegetables. The kernels have a bit of soft starch surrounded by hard starch, so they dry and shrink uniformly and are less prone to spoiling. It is type of corn ideal for harvesty décor, but it is also consumed by livestock and for people it can be used for hominy and polenta.

Popcorn is Zea mays everta meaning "corn turned inside out" and is considered a variant of Indian corn.

And Indian corn is a historically accurate name.

Bond. James Bond.

James Bond is the fictional protagonist of a series of novels and short stories by Ian Fleming. The first Bond story appeared in the 1953 novel Casino Royale. Most of Fleming's twelve novels and two collections of short stories have also been used for film adaptations with many retaining the titles of the novels.

Ian Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) came from a wealthy family, and was educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly attended the universities of Munich and Geneva. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during WWII, he was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. All these aspects of his life are used in the Bond novels.

GoldenEye, the film, was released in 1995 and is the seventeenth James Bond film. It was the first to star Pierce Brosnan as 007 and also the first film in the series not to take story elements from the works of Fleming.

The Bond stories were written at Fleming's Jamaican home, named Goldeneye, and he generally published a book each year. Two of his books were published after his death in 1964.

Goldfinger is the seventh James Bond novel in the series and originally it was titled The Richest Man in the World. Perhaps, Fleming should have used that original title because his revised title used the name of someone he had known, Ernő Goldfinger, who threatened to sue over the use of his name. The matter was settled out of court and the title was used for the novel and the film version.


You Only Live Twice is the eleventh novel Ian Fleming published in the Bond series and is the last published in his lifetime. I am a Bond and a poetry fan, but I didn't know that these two interests ever crossed. That particular title got inspiration from the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. In the novel, 007 tries his hand at writing a haiku in the style of the Japanese master.

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face

"A Diamond Is Forever" was (and might still be) a phrase used in advertising for the company De Beers and probably Fleming just tweaked it slightly for his novel Diamonds Are Forever.

"The World Is Not Enough" is believed to originate from Alexander the Great’s epitaph, and it is found in the 1963 Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as being the family motto of Sir Thomas Bond. James Bond sees that coat of arms in the novel.

The phrase was used for a film of that name, but the plot of the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service became a film of its own. Sean Connery retired from the 007 role after You Only Live Twice and George Lazenby became Bond for only this one film in the series.


Not all of the Bond films are derived from Fleming novels or the novels' titles. A View To A Kill comes from an a non-Bond Fleming short story called "From A View To a Kill" and doesn't really make much sense plot-wise as a title for that film.

The second of the two Timothy Dalton Bond films is License to Kill. Having run out of novels to use, the filmmakers took elements from  two Fleming short stories, a novel, and some Japanese Rōnin tales. The working title for the film was a much more accurate one: License Revoked. In the film, M  suspends Bond and therefore his "license to kill." But after testing the "revoked" title, American audiences associated it with losing a driver's license, so the filmmakers went with the ironic (or just inaccurate) License to Kill.

Another oddball title in the series is Quantum of Solace. This 2008 film is named for a Fleming short story. Though a "quantum" is the smallest possible amount of a physical property, a small amount of solace have no real meaning in the film.

One inside joke became a film title.

In Never Say Never Again (1983), Sean Connery returned to playing James Bond for the seventh time. It was 12 years after Diamonds Are Forever when he "retired" from playing 007, and the film's title is a reference to Connery saying that he would never play Bond again. Now 52 years old, the plot was adapted so that Connery would be an aging Bond brought back into action.

The plot is a second adaption of Fleming's Thunderball novel which had already been filmed in 1965 with Connery.

Sony

Sony's first unbranded transistor radio - TR-55 (1955)

In the 1950s and 1960s, the transistor radio brought rock and roll music to teenagers and spread it more powerfully than the actual records that were being played by the disc jockeys.

Texas Instruments was the first company licensed by Bell Laboratories to use the newly invented transistor for a small radio. The term transistor was coined by John R. Pierce as a contraction of the term transresistance. The Regency TR-1 weighed 8 ounces, fit in your pocket, turned on instantly and cost $49.95. More than 100,000 were sold.

The Japanese company Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to get into the transistor radio business but wanted a new name that would work with American consumers. They considered using their initials, TTK, but a railway company, Tokyo Kyuko, was known as TTK. They also considered  "Tokyo Teletech" but discovered an American company already using Teletech as a brand name.

Like many other people seeking a new name, they looked to Latin. Looking up "sound" they found "sonus." This sounded a bit like the word "sonny" which was a loan word used in Japan in the 1950s to refer to "sonny boys" - smart and presentable young men. Dropping one "n" in sonny and being closer to the sonus of sound seemed right.

The first Sony-branded product was the TR-55 transistor radio in 1955. The company officially changed their name to Sony in January 1958.

Sony 8-Transistor Radio, Model TR-84, 1959