Banana; Sferics

Fri Jan 24 23:14:42 CST 2003

3. Topical Words: Banana

If it were not such a serious subject, and such a
terrible joke, I
might be tempted to say that the press last week went
bananas over
alarming reports of the fungal diseases that are
threatening to do
to the world's producers of bananas what the potato
blight did to
Ireland 150 years ago.

The word itself presents no etymological conundrum. We
know that
the fruit was encountered by European explorers
investigating the
West coast of Africa around the middle of the
sixteenth century.
Spanish and Portuguese sailors came across them in
local ports and
borrowed the name from one of a set of related local
languages -
we're not quite sure which one, but probably Mandingo
or Wolof.
Some say the Arabs imported the fruit to Africa from
India, and
that they gave their word for a finger to it.

The poor banana has often been a subject of humour.
Its shape is
risible, its colour ludicrous, and its name, with that
repeated
syllable, irretrievably childish. A look at any good
dictionary of
slang will show the great range of applications of the
word.

Among others, "banana" has been used as an obvious
slang term for
the penis (and also for a dollar, for less obvious
reasons); it was
once a name for a slapstick comedian in vaudeville,
leading to
those evocative terms "top banana" for the starring
act and "second
banana" for a supporting performer or straight man.
There's "banana
oil" for nonsense, baloney or hypocritical talk, a
close relative
of apple-sauce, which was no doubt linked with its
blandness and
smoothness; a "banana ball" is one that curves in the
air; a
"bananahead" is a fool. All these are American, you
will note.
British examples are thinly spread, though I do
remember a derisive
use of "bananas" in the 1970s for corrupt London
policemen, on the
grounds that they were yellow, bent, and hung around
in bunches.

What of "to go bananas"? It burst upon the world in
the 1960s and
became a fashionable, not to say faddish, term in the
1970s. Its
heyday is over, perhaps thankfully so. But nobody
seems to have any
very clear idea where it came from. Was the idea of
something bent
at the root of it, so that a person was being driven
mentally out
of shape? Or was there a mental image of an
over-excited ape
clamouring for his daily feast? Or was it a more
subtle image
connected with the older phrase "to go ape" or even
"to go nuts"?
You can go crazy thinking about this stuff.

4. Weird Words: Sferics  /'sferiks/

Atmospheric discharges.

We can't hear it without special equipment, but the
planet almost
continually sings with the sound of low-frequency
radio signals
that derive from lightning strikes. Because the
signals are mostly
trapped below the ionosphere, a reflective layer 55
miles above the
ground, a suitable receiver can pick them up from
thousands of
miles away. They sound like twigs snapping or bacon
frying. This
weird-looking term for them, "sferics", is just a
respelled version
of the last part of "atmospherics". The abbreviation
appeared
around 1940 when researchers first started to
encounter these
strange noises. There's a complete vocabulary of words
to describe
various types: "tweeks" come from lightning that is so
far away
that the high radio frequencies arrive before the low,
resulting in
a musical set of clicks and tweets; "whistlers" are
slowly
descending tones caused by the same mechanism, but
which acts on
bursts of radio waves that pass through the ionosphere
and are
reflected from another layer 6000 or so miles up.

LINK
Visit
<http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/inspire.html> to
hear
samples of each type. There's also a real-time
receiver.

[...] 

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...enjoy!

-Doug

=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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