You remember Valerie, the miniature dachshund who escaped into the wilds of Kangaroo Island, blogged here.
Today, I see "Valerie the dachshund rescued after 17 months in Australian wilderness/The eight-pound miniature dachshund had transformed from an 'absolute princess' into a rugged survivor" (WaPo).
I had to blog that... in case you were on tenterhooks.
What are tenterhooks anyway?
They are the bent nails on a thing called a "tenter," upon which cloth is stretched. For the annals of Things I Asked Grok: What do you call it when a figurative use of a word survives the original meaning and just seems vaguely to refer to something that the user of the word doesn't even know?Bonus: a stanza of Lord Byron's "Don Juan":
Whether Don Juan and chaste Adeline Grew friends in this or any other sense, Will be discuss'd hereafter, I opine: At present I am glad of a pretence To leave them hovering, as the effect is fine, And keeps the atrocious reader in suspense; The surest way for ladies and for books To bait their tender, or their tenter, hooks.I admit to asking Grok what that meant, not that I didn't have my own ideas. I mean, I assume the "atrocious reader" is the one who's looking for the sex.
పోస్ట్లు
19 కామెంట్లు:
hooks that tenter
You go girl.
Waiting nervously for something "“On tenterhooks” means “waiting nervously for something to happen.” The word tenter means “a frame used for drying and stretching cloth” and is related to tent, so being “on tenterhooks” compares the tenseness of the stretched fabric to the tension of nervous waiting."
"Tenterhooks aren’t connected with tents, nor are they the hooks used by butchers, as the common misspelling ‘tenderhooks’ might suggest.
A tenter is a wooden frame, often in the form of a line of fencing, used to hang woollen or linen cloth to prevent it from shrinking as it dries. The tenterhooks are, not surprisingly, the hooks on the tenter used to hold the cloth in place.
Tenters are no longer everyday objects but a hundred years ago, in wool weaving areas like the North of England, they were a common sight on the land around the many woollen mills, called ‘tenter-fields’. It is easy to see how the figurative expression ‘on tenterhooks’, with its meaning of painful tension, derived from the ‘tenting’ or stretching of fabric. The expression was originally ‘on the tenters’. The English West Country playwright John Ford was the first to record that expression in the play Broken Heart, 1633:"
SEE https://www.tenters.org/
We had a dachshund when I was a child. It was like a fierce seething miniature rottweiler. The thing would attempt to maul anyone but my father if you even looked at it crosswise. It hated the garbage man with such loathing that we had to hide the metal garbage can from him or he would attack it constantly, jumping up to seize the metal handle in his teeth and hang from it, refusing to let go. I later learned dachshunds are terriers, which in French means, roughly, “earth-bound killing machines.” So it comes as no surprise that sweet little Valerie the dachshund flourished in a state of nature: She was designed to do so. Rescued from the wilderness? More like the wilderness was rescued from her.
Oh, and its name was Dandy Dasher.
In the name of diversity, "The Call of the Wild" will be remade with a dachshund, shih tzu, or poodle in the lead role.
Is there a word for it? Frozen, fossilized, dead, inert, dormant, and lexicalized metaphor have been used, but let's keep it simple and just call them "linguistic skeuomorphs."
Online "newspapers" have been suggested as an example, since they are no longer printed on paper and don't contain any news.
I wonder why a dog treated like a princess would so doggedly resist being recaptured.
🎵 "... I'm the same dog I used to be." 🎶
"I later learned dachshunds are terriers, which in French means, roughly, “earth-bound killing machines.” So it comes as no surprise that sweet little Valerie the dachshund flourished in a state of nature: She was designed to do so. Rescued from the wilderness? More like the wilderness was rescued from her."
We had a half Jack Russell who would happily attack multiple Doberman Pinchers if given the chance, but was a sweetheart with people. Anyway, Dachshunds were bred to go down into holes and fight badgers. So, its not that big a stretch to think even a miniature could be a bad ass.
Modern day Call of the Wild
Out bicycling with a friend one fine day in my undergrad college years, we rolled into a suburban street and a Dachshund immediately saw us from several lawns ahead of us. It gave chase, and almost caught my friend, who was cycling in the lead, but failed. He then saw me and hopped broadside directly into the path of my front wheel. I went ass over teakettle, a fine old expression, and ended up scraped and bruised. The little weiner dog was completely uninjured, quite happy with its victory over the bicycle, and trotted home. My wrist was broken and I wore a cast for 10 weeks and squeezed a rubber ball for many more.
The risk of being seriously injured by a Dachshund is very small, but not zero. Be warned.
The eight-pound miniature dachshund had transformed from an 'absolute princess' into a rugged survivor.
Disney Studios on line one!
Heinie, my eleventh birthday gift-dackel, was a digger, climber, and all-round artful dodger. We tried to keep him--when he wasn't inside or under our supervision outside--in a fenced enclosure in the back yard.
A nice little plot, with shade and a doghouse, but he learned that his digging skills, which made his pen look like Verdun after the battle, could be put to use tunneling out. If that didn't work he could climb the wire fence and leap from the top.
He was run over several times and was little the worse for wear, but finally lost out to a truck that hit him square.
I never thought I was an atrocious reader of National Geographic, until now.
Poor little dog used to have a whole island to play in, now reduced to a back yard.
Grok garners annals for Althouse.
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