George Morrison had a great career in the NHL but he probably will be remembered for an event in his rookie year he would just assume be forgotten. While playing for the St. Louis Blues that year, he had not seen much time on the ice. So when he had finished what he assumed would be his last shift for the evening and finding himself rather hungry, he caught the attention of a vendor and traded one of his sticks for a hot dog with the works. His plan was working out rather well until the coach ordered him on the ice to cover a penalty kill. So he shoved the hot dog into his glove to hide it from his coach and took the ice. His ruse was discovered however when another player cross checked Morrsion and sent his glove, the hot dog, mustard, relish and ketchup flying across the ice. There are a lot of lesson that one could learn from this tail, but the one I think of is being prepared. We, like this hockey player, may think we have plenty of time to engage in other less than appropriate pursuits. But when we are called, we also won’t be able to hide away the things we were doing. We need to stay prepared, less our indiscretion be spread out for the world to see.
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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