"Apple has acquired a company with access to 'the hose'..."

"... the nickname for Twitter’s stream of 500 million tweets per day."

$200 million for Topsy, which I've got to assume is named after the character in "Uncle Tom's Cabin":

A ragamuffin young slave girl. When asked if she knows who made her, she professes ignorance of both God and a mother, saying "I s'pect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me."... The phrase "growed like Topsy" (later "grew like Topsy") passed into the English language, originally with the specific meaning of unplanned growth, later sometimes just meaning enormous growth.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after a slave girl?

Or do you think the company was named after Topsy the elephant, famous for dying of electrocution, captured on film by Thomas Edison in the year 1903?

Initially, Topsy was supposed to be hanged, but other ways were considered when the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890.

Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body, partly as a demonstration of how "unsafe" his competitor's (George Westinghouse) alternating current design was.

Is it in poor taste to name a company after an electrocuted elephant?



The hose.

"Researchers long viewed infanticide and similar acts of maternal skulduggery as pathological, a result of the mother's being under extreme stress..."

".... it made little genetic sense for a mother to destroy her young, and maternal nurturing was assumed to be a hard-wired affair. More recently, scientists have accrued abundant evidence that 'bad' mothering is common in nature and that it is often a centerpiece of the reproductive game plan... [P]andas, for example, often practice  'a postnatal form of family planning, giving birth to what may be thought of as an heir and a spare, and then, when the heir fares well, walking away from the spare with nary a fare-thee-well.'"

From a CSM article titled "Baby elephant cries for 5 hours. Is Mom rejection unusual?"

"Trunk."

The word "trunk" has come up — by chance — in 2 posts today.

1. "The plus-size 'bikini'": "Note that the caption refers to the bottoms as 'trunks,' a word that strikes me as way too masculine (perhaps because I associate it with elephant appendages)."

2. "'The Giving Tree' — 'Remember that book...": "In his childhood, the boy enjoys playing with the tree, climbing her trunk, swinging from her branches, and eating her apples. However, as time passes the tree becomes mean, jealous, and stingy...."

When things like that happen around here, it's de rigueur to consult the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. The first meaning, going back to 1490, is "The main part of something as distinguished from its appendages," which explains how we talk about trees.

1490   Caxton tr. Eneydos iv. 17   Eneas..hewe the troncke of a tree oute of the whiche yssued bloode.

That leads to a figurative use, for example:

a1616   Shakespeare Measure for Measure (1623) iii. i. 70   You consenting too't, Would barke your honor from that trunke you beare, And leaue you naked.

The second meaning is: "The human body, or that of an animal, without the head, or esp. without the head and limbs, or considered apart from these..."

a1616   Shakespeare Henry VI, Pt. 2 (1623) iv. ix. 84   There [will I] cut off thy most vngracious head;..Leauing thy trunke for Crowes to feed vpon.

So how do we get to the elephant's trunk, which seems to have it backwards, with the word referring to the appendage and not the main part? And what about those swimming trunks? There's the "trunk" that is a large piece of luggage, and I see that usage seems to have come from the fact that trunks were once made out of tree trunks. Another word for that sort of trunk is "chest," which seems to take us back to the human torso sort of trunk. A puzzle!

Anyway, the elephant's trunk is the 15th meaning for "trunk," and there's no explanation for why the appendage gets the word that originally meant the main part.

1589   R. Baker in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations i. 138   The Elephant..With water fils his troonke right hie and blowes it on the rest.
1613   S. Purchas Pilgrimage 816   There was another strange creature in Nicaragua..like a blacke Hogge, with..a short truncke or snowt like an Elephant....

And we need to scroll down to meaning #17 to get to the pants category, first with "trunk-hose," and then "trunks" to mean "Short breeches of silk or other thin material; in theatrical use, often worn over tights...."

1836   Dickens Pickwick Papers (1837) xv. 152   The appearance of Mr. Snodgrass in blue satin trunks and cloak, white silk tights and shoes, and Grecian helmet.

And finally, "orig. U.S. Short tight-fitting drawers worn by swimmers and athletes."

1883   Pall Mall Gaz. 26 July 7/1   Captain Webb attempted his perilous feat of swimming the Niagara Rapids... He wore a pair of silk trunks....
1894   Ralph in Harper's Mag. Aug. 341   Nude bathing will not be permitted... The use of tights or ‘trunks’ will not be allowed.

With little help from the OED, I'm going to leap to the supposition that meaning #17 is an example of metonymy — where a word referring to one thing is used to refer to a related thing, like "dish" for the food on the dish. The trunk is in the garment and the garment gets called by the thing it contains. That wouldn't explain why we say "trunks" in the plural, which is like "pants," which we can easily tell is plural because pants have 2 legs. (Calling pant legs "legs" is clearly metonymy.) Oddly, trunks, unlike pants, lack legs, but I think if we go back to the first #17 usage and see "trunk-hose," we get a clue for where "trunks," plural, came from. It was a one-piece garment, the tights, and the term got transferred to those puffy panties that covered up the dancer's bulges...



... until they didn't....



As for the elephant's trunk, the 15th meaning of "trunk," I'm thinking the word for the main part became the word for the appendage as way to express the awesome size of the appendage. It might have been a comical figure of speech at one time, the way a man's very large phallus might be called his "third leg."

There are millions of mammoth tusks in that Arctic ice that is melting.

And they're worth good money as a substituted for elephant ivory, which, unlike mammoth ivory, is illegal to buy and sell.

At the link, a picture of a man posing with a mammoth tusk — it's huge — that might be "worth $80,000 to $100,000 or even more."

[S]ome scientists lament the tusk hunting and trade. "Each of these tusks is kind of like a tree, which has rings," he says. "The tusks themselves can kind of carry information about the climate, the diet — that would be valuable data. On the other hand, if they find mammoth hair, or an intact mammoth, they're the first ones that tell the scientists."

"Chinese students come up to me and say, 'Wow, you know, what can we do? We had no idea...'"

"That's the story that's put out, [the elephants are] anesthetized, the tusks are taken out, and they're patted on the bottom and sent out to grow a new set."

"Alexander the Great arrived in the area of Afghanistan in 330 BC after defeating Darius III of Persia a year earlier at the Battle of Gaugamela."

"His army faced very strong resistance in the Afghan tribal areas where he is said to have commented that Afghanistan is 'easy to march into, hard to march out of.'"

"Afghanistan was conquered by the Maurya Empire, which was led by Chandragupta Maurya from Magadha... [A]s he was going to war with the generals of Alexander, a wild elephant of great bulk presented itself before him of its own accord, and, as if tamed down to gentleness, took him on its back, and became his guide in the war, and conspicuous in fields of battle."

"Arab armies carrying the banner of Islam came out of the west to defeat the Sasanians in 642 CE and then they marched with confidence to the east. On the western periphery of the Afghan area the princes of Herat and Seistan gave way to rule by Arab governors but in the east, in the mountains, cities submitted only to rise in revolt and the hastily converted returned to their old beliefs once the armies passed."

"From the 16th century to the early 18th century, Afghanistan was divided in to three major areas.... The Kandahar region in the south served as a buffer zone between the powerful Mughals and Safavids, and the native Afghans often switched support from one side to the other."

"King Amanullah Khan moved to end his country's traditional isolation in the years following the Third Anglo-Afghan war. He established diplomatic relations with most major countries and, following a 1927 tour of Europe and Turkey (during which he noted the modernization and secularization advanced by Atatürk), introduced several reforms intended to modernize Afghanistan."

"Amid charges of corruption and malfeasance against the royal family and poor economic conditions created by the severe 1971–72 drought, former Prime Minister Mohammad Sardar Daoud Khan seized power in a non-violent coup on July 17, 1973, while Zahir Shah was receiving treatment for eye problems and therapy for lumbago in Italy."

"In response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Carter administration and Reagan administration in the U.S. began arming the Mujahideen.... The 10-year Soviet occupation resulted in the killings of between 600,000 and two million Afghans, mostly civilians."

"The Taliban started shelling Kabul in early 1995 but were defeated by forces of the Islamic State government under Ahmad Shah Massoud... [W]hile trying to consolidate control over northern and western Afghanistan, [the Taliban] committed systematic massacres against civilians.... Bin Laden's so-called 055 Brigade was responsible for mass-killings of Afghan civilians.... [E]yewitnesses in many villages describ[ed] Arab fighters carrying long knives used for slitting throats and skinning people.... Of roughly 45,000 Pakistani, Taliban and Al Qaeda soldiers fighting against the forces of Massoud only 14,000 were Afghans."

"In early 2001 Massoud addressed the European Parliament in Brussels asking the international community to provide humanitarian help to the people of Afghanistan. He stated that the Taliban and Al Qaeda had introduced 'a very wrong perception of Islam' and that without the support of Pakistan the Taliban would not be able to sustain their military campaign for up to a year. On this visit to Europe he also warned that his intelligence had gathered information about a large-scale attack on U.S. soil being imminent."

***

And so we continue to the 2d day of this 206 day project, reading the "History of..." Wikipedia page for the 206 countries of the world. Yesterday's country, like many of the countries we'll encounter (in alphabetical order), was Abkhazia, much more obscure to us than today's country, a place we've been hearing about continually for the past decade. And yet, how much do we really know about Afghanistan? I've extracted a handful of sentences, all from before this last decade, in an effort to create a faint sense how little we know.

"Animal activists have been attacking our family, our company, and our employees for decades because they oppose animals in circuses."

"These defendants attempted to destroy our family-owned business with a hired plaintiff who made statements that the court did not believe.... This settlement is a vindication not just for the company but also for the dedicated men and women who spend their lives working and caring for all the animals with Ringling Bros. in the face of such targeted, malicious rhetoric."

The ASPCA pays $9.3 million to get out of this case, which continues against the other defendants, the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, Animal Welfare Institute, Animal Protection Institute United with Born Free USA, various lawyers, and a former Ringling employee named Tom Rider.