Who Knows the Troubles?

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

It is one measure of our true humanity that we dream of, hope for, and work for peace.

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Well, I suppose you do.
Nobody knows the sadness I’ve seen. Well, I suppose you do.
Nobody knows the joy, the cruelty, the generosity, the violence, the creativity, the waste, the beauty. Well, of course you do.
Thank you for sharing it all with me.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“Call my psychic hotline and I’ll tell you everything about yourself.”

[A nominal fee will apply. Nope, didn't say it.]

D. Blog: What’s With This Word?

“Skedaddle”

Run away; scram; leave in a hurry; escape.

This archetypal American expression has led etymologists a pretty dance in trying to work out where it comes from.

What we do know for certain is that it suddenly appears at the beginning of the Civil War. Out of the blue, it became fashionable in 1862, with lots of examples appearing in American newspapers and books. The focus of all the early examples is the War; without doubt it started out as military slang with the meaning of fleeing the battlefield or retreating hurriedly. Its first appearance in print, in the New York Tribune of 10 August 1861, made this clear: “No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they ‘skiddaddled’, (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good use the seceshers make of their legs in time of danger).” However, it quickly moved into civilian circles with the broader sense of leaving in a hurry. It crossed the Atlantic astonishingly quickly, being recorded in the Illustrated London News in 1862 and then being put in the mouth of a young lady character by Anthony Trollope in his novel The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1867: “ ‘Mamma, Major Grantly has — skedaddled.’ ‘Oh, Lily, what a word!’ ”

So far so good. Where it comes from is almost totally obscure. Was it Greek, as John Hotten argued in his Dictionary of Modern Slang in 1874, derived from skedannumi, to “retire tumultuously”, perhaps “set afloat by some Harvard professor”? It sounds plausible, but probably not. The English Dialect Dictionary, compiled at the end of the nineteenth century, argues that it’s from a Scottish or Northern English dialect word meaning to spill or scatter, in particular to spill milk. This may be from Scots skiddle, meaning to splash water about or spill. Jonathon Green, in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, suggests this transferred to the US through “the image of blood and corpses being thus ‘spilled and scattered’ on the battlefield before the flight of a demoralised army”.

[From Michael Quinlon at www.worldwidewords.org]

[Time for me to skedaddle out of here. For US to skedaddle from Iraq?]