Cancelled Potatoes

[rain_gryphon]

In the '70s, when I was in high school, 'to nark' meant to be an informer, to betray someone to the authorities. I, and I'm sure anyone else who considered it, thought that this had to be derived from 'narcotics'. It was the Golden Age of Recreational Drugs, and we lived in farm country, where hemp had been grown intensively and legally a generation or two before, so that it was wild everywhere. Having no real crime to deal with*, the police spent much of their time trying to catch people smoking pot. One had constantly, as a teenager, to be on the watch against those dishonourable companions who might nark on one.

So, cut to the present day. I'm reading a book called 'Hooligan Nights', written in 1899, about the lives of teenage petty criminals in the east end of London. Imagine my surprise when one of them expresses his trepidation to be seen talking with the interviewer, as he fears his friends will think he's 'narking'! Clearly, the word is a lot older than I'd believed.

*Literally. We did not lock our doors unless we were going to be gone for a stretch of several days at a time.

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It's really odd to read police notes from a crime committed in 1993, and reflect on the fact that the suspect having made a phone call to a witness at a certain time greatly restricts where he could have been at that time. Phones were a fixed-location item, and it wasn't that long ago.

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Synchronously, as I write, I hear swarms of police sirens, and now the helicopter is orbitting overhead. The police chopper should be equipped with rockets and machine guns.

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Japan, the Land of WTF?!?

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Boobs of Doom!

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The Beloved Leader Jr. doesn't like boobs.

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A truckload of fireworks exploded in China, and knocked down a bridge! That seems a remarkably extreme result to me. Admittedly I'm no expert on bridges, and I'm sure the design wasn't explicitly intended to withstand a contact explosion right on the deck, but still... Fireworks are made of black powder, and usually pretty heavily doped with stuff like steel filings or rice hulls or little chunks of charcoal. It's going to be a fairly slow explosion, lots of heat and gas volume, but not much of a shockwave. patch_bunny, would you expect that to knock down a proper bridge, or is it just shoddy infrastructure?

Comments

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

"Nark" definitely seems to be late C19 in origin: the OED has this: "It was the sole commandment that ran there: ‘Thou shalt not nark.’" from a story published in the 1890s. The dictionary says the etymology is uncertain, but it might be from nok, an Anglo-Romani word meaning "nose" -- with the idea of poking one's nose in.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The line sounds familiar - it might even be from 'Hooligan Nights'. I'm left to wonder now how 'nark' ended up being common slang in the American midwest in the 1970s.

[patch-bunny.livejournal.com]

Black powder was used for blasting rock before the invention of dynamite, so I don't see why not. It's what they used to build the railroad across the Sierra Nevada and Rockies in the 1800's. In this instance, all the explosion has to do is weaken the structure. Gravity does the rest.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Black powder's really good for blasting rock because of all the gas pressure it evolves. It doesn't so much shatter the rock with a shockwave like modern explosives, as just develop a whole lot of pressure and push the rocks apart. That's why I'm so surprised to see it break concrete in what's essentially an open-air explosion.